Designing Games for Game Designers

[Music] stone lab Randi and creative director of Maxis also as I just mentioned the lead designer of SimCity have actually been working on that game for two years now so if the last two GD C's I've had to hide that little bit off my slide that's what's nice to finally be able to come out and say that I'm not gonna be talking about the game at all today so I'm gonna be talking about not even EA or Maxis I'm gonna be talking about my kind of side job that I have of teaching game design so I want to start out with something that's not really game design it's this great book paper engineering and I had picked it up a while back and what I really liked about this book was kind of the first page is here's ten working models for how to make pop ups these are really simple they're designed to be as simple as possible because the he wants to show you the mechanics the structure behind how these things work it kind of defeat the purpose if they

were really complicated the books great so there's a section for each one of these ten models and the best part of it though is that you actually build the models and you can glue them back into the book so as you're reading the book you're making your own pop-up book at the same time and it's just a really fun book to play with but it's a great way to learn and in a way the games that I'm gonna be talking about today they're the equivalent of what you're seeing here so I designed a set of games that were meant to kind of lay bare the basic fundamentals of game design in a way that this little box lays bare the basics of this particular what pop-up paper and then the series of games that I've made you can think of it like the book you know that you put them all together and then when you run through that course you would have a really good understanding of game design so for those of you in the audience who are full-time game designers have been doing this a long time the point of the talk is not really to say oh I'm going to teach you the fundamentals of game design you already know them what I am doing here is a extreme form of

deconstruction where I'm trying to remove everything possible from the game except the one idea that I want to communicate to the students and it was a real fun challenging design task harder than I would think at first like making something simple that's easy it turns out sometimes making something simple is harder than making complex things where you can just keep throwing stuff on to it so before I get into it I'll talk briefly about the overview and are they the class background and my philosophy of teaching that class then a little bit about the fundamentals of game design what are these things I'm trying to teach anyway you know if I don't know what the fundamentals are it's hard to make games about them the most of the talk the majority of the talk will be spent talking about the games themselves so I'll kind of run through them all and describe to you know how they worked lessons I learned from building them and then the lessons the students are supposed to learn from playing them and then just a little quick final thoughts wrap up at the end so I've been teaching classes for it's

about 11 years now I actually started teaching classes right before I first got my my job at Blizzard so even before I was in the game design industry I was teaching game design classes and I was like 2001 I started teaching at Cogswell Polytechnical College which if you don't know it's about 40 miles south down in Sunnyvale it's a great school the game design workshop which mark LeBlanc and a few of us run every Monday and Tuesday here at GDC which looks like a lot of you have attended and so you understand that format game connection in Paris which is another event in Europe that they have I've taught workshops there and then at EA I take the maxis interns and I kind of run them through a little boot camp in the summer while they're there the workshop itself there's no electronics allowed we do everything with paper and pencils and dice and cards I've found that electronics are a huge distraction in making games I don't really see the need for them when you're learning the basics of games you can learn everything

you need with some dice in a deck of cards and your pencil never crashes you know it doesn't need software upgrades the workshops themselves are about two to three hours a lot of times I'll be teaching these and it'll be time to go and I'll want to leave like the Saturday Club Saturday class I teach is about five hours long and if I could take you my whole Saturday I was like I just want to go home and they're like no we need to play this game some more so that's always a big win when that happens then you know you're on to something if they just keep playing the game that they built like I mentioned they focus on one specific topic and you'll see that as we go through here and no grades I don't grade these things so even though it's a class and they are getting a grade for the whole class when they do one of these exercises the point isn't to say oh you did good at the exercise you get an A and you did bad you get a B instead it's just you showed up you participated so you know you're gonna get the credit for that day but it's kind of important but there are winners so it's like you don't get a grade but you won so you're pretty awesome and that what I found is

that a little bit of competition it gets the students engaged in the game in a way like I don't want them floating above it like a game designer and analyzing it I want them down in it so they're actually feeling the emotions that the players would feel while they're playing it and the way a simple way to do that is I just egg them on I'm like oh who's winning over here who's gonna get the award at the end who's doing the best and I really try to like encourage them to fight each other and it actually makes the games a lot more emotionally charged and then afterwards and we can talk about the emotions they felt because they were down in them down in there with him alright so before I get into the main games I want to talk about this first-day game when they first show up to class and I'm not at this point trying to teach any design goals for this first one what I'm trying to do is just say hey this is an icebreaker let's get to know each other I need to know their personalities there's always in the class there's always that one guy who knows everything about games already and so he just comes in with this huge knowledge and then there's a guy who's you know the person is more quiet and subdued and you try to get them balanced

out and I try to get a mental read on who's who so I can know who to control and who to try to boost it up a little bit this first game it's more I didn't want to get them active I don't want them sitting there looking at a board and getting analysis paralysis and at some kind of exercise where they're just not talking or communicating everything's in their head instead I want to get everything out into the room as big as possible and just make a lot of noise and get them moving around and then it really just set a tone for the semesters like this class is not one where I'm gonna stand up in front of the whiteboard and lecture to you while you take notes like you you better like you're gonna get up you're gonna be moving around you're gonna really be an active participant of this class so here's the kind of the first day thing as I get up get out of your desks I'll get out your seats and this boy the board the floor is a nice checkerboard tile floor you can kind of see it there so you are the pieces this is your board make a game out of this room and they can do whatever they want is totally wide open and usually somebody will like

how do we move it's like okay you ask the question you have to tell me right now tell me how you're gonna move and then he has to make up something on the spot like you can leave with one square or you well can we move diagonal oh you asked the question can you move diagonal and I let them build the game basically by asking questions about what they can do next and whoever asks the question has to answer it right away so it's very fluid very freeform in this particular class this was a great one you can kind of see then get my laser pointer this curtain over here it's one of those folding accordion curtains that separates a room into so they closed it they divided the class into two groups and they made a capture-the-flag where they built their own base and secret and they tore up the whole room stack all the desks this is great because I teach the class on Saturday there's almost no one else in the school and I completely take advantage of that fact so we tear everything up we go into all the different rooms and we make the whole school into the classroom and hope nobody walks in they you know tear it up up here they open up the curtains and

you can kind of see at this point their mazes there there little territories get linked together this particular game they had to roll dice and you try to get it into that players square and it started out with just severed he had one died in neutrality roll roll of five or six but that wasn't exciting enough and by the end of the exercise we had a coffee can full of dice that were all over the room so they had shotgun attack where you could like grab as many dice into a hand as you can and just throw them across the room and but there's friendly fire so you have to watch out for that so this is this is a great example of a kind of an icebreaker game but it's also when I first started teaching this class all my games were like this so I can get up and here's a box of cool stuff and go out there and make games out of it and I would give a lecture about some topic and say try to follow that topic in your in your exercise and sometimes they wouldn't sometimes they wouldn't but because they're the creativity the problems bass was even though I can strained it they had so much to work with he had too much creative freedom basically so I started constraining it's like no don't

do that don't do that and that's kind of how I got to the games that I'll be showing you what it's like just removing stuff to get them to really focus on what I wanted him to focus on so you know before I could do this there's a questions like well what is a game I'm going to teach you game design but how do I teach a game design if I don't really know what a game is and when you ask the students what is a game they can't tell you they don't know they they're not academics they don't study this stuff like a lot of us in this audience do and actually when I first started teaching I didn't study this stuff either I had no idea what a game was I couldn't define it myself the reason that I taught game design was because I've been making games ever since I was a kid and I'm like oh I'm gonna be great at teaching game design because I paint games but it turns out when I was really tried to fill up that 15 week syllabus it's like wow I can only do like two classes I'm drained of all my knowledge this isn't gonna work very well so where's the sources back in 2001 there wasn't really a lot of game design classes back then there was no text books the rules of play book wasn't out yet a lot of these books that we see now all the time don't even didn't even exist back then but I was a huge fan of

magic cards and there was a magazine called the Duelist magazine which if you played magic cards back then you may have seen it and Richard Garfield the creator of magic cards wrote the back page a column called lost in the shuffle so I had a stack of these magazines and look this is great this is my curriculum right here I'll just pull 15 of these articles and I'll teach one of Richard Garfield's back of the magazine lessons every week and I'll get to the whole program and that didn't work either but it gave me a lot of cool things to think about read through the art of computer game design by Chris Crawford which I'm sure many of you have read and that one is pretty good is it you know it's more focused a little more on game of computer game design and I didn't really want to teach computer game design but there are some sections in there about just games in general which I thought was really helpful but the main one I found was greatest achæans I have no words and I must design so if you're familiar with this essay it's just a really great way of just breaking down on games to the fundamental and it's it's not just electronic games it's every game it's all the way from you

know hide-and-seek to chess and from you know games like Battlefield and sports games like basketball things like that so you can break them all down and this really became my my structure that I I really kind of latched on to I really like the way that was written but if you've been to some of my previous talks you know that I not really a big fan of gigantic essays with lots of words and texts and no drawings in them so I wanted to make my equivalent of like what's the one page design of Greg's essay so I started to kind of like breaking it down into a simple drawing that I could give to my students you know actually what I found in the first few classes I actually tried to get them to read this thing and they would say like did you read it and they'd all say yes but then you ask some questions and you realize they were just saying yes they hadn't really read it anyway and we all know what that's like if you're a student so what what are the fundamentals of game design now I what is my one-page drawing of this that I could just draw on the whiteboard really quickly to get the idea across so you start out there's a start condition you travel for some distance you get to a goal and if you know that's pretty obvious but if that's all that was to it

I could make a game right now which is let's play this game everybody sit in the chair they're sitting in right now and you all win very good thanks for playing not very interesting so we add some opposition in the way this is what Greg would call struggle that that force you're trying to overcome to get to the goal the way that I've drawn in here though of course if I say let's play this new game I'm gonna modify that last one because it was too boring I'm gonna say when you know when I say go stand on your chair jump up and touch the ceiling and the first one to touch it wins that would not go over very well either so what you do is you kind of break it down with decisions to work around these and how do I move around this toy can I move through it or you launder it around it how many different decisions are there the rule system that binds the whole thing together and this is how it defines what's going on inside that box and then the last part what I would call interaction the input but more importantly the output coming from that system also that sets the dynamics and motion of the system makes it come to life so this is it this is like my

simple model and I like now I can make a game a class about these different topics and we'll just like run through the curriculum and it's worked out pretty well so I'm going to go through the different sections oh actually before we get into it this drawing right here it is great does it find a game but there's a question I like so what like if this - if this is really true if this defines every game then it also defines every bad game ever made and so it's like now I know what a bad game looks like hey it looks exactly the same as the best game ever made so this is not too helpful what we really want has a teacher I want my students to make the best games possible not just make a game because you can phone that into no problem so I teach them to think about it as a series of slider bars it's not a binary thing this is a game or this isn't a game that's not really important you don't we don't have a need for people to run around the world say no that's a game and that one's not a game it's what is what makes it great and so if you think there's a slider bars the goal then of the game designer is to make all of these systems as cool as

possible to make them as great as it can't possibly can be all right so let's start out with the simple one goals seems so simple and yet as I started digging into it I found is actually quite rich what I'm trying to get across here the thing that would pull that slider from 0 up to 10 is you know is the player's relationship to the goal really clear because if the goal isn't really clear then the player doesn't really know what to do next or where they are through that and more important if you think that blue line is a narrative that the player is going to engage in is the drama increasing as the player gets towards the goal is there's like a sense of dramatic tension building up is the game getting more exciting and we've all played games like risk and monopoly where they reach some kind of high point and then you play for an hour or more while it is really bored so you can tune in that that narrative by changing your start and your goal we mostly think about the goal but I think the start is just as important when you look at it from the other way this is a

game I didn't design backgammon how many people have played backgammon how many people have played back in and with the doubling cube keep your hands up the doubling cube is this little thing in the middle and if you played with the doubling cube have you played for money keep your hands up so only the few six people with their hands up you play back am and everyone else hasn't you once you do that you can't go back the the other thing is just so shallow so anyway I could give a whole talk about backgammon in fact my class I do it's 5,000 years old so there's a lot of good in it obviously if it survived that long what I want to point out for this though in the relation of start and end goals is this is the board if you haven't played backgammon it looks incredibly cryptic most people when I talk to them they remember it as that board on the back of their checkers game that made no sense to them when they were a kid and I see a lot of you not in your head so yes you know that so what happens is the brown player he'd be sitting over on the left and he has to get all of his pieces off the board going around that big u-shape

the white player sits on the right he goes the other way it still seems kind of weird why do they do that let me make it more obvious what's going on if we split the board you can kind of see much easier what's happening now so it's actually the board was split if you look at the history of games at some point it folded together for compactness or who knows what but it kind of used to look like these tracks that we're just going this way there's this question of why is it like so seemingly random or the pieces the way they are like if I was the game designer of this game I'd clean up that mess I would do something like that I would move all the pieces to the start spots because that would be like much cleaner and easier to do well turns out that game that I'm showing you right now actually existed there's artifacts that show a games look much like this and it's really boring because you spend the first few moves doing nothing you're not interacting at all so at some point along the way some brilliant primitive game designer forefather of ours he's like you know what this game would rule if we fought on the first

turn so let's move all of our pieces together and then his son or whoever took up the lead was like if we move more pieces it'll be even better so what they're doing is they're not tuning the goal the goal still exactly the same they're tuning that start condition and then you get when you really look at what's going on white only needs to move two pieces across the board it's like this ancient buddy movie you know where these two guys have to like work their way through all odds and become friends at the end you know and finally overcoming their obstacles so that's kind of a good example of the start and I like it so much that he didn't bother making a game about the start stuff because I like I said I love back Hammond but for the goal part the the other side of that line we can tune that as well it's the exercise the goal cards game has a goal this talk gets kind of Medicine I'm talking about game design - game designers about games at each game design but this one has a goal to teach goals but one of the the exercise goals is what are different goals what how how can we break them down there's not just one type get here or collect 100 points

like there's a whole bunch of those let's talk about them try to only change the goal not the rules so I'll make a game with very simple rules and then you know just only change the goal if we can try not to mess with the rest of the systems and then talk about that what does that mean so the game is really as simple as I could make it you reach into a bag you pull out a colored poker chip they have different values at different distribution in the bag you flick it onto the table you try to hit another poker chip and if you hit another poker chip you score it you put it on on your side or into your cup there so we start out with the really simple like collect a hundred points what does this feel like and then we tried a couple ways one is you keep it your point secret and one is you display your points publicly and we talk about the differences between those two things then we start messing around with well some timed goals collect the most points in five minutes how does that feel different when you're just trying to collect a hundred points collect the most chips in three minutes suddenly we talk about how that invalidated or just made the rule about

colored chips now is meaningless because of the goal and I've seen this a lot of time and game design where people will change the goal and not realize that they've actually made some of their rules meaningless to the game system and then this the other one over there collect the most points in five rounds of play that's kind of like saying let's get rid of that's almost like moving the start condition up it's saying let's just play the last five turns because those are probably the most exciting anyway and let's see how that feels and you know some of these are more exciting another some are more strategic we talked about that then this idea of a negative goal you're you're not trying to accomplish something you're trying to avoid are you trying to be the last one standing while everyone else gets knocked out and multiple goals like a bunch of cards we deal them out randomly and now you're playing there's multiple things going on we randomly change them there's a deck of them and you start flipping them down and every time they win one of these games they get a gold card and they put it in their pocket and through the series of exercises they're collecting gold cards the whole time and the idea is the winner is the one with the most gold cards at the end the last little bit we do their secret goals that only you know what they are

and everybody else just has to kind of try to figure out what you're doing and some of them are really crazy and almost impossible so we finished that part and then they have to make their own goal now they understand all about goals all these different ways we can mix them and match them and play with them so make your own I give them a blank card they play those for a while some are really off target some are really cool we talked about which ones worked which ones didn't also we shuffle them all up so no one knows like you draw them out you don't get your own back again necessarily although you could so you have to be careful not to make something too impossible then at the very end of it I count up who has the most cards and this is that winner thing that I was talking about it's like whoever has the most goal cards wins I promote your card to the next year so I'm gonna do nice art for your card put your name on it like a magic card artist and and promote you to next year's class and that's like a huge goal for the students oh yeah I want to be that one guy who who gets to go forwards print that out for them just kind of a fun little thing at the end so

as we go through the different phases at the very end I was like well we've been talking about goals but you realize there's all these like sub goals we can break this thing down so you're trying to win a chip as a goal of that particular turn you're trying to win the cards get the most cards get your card promoted and we can take that idea everything I just talked about the start and end and the goal in the journey between and we can start subdividing and subdividing and think of our game as a series of chunks like that all right the next section opposition this is gonna try to focus just on that red bar there in the middle and what game would really like bring that out to the class so flow comes up a lot this idea that you don't want the opposition to be too hard because then again gets frustrating you don't want to be too easy because then the game is too boring try to get the the player into that nice groove of flow and this sense of accomplishment like that the player feels really happy that superior almost to the opposition as they work their way through the and

past the obstacle of course if they can't get past it then they're they're not going to feel that but when they do get past it you want them to feel this moment of triumph a very emotional kind of feeling and that means your opposition as well so the game that I came up with being college student so I figured they would understand this one here's a red cup in a ping-pong ball guess what you do with this you know it's really like what's the most basic thing I can think of that will demonstrate this concept and this came to mind even though I teach on Saturday I still don't bring in beers I haven't been that bold yet so we talk about incremental difficulty tuning how you can slowly kind of ratchet it up or turn it down this difference between hard and soft obstacles the hard obstacle would be like a wall it's like you're not going through it you have to go around it one way or another and soft optical think of it like mud that I can slog through it slowly giving the player an edge you you can make obstacles as you know all these different obstacles but the player has to always have the edge the rule system always has to let the player get through them all and then the difference between opposition and

opponents sometimes people get those confused but opposition doesn't need to be your opponent it could be just the board itself the configuration you could have a cooperative game where you're playing against a deck or whatever you know but a game like basketball or football or something where your opponent is really the obstacle the Opposition in your way so obstacle pong their first task they go off into different rooms and they build miniature golf course essentially and their first task is build a par one course can you build a course that is par one everybody can get the ball in the cup no matter what does everybody do that great let's move on to part two it's actually a little harder than you might think to do that then now step back and say what's a par two course and here it's like put a bottle of water on your head and throw it into the if you got it into this area you can move anywhere in that area and then just drop it and the water is kind of that soft goal idea I doesn't mean a soft obstacle idea and then step back to par-3 and can't kind of keep

working backwards so they build out the series of obstacles until they get what should be a par-5 course here's some of the the different things again they tear up the rooms they'll have their own room it's kind of fun at the end because you it's like playing miniature golf like you run from hole to hole and you don't know what to expect in the other rooms and you have to play your own course too so here's one they're bouncing it off the art desks trying to hit it into this Cup over here this one was fun day they went to the room with the curtains that went together and they turned off the lights on one side so you have to kick it down this path but you don't know what is on the other side so there's kind of this little mystery element which I thought was really nice touch this one here kind of shows what really happens though which I tell them it's a game design about obstacles it's not really it turns out because ping pong balls are so finicky they and if they miss they can who knows where they're gonna go they're gonna roll all over the place and so they spend it they end up spending more time funneling and helping the player try to get that ball in the cup and here you can see they just like

tore up posters off the walls and they make it easier to make it easier we've got to get that par one we've got to get that thing down and and that's really one of the important lessons that this that this teaches it's like it's not about helping or it's not about hurting it's about helping then the winning part is we actually keep score have these little score sheets I play too I think it's really important for the teacher for me to go and play these games as well so I get involved in systems and I try to win like I don't hold back in fact I make a big point of trying to be the winner so I can rub it in the other obstacle goal here this is us first it's some of you may have played this at the GDC tutorials on Monday and Tuesday the idea is let's work with that balance not too hard not too easy so we give them a robot and there's these tanks that are gonna fight the robot the idea is to tune for drama talked about this from dramatic arc this dramatic tension that you want and so I want them to like make this feel like a movie they get this robot programming

sheet every they get a little teams and first they're what I call the scientists and the scientists get in teams and their job is to program the super military robot in their lab their secret lab somewhere and they kind of fill it out they give it a name like doom cuddles version 2.0 they fill out some instructions they get like 10 slots to fill out they get to put in the damage numbers and how it moves and rotates and things like that and then they get to give it a little secret special goal a special ability this one's like a self repair thing that every turn it gained a hit point automatically but they could've done jump Jets and burrow lean and call downs from lights and all sorts of teleporting things like that so there's a huge space there for them to be creative in then they take that robot and fight against tanks and the idea this the story here is that the robot of course escapes from the lab and those now they become tank commanders because the robots been programmed they can't change the robot anymore and they've got to now fight these tanks and now they are the tanks now have to fight the robot to keep it from crossing the goal line so the

robots trying to cross the board and this is the orphanage right over here and so if the the robot crosses that line he steps on the orphanage and kills all the other kids so it's trivially easy well so the the tanks there set the the students can't mess with the tanks they have a very simple move shoot rotate kind of scheme and that can't be changed and at this point the robot can't really be changed either but what happens is it's trivially easy to make a robot that wins on the first turn because you give it 10 movement actions and it just wins on turn 1 it's really easy to make a robot that dies on the first turn you give it like one hit point you have a turn around backwards and then the tanks come in and shoot it from behind so the the goal here for the students is to I want that Hollywood ending I want the robot down to one hit point about ready to step over the line right when the last tank because the other three have been blown up and the captain's all bloody he's like hitting the button and then he blows up the robot it's like that's what I want that's the tuning that I want so since they can't do the tanks they just

keep going back to the robot iterating on it and seeing how it does and eventually they get this robot that hopefully after an hour or so is like this perfectly tuned robot the real the trick here at the end there's always a trick on these is that I didn't really want them to fight the tanks I wanted them to fight each other and since they've all tuned to the same tanks and you can't change the tanks the the idea which usually turns out to be pretty close to truth is that the robots are all balanced with each other even though they're completely different because they've all been tuned to the same thing and even though they have teleporters and laser call downs and berline and all this other stuff it's amazing how close these battles are the other thing I'd find is pretty amazing is that there's no decisions in this game like you've already bought you've made your decisions upfront so when the gameplay actually plays out you just followed the program and that's all you can do and how exciting it is you would think that would be like that's got a boring you're just gonna sit there and watch these things go but it's not that way at all it's like everybody's cheering because you can't

see enough ahead in the future that you don't really know what's gonna happen and then when it plays out there's just a lot of like cheering and ohms and ahhs and and laughing which is great so we really had that drama so each sheet kind of each robot running its own little sheet there alright so moving on the idea of decisions and how we get around those obstacles the you know Sid Meier gave the talk just about interesting decisions so I'm not gonna go into that at all I'll let refer to his talk I'm sure he has a lot more to say about than I do anyway but it's really true it's like what am i doing as a player you give me a million decisions but if only one of them is good and that's not very interesting choice this feeling of creativity and discovery though is what the emotion that I really want to bring out in the players that I want the students to to experiment with how do you how does a player feel like they did something really creative maybe the game designer didn't even think of this and that's a really good win for the player

to feel like they're better than the designer of the game and that discovery that comes from that so 100 zombies one of my games last year that I showed the weapons of zombie destruction I had over purchased zombies so I had a huge drawer full of little plastic zombies I'm like I got to do something with these so we're gonna use those in this game it's really about balancing those decisions with each other so that all the decisions are worthwhile that you don't always pick this one and never another one also really want to encourage expression and role-playing with this exercise so I pulled some pieces out of a game called the last night on earth a zombie horror type game these are all just like the archetypical you know the stereotypes that you would see in a b-grade zombie movie these different characters the boy genius and the jock and so I really want them to get as if they're playing one of those characters I want them to feel like they are that character it's not just their pushing a piece of hardboard around they are a boy genius and how am I however

the decisions gonna make you feel that way and then you combine these characters at the end to see this new story start to form as these different characters come together how does a story how does a narrative change so the the game itself is as all these are try to be very simple with them you set up a bunch of zombies around the perimeter if you want to try to run this game on your own you can either you can just search Bag ohseong be and you can get like a huge bag of zombies for like 10 bucks which is what I did about 20 times so I've got thousands of these then you can also just use pennies I've seen people run it with paintings before and then it's kind of like these Abraham Lincoln zombies or attacking and just cost you a dollar to do that then you roll a die and the direction that you roll is the direction that all the zombies will move so if you roll a three then they all move towards the the three side and if you roll in this case of two they're all moving up so eventually they're gonna close in on the player and kill him but of course the player doesn't just stand

still the player needs to have some decisions some interesting decisions to work with so there's the full rules of the game they fit on one little card and rule 2 is the only one you need to pay attention to which is insert your rules here and this is the one I give to the students it's like give me the list of decisions based on your character so how does a priest move how does a priest attack and I don't have them do the mechanics that's not important at this phase of the game just tell me what priests do and and in tell me the verb tell me the words that describe what priests do and they come up with things like this and then you know the town drunk team meanwhile in another corner they have their own set and hopefully they're completely different than the priests although sometimes they align I don't know how that works but I'm just kidding so you build those up and then you kind of play out your game though then you add mechanics behind all of those like what does it mean to step verse stagger is that you know for step maybe you have one space but the jock might be able to sprint instead of step and then the drunk might roll a die and randomly move in a direction and that's

a stagger so then you have to translate that word into a mechanic in the game play it for a while do a little bit of balancing with those X with the decisions and then we join the boards together so there's two characters with double the number of zombies and then we'll like double that so then you've got close to a hundred zombies and four characters and at this point I know it's a success if they're really role-playing their characters and I'm somewhat I'm listening for is people talking in accents people slurring their words if they're the drunk people actually like holding their hands if they're the priest trying to really get that sense then you know they're really engaged and they're really into it from the level that they're now down in that world all right the rule systems you know what makes a rule system good it's the old cliche easy to learn and you all know the second part a lifetime to master for a beginning studi for beginning students they don't always think of this as like you get both there's a feeling of it's

kind of a teeter totter it's like if you make it easy to learn then it's not gonna be a lifetime to master and vice versa and so really trying to teach them it's like no you want both of these things they're independent vectors you want them to get as high up as possible and that's really important to try to get that idea across in the rule system so there's a series of little exercises that I do this is actually over three weeks as a kind of a warm-up when they first come into class to wake them up in the morning on a Saturday so we'll talk about rule structure and organization how to really lay them out so that people can understand them how to write rules with precision so that people listen they're not ambiguous that you have other people besides you know what you're talking about and how to simplify your rule system down so that it's it's really easy to learn no matter how many rules you have you can still make them simple if your phrasing them in the right ways so the kind of first week is the take a stick and make a rule game I write that on the board I put up a bag of sticks and we go around the room we walk up front grab a stick make a rule some of you may have played games like this so they come up front and make the

rule if you get a green stick give it to someone else if you have two green sticks and you have to sing or hum poker face and so then immediately the next person goes up and grabs the green stick and gives it to the first person to get that funny thing going on you have to close your eyes when taking a stick so you can't just keep grabbing green sticks I'm moving around the room you have to hop on one foot because you have to go back and forth and sing mary had a little lamb when your eyes are closed on and on keep your on your back so they start stacking up all these rules one by one and at some point I'm like you know what's what are you guys trying to really do here because it's it's hilarious what they're doing like they're bouncing all around and singing these songs and they're all laughing they're having the greatest time ever but you realize this game will never end okay it's like because they have no goal so it's really getting that point back again a site without a goal this is completely meaningless exercise oh uh no meaningless it's actually a blast but teaches that lesson so then the next week we're like now that we learned that lesson let's define a goal let's define our setup let's let's be

more specific about this and this is a similar thing get 50 points in front of you so you're trying to get dice in front of you and the the top face is how many points you have and this time they still pick a tie and they make a rule but I put them all sequentially in order and you have to follow it like a turn order you have to you can only do one you can only do two the the first one the one I just showed you the it's like spaghetti you it's really hard to analyze what you should be doing at any one point in time because all the rules are cross referring to other ones this one is like you only have to look at number six that's it ignore everything else now look at number seven and so on this game is much more organized it gets boring really quick unlike the first one which is more and more exciting and weird this one gets drags on as you start to step through all these rules and it gets really kind of tedious to run through after a while it starts out good but it usually starts to like dive really quick then the last one is try to get the best poker hand with five cards now what we're going to do is everybody still making rules but they can delete other rules they can insert them in the turn order or wherever they want and

they can really basically kind of define this little structure try to get it as simple as possible to make the game as entertaining as possible also I have them play simultaneous on this one so everybody's doing all the stuff at the same time as much as possible and that keeps the flow really going everybody's engaged instead of waiting for the person before them to take eleven actions before they get there eleven actions the more advanced version of this is the the card wars game and this one's really about creating modular rules they'll get these little rule cards and they'll make a rule for each one of the suits in the deck how to balance those they'll be doing this independently and so they have to try to and secretly and then they I'll get pushed together and then they have to try to balance them across the room as they start to move around I'll talk about that in a second there's as the rules get passed around you're reading other people's rules so you have to make these interpretations that you don't know if that's really what their intention was that's the main part of the exercise actually is getting people to try to understand other people's rules and talk about how the language is causing problems in

interpretation and then this last part easy to learn right we want the we're gonna be making I don't know 30 40 rules are gonna be swirling around the system how do we make them easy to learn we have a lot of rules there's tricks we can do to make that happen so the game itself is just war we've all played war you get a deck of cards in this case they're just 1 through 10 so they have 40 cards that end of each suit flip over the top one highest wins gets a poker chip when you get 10 poker chips you win the game the fun part comes in with the rules though so they have these 4 cards and when you flip over a spade you get to trigger your Spade rule and the other person will have a different Spade rule based on what they came up with so to try to get this emerge to tell you this easy memory tricks I don't have them do the rule the mechanics just like without a hundred zombies thing just give me the word so spades we say they're military they're attack they're aggressive so give me a phrase a word that implies

something aggressive something attacking like arrows flight then once they get those words written down then go back in and do the mechanics and now you have the shortcut this easy way of remembering oh I have an arrow and then in this case there you're dropping arrows onto the floor and trying to get them to land face-up so I will go through all of these but they're all followed the same thing diamonds are about trying to get extra points so they're usually a way of getting extra poker chips that you maybe didn't deserve to get through the normal mechanics of the game staffs we have this kind of nature feel for them here they're kind of instead of just pulling from the top of their deck they're building up a hand of cards and they can make a decision and this last one consolation present the hearts are about giving and healing so maybe taking cards from the discard pile and putting back in your deck or giving bad cards to your friends in this case so they kind of make those cards up they we've shuffled them all up you get your floor you move around the room and then we just kind of play it out and the idea

is that you correct the card if something seems wrong even though it's not your rule to begin with try to make it easier to understand if something's too strong then make it weaker or something's too weak make it stronger and the the goal then it's at the end of the session an hour or so we should have a really balanced set of rules even though everybody was independently in their own little rule module at any one time we try to see how that would all come together now usually comes up pretty well there's a few that usually get just wadded up and thrown away but overall the game gets pretty interesting all right the interaction last section here there's actually a lot here with interaction and trying to like get there's more than one exercise that just what I would be able to come up with to really get the richness of what I mean by interaction so the easy part of course is that it's the ease of input the user interface how do I talk to the game as a player and you know that's kind of an obvious concept and we all understand that the more subtle one is

how does the game talk back to me talk back to the players and this one is kind of like what tricks can you use as a designer to get your game to talk to speak to the players that are playing it well one way is I'm gonna reward you you're gonna pay attention to me if I reward use of the game systems outputting rewards then I'm gonna want to put more stuff in so I get those rewards back out again the other thing I really look for the thing that would slide the interaction slider you know from zero to ten would be this immersive atmosphere this idea that I'm really in this game right now I'm not I've crossed that dotted line there I'm not sitting at the table I'm down inside the system and if you can pull that off then you know your game is really communicating well with the players and this is a lot of subtle things it's just like color choices and fonts and the pieces that they're touching things like that can really help pull people into it so this is one of my favorite games I look forward this one every year roll dice fast game so I want to show them the power of rewards and like any good teacher I used to do this BF Skinner

kind of lecture you know about reward systems and we've all heard these things before so we know how that lecture goes and I decided it's kind of I'd rather actually be BF Skinner and have the students be my rats so I'm gonna be I'm gonna stand up front and I'm going to actually run them through some exercises they don't know it I was like hey let's play a fun game roll double sixes and try to do that as many times as you can I can get them to do this for over 30 minutes I record an hour on top of that they're standing up the whole time they're more and more engaged as the game goes on and it turns out that it's just they're having a great time so how it works is you treat them like rats so you start out and say here's a bunch of poker chips every time you roll double sixes call fries and you get a poker chip if somebody else has a seven when you called fries take a poker chip from them that's basically the whole rules of

the game now it's all simultaneous you're not taking a turn so your only real decision as it were is to like I don't know if there isn't one you run a real fast like if you have a seven on the table you want to get it off the table if you don't have double stitches you want to be the one with the double sixes and so that means as soon as they hit you pick up and as soon as you hit you pick up and so we we exhaust the pool of poker chips we see who has the most and that person wins and a lot of rooms like I was pretty interesting that's kind of fun it's like well as poker chips you know like let's play for cookies so I get out the the Pepperidge Farm the really nice ones you know don't get just the cheap cookies you want get really nice ones and you set them and then you and you blow the Santa's you open the bag you make sure every we can smell it you try to really get them engaged in that and then you go for cookies so now there's oh this games great I love this game I'm trying to roll sixes then we step it up we're like hey how about I pull out a bunch of quarters and throw them down we're gonna play for real money now the thing with cookies is you only really need one or two you know and then you're kind of

like I don't need any more cookies but if you're a college student you want all the quarters you can get especially with the vending machines right down the hall so now we we play for the quarters and by this point they're really into this game so they're like this is the best game ever played we should play this every week I love this game I can't wait to play this game with my friends and your double sixes okay and then of course I step it up it's like all right it's on we are I pull out 21s for my pocket and just like throw them down on the table I was like this is the real thing now that was war that was child's play what you guys were doing we're we're deep in this now and then now at this point they're just off the wall like they're loving this game so much you know so you know it's basically I'm showing them that you guys are not much different than rats and pigeons and all those other things I can get you to do these things it's fun real real quick is anybody in the audience one of my students played this game I'm curious if there's anybody okay I don't see anybody sometimes I might shoot a student show up oh okay back

there all right so what did it happen though is I was losing money every time I ran this exercise so and I'm just standing there and you can imagine me like I've got my white lab coat on and my clipboard and stupid students so you know I can I can manipulate them any way I want I'm so cool but I'm losing money so I'm like I might as well play because I could get some of my money back and it turns out this game is awesome it really is I don't know why but it's really fun and try it yourself and see like I totally get into it I get I get all excited like it's amazing so the simple things you could do by throwing money at people it's the power of that was great all right so you wanna the other game that we do for atmosphere and this was talking about just the fonts just the colors things like that is I have them just bring in some board games from home and we basically just hold up the boxes and say hey look at these boxes and tell me how you should feel how the marketing people how the graphic designer wants you to feel without even opening the box just describe that to me what font did

they use what color did they tilt the font you know is it kind of jumbled or is it really straight as it cursive font like Trivial Pursuit things like that and then they combine the two games we do a little mashup thing where it's like take these two games I randomly put people together and they just kind of have fun this one's a little more open-ended it's not really about the game that they come up with it's just about talking about the pieces so the wrote the one rule of the game is they can't use the rules of the game they brought in they can only use the pieces they have to make a new game so here was the battleship Jenga where you're trying to build a Jenga tower and then I guess blow it up by calling numbers out as they work their way up here here though you can kind of see the difference from what I was talking about like look at the Jenga font first look at the battleship font like you can clearly see right away the mood they're trying to set without even opening the box you know what's gonna be really whimsical the other is like worth so those kid that kid over there and he's like crazy into that game this one Starcraft the board game combined with gloom the if you play that game it's the game you try to get a buddy depressed so

they commit suicide and so I guess in this one you're travelling around the galaxy trying to depress people I'm not sure Trivial Pursuit combined with this co-op game called pandemic some of you may have played I'm not sure what they ended up with that one I can't remember and the last one here this was Settlers of Catan plus a game called Tannhauser which is a squad based tactical game so they've got these troops running across their settlers world destroyer I think they turned the the roads into bunkers or something like that so just kind of a just a fun mix-up thing but you kind of see all these different pieces and then the moods that they that can be set by them the differences in the packaging alone and the pieces that you play with makes a huge difference in immersion into the game system this last one here is am i doing time okay the squadron so I've been trying to teach probabilities and statistics for a long time and I'm in this class because I think it's really important for game

designers as as far as the interaction the output of your game it's really helpful as a game designer to know what your game can do and if you only have to wait for playtests it's too slow so if you can use math and probability statistics to figure out what your game can output in advance that's a huge win and so I've been trying to teach the students this and it just usually fails some it's spent some time like what's the game that teaches probability and statistics with no math because a lot of these do there's usually one or two programmers in the class but a lot of times it's artists and as soon as I do any math at all on the whiteboard they just fall asleep it's just amazing so it was really kind of a challenge for a while for me to get to come up with something kind of I'm still working on this one but it's coming along pretty well slowly progress in difficulty the idea here is I'm gonna borrow from my own lessons this is kind of another meta part of this talk where I'm using my own design lessons to help make games for the class and so that obstacle pong one with the par one I'm like let me start with a par one obstacle and then part

two and I'll keep stepping back until I get like the par-5 problem and then figure that they won the game of learning math and then this idea of like let's simulate thousands of play sessions let's not just go by what we find out in the class here so here's what I used to do I used to give them something like this and you feel free to try to solve this if you want you probably want to download the slides the answers are in the PowerPoint and the notes thing but I'm not gonna go through it right now but this very dry kind of typical math problem you would get in any math class that you went through through high school purposely with a lot of junk in there to get the play or the student to try to tease out the important bits of information and it doesn't really work most players are most Keep Calm players most students they just don't even do it like they would they would never turn in their homework so it's like what's the simple game okay here's the simplest game I can think of you each have one die you're gonna roll a die whoever gets the highest wins draw that probability table like that's so trivial it's like

of course that's easy and now compute the odds for me well there's 15 red X's there and there's 15 black X's so the odds are 50/50 good job super simple par 1 like you cannot fail this I guarantee it's so obvious so everybody comfortable with that all right let's move on I'm gonna try not to give you the lecture while I'm talking here the then I give them some stickers they have to make their own custom dye it has to add up to 21 but they don't know what everybody else is making this is an interesting problem I've actually if any one of you want to solve insanity answer is there one dye that's better statistically than any other dye you could possibly make or is it like rock paper scissors no matter what dye you come up with you can think of a dye that beats that and I still haven't really figured the answer myself out and I've been trying to get some programmers somebody to write the program that will do that for me so you know you can do these different kinds of dice and play with them and then they have to make the odds table for that so here the white person is a standard dye the blue person's modified there's a little bit take that same chart hook

them together oh that's 16 blue X's and that's only 15 black X's so 48 percent 52 the blue dye is clearly better but then mister green dye comes in mixes things up a bit you know he comes in and he gets the edge a big edge over that blue dye so they play with that for a while and try to figure out like who's dye was the best and do this little competition then we move on to number tiles these are unlike a dye that you don't know what it's gonna be every time the number of tiles we play two ways when it's just randomized and when you actually get a pick and set down the number your choice but you use it up you can't use it again and so this table as you start to use things up well the first turn it's 50/50 of course but then one you know read place for black plays to you redo that chart figure out now and the next turn after that what are the odds they start to shift depending on what you play when so as it kind of worked their way through the exercise the chart gets more and more constrained until the last turn you know who will

win a hundred percent of the time so just kind of work their way through again you kind of see what I'm doing here it's just like step step step step step step a little little little little and we're not really doing any math then the real game comes in and the real game here is I get these little spaceships to them I give them two four-sided dice six sided and ten sided and say you have engines weapons and shields when you first attack you roll the weapon are you roll the movement and whoever rolls the movement the highest gets to roll to weapons the person with the lowest movement only gets to roll one weapon and then you're trying to roll higher than their shield roll so again it's kind of a fun little promise like what is the best ship configuration like should you have fast movement so you get a roll to weapons and then you can't blow our weapons you know and so there's like a lot of different ways to think about it we then play this game I go around the room and say what ship was the best because they fight everybody else's ship and they kind of keep track of who's was better and they all say something different I was like Oh movements clearly better no way weapons are better Oh Sheila are much better and that's kind of what I hope happens because the

sample size is so low that they jump but they jump to conclusions anyway and I see this happen even at my work all the time of people with the sample size of one telling you that your game is broken so you know you what you want to get them to like hey do we really know this is true then open my laptop I have this little Excel spreadsheet we type in the ship we type in the numbers on the ships and I can actually tell them and simulate like you know what no you know in this case the the blue ship will do 76 damage over a hundred attacks where the red ship the B ship will do 86 damage so clearly the red ship is better than the other one so I'm just kind of showing them that the power of being able to actually clearly know the answer instead of just using a small sample said and I think that series of kind of stepping through is actually pretty successful I'm still kind of tuning this stuff and different things with it but actually showing some promise all right so let me wrap up here I'm getting kind of down to the final few minutes putting it all together towards the end of the the work at the end of the semester we

start combining all these ideas once we get the basics all figured out and there's a lot of games actually when I was going through trying to pick the games for this talk I realized how many of these I have I have like at least another 10 20 that I could have pulled out most of them start to fall in towards the end where we're just talking about all those ideas and building upon them I'll just use this one as an example because it touches on a lot of the different things the casino exercise you know you wonder you're going to make a casino game it's better have a really obvious goal better have some really interesting decisions to get the player there and need simple rules you don't want somebody spending a lot of time trying to figure out the rule systems you use reward and atmosphere to entice players to play your game but you need to make a profit so you actually need to make more money than you're giving away in rewards so they go again they go off to their own separate rooms as little teams they build these casino games and we pull them all back together we take over the lunch room and we turn it into a casino and this is always dangerous when the Dean happens to make a surprise trip in on set Saturday and every is

rolling dice and cards and poker chips everywhere and lots of noise also when there's always a few students in on Saturday from other classes especially towards the end of the semester with finals and so when they come down the hall to see what all the noise is about I give them a stack of chips like come on in this is where it's happening come on and spend these chips and then you get this kind of outside view so there's really two goals there's like the winning house the house that makes the most money and they get a special reward trophy for winning and then the winning player the one who can take advantage of the most systems that you have your house stash and you're your own personal stash I won't go into these in detail but just a few of them this is a pirate type game where you're trying to sink ships and you deal random cards onto the ships this one was a thing Uncharted ruins or something like that where you're exploring these different temples for gems basically rolling dice trying to fit him into a certain packages a big payout was this game it's

just a simple board you're trying to move around you you can cash out along the way as you work your way to the final goal or you can risk it all to keep going to the next cash out spot until you get to the big payout and they would actually like kind of yelled at who wants big payout come over here and try to like pull their out like carnival barkers almost they're really trying to like actively pull people's money into their systems and this one don't wake the dragon another kind of risk reward game or you're grabbing dragon gold but he may wake up at any moment and eat you so a lot of different things that they have a lot of fun with this one but it kind of stresses all the different things about rewards and decisions and goals and everything and putting it all together alright so we've got just a couple minutes here let me just wrap up with a few final thoughts of all of this so just spend an hour talking about these games take what you want from them from this talk but play them if you really want to understand what I'm talking about so you know listening to me talk about games is not the same as what I'm saying you should be doing but don't take what

I made as like oh stone said this is the game we can't change the rules just to opposite like make it your own do whatever you can to make that game meet the needs or teach you the lesson you know as a game designer I make these games and they're simple they're so simple but I learned from them every single year that I teach these like I've been doing this stuff for 10 years now and I still learn new things it always surprises me so you know you you can't stop learning you can't you drill on the fundamentals because there's a lot there there's a lot of richness there that keeps revealing itself that comes into these big complicated games these million-dollar games that we make and then find into my last point here is if you are a designer and everything that I talked about in this talk is like yeah I understand all that that's cool like that you know you didn't really tell me anything new I didn't already know then you should be a teacher go out then I say Mike go go down thank you go down ascend go down to your college or whatever and sign up for it to be a professor when I'm go to your QA

department and say hey who wants to learn more about game design and I bet almost everybody in that QA department will raise their hand just take a lunchtime pulling over to a lunch table have them play a game with you one of these games are really simple and you can educate you know it's a it's a two-way thing and by educating you'll learn trust me alright so I'll leave it at that the the all the games I'm gonna hopefully next week have them up on my website at Stone tronics comm so you'll be able to download PDFs of all of this stuff all the rules everything should be there but they're not there yet unless you really want to dig around because I've run these exercises in the past so a lot of them are up there but you have to search if you wait a week they'll be in one nice folder and I'll leave it at that I don't think we have time for questions unfortunately but feel free to come up afterwards if you want to talk about this thank you [Applause]