How Board Games Matter

[Music] hey everybody I guess it's probably time to get started um so this is a study and transparency how board games matter so I'm uh saon Johnson uh and these are pro uh these are the basically four major games I worked on uh probably most notably I was the lead designer of civ4 uh and I wrote most of the gaming and AI code for that as well um and who I am now I hope this isn't a little too on the nose but I'm uh the founder of Mohawk games uh and we are developing a economic RTS right now uh which we'll probably be talking more about sometime later this year um and uh it's another way to describe that is an RTS without units and if you're curious about that just ask ask me about it after the session all right so let's talk about video games you know like like these video games uh but when you see these

games uh do you think of video games or do you think of something else for example card Hunter you know when you see this perhaps you think about D and D or when you see Hearthstone uh perhaps you think about magic when you see Hero Academy you might think about uh Miniatures uh when you see Battle of the Bulge you might think about you know old school Avalon Hill war games um and I'd like to take a moment to look at this incredible picture here if you notice on that board I count two calculators and four sets of tweezers we we've lost something I think in gaming all right so so what are these what are these games uh they are often described as board games but you know strictly speaking these are video games uh so consider days of wonder

which is a very successful board game publisher you know they make Ticket to Ride For example which is a which is a great game uh however uh Ticket to Ride the app out sells ticket to the ride Ticket to Ride the board game by 3 to one um you know it's perhaps not a fair comparison but still you could ask you know is days of Wonder a board game company or a video game company another way to put this is are board games defined by their physical components um and if board games are supposed to be physical then why do people call uh still think of those video games I was talking about earlier as board games what I'd like to argue here today is that board games are defined by their transparency um so let me talk about a few examples to to clarify that point so here's Memoir 44 and these are the dice you roll when you attack in that game um and the results are very direct you know you see a infantry unit that means you kill an infantry unit you see a flag that means you Retreat you see a picture of a tank that means you can kill a

tank uh here's Agricola uh in this game you have these various resource piles which build up from turn to turn and so you have a very direct sense that uh you know you might want to grab that clay because now there's a giant stack of of clay there um it draws attent you know draws the players attention uh here is power grid a a game which has a very uh transparent and simple model of uh supply and demand uh this track here that runs along the bottom of the board uh you see a bunch of sort of wooden wooden markers uh the black cubes represent coal uh the brown is oil uh the red is uranium the yellow is garbage um and each of these different boxes you see represents a different price so all the uh all the cubes that are in the the far left box here are available for for $1 but as players pick those cubes off the track the price goes up and that's represented directly by the fact that you look where the the far you know the

cube farthest to the left is it's in the Box label two so that means it costs $2 you know as you move further you know it costs $3 you know and eventually you can get all the way to the end here and it's going to be cost you know it'll be costing $8 and it might not even be available at all uh if someone you know decides to just buy up all of the all of the coal that's available um furthermore you know each turn you are also adding resources back into the system which represents Supply so every turn you're you're picking tiles up or picking cubes up and moving it to the right and then you're adding them back moving them down to the left so you see directly how the prices go up and how the prices go down and it's very ter it's transparent to see how that's a direct result of player action um so thus here we have a very simple transparent mechanic that models the free market pressures of Supply demand and scarcity this is this is Shogun uh a game that uh resolves its combat using this this Cube power um and uses it to

model the randomness of combat and also to mess with players expectations uh and I'm going to go into some depth here uh so here's here's a look inside the tower so uh you see it's got these I'm not sure what to call them but sort of these floors that you insert inside the tower that had these different holes in them and that's there to sort of randomize the process of throwing uh these wooden cubes into the tower and seeing what comes out in the bottom um you know so here's here's a look at you know directly from the top and you see you know it can take quite a winding path to get down to the bottom so over the course of the game uh let's say uh the blue player attacks the red player uh you moving two uh 12 cubes against seven um so then what you do you know is you take take those cubes off the board uh you know you you set up the cube Tower you mix them all together and then you toss them in the tower now some of those cubes will come out and some of them won't um and you know all you have

to do is count up uh you know however many Cube you know the the cubes of the two different players and whoever's the most uh wins um you believe it or not if you remember early on a c blue actually had 12 cubes so half of his cubes actually got stuck in the tower whereas all of Red's cubes came out which is uh a pretty unusual result but that's I actually did this in this was my first attempt doing this to take these these shots and that's just how it worked out and uh so poor blue player you see he could come back can look down and they're all his cubes stuck inside the Tower of no use to him however what the the thing that's really interesting about Shogun is you don't then dump the cubes out of the Tower so you have an empty Tower what you actually do is you leave them in the tower over the course of the rest of the game so for the next combat let's say yellow decides to attack blue you know four cubes to two well you mix all those cubes together you drop them in the tower and but remember blue still has six cubes stuck inside the

tower and you know sure enough blue gets some of those old cubes to fall out and ends up winning the battle um you know and now yellow has has a cube stuck inside the tower um the physical the physicality of which cubes out cubes come out or stay inside creates an unpredictable but transparent combat system what makes this system so interesting is that the players can and of course do peek into the tower during the game to see which player still has cubes inside the the tower which affects their decision- making about who to attack when blue lost a very tough battle by having six cubes stuck inside the tower that hurt but the upside was that the other players would be afraid to attack blue until all those blue cubes come out of the tower essentially blue gets a short-term combat bonus which will change how everyone plays that's a that's an interesting mechanic but is what is really interesting about Shogun is how the Simplicity uh of the how the Simplicity and transparency of the cube Tower creates all this depth in

gameplay so I'd like to talk about these two games for a little bit race for the Galaxy and in Innovation um and these two games are both uh based around a set of cards uh which have essentially rules printed on them but they they both do it in uh very different ways uh so when you play a game of innovation uh the board looks something like like this uh and you see there sort of five different colors for the different types of Technologies and you see the sort of the player in the bottom left he has sort of all these cards splited out on the table um but essentially the the sort of Active technology is the one that's on the top uh and that's the one that's sort of relevant to play at at this specific time and this is what these cards look like uh the rules on the card are communicated as text you know thus each card can have a completely unique power and in in a four player game if you're you're talking about five active Tech technology that means you could

have 20 unique rules in play at any one time uh which can also change from turn to turn now the the cognitive load of trying to understand the state of the board here is immense um a new player who wants to be competitive has to essentially Force the game to a crawl to make sure each card has been read and understood and often sort of the the social cost of doing that is simply too high you know and a lot of new players just well okay you know let's just keep the game rolling I'm not going to actually take the time to understand you know all the pieces on the board and what they mean because you know I'd have to literally read these you know two to three sentence descriptions on each card and you know that's just that's just not you know that's just not going to work that's going to slow the game down too much but they're essentially just accepting the fact that they're going to be playing the game poorly because if you don't understand you know what the cards what the cards do you're not necess going to be making the right decisions now uh race for the Galaxy is Is Not So Different uh each player can have you know up to 12 cards in play at

at once um although the cards are uh each of the cards in Innovation is unique uh in race for the Galaxy there are are duplicates in the deck so you don't quite have the same uniqueness problem but but here's the big difference you know let's look at the the race for the Galaxy cards so you see these these cards do not have text um instead the uh designer has sort of invented this uh iconographic grammar to communicate the rules um so so if you look closely at these cards you'll see uh certain patterns repeated you know whenever you see a hand holding a card that means you draw a card if you see a little circle which is the symbol for a planet with a minus one you that means it costs one less to uh to colonize that planet um you know red is the symbol for military so if you see a plus one that's red that means you get an extra military Point um and here's the thing these um this card here basically collects all of these iconographic rules in one place um and now to be clear this is actually

a pretty big demand on the player to okay you want to play this game you now need to learn this language before starting um however you know I would argue that this is actually preferable to Simply describing everything in in text as in in in as an innovation because the uh self-imposed constraint of a limited grammar keeps the designer from special casing from overdesigning the game um in race for the Galaxy they going to be sort of these natural sets of cards like oh here's some research cards and here are some military cards and here are some production cards and in your mind you can kind of group all those together and think of them in the same way you know that they'll have these interesting subtle variations and they'll be hybrid cards but you have these sort of uh schema or archetypes in your mind to use when you're considering what to do with these cards um in Innovation uh every card is an island essentially you know there's nothing limiting the designer from from doing something that's just radically

different and unexpected with each card um and indeed that's what you see with some of the cards Innovation because there wasn't that self- inspos self-imposed constraint you know the designer was able to kind of just um you know overdesign the cards and make the game you know very heavy and and difficult to understand um you know they weren't weren't committing to the the ADV the advantage of having a consistent grammar um so if you think about video games um you know they can have their own grammars as well um in Thief Garrett's main method of interacting with the world is via arrows which is uh really its own type of gameplay grammar uh the designers could of course come up with completely unique ways uh for the player to douse torches uh cause distractions like fires and so on uh you could have it so you know um a Garrett could snuff out a torch with with his hand for example um however by limiting Garrett's agency to just as arrows uh the cognitive load is reduced on the player because the player understands that he can start

a fire simply because Garrett has a fire arrow that's that is you know all all that you know all the all the player needs to know um they just simply look in the backpack I have a fire arrow what do arrows do you know they they cause an effect on something in a distance it's fire I know what's going to happen when I when I when I launch it as opposed the player is not going to imagine uh a bunch of interactions that the game simply doesn't allow you know he he's just simply going to see these are the type of arrows available now I know what is possible to do in this in this world uh so in contrast uh do you know Call of Duty is an example of a game that has a heavily scripted single player campaign um and it it doesn't really have a grammar uh anything can happen at any time so the player never expects you know that the rules can even be understood um and you know is is basically that the equivalent of you know the cars in in Innovation uh um is

you know there is no system that runs in the player's head you know there there isn't really something to be understood there's just something really to be consumed so A Game's rules are what keep the player engaged with the actual game part of the game as opposed simply consuming the scripted content uh thus it's very important that the rules themselves be be consistent and transparent uh so now I'd like to talk about yomi for a little bit uh yomi was designed by uh noted noted figh game player and designer uh David serin um and yomi is essentially his attempt to expose uh the core highlevel mechanics of a fighting game to an audience that doesn't have either the dexterity or the free time to master such demanding games and uh this is basically in his own words here uh competitive games tend to shut out most of the population because they tack on extra skill tests Street Fighter for example requires so much dexterity with the joystick that most most potential players are not able to

experience the interesting mental challenges at the core of the game I want to extract those great mind games and offer them to everyone not just the few who can pass the other extraneous tests so what he did then was um he made this transparent abstraction of that inner game inside of fighting games um he he boiled it down to this sort of uh rock paper scissors like Simplicity and then uh in a deck of yomi cards each card is explicitly categorized as belonging to one of those four types um and and I like to draw special attention to the graphic design here uh usually uh like as in a card game like magic uh the name of the card is put up in the upper left hand corner of a card that's sort of almost a standard um here however it's in the upper right almost as an afterthought what is actually important is that it's an attack card um along with the various various stats for that specific spe card so a player sees this card and he thinks

ah it's a tack card of value four uh she doesn't think of it as spectral pull uh serlin is is making this categorization transparent so you know event in fact nowadays you can actually play a digital version of yomi which means you're playing a video game version of a card game that distracts a different video game um that's how it goes um so the important lesson of yomi is that games have a core in game that is often invisible to Casual players and so it's important to make that in game transparent as much as possible abstraction is a great tool for teaching which is what's necessary to bridge the gap between novices and experts so let's talk about magic uh Magic is a collectible card game which is notable for having a rich metag game composed of drafting and deck building um and for those of you who don't know deck building means that you know you have a deck of 45 cards you

bring to a magic game and they can be pulled from you know the existing world of millions I suppose of magic cards you know it's up to you to build your own deck drafting means that before you build this deck of 45 cards uh what you do is you uh pull up a hand of say 15 cards and you pick one and then you you you hand the cards that you did not pick to uh one of your you know the player to your right or whatever and then you keep doing that so you're basically taking turns uh building your deck one after another and you see as you draft you also see not just the cards you pick but you notice which cards are missing so you know what cards your opponent is picking as well um now it's important to note that these aspects of magic are not part of the core rule set in other words it is it is not necessary to do either one to play Magic but the game would not have become nearly as possible without this type of metagaming so let's say you want to build a great magic deck the problem is that there are a lot of Cs to choose

from there's a lot of cards really there are so many cards you know and and what are you going to do with all these extra cards and not to mention there's the pro problem of scarcity see there's a card up for sale for $6,200 I don't know if it's sold for that or or something else but uh you know that's that's what you can see with Magik cards so um the metag game is fun that's really what drives a lot of the interest for magic you know but is it uh visible and accessible to most players will I really ever be able to actually experience magic without committing to it as a lifestyle choice so what we've learned recently is the meta game can be an actual game instead Seven Wonders and and Dominion split the metag game of magic between them making each part transparent and access and accessible to everyone Dominion turned deck building into game play um by making the deck

building the actual game instead of the thing you do before the game deck building is hugely intimidating for new players and Dominion solves that problem by letting players do it one step at a time all out in the open beginners can see what cars the veterans are buying and in what order and even if they never catch up they at least get to see how the winner won seven wonders did the same thing for drafting by making drafting the actual game instead of the thing you do before the game the process is that you draft a card and then you you play it immediately face up so just like in Dominion the player gets to take it one step at a time and see what everyone else is drafting each turn so it's it's a form essentially learning while drafting and drafting is now no longer scary instead it's a transparent process and players will much more quickly learn some of the subtleties of drafting such as hate drafting by picking a card that you know will hurt your opponent by not having then than helping you you know and then

still comes out as as a net win um you know that's something that you can you can pick up you pick up and feel as you're playing Seven Wonders even though that's something that's that's you know not really a beginner strategy in uh as you learn to draft in Magic um so the concept of making game play processes visible to all players uh raises an interesting question about something most uh strategy games take for granted at the fog of War uh it's it's almost a trivial to implement in a in a video game uh and of course almost impossible to do well in a board game uh so it's usually an automatic choice for video game designers to to add fical War to their games because uh hey it's this this great thing that only we can do um however there is sort of a a hidden cost to fog of war in that new players don't get to see how the veterans are winning uh replays help of course but the typical RTS experience for many is sort of this quiet early game where you're building up and you know dropping down some barracks and Mining some minerals

and building some units you know and then suddenly you know this this happens uh now the uh the RTS my building the RTS uh we're building right now actually has no fog of War um players learn by watching each other um and you know of course fog of War fog of War sort of runs counter to that now there are important reasons why you have fog of War in RTS games like there's there's no avoiding that and it's not something that's going to go away but you know perhaps M mainstream RTS designers should consider uh simply shipping with an option to disable it just for sort of learning matches you know where you're helping people play but there is this important core issue here where you don't want to hide what's going on uh you know it's not necessar a great thing to hide all the interesting stuff that's happening in the game just for sort of some sort of uh strategic mechanic uh as you you know which is what you get out of War um so ultimately the ultimate point

the important Point here is that transparent mechanics increase a player's comfort with a game uh don't ask your players to make a bunch of crucial decisions like drafting a complete magic deck before they they've even experience the game itself this has always been a bit of an issue for how do you get new players into magic right you know you can't what are you going to tell someone who's never play the game how they should build their deck it's basically impossible you sort of basically have to build a deck for them and just drop them into the match um and then you know eventually they'll be able to understand that there's a metag game involved but it's almost like telling you this is this great game but you aren't going to be able to get to it until you go through the you know just go through the sort of Road steps of of learning the basics first um so now I like to talk about two different kinds of luck found luck founded games which is which is very explicitly visible in board games so pre-u is talking about um some sort of random event happens in the game and then the player uh makes a decision

or chooses an action based on that result so this game game here is alien Frontiers and it has a very clear version of prelu uh it's it's a bit like Crossing yachi with uh um agrica as you'll see here um so basically the player rolls the dice and then uh these dice themselves are the workers um and so then the player then gets to decide how to place them on the board depending upon the role so you have these different different areas on the board and they all have different rules for how you can place the dice in them so for example the colony of Constructor takes three of a kind the orbit of Market Takes Two of a Kind um and the important thing here is that luck creates a situation from which the player then reacts you know which is not fundamentally different from say encountering a random map in a game of sip so post luck on the other hand involves the player making a decision and then excuse me and then a random event determines the

outcome so risk is sort of a classic example of this right because the player decides uh which country to attack you know moves in the units and then rolls the dice to determine the outcome um now I don't want to go so far as to say that uh pre-u is good and post luck is bad uh but games with pre-u tend to be more engaging that because the player gets to think and to adapt uh to make the best of a bad role or to take advantage of a great one uh post luck games on the other hand can uh often make the players end up feeling like victims um so the the combat system you know looking at video games here the combat system of RPGs often tend to favor post luck uh with players basically choosing the same few abilities and spells over and over again and then the random number generator you determines the result um the most interesting decisions get made when you're basically when you're leving up leveling up your character you know when you're essentially choosing your build that's that's when you make the decisions and then the ACT combat which unfortunately is what you're doing most

of the time is is somewhat rote um card Hunter uh provides a really interesting alternative um each player uh the the basically your spells and abilities are represented essentially as a deck of cards and each turn you're kind of drawing five from that deck and so even if there you have some Powers available that you really want to use they may or may not be available depending upon what what hand of cards you draw you drew um therefore you know therefore a player gets a different set of uh options to choose from each turn which can make the gameplay much more varied and dynamic so the the big Point here is uh pre-u is a great way to give the player a clear set of interesting decisions uh Often by limiting which ones are available at uh as each decision point so I sort of moved through uh some great uses of transparency in uh in board games um and you know here are kind of the main points I I I I pulled upon and I'm going to transition now to

talking about about video games um but I just just like to review you know that you know transparent consistent rules run in the player's head creating engagement transistent transparent abstraction focuses players on the inner game transparent visible mechanics increase player comfort and pre-u is a transparent way to present interesting decisions you know these are all really valuable lessons I think can be applied to you know games of all type so uh let's let's get back to talking about what this all means for video games you know real video games not not ones that could be mistaken for for board games uh but first I'd like to ask uh what connects these games um well these four games they're all story driven you have authored levels fixed progression and it's important to note here that uh I'm not talking about budget um you know these these all eight of these games essentially fall fall

within this category um and what that that means is that uh these games are static uh static means that the game world is authored set in stone uh each player is going to be confronted with the same experience uh even if they uh you know experience it in in different ways uh there is sort of this this static world uh and furthermore they they're meant to be finished to be consumed but games can be dynamic so what do I mean by Dynamic uh Dynamic games are unpredictable rules driven challenging they are meant to be replayed to be mastered however it's not it's not necessarily black and white it's it's a Continuum some static games use Dynamic systems uh these games here have stories and author progression but the dynamic game systems mean that the player's experience will be more bued on the other hand some Dynamic

games use static content uh these Dynamic games are highly replayable but make use of static content like Maps or track or tracks and so on of course there's there's lots of room for debate you know Perhaps Perhaps swapping these you know is correct you know at least in single player uh Starcraft 2 is a very static game there is a mostly linear set of levels which are meant to be solved in a a specific way uh Dragon Age on the other hand changes a great deal depending on the player's companions story choices and chosen skills however this is definitely uh excuse me getting h of myself so there's lots of room for debate uh however this is this is definitely wrong um you know there you could there's no way you can argue that last of us is a dynamic game or that Civilization is a static game so what's really important here is is that you understand the extremes of

the Continuum you know what it means to be a static game what it means to be a dynamic game and uh here is what I think this is what I think is the most important Point uh for static games the content is of primary importance and for dynamic games the mechanics are primary importance and so I'm mostly concerned here in this talk in general when I'm talking about the importance of transparency and what we what we learn can learn from board games I'm mostly concerned about Dynamic games so you know not all of these lessons can be applied broadly to all games at at once but they're they're going to be most applicable to games on the right right side of the spectrum um so you know what engages the player with the Dynamics with the mechanics of a dynamic game um well I'd like to say that transparency is the key factor uh spun for example is very upfront about what tools and challenges the players will have and how they interact even if separate

playthroughs is radically different um and you know there's lots of uh there's lots of great examples here of you know good transparency and bad transparency in video games so if you look at the Civ series as a whole uh combat was was a real mystery with with Civ one you got a lot of unexpected results a lot of faanes destroying battleships um you got you know wildly Divergent outcomes there was a this whole collateral damage rule which was that you know if I had a stack of 10 units and you attacked me and you killed the the unit on the top all the rest got destroyed which um was usually quite a shock to players who didn't know about that rule um and so as the as the series moved forward we moved more and more towards transparency uh and when we got to C 4 there was sort of a a key you could hit when you moused over a potential battle uh that would show you directly these are the these are your odds of winning this battle you know they're 80% and these the different modifiers uh for the for that battle um

you know and after the battle was fought there was a Battle Log you could look at which would actually explain all the roles um and then Civ 5 uh did a wonderful job with sort of this very simple um transparent U piece of UI that you would see before combat that showed you you know the approximate damage that's going to be inflicted uh your strength their strength what are the different modifiers um you know the we we would always get um we always felt like player engagement went up the more uh open and transparent we made the um the rules and the the aspects of combat the more players were able to understand ahead of time what is the result of the ACT what is the potential result of the action that they are choosing um so here's another couple examples of of games that that both had a global scale um the one on the left here is Sim Earth uh it had uh a lot of complex interrelated systems that were

hard to describe and hard to understand a lot of chaos theory and and snowballing if you look if you look closely at the screen there there's a very helpful diagram that talks about carbon dioxide absorption and thermal tolerance and you know very simple easy stuff to to grasp um Defcon on the other hand uh simplifies the globe to just the the be it's a beautifully designed game just the bare minimum amount of information required to play the game um and you just these subtle Point like for example the missile Trails um when you look when you look at missile moving you don't just see where it's headed but you also see where it came from you know there's a lot of of information uh present in the the few bits of of of of data visible to you uh interface is a great place to um uh to employ transparency to to sh shed a window on the system in the background um these UI elements here uh both uh highlight you know sort of chunky as you

say Boolean based aspects of the game design you know a a critical hit in team Fort 2 is a is a um is a distinct event and so they they they really highlight that directly every time that happens um you know opening and accepting a quest and wow is a is a leads to a very distinct State and so you know that exclamation point was a you know sort of really important innovation in interface uh you can have trans transparency via systems um you know it's always this is one of the reasons physics is very popular um as a as a a gameplay system because it's sort of inherently transparent you know all you have to do is is be human and know what it means to to fall down and try to get up and to throw a ball you know you already have a sense of of how the the gameplay is going to work and this is this is an important one here you can um make your game play transparent via theme if you're smart about how you uh are pit position in your game you know when you told someone

so in a in a tower defense game at its core it's based around the concept of you place down static Towers uh which then fight slow-moving um AI controlled uh characters creeps is what they're called but you know basically AI units that are are moving in to attack you um and sometimes those games are very abstract um sometimes they're not but you know you'd have to you still have to sort of teach a player that this this this is the core of the game you know you're playing you're placing down these units that are not going to move and you're defending against these slow moving objects um well all you have to do is say the words Plants versus Zombies and someone understands that intuitively right you know that plants can't move and you know that zom zombies do but they well most of the time they move slowly um so you know that that pairing was was a brilliant way you know to make the the the the the gameplay that existed within the game transparent to the player um you know Triple Town is a match 3 um

that uh is sort of a match 3 I'm not sure quite how to describe it but um the it's built around comb these combinations um the the match3 is built directly into the game's art by three bushes becoming a shrub and then three shrubs becoming a tree and and so on you know each of these Le levels is sort of easy to imagine and you sort of anticipate what's the next one uh what the next one is and you even wonder what the the the one is three or four levels above you and you can also go a long way you know gain transparency via VIA help um so this is the city screen in Civ uh Civ 4 uh and if you Mouse over uh the essentially the the um the food in the production bars um which is also sort of where you see your health and your happiness uh in this case I guess the player is moused over the happiness you get this this uh explicit breakdown of all the different factors that explain

why the city has 23 happiness and 15 unhappiness uh I'm not sure if you can read it but some of those reasons are you know plus six unhappiness because it's too crowded that means there's too many people in the city um plus four because of War you know this war has been going on for too long um plus plus one we will not fight with our brothers and sisters in the faith uh that means you're fighting a another Civ uh which happens to be of the same religion as you um on the other side of the Ledger you see things like um uh plus 12 happy you know we enjoy our luxurious resources you know all the uh The Furs and the the diamonds and the spices that you've been bringing in the city are making your players uh happier um you know so this is this is a nice way to like really you know there's there's a lot of stuff going on inside a game of Civ and it's great to have that all broken down into one specific place um and this was even even more true when you're talking about diplomacy in the game this is the diplomacy game and this is the diplomacy screen in Civ 4 um and diplomacy has

always been a very challenging thing in the in the Civ games um because you know there's complicated algor algorithms going on in the background controlling you know what the AI is going to do um and sometimes those algorithms do things that even surprise the people who write the code themselves right um and what you what we discovered over time is that the more we're able to expose about the uh the reasoning that's going on inside the AI the more engaged the players come and this this was sort of a hard earned lesson because um often time our intuition as designers was that we wanted there to be a little bit of mystery there you know that uh the the AI is supposed to be a replacement for a human right and humans are unpredictable uh humans have their own uh quirks and they their their own vendettas and maybe they want to get to revenge and they you

know there's a lot of depth to play game with the human and theoretically the AI is supposed to replace that but the simple truth is players know when they're playing an AI you know you're not you're not going to be tricking them and they have inherently a certain expectation that the AI should should behave a certain way and if the a the AI deviates from that it's important that you're able to explain to them why that happened um so in this screen here what I actually originally did um you know there's sort of like five states of diplomacy of attitudes in C4 you know from going from uh Furious to angry to cautious to pleased to Friendly you know those are the five different ways the AI can uh can consider you um and originally that was all we were going to show but as I was writing the AI to the game I often was surprised why a specific AI that I thought should hate me was pleased or or vice versa so I I basically added some debug code so that

I could Mouse over that and I could see the numbers behind that um and that was just part of the game for a while and our testers saw that and you know they they loved it like that was something they responded very positively to um and you know anytime we tried to take that away um it was it was something that caused a lot of frustration um and also beyond that as soon as this this stuff was in there we saw just a very different tone when people started talking about uh the diplomacy of in the game people were less frustrated they were more directly engaged with what was going on they were they were thinking more more deeply about what was you know what was actually going on in the game as opposed to um you know kind of a lot of paranoia and conspiracy theories and a lot of you know kind of strangeness about the AI um so you know you see here directly on the screen um there's you know the a plus run modifier because years of Peace have strengthen our Rel um there's a plus two because we

appreciate the years you have supplied us us with resources um there's a negative one because you declared war on our friend um so beyond explaining to the player why the AI feels this way uh it also helps teach the player the importance of their decisions further on in the game so farther down the road they know the effects of declaring war on the friend of someone else and that if I Declare War now I will kind of lose that bonus of the fact that we've been uh at peace for centuries um you know it's a very very important teaching tool so ultimately uh if the mechanics are primary to a game you know then I I I really want to strength that a key factor is is transparency all right thank you all right I think we have uh some time for questions here uh thanks good talk um sa and I

been arguing about this for years um but I was interested in uh um I tried to find many things to disagree with but I only found one thing really to disagree with so it was it was when you said there's a a core part of the game that's it was Bas around the serin stuff sure and there's a core part of the game that basically isues the micro and only the M the macro to use RTS you know strategy and tactics or whatever but at least my experience in making spy party is that like the micro in games like that is actually part of the core and like in is in kind of an inextricable way which is one of my criticisms about the idea of taking too much from board games so I was wondering if you could talk more about that because I don't agree with the fundamental concept that every game has this core thing that is not micro sure that you can pull out of it so you don't believe that spy party has the inner part that could exist without the micro I think for example the pathing in the micro is part of the game of Performing like the spy for example or the aiming aspect deepens the game for the sniper

and I think that's true in a fighting game and in a whole bun other games like that kind of performance Under Pressure there's a whole bunch of things that aren't like a different real time and a strategy game aren't the same and so one of my criticisms about taking too much from board games is there's the whole stalinist like quantity as a quality it's all its own you know the fact that you're running at 60 HZ and you're evaluating millions of things a second changes the thing completely so well I think I think the micro can be the game for sure and you know I think those are aspects fight party you identified that that are important that are not not ones that should necessarily be abstracted away I I think the issue for serin was that uh having a level achieved a level of Mastery in fighting games he became aware of this whole other pipe of game that most players just never saw right and he wanted to expose that and that doesn't necessarily mean that you wouldn't want to have any type of Micro in fighting games I think perhaps the issue and I'm probably putting words in his mouth now uh is that um there was perhaps the the micro parts of fighting game perhaps got fetishized a little bit

you know that it you know that's where it kept the the genre kept kept growing they kept adding more buttons and more Combos and longer combos as opposed to uh instead trying to pair that stuff down and trying to Big out bring out this beautiful thing at the heart of the game um I think dive kick is an example of a game that you know also you know is sort of pushing towards that that inner core of fighting games um and you know I think there's room for both I mean I think that the games that really focus on the micro fighting um you know I think I think that's that's fine too but like you know maybe they should really think through what it means that that is what the game is that they're really making a fundamentally twitch based game and perhaps those games should have less Mind Games I I don't know that's just I'm not the fine game expert but oh sorry go ahead yeah I'd like to get your take on um iPad ports of some tabletop games with respect to sort of information and ux design you know I think of game I think of games like Stone Age and Puerto Rico which I think have been ported really successfully and

they create you know a fun experience and then I think about a more complex game like eclipse in which from my perspective there's just too much going on and it's too hard to actually play something like that on an iPad do you think that there's sort of a a complexity point in terms of board games Beyond which it just doesn't work in a digital format yeah I mean we're I think in this early stage of the the sort of um transition like at this point board games were designed just to be board games and then the iPad came along and now you know I want to play all these games I've never got a chance to play in real life on my iPad and sometimes that works out wonderfully and sometimes the UI is a bit of a disaster either based off of execution or that the game is just simply too complicated right I think the next wave is people designing games aware that perhaps most people are going to be playing this game on an iPad instead of you know in person uh or that the two need to fit together or stuff like Battle of the Bulge where where it's made by uh you know war game designers but they're fully committed to

to the iPad I mean that game is built to fit you know exactly within this the the iPad screen and you know just makes a beautiful use of of a touch interface um so I think that's that's what they're is to be excited about you in the future for for mobile mobile board games thank you oh W all right go I I have a question about fog of War even though I love your magic slides by the way thanks we live in a world of YouTube and like twitch where maybe it's not too difficult to see how a good player is beating you given that there's these Avenues to see high level play of these games that do use fog of war is that make it less of a decision to actually use it uh sorry I need you to repeat the question once so using fog of War you said a problem is it hides what your opponent is doing and possibly how they're beating you right so you may not learn to play the game right but because of YouTube and twitch stuff like that

people can see high Lev gameplay and and beyond that I mean like Starcraft 2 did a wonderful job of uh you know you know bringing replays into the into the experience and you know at the end of the game it it'll show you that direct list of all all the different actions you know they built four scvs and then they built a a vesian uh they built on the VES gas and you know you see the exact order that they took so if you're if you're wondering how you fell behind behind you can kind of like look at that build order and kind of imagine it I mean like I I'd say in a sense they're they're aware of the problem I'm not sure whether consciously or or or not but you know they they know that you know they want to expose what happened in the game as much as possible even with a fog of War um so I mean I think I mean fog of war is here to stay I mean it's one of the great things that video games does and you know it's not going to go away but um it you if you you definitely shouldn't just assume that it should be there in strategy game you know that that's that's the best way I would put

it all right uh with transparency in mind how do you approach games whose core gam play is founded on things like in information or lies or betrayal and things like in identity games and the like yeah well I'd like to draw a line between sort of rules transparency and hidden information um which is perhaps something I I should have got into I mean there's there's a lot of uh great board games where everyone understands the rules but of course they don't know you know what cards someone is holding and uh uh you know that you know the sort of the classic block war games War Games you know the blocks are sort of turned around and you can't you can't tell if if that's a tank or an infantry or an artillery or or whatnot um and so you know that's that's just a great uh great tool for game design hidden information um there is sort of this this higher level issue of some simulations um you know sort of the Paradox games EU Crusader Kings uh or game you know simulations in general things like out of the park baseball um

you know these games are kind of built around this concept or part of the appeal of these games is you're never quite sure what's going on under the hood um and there's there's no getting around that that that is you know that is not transparent and transparency is not just this this goal you should always aim for it's just it's just this important tool if you want to if you want the player to engage with a certain set of rules um so the point is is that if you're making a game like you know like out of the park or whatever you you should know that you're purposely making an opaque set of rules um and you should design that into the system that like okay so they don't know what's going to determine what happens in each specific game of baseball but we should you know we should provide hints um you know we should you know have some Scouts that give some you know bits of text to explain why players kind of preserve behaves certain ways you just need to be very aware of what you're doing because you're you're you know you're choosing to be transparent all right cool this question is kind of related I think like

so I love this talk and I thought it was great and it like did a a great job representing a point of view that I think is completely valid but there's this opposite point of view which uh questions a lot of the assumptions you're making about whether players are supposed to be comforted and supposed to be satisfied and have clarity about what they're achieving right and so in games obviously the system is the message and a game like Sim Earth is actually an amazing game in part because it it you know captures that idea so perfectly you know and so the idea of a Diplomat being represented as almost a robot kind of sends this message that's very different than what it's like to real diplomacy and real interactions with humans so I guess the question is have you thought to what extent do you think and you're obviously a super smart person what and you're coming down on one side of this argument to what extent have you thought about those dogmas and playing the other side of that argument like well I I like to think of it as a certain it's a certain type of transparency is a certain type of game play aesthetic right like it's it's a specific way to make a game and I think what's important is a lot lot of people are making games that should be transparent but they're

not making the effort to make them transparent as opposed to other people who are making games where they're they're maybe purposely choosing that they want the game to be somewhat opaque uh because they don't want the player to have control over the system um in Civ we felt very we felt we or perhaps we learned over time that our player base wants to have sort of full control and full understanding over the game or perhaps even that's just the gameplay aesthetic that we chose right I think there's a very direct contrast between the the Civ series and the EU Series in how they they approach that you know these are almost like if you chose those two different PRS these are the type of games that you would make um and that's and that's fine you know it's it's mostly I'm just trying to to highlight that like I said that you you are making a choice and there's many great games I love that are opaque for sure cool great answer thank so as you're looking at um making complicated systems transparent to the player um which was was really useful in C 4 and one thing you end up with at least in that game is a laundry list of

just like a whole bunch of individual points that the player all has to pass if you thought about and this might be very domain specific to every game you're working on how you actually visualize that and how you maybe take more than one or two systems like saying in si there's three guys and how they're related and what their interconnection is and how you actually visualize it to the player or you know at what point does the underlying system become so complex that you don't want to show it to the player anymore but you need to figure out a way of how you show that yeah so that's a really that's a really tricky tricky issue so to be clear what you're talking about is that at some point you know you you write game code and perhaps that game code can be expressed graphically perhaps it can be expressed in text you know it but it needs to be expressed in a limited amount of screen space right but perhaps at some point you write code that stretches beyond that and there's there's just no way to to express that cons concisely is that sort of what you're getting at yeah and you probably

want to be make sure that the player at a glance can see the interconnections instead of having to go through a list of a whole bunch of stuff that you as the programmer don't mind going through individually yeah um I mean I have a number of different theories about this um like for example if I was to make a if I was to make a baseball Sim um you know I would probably have it so that you know you look at a box score and you play out of the park you look at a box score you're not really sure what happened you know all the players involved you know what the ratings are but you don't know why the game decided that at this moment this guy struck out and why this guy hit a home run or whatever um what I would probably do is just allow you to essentially click on that app Bat and it jumps to something else that shows you the exact breakdown of like these are the dice that were rolled and these are different modifiers and this is why it ended up here and I'm not I wouldn't expect that players would do that all the time but it's just sort of comforting to know that that's possible um and theoretically most game systems I think could be broken down enough that it's a bit like a fractal

you know there there's you could arrange it so you can sort of keep drilling down farther and farther to get at the the correct amount of information um but you know I too think that perhaps that might not work out so well in practice um if with a really very complex system like I'm not sure you could do that if a game like your EUR open Universalist uh just because yeah I think it would just be overwhelming um I think perhaps a good way to do it is to I mean this is another thing that's kind of more in terms of just theory is that if you release the if you release the game code um it kind of allows the community to essentially uh discover uh discover the game and and uh develop you know their own accurate understanding of of how it works um because there's also sort of this this open question about when does a player need to know what's going on right uh if you have a if you have a pretty complex game you can perhaps design the way the game in a way that so for a new player you give them enough

information that they're able to proceed but at some point they're going to if they want to keep delving into the game they're going to want to know what's actually going on um and that's when you have to worry about that um but some level like this is this is sort of a tension that I think can't quite be resolved because for sure in Civ there were times when we wanted to try a a certain type of game mechanic and we realized there's probably really no way to describe this on the UI right it's going to probably end up as some sort of black box and so you know 90% of the game is is explainable and comprehensible and then there's this 10% here that you know well sorry it's really complicated and I think we made just a high level choice not to do that right that we we thought that didn't that didn't fit with um our perception of Civ um but if you really want some of those mechanics um then yeah I mean it's it's challenge I'm not sure I have the there is a total answer for that cool um so your talk seem to be

about two things the importance of transparency in rules making sure the rules are accessible to everybody but also the gro ability and the understanding of the math in the game which can be complicated so in board games and magic cards you rarely see numbers and digits numbers go into the double digits and further but games like let's say diablo start off at level one very understandable the numbers are small but as you advance they get to these six seven eight digigit numbers that the human brain can't like parse or compare easily I was wondering if you had any tips tricks best practices anything like that that when the numbers in RTS games or anything with sort of stat exponential growth rain it back into understanding for players that's a good challenge I mean those games are always tough because they sort of built around inflation right um and uh yeah uh I'm glad I haven't had to design a game like that that's that's a big challenge I I know in Civ like you know we always very did

did our best to you know start the first units with a strength of one because we knew that you know we wouldn't have to go up higher than maybe 25 or 30 by the time we got to the end um I think that maybe I mean just off the top of my head perhaps what I would do is like if you're talking about damage per second or something like that uh almost have two different systems like one um like have a color-based system right that uh this is almost like logarithmic I guess I'm not sure what the right math term would be but like you know it starts it starts at blue and then the next level is green the next yellow is level is yellow and the next level is orange and red and each of those levels essentally essentially maybe represents a factor of 10 or 100 or something and then you see a specific number on top of that so the player maybe in in two intuitively understands okay I want to go up that color chart as much as I possibly can and then with within that color chart I can kind of compare between them obviously I want the higher number but you know red is always better

than orange or something like that I mean I I I might try to try something like that but yeah like I I do think that anytime a game has you know a meaningful value that's higher than a thousand something's gone wrong basically um yeah I mean I've seen a lot of Japanese RPGs where it's like they're losing you know they have like I don't know you know 990,000 hit points and it's just I that's kind of baffling to me so um oh all right go um is is there a danger or do you see a risk in like too much transparency in the sense that once everything's laid out in the table and once all the knowledge is there it's possible for for situations and mechanics and games to become sort of solvable or like just turn them into an optimization spreadsheet which sort of sort of isn't as much fun well it depends on what your intention is as a as a designer certainly um I mean there there are plenty of games that uh you know it's not it's not solvable in in a in a sense like there the you know you know go has

very few rules but clearly it's not solvable right uh and of course that's because there's another player involved but but like the um what's the right way to put this um I think that you you you know Civ has a bunch of rules they're fairly transparent you understand what they are but ultimately there's there's too many different fact going on at the same time for someone to to come up with some sort of Ideal answer and that's kind of where you want to be if you're making a single player game and so I think that for sure that's a big issue if you're especially making a single player game so that's that's what that's what I would be working worrying about if you're making a multiplayer game I think that is not necessarily you just need to see the feel how does how how does the game feel there's there's not nothing infer Better or Worse about having you know more or less rules well actually generally it's better to have less rules but okay thanks all right I think that's should do it thank

you