Rules of the Game: Five Tricks of Highly Effective Designers

Um, so I think we should probably get started here because we've got a full 60 minutes to get through. My name's uh Richard Rouse. I'm a game designer, writer, and director at my own company, Paranoid Productions, where I'm working on a experimental action stealth game with some weird narrative stuff in it. Um, today we are here to talk about the rules of the game. So, I am fascinated by game design rules, uh, tricks, tradecraft, whatever you might call them. you know, as game designers, uh, we spend our days making up rules about the games that we're creating. Uh, so it's only natural that some of us start thinking about the rules of, you know, life itself and like how could I model this human interaction in this game using rules? And then it's naturally that we extend that to the the art of game design itself and think about what are the rules if I could just follow them, I could make my game fun. Um, and so I've I've, you know, fascinated by looking at these things and you've you've heard of a lot of these. This is a a classic uh you know sometimes we get these from other industries. This is form follows function which was originally said by Lewis Sullivan who

was a 19th century architect. Um you know basically saying that you should figure out what your building needs to do before you decide what form it should take which should also apply to games. Obviously you should figure out what player is going to do in your game and then design the game around that not uh not the other way around. Um or you know we have this old chestnut which I did not actually know was from uh Nolan Bushnell. Um you know it goes back a ways obviously. I had originally learned it from the cube I got at the Ubisoft Design Academy. Um it contains a lot of wisdom actually. If you flip this cube around it changes to say form followers function. So it's one of the smarter cubes I know. Um, so you should really think about the source of some of the game design rules that you may hear I find because uh if we look at the world of say self-help books uh or or business help books or whatever you call these things often you'll find that the thing that the people who are you know writing all these proclamations about rules to live by or whatever the main thing they're known for is giving advice right

that they don't actually have a craft of their own they've never made anything of their own they're just known for giving advice and that's fine I think it's fine to get you know useful advice from people who are more educated ation uh you know educators than practitioners uh but the rules I find most interesting are those from game designers whose whose work I really respect. So for example Sid Meyer is is famous for doing a lot of sort of things that you can capture in nice rule format for example it's one of my favorite there are three types of games where the designer is having all the fun games where the computer's having all the fun and games where the player is having all the fun. you know, his point here being, you know, if you know, I've certainly heard a lot of game designers tell say this to me of, you know, I really had a lot of fun making this game, but I don't really like playing it. Well, that's probably a bad sign. Um, and you should always remember who the, you know, the end goal is to make the player have fun, not just to have fun making the thing yourself. Though, it's nice when you can do that, too. Or, you know, heavy computational games where the computer is doing this amazing simulation that is completely opaque to the player. Uh, you know, maybe that's not the best use of a game either. Uh you know another quote I like

came comes from Brenda Romero who's sitting here in the second row um you know she said uh the interface is the gameplay saying that you know for you those of you who might be working on a game and you get all the systems working really well uh but the player has trouble interfacing with it the player can't doesn't know how to control it they don't get good feedback and it's kind of not going to matter and you shouldn't put off you know doing the interface to your game until the end you sort of do that at your peril um or uh you know will write is famous for saying a number of of uh quotable things about game design. Um, you know, I I feel sad having learned about the shutdown of Max's Emeryville this morning and felt I had this slide in there for for ages and I loved a lot of games that came out of that studio. So, it's sad to hear. Um, anyway, so Will Wright uh, you know, said this about how you should really focus your game. Your game is not complete until there's nothing else you can remove. He attributed it to a expression about Japanese gardens, you know, that, you know, they say they should take out everything and then the garden is complet. It's also attributed to other industries. So, who knows what

the actual origin of this maxim is. Um, so when we look at rules like this though, we should think about are these rules really universal? Do they apply to everything uh to all game types? And I don't think that they necessar necessarily do. I mean, there's hundreds of types and genres of games that we've already made as an industry and as a medium. Um, and I think there's hundreds of types of games we haven't made yet. to think that these rules necessarily apply the same to everything or can be can be so universal as to you know anything you might think you have to follow these rules you know I don't think that's necessarily true um I think that game design rules are personal not universal I think that the the rules people come up with define them as a creator so if you're thinking to yourself hey I want to make a game like Sid Meer or Brenda or Will you know you might look at their rules and say hey well I can learn from some of this and then come up with my own rules that'll supplement that maybe some of their rules I will move on from and not uh you know and not have to follow that one. It's a choice each of us have to make as a game designer because I I just don't think there are any completely universal

rules. So today that's what we're going to do is we're going to go through have five speakers come up here for 10 minutes each. They're each going to speak about their own rules um that they use in creating games. And these are personal rules, rules that you probably haven't heard other places um you know that you may agree or disagree with. But I hope that as you hear each of them you're thinking well how does this compare to my own philosophy? you know, how will this, you know, change how I how I work on games in the future potentially. So, with that, our first speaker is Laurelyn McWills. She is a uh uh a veteran of the industry, having worked on everything from uh Full Spectrum Warrior to the, you know, MMO for all ages, free to uh Free Realms. Uh she also worked on a a Snoop Dog game, which I got to play while I was at Midway, but never made it out into the rest of the world, sadly. Um and in 2014, she was honored as one of Gamma's top 10 game developers. So with that I give you Marlin.

Hi. So my role that I'm going to be talking about is to stress emotional connections at a systemic level. And when you look at the games that I've made, they're super eclectic. Uh you would think a lot of them there's nothing in common between them, but actually there is. There's a thread between all of these games that they take not just character emotion, but player emotion and create a system out of it. So that's what I'm going to be talking about today. So as designers, we're all about making connections between player actions and how those actions are rewarded in a game. And that can be explicit UI, for example, like dialogue trees, right? Which good ones tell you not just what uh is about, but what might happen when you say it. But also we think about it on the back end for feedback about the choices that you've made like this from Darkest Dungeon. We understand these tangible needs of a player to give us input and for us to have the game do something in response. But really at the heart of a

player's interaction is not the interaction itself. It's the motive behind that interaction. Basic human needs like for example the need for wealth which is why players in MMOs collect coins, right? To spend it to feel rich. There's inherent value in that. like the need for relationship. You can see this behind a lot of the systems in boware games. Like a need for mastery. This emotion is behind Dark Souls. When you really think about it, it's behind the systems. And even the search for, you know, meaning in life, these are all things that we know gamers bring to the table when they come to play our game. But we think about systems in a whole separate category from the emotional side of games and most design teams. In fact, when you think about it, they're even separate groups on larger teams. the systems team is totally separate from the story team or whoever whatever designers are traditionally charged with thinking about emotion. We think it's a separate part of the process. But ultimately the goal in every game is to elicit emotion even if that emotion is [ __ ] yeah I eat it zombie, right? That's an emotion that we're trying to elicit from our players.

And I'll never forget an early GDC where I heard the System Shock developers talk about creating a system where the last bullet in a cartridge would always do double damage because they wanted to push that emotional moment of it was my last bullet when I took him out. Right? That's thinking about your system from an emotional perspective. So I'm going to talk about kind of a cheat sheet that I use and show it to you and walk through a couple times that I've used it. So full spectrum warrior was a hardcore military simulation. You control two squads of four men each. uh US Army dismounted light infantry. So it started as an official army game and what that meant since we maintained that authenticity was that there is zero tolerance for any casualties on your team. Now in the training version that meant game over the minute a soldier died. But I was looking at it as an emotional experience for the player. I wanted you to understand what it's like to be a soldier on the field with a very documentary style feel to it. It was really important to me that you cared about your soldiers dying, not because it was game over, but because they were your guys. So I started thinking about

how can I design a system around the human need to feel attached to another person. So this is the cheat sheet that I use. So you start off with needs, right? Human needs. These are not necessarily game needs. So it's things like a need to feel progress, a need to feel individual, individualism, like I'm making my own way through this game. Agency, right? Ownership. The second step in it is what interactions the players can actually take in your game. So in for Spectre Warrior that was interacting with cover to take cover behind it or interacting with a trigger that might make an event happen like a a car bomb. And then the third part is to explicitly list player rewards. Now notice this is a mix of systemic awards like mission advancement along with less tangible ones like emotional impact which is an award by itself. So this forms a different kind of core loop than we're used to looking at. This is the experiential core loop. This is the core loop that goes

beyond just saying when the player interacts with A, B happens and he's rewarded by C and that sends him back in. This is a loop explicitly centered on the need the player is bringing to the table and how you're going to address that in your systems. So you see some common translations for this like the combat loop. my need to feel a sense of progress in full spectrum moria means when I kill enough enemies or a certain type of enemy or certain specific boss the mission advances right that's the combat loop but what it also led to was a system where the soldiers had personality because you needed to care about them and if I can get this to play. Oops. One second. That translated into the system behind the dialogue in full spectrum warrior where the soldiers called each other by name. They reacted to the environment because you needed to care about them.

And here's a really specific example of using this system. When we went into usability testing, we saw this that players actually did care about their soldiers. They cared about them so much that as soon as a soldier was a soldier was shot, they reloaded the game. Totally took them out of the game, killed the immersion. It's a system again. They see past the, you know, past all the veils. So, we needed a solution for that now. So, go back to the chart. So, I'm now looking at this. I want your need to feel a relationship, a close tie with this soldier to result in what? I need a reward. And actually, when I looked at it, I realized I could make a mission reward. So what we ended up doing was when a soldier in full spectrum warrior was shot, it spawned an instant top level priority mission to heal that soldier and then take him to the, you know, do field healing and then take him to the unit for permanent healing. And that mission objective meant players stayed in the game for what I wanted to be the emotional moment instead of seeing a system over, you know, a game over screen. So I didn't let them see

the systems behind it. And the end result was that players actually stopped reloading when we went into usability testing. And it ended up looking like this. There's a cut in here because it's kind of a long sequence. Yes, sir. And you actually hear him call him by name, which is a very important element, I think, to your emotional assessment. at your service. So that's one example of how thinking about emotions at the core can lead to a system change. But here's a little more concrete example. Free roams. So free was an MMO for kids and families. And the core of Free Realms was that you could do anything you wanted at any time. So you could be a ninja one minute and a chef the next and a postman uh for example. So that meant we had to think about how do you level up as a postman? How do you level up as a pet trainer? um does that have any parody with leveling up as a race car driver? And really it

comes down to this where once again I'm listing these are the free roams specific elements and notice that different things start to come up. So in free roams we had the explicit agenda going in. We were going to reward laughter specifically right and listing that out specifically sets our goals for the players in motion as a part of our game. So again some of them are obvious. You feel a need to progress. You kill some enemies that give you XP. You level up. Right? That's what all of us expect. But what about these needs that are not usually recognized from a systemic perspective? How often do you level up by socializing? How often do you actually get an item for being individual? Right? These are player needs that we're just not recognizing in our games from a system perspective at all. And so we took on some of these. We said, "Okay, can interacting with an NPC to get information produce laughter?" And when you think about traditional MMO dialogue, it's actually pretty dry. And we wanted to change that. We wanted to reward laughter. So we actually spent a lot of time working on camera angles to get closer to the

characters, working on the exact way that the print looked at the the style of the writing. You can even see it in your response is thanks, right? A very positive response to give a very positive feeling. But even going beyond that, we actually realized by using this technique some specific problems we had in our game. For example, players were not leveling up and we were trying to figure out why. We saw in the metrics that they weren't leveling up the way we expected. When we actually started looking at it really closely, we realized the reason was because they were socializing. They were hanging out with each other and having parties and showing off clothes and all of these things that none of our systems handled at all, right? Completely outside of our systems. So, what this meant was we our loop went like this. I have a social need to interact with another player and nothing, right? And what that really means if you're working in freeto play is you have something incredibly unmonetized right there which was not our motive but certainly it should be yours because those emotional ties are what make people spend money or stick with your game and what drive

attention because ultimately that social experience is what's important. So we never got to the point where I I got to take on leveling up through socialization which is something that still I'm still going at in another game. But what we did do was think about another reward that we had available which was appearance items. So, my need for social status through another player creates a social loop in giving me appearance items. And we explicitly had a ton of updates that featured player appearance items specifically tied to showing off birthday parties, those sorts of events. Boom boxes that make everybody dance. Our uh retention went way up. Players were very happy. Actually, we made money off of those items, which is a nice side effect. But ultimately, what I like about doing this kind of chart is that it leads to brainstorming. that leads you to make connections that you might not make otherwise by explicitly treating player emotions as a core part of your systems design and focusing on those needs really at the heart of it. What player need, what human need are we trying to satisfy because ultimately that's why we

make games, right? We're trying to make em emotional meaning for players and emotional meaning for ourselves as well. Thank you. Thank you, Laurelyn. I like how uh you know, not only will you, you know, I think enhance the the emotional experience by just having it part of the whole game and not just in the narrative, but I think the emotional resonance you get out of systems is much stronger than like in a purely narrative way. All right, our next speaker hardly needs much introduction. You know, only to say that if you've played an RPG in the last 20 years, there's a good chance Chris worked on a an on entry in that franchise, particularly if it's post-apocalyptic. Or you might know him as the lead designer and writer of one of the most beloved narrative games of all time, Plscape Tournament. I give you Chris Avalone. Ah, so uh I thought I'd bring things down a little bit and talk to you a little bit today about embracing crap,

which otherwise I've entitled Look for the Silver Lining. And what inspired this was uh every Wednesday at Obsidian, uh my two friends, my only two friends, uh Brian Mensy, who designed the uh the Vault Boy for Fallout, and uh Anthony Davis, who helped me on Nights of Republic 2. uh we go to the comic book store and we have very long conversations about movies that we hate and TV shows that we hate. And these conversations go on for a very long time. And usually I discover that we all hate different things, usually about movies and TV shows that I really like. And I feel very victimized when they tear into stuff that I really enjoy because I feel like they're not seeing the great qualities in these absolutely beautiful pieces of media. No matter what they are, they're fantastic. Anyway, the particular movie that really set us off for one Wednesday was I Frankenstein. And I don't know how many of you guys have seen this, but

this is a great movie. It's as great as Cube. It's as great as The Darkest Hour. And it is great as yes Twilight and I will defend Twilight to my dying day and my undying day. Um in all these movies I think that there is something positive from a design perspective to embrace that's worthwhile looking at. So for example, Cube Cube is not a great movie. A bunch of prisoners are thrown into these incredibly similar series of rooms that that have different colors, which is great for your environment artists. And each one of them has a special skill or ability that when they all get together like an adventuring party, they can solve the cube. Isn't that exciting? So, we use that for example in Plscape Tourman. We're like, you know what, we don't really need to have a large number of party members to go through the Modron cube um because and also we don't have to flex a lot of environment art resources because we can change the colors, randomly move the blocks around,

and the artists really love that because we were a very short staffed team. We also took that principle into the New Vegas deal new Vegas DLC Dead Money. We're like, "Hey, we're going to have a very very limited cast because we don't have a lot of budget to play around with." And each of their special abilities will help you solve the mystery of the Sierra Madre. Um, another piece of crap, or what I thought was crap, was this series called the Elementals, which had a superhero premise, which I consider incredibly boring, not just for super teams, but also for spell systems. So, if you're doing spell systems like this, I'm not going to play your game. Each one of them had a superpower that embodied one of the elements. And I'm like, "Oh my god." Oh, it sounds like total total crap. It wasn't crap. They each gained their powers by dying. Okay, instantly I'm interested. Okay, there. So, they're all actually dead. But because they were already dead, they got into the most horrible fight sequences where limbs got torn off, they got spears impaled in them. And a few panels later, they got right back up, which from a narrative

design perspective explains why you can do catastrophic damage to a PC and have them get right back up. And that's a great hook for any computer game. also at the elementals because I discovered that I really love this comic. Um, in this sequence, uh, this tiny girl here in subsequent panels beats the ever live ever living [ __ ] out of this butler in front of her. I'm like, what the It turns out that little girl isn't a little girl at all. She's a projecting telepath called Sanction who has the ability to reinvent his personality every time he goes after a target. And I was like, "What the hell? That's the most amazing thing I've ever heard of." And I thought, "Well, you know what? If you applied that to a protagonist in a game, but instead of killing people, every time he died, he changes personality, that could explain why thousands of players have a different experience every time they play a role playing game." And also, uh, so me and Richard argued about this one. How many of you have read the comic Trans

Metropolitan? Okay, this is still gonna be valid, Richard. Still gonna be valid. I did not want to read this comic. You want to know why? Because the protagonist is a journalist. You know what? When I read comic books, I want to read about superheroes beating each other up. Spider Jerusalem does not does not beat people up. But what he does have is he has a series of kitchen appliances with personalities, which I thought was fascinating. His coffee maker is addicted to drugs and gets high all the time. That is the most amazing thing I've ever heard of. And then I'm like, well, what if we took that into Fallout New Vegas and we had a brand new player stronghold where even though Spider Jerusalem's appliances aren't very helpful, the ones that you find are very useful and they're just as crazy. Um, so anyway, I Frankenstein, which sort of set off this whole conversation. Very well reviewed. Very well reviewed. But there's things to like about this movie. Okay, aside from the fact that Frankenstein's monster Adam looks like he just just stepped out

of a J GQ catalog, I really like the fact that his immediate environment emphasizes how debilitated his physical condition is. Like it actually looks stitched together just like he is. I'm like, "Okay, well that's kind of cool." Also, they had some pretty cool weapon design I Frankenstein. Aside from the fact the protagonist gets a hold of all the cool weapons, which is what you want every player in your game to do, they actually had it set up so this cool segmented battle axe actually acted as a key that opened various vault doors in the game. I'm like, "Okay, I'm sorry. It's a movie. Oh, I'm getting confused." Um, and I thought that was pretty neat, aside from just being a badass weapon. Even better, they had these symbols in the environment where when they actually threw the enemies against them, the enemies would explode in these great bursts of fire. And those symbols were on weapons. that was the only way to kill these enemies. But from a game design perspective, that's really cool. That's a really a nice way of making your environment matter. Like look for where these symbols are. How do I punch the enemy into it? How do I impale the enemy on these symbols to take them out when I have no other weapons at my disposal? I think that's [ __ ] cool.

And darkest hour. Oh, this was a really great one. Oh, it's even but it's better than I Frankenstein. So anyway, energy draining aliens come to Earth. They come to Moscow. They come to all everywhere. A small party of adventurers must be united to stop this grave threat from beyond. But what the way they do it is one of them is actually the the inventor of this social app that tracks where the other potential party members are and gets them into the party. And I'm like, hey, that's kind of a cool game design thing. And that explains why they can all get together and speak the same language. That's awesome. Also, the aliens in Darkest Star are a little bit interesting because they are invisible until they get near a piece of machinery that can be turned on with electricity. So, you could actually pay attention to your environment and see these invisible creatures depending on just where you scan and where you look for where they might turn something on. And I thought it was a really cool way for environment design to pay attention to your surroundings. or if you actually had light bulbs on you, they would light up whenever the

invisible creatures came nearby or cell phones would go off. Or if you're an advanced player, you can play a higher risk game of luring the aliens close to things like elevators, buses, subway trains that you really need to advance to the next level. And I thought that was pretty cool. So, a micro design trick, which I'm going to slip in here, is the idea of special features. You should always watch the special features for any movie that you watch. And here's my special feature for you. Every single movie I watch, I try and do it on the iPad so I can take screen screen captures and give it as reference art to every other department at the studio when I need to explain what I'm talking about. But anyway, back to movies like Twilight. I probably should have used Fifty Shades of Gray, but I'm sure there's more ways to make that exciting that I just simply have not thought about. Um, I think every creative director and designer needs to embrace why people like a certain form of media. no matter what it takes because sometimes all those bad ideas will give you a lot of

inspiration. And what I usually do instead of leaving notes in my books, I actually use my Kindle to make all the notes and I do like numeric codes for each entry and then I run a batch file and then I organize those into different documents and that allows me to use them as a source of inspiration which I for when I want to create art. I don't get bogged down with going through notes because it's already organized. Anyway, Twilight. Uh, so Twilight a little bit better than the other movies. Um, but what you know, as much as you may not be a romantic just like me, um, there are good things about the romance in this movie, aside from the creepy stalkery elements, and note the the subtle use of the owl wings behind Edward there. Isn't that subtle? That is very subtle. I like little touches like the fact when they go on a date and the waitress is trying to flirt with Edward, he totally blows her off. You know, I bet that's a very nice little touch. It's a very human moment. It shows how much he cares about Bella. I'm all for that. I like the fact that her dad isn't a dick. I'm like, "Wow, no more real parental rebellion here. At least one of

the family members in the situation is actually a good person." I liked the fact that each of the vampires had their own unique ability. I'm like, "That's kind of nice." And also, this was the touch that really did it for me. They in Edward's house, they have this display of all the graduation caps they've accumulated over the years because they've graduated high school. so many times and I'm like, you know what, the ab she absolutely did not have to put that touch in the book or the movie. And guess what? It's there. It's a nice subtle way of reinforcing their immortality. So, I guess my point today is take what you would consider to be crap or a negative experience. It might take itself too seriously. Find a way to transform that element into something that people love, and chances are you'll make a really good game element out of it. Thank you. And the great the great thing about uh stealing from I Frankenstein instead of say Alien and Star Wars and Blackhawk Down again is probably no one stolen

that stuff from my Frankenstein yet. So your game will seem original even though you're not creative. So our next speaker, speaking of not creative, uh is Dan Teasdale. Sorry, I'm just burning all the bridges. Uh, well, he's about to embarrass me, so I just had to go for it. Um, so our next speaker, you may know from having worked on big franchises like Destroy All Humans or Rock Band. You may know him from the puppeteering connect game, The Gun Stringer. But what you should know him from is the absurdest indie game he released last year called Roundabout, which brought back FMV. And why you should listen to game design advice from someone who loves FMV so much. Well, I guess you're about to find out. Dan Tale. Thank you for that ringing endorsement there, Richard. So, hey everyone, thanks for coming out. This might come as a bit of a surprise given that I'm talking on a design theory panel, but I'm actually not a big intense design theory kind of

guy. Instead of spending my time writing books or blog posts, uh I instead spent it creating things like the world's number one allmale game development pinup calendar. Having said that, there was one design concept that's intrigued me for a while. It's a concept about a magic number. And it's a magic number that I think every designer in this room has used. And it's one that until a few years back, I had no idea why. And it's about this guy here, the number three. Three is kind of a big deal when it comes to magic numbers. If you've played games for a while, you probably noticed that threes and to a lesser degree fives are popular numbers. number of starting lives, the number of Angry Birds stars, even things like the number of Mario Kart turns to reach full boost. They're all balanced to the number three. Obviously, three is a magic number, but why? Just saying that it's a design habit doesn't really get into the root of why it became a habit. There's

clearly something to this number beyond random coincidence. So, I started diving into why this was, and it turns out it stems from how the human brain deals with information. My one weird trick is actually based around two different theories of the human brain. You may have heard of the magic number seven plus or minus two. It was discovered by this not at all creepy guy named George Miller. The whole idea is that your short-term memory can only hold five to only remember five to nine objects at once. And this seems like a pretty useful piece of knowledge at first glance. And it gives us a pretty strong hint as to why five is a magic number in games. But there's a second part to this which is equally important. The second part is based on research by this dude uh Herbert A. Simon. Uh while George Miller wanted to find the largest amount that short-term memory could hold, Herb here realized that the total space is actually divided into what he called chunks. While those can be different sizes, the best size is

actually three units of things. So we can use these two theories to get a nice rough rule set of how of the human brain's constraints. five to nine items of which the brain's ideal container size or chunk size is three means at most we're dealing with three chunks that can carry three items each nine items total example of how this works number splits it into chunks of two to three units you're most likely going to separate it into a three-digit chunk and two two-digit chunks that's because the separator is providing a hint to your brain on how to chunk this information. It's a really good example of why separators and delimiters are really important. Having a comma and a four-digit number isn't just pretty. It lets your brain chunk the importance single digit on one side while spending less time on the remaining three digits on the other side. This isn't the only way to chunk this number, though. If you

heard the song before you saw the number on paper, you probably chunked it to the beat. two chunks for the first bar, one chunk for the remaining digits in the second bar. And this is completely valid. Your perception of the number doesn't have to be visual only. It can be audible, too. In both these cases, your brain is trying to organize this data into three neat chunks. So, let's try and break that. If we split the Jenny number into four chunks, your brain has a harder time remembering it. I mean, you can probably remember this if you actively try and internalize it, but it's an uncomfortable process because you're dealing with a set of chunks that's larger than three. It's also probably why you'd have a harder time remembering this 10digit number. Your brain is trying to fit this into three groups, but it can't easily without a number falling off. But wait, you might say, if you're smart, that's just Jenny's number backwards with an LA area code. I can totally remember that now. And you'd be right. I bet you can even remember this 15digit number if you

know US area codes, 80s songs, and you've played Call of Duty. And that's because in this case, in this case, we're not dealing with short-term memory alone. After 30 seconds, if everything goes well, your brain will try and move that information into intermediate memory. And then two to three hours later, if everything goes well again, it goes into long-term memory. In long-term memory, these chunks of objects become unique objects themselves. Your brain is essentially compressing the starter for you. Anyway, you're probably super bored of this 5minute intro to brain theory, and you're asking the real question, which is, now that I know this one weird trick about the number three, how can I use it to make my games better? Well, since we're dealing with perception of information, UI design is a no-brainer to apply this to. Take roundabouts main menu. Instead of your van standard vertical list of five menu options, we split it by rows into two chunks. One row for gameplay stuff that matters and one row for housekeeping. That way, we

can make sure that we're we're driving players towards gameplay with zero thought on their end while at the same time not bearing settings and important options that people might need later on. And as a bonus, it means all but one of our options on the main menu benefit from Fitz's law, since every button is on an edge instead of an onedimensional list. You can also use chunking for evil. Take roundabouts challenges menu for example. The ideal chunk group for this would be a 3x3 grid. However, that was easily chunkable by players and it gave the impression that we had a small challenge list. So instead, we did two rows of four and an extra item, which made it slightly harder for players to internalize all the challenges at once, which made it seem like we had more challenges in the game, which is a total [ __ ] thing to do, but I am gaming's biggest [ __ ] of 2013, so it's the least I could do to hold up my reputation. The best case for perceptual optimization, and actually the worst

case as well, is the Gunstringer. So, I was the lead designer on the Gunstringer, which was an on-rail uh on rails connect shooter with a skeleton marionette puppet. And it was really the start of this skeleton phase of my career that I find myself in at the moment. Because everything was on Rails, it meant we had incredibly tight control over everything the player saw, making it perfect for this kind of perception optimization. It's also a pretty good example about what happens if you apply the rule of threes the wrong way. Here's why. The Gunstrings gun was a six shooter. In the groove, you'd target six things and then you'd shoot six things. It's a really nice example of using the rule of threes to help target acquisition. And the six shooter helped reinforce the 2x3 pattern. But of course, I had to go and ruin a good thing. An enemy's AI would spend a cycle spawning, a cycle aiming, a cycle firing, and a cycle or a number number of cycles fleeing. Because we were on a rail, I made all of these states take the same amount of time. as

the uh player aim and fire cycle. It didn't stop there, though. Since we used encounter design, we naturally extended that same timing pattern to our encounter pacing. Because we had regenerating health, it meant we also have to apply this timing to the health meter. And because we were on a rail and we had to time our multiplier system to all of these encounters as well. When I first balanced the game like this, I thought it was genius. But it very quickly dawned on me that this was actually more like the crazy ramblings of a conspiracy theorist. I went way too far down the rabbit hole and it made the gun stringers enemy balance a knife edge system. I forgot that the rule of threes is about how you perceive objects. Grouping visible objects into twos and threes is a really great way to optimize how your brain acquires objects. But adjusting the behavior of unperceivable things isn't always going to pay off because well, they're

unperceivable. And I guess that works as a pretty good summary for all of this as well. The rule of threes is a great way to optimize your game for the human brain, but you have to treat it like optimization in any other part of game development. Don't apply it or it doesn't have a benefit. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Dan. So, moving right along here. We're running a little short on time. Uh, so next up, we have uh Kim McAuliffe. She is a veteran game designer as well who just finished up working on Project Spark at Microsoft. She's worked on everything from big and small things from SOCM comp to the Sims uh and is here to tell you whether size matters in the end. I give you Kim McAuliff. [Applause] That's not exactly how I remember phrasing it, but

okay. Okay. So, often as game developers, we're focused on the big picture, but today I'm going to talk about why it can be important to fight for the little things. Uh, one of my favorite little things in Portal 2 is a moment where you can choose to rescue a different little turret from incineration. Uh, it's an extremely well-crafted moment. Uh, from the setup that introduces you to this turret stuck on a vent a few levels earlier to the intriguing hints about the plot that you get from this turret as a reward for rescuing it. Um, another little thing that contributed to my enjoyment of a game is the context sensitive dialogue in Left 4 Dead 2. Uh, the way the characters respond when one of them gets hurt or killed uh, made them feel human and deepen my desire to uh, make sure that they stayed alive. Uh, the design trick that I want to talk about today is fight for the little things because they can

have a surprisingly big impact on players and even the development team. And the things that impact your players can then in turn have a positive impact on the success of your game. Uh in Contagious, uh Wharton marketing professor Jonah Burgerer shares his research exploring why some products and ideas catch on and others don't. One of the principles that he focuses on is social currency. People gain social currency by talking about remarkable things. uh gaining positive impressions with their co-workers and family and colleagues. Uh in other words, we talk about things that are cool because it makes us look cool to others. Uh remarkable things are talked about more often and smart brands take advantage of this. Uh one example in the book is Snapple, whose quirky and weird real facts people couldn't help but talk about until they were ingrained into

popular culture. And the point to take away here is that the excuse me, the uh the little special things that people find in your game, people are going to want to talk about because it makes them feel special. So, the first example of a little thing that I want to talk about is from my very first game, Sims 2 for the Nintendo DS. Uh the DS version of Sims 2 combined an open world sandbox with an adventure game questing. Uh, the main story is that your Sim gets stuck in a town called Strange Town and ends up taking over the local hotel, uh, befriending the citizens and then defending the town from various attacks. So, uh, the little thing in question had to do with the town's cows. Uh, you can interact with these cows to get milk, but that was it other than some mooing. Uh, I strongly felt like there was an opportunity here for more interaction and some reward for

exploration. Uh, if we added cow tipping, for example, and then the player interacted with the cow afterward, then we could have a milkshake that you could get from the cow afterward. And then we also in the game had chocolate. And so why not be able to give the cow chocolate and then get a chocolate cow and then have the cow yield chocolate beverages? Like this is genius. Um, unfortunately my producer at the time felt like, you know, cow tipping might be construed as, you know, potential animal cruelty and this could jeopardize our ESRB rating and we had to be, you know, E10. Um, and this is my first game. Uh, I didn't understand the uh the idea of feature creep. Uh, so I may have gone behind his back and convinced uh a junior programmer at the time to uh to maybe just put it in anyway. And it was kind of a joke. It wasn't really supposed to stay in the build. Uh, and to keep it from seeming too mean, he even uh animated the cow to

immediately bounce back up, but it was it was programmer arts. It was kind of like just a weeble wobble on it. It wasn't like it was a joke. It wasn't supposed to stay. Um, but fortunately or unfortunately, EA saw it and loved it. And so then we had to add it to the schedule and have real animations, real animations and real uh a real chocolate cow. And um the producer was definitely not happy with me. Uh but I can promise you that he got over it. Uh this is a picture of us about five years later. [Applause] So, so, uh, this kind of felt like just my small little victory. This is my first game ever. Um, and I wasn't driving the creative vision or anything. I was a mission designer and a scriptor, but this is my my creative contribution. Um, but the impact turned out to be much bigger than I could have seen at the

time. Um, here it's called out in the IGN walkthrough as uh clever and amusing. Um, another thing that happened, this is a a friend request or a message from a girl in the UK a few years later who wanted to be my friend because Sims 2 DS was her favorite game ever. And I was like, "Wow, that's awesome." Um, I asked her if she ever ever found the Chocolate Cow because uh I was afraid people would never find it. There were no hints in the game about it. And she was like, "Well, of course I did." And uh but even that that was the impact was still bigger than I I even thought at that point. Uh because it turned out that EA also uh thought that this feature was um popular and successful. And so they uh announced in Sims 3 that they were going to uh bring out a a cow like a farming set and they were going to take the cows from all the cow features from Sims 2DS

and put that into this pack and add a bunch more features. They had a cow tipping miniame um that you could fail if you slipped in a cow pie. And then you could also play tic-tac hoof with the cow to increase your logic score. um you could give the cows soy beans to get soy milk and there was this whole thing. Um and then I I went looking around on the forums and there was there were 22 pages of people excited about cow tipping and milkshakes and there was even someone who called out that cow tipping was fun. Her daughter had had it on the Sims 2 for DS. There was a hashtag that came out when um this was about to launch and then on the day that it launched people were posting pictures of their Sims playing with cows. So, looping back around to uh the book contagious and social currency, here you have people talking about a feature that they think is cool and interesting and in doing so contributing to the success of a game. Um, so moving on to my next example. Uh, another example of fighting for a little

thing arose when I was working on connect TV. Uh, this project used connect to add gameplay to a family television watching experience. And there are multiple ways to interact with uh the TV, including an augmented reality game where you dressed up as the animal star of the show and uh the show went into your living room and you became the animals um and played games based on the main narrative from that episode. Uh the the little thing uh the battle over the little things that I'm talking about today was involved the sidetracks. the sidetracks feature. These were special stories that we wrote together with Grizzly Creek Films, who did the original show, and then filmed on location. And these were designed to be conversations that uh were directly between Casey and the kids uh where the players got to be in control of how the adventure unfolded. And how this worked was that Casey would stop during the adventure and ask the

kids a question and then based on what they said there would be one of two different um segments that would play next. And the problem that we encountered is that connect could only track two skeletons at a time. And but we wanted the whole family to play together. And uh so for our first iteration we were using uh we had to have a we decided to have a a family spokesperson that would choose the answer for the whole family using a hover cursor. Uh but this didn't have the whole like everyone gets to participate feeling that we really wanted. So we uh we were challenged by the executive team to come up with a better solution. So we we all put our heads together and a few people came up with some ideas and a really smart guy from our development partner um put together a solution where we combined blob tracking and skeletal tracking to uh to pull the room every frame and uh to come up with a way to to uh

uh switch skeletons every frame and count up to eight votes in the room. So in the final version, the entire family can vote together on which way they should go by raising either their right hand or their left hand uh so that everyone can play at the same time. So Dad, I'm sorry, but I don't think I want to work for a newspaper or review games when I grow up anymore. I want to be a naturalist. So the speaker here is Scarlet, the daughter of columnist controller freak. in her review of connect gov. Uh this particular quote is so great because it means that she was definitely definitely impacted by the sidetracks in particular. Uh this is the only place in the game that Casey speaks directly to kids about learning how to be naturalists. Um returning back to contagious again for a second. This is a kid talking directly about the impact

that a little thing that we fought for had on her in a way that was shared with a lot of people. Uh the last example that I want to mention is from another Nintendo DS title. This time I want to talk about championing someone else's cause and how fighting for a little thing uh can help not just uh a title but also a team. I came on to this project later in development and was tasked with designing the final level in the game. Uh the level artist working with me expressed frustration that the other levels in the game had what he felt to be too much sameness in layout and not enough change and elevation. So when I started working, I was looking at the concept art for the level that I was going to be doing. And um the art for the setting makes it clear that there should be lots of room for changes in elevation because it's a it's a pile of wrecked ships. So I started white boxing some

ideas and uh working with him very closely from the beginning and getting his input. So I proposed a design that included a ton of vertical progression um and then also frogger because why not? and uh he was immediately re-engaged and excited to begin. Uh we had to win some people over because uh it was so different from the rest of the game. But in the end, because it was the final level, we were we were able to sell it. And fighting for this little thing made the game better, it challenged me to be a better designer, and that it also boosted morale for a team member. Um, I didn't realize how much of an impact that being listened to had on him until he told me about it years later. So, in closing, fighting for the little things during the development of your game pays off in big ways. If you're on a project where you're not the creative lead, it's a way to carve out

your own creative stamp on the game. It may be a way to support a team member by fighting for a cause that they believe in. Finally, if a feature means a lot to you, it might have a big impact on your players as well. And the little things that impact your players will be the things that they want to share with others, which is the best promotion that you can ask for. Thank you. [Applause] Definitely in this age of ever more polished super big games, it's harder to sneak things by producers than ever, but still super important. So, finally, our our last speaker is uh is Nells Anderson. Uh he describes himself as the best Wyoming born game designer currently living in Canada. Uh you may know him as the lead designer of Mark the Ninja or the stunning Firewatch, which he will be demoing later this week. And I'm sure if you came up and asked him afterward, he would tell you

how to go see that yourself. And you should do that. I give you Nells Anderson. Hello. Is this thing on? Okay, cool. Yeah. Um Oh, Richard, you didn't change my X to an actual number. All right. Well, whatever. Uh, my name is Del Anderson, and my game cool game design, sure, it's a variable. It's whatever number it needs to be. All right. Uh, so my cool game design rule today I'm going to be talking about is don't try to evaluate your own game. So, as Richard mentions, I used to work at this place and I was a lead designer on this game and then I helped start up this place and now we're working on this cool game. Um, yes, and come ask me later if you want to come play it. Uh, but yes, this is my game design rule. So, as noted, don't try and evaluate your own game, but note the asterisk. That's going to be important later. See, so here's the problem. When you're designing a game, you have all this knowledge in your head about how the game works. I mean, of course you do, right? It's in your head. It has to exist there before it can actually get out into the engine or the board or the whatever it is. Uh, but there's a problem with that. What that means is it's actually impossible for you to strip that knowledge back out of your

head. Our perspectives as designers are wholly tainted with this dark knowledge about how the game works. And this is a problem because people who don't have that knowledge still need to be able to play your game. And they need to be able to do it without you explaining it to them. Often some of the biggest failures in a game's design are not necessarily its systems or its mechanics, but rather how those systems and mechanics are communicated to the player. At the very least, it's often nearly impossible to determine whether a problem is having with the game is because of the design itself or simply because they didn't understand what was actually needed to be understood. Um, of course, so surprising absolutely no one. The answer to that is to do a crapload of play testing. Now, obviously there's been a million GDC talks about the who, what, when, where, why of play testing about people far more eloquent than me and for way longer than 10 minutes. Uh, so I'm not going to talk about that particularly, but you know, even folks like Richard who wrote this awesome game design book, there's an entire chapter about play testing. Uh but there is one very important practice I do want to call out about play testing. It's not really about actual process but more about the mindset the design mindset

that one can adopt when observing and reacting to play tests. So one thing that I see people doing wrong in play testing and I I find myself still doing this sometimes is they is the the designer ends up listening to the solutions that come out of the play test rather than the problems themselves. See here's the thing about people who aren't game designers. surprise. They're not game designers. That's why what we do is kind of important. Remember all that horrible tainted knowledge that you have in your mind, which is why you need other people to play test the game in the first place? Well, this is where that knowledge is actually useful. You know, during play testing, people will often talk about the problems they are having in terms of solution rather than the problems themselves. They might say, "My character is too weak. They need to be tougher." Or, "These enemies have way too many hit points. They're impossible to kill." Um, now it is indeed possible that your enemies might just actually have too much health, but it might be that they actually have some weakness that the player just didn't understand. Or maybe the play tester missed some important item that's actually the counter to that kind of enemy. Or or or or there's like a million reasons why

the play tester could be feeling the way they are. That's why it's essential to personally observe play tests and focus on the player's behavior. You know, if it's unclear, ask them afterward why they were doing what they were doing. This happened all the time during Mark the Ninja's development. And I gave a talk here a couple years ago about that. So it's on the vault. Also, you can just grab the slides and the text on my website. Um, but this is where it comes back to the game design rule. So what I said at the beginning was don't try and evaluate your own game. But remember our friend Mr. asterisk this important caveat. Well, if we actually expand out this entire rule, what it is is don't try to evaluate your own game, but only you know what it should be. See one. So obviously during all that play testing I mentioned, another problem I find some designers have is they do not actually have a specific coherent vision for the particular moment they're trying to evaluate. Running a play test or hell even evaluating an entire design based on whether or not it is fun is an absolutely ludicrous notion, right? Like what is and isn't fun is not only

utterly subjective between players, but it's actually such a broad term it generally describes just about nothing. what makes Mario Kart 8 fun is completely different from what makes Dark Souls fun. And both of those things are completely different from what makes Silent Hill fun. And yet we some people seem to think that fun is just this universal positive category that all games should have. Um as a as a brief aside, maybe let's actually just stop saying games should be fun altogether. Uh one because as noted Oh, thank you. It's it's basically a meaningless word, right? And two, calling something like Silent Hill or Dark Souls fun even further highlights the absurdity of using that term some kind of universal positive description to begin with. So, I don't know, let's say compelling instead or something. Anyway, um so what makes a game experience compelling depends hugely on the game. So, you need to have a vision for what a particular mechanic, moment, whatever it is actually supposed to feel like. It needs to be tangible and evaluable. Apparently, a term some folks use for this is design intent, which I actually

I like that term a lot. It so for any particular moment, it needs to have a design intent. That's something you can articulate. And at some level, the players need to feel that as well, even if obviously they can't articulate it quite as clearly, right? So, when you have that clear articulatable goal, then as you're play testing, you can evaluate, well, is this moving us closer toward this specific thing? And if not, what can we do to get us closer in that direction? But if that goal is just to have your game be fun, then you are just going to spiral into a million subjective arguments and quickly you will just want to wither up and die. Um, so to be briefly tangible, we were recently play testing Firewatch a whole bunch and there's a bit right at the beginning where the player discovers someone setting off fireworks in the middle of the woods, which obviously during the middle of fire season is a really godamn bad idea. So the player has to find their way toward where these fireworks are coming from. Now, Firewatch is a game about narrative and exploration, but this bit right at the beginning, we didn't actually mean for the path to be unclear, but play testing it, people kind of totally got lost. You

know, not not necessarily in a bad way, right? Some people even said, "Oh, they enjoyed being lost and kind of confused and enjoyed the exploration." The problem was is that even though some people's experience was relatively positive, if we left that as is, then the bits later where we kind of do intentionally want the players to be lost for a little bit, those moments wouldn't be unique. They'd just be kind of interest. They'd just be kind of sy. It's like, oh, I guess the experience of playing this game is being lost all the time. Um, so instead, we improve the wayfinding in that initial area. And obviously, we're going to keep looking for that as we continue play testing. So the notion of design intent does stand in contrast to something that some folks talk about pretty frequently. The notion of building a minimum viable product or MVP. Um and to be perfectly honest as far as at least games are concerned in my opinion. The notion of an MVP is kind of [ __ ] You know the idea at a high level is basically you build the simplest cheapest version of of something then you put it in front of a bunch of people and then you change it and update it in response to what they

find attractive or appealing. Wait, hold on. That just sounds like exactly what we were talking about, right? Except in almost all discussions of MVPs, there's one very important thing missing. That vision. Minimum viable products fall out of the garbage heap of Silicon Valley startup culture where the only purpose for creating anything is to sell it either to customers or more likely to a different Silicon Valley company. If you're making something interesting, like say a really cool new piece of communication software, but early adopters are just using it to schedule doctor's appointments or something, well, you actually just drop everything you originally wanted to do and then you pivot and now I guess you're making calendaring software. Um, I mean, maybe there's some value to all this if you if all you care about is building products to be sold. Um, honestly, I'd even question the value of that pretty heavily. That's a whole other can of worms. But this is especially poor for games. You know, as our as our good friend Mark Cerny once said, if you ask someone what they want in a game, they're just going to tell you about the

last rad game that they played. This notion of minimum viable products is really good at finding local maxima at optimizing under known conditions. But what results from this creation is usually just a bunch of seamy games guilty of the worst sin, being boring. You know, some of these aren't necessarily bad games, per se. They're just really really goddamn boring. They're they're uninteresting, right? There's a million of them and they're all basically the same in terms of presentation that sort of vaguely cartoony appeals to everyone aesthetic, in terms of the play experience, in terms of kind of the vapid treadmill of gameplay. It's they're all just kind of the same. And of course, like you can label you can level the same criticism at a certain subset of AAA games or independently made games or whatever else because all of those games were basically built to be sellable or good or fun or whatever else, but nothing more specific than that. So, you know, don't be content designing toward that

local maxima, building something that's really just meant to be sold. I know all of your games can be unique, compelling experiences. Stay focused on that. And while you're having people play what's being built, listen for the problems they're having, not just the solutions. I'll leave this with uh something Mr. Neil Gaiman said, because I certainly couldn't have said this any better. Remember, when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. That's it. Thank you very much. Thanks everybody and that concludes our our rules for today. Remember these game design rules may or might may not apply to your own rule. You need to think of game design rules as personal and be thinking of what your set of game design rules uh that you may or may not want to follow for your own projects will be. The slides for this will be up on my

website. Thanks everybody for coming.