You Have No Idea How Hard It Is To Run a Sweatshop

Hi everyone. I'm Soren Johnson and welcome to you have no idea how hard it is to run a sweatshop. And I'll just say I'm very pleased to see everyone came out for a talk with this type of title. So here are the published games that I've worked on over my career, some of which I will touch on over the next hour. I also do a podcast where I interview game designers about why they make games. The episodes tend to run long, so check it out if you have any 4-hour road trips coming up. So the talk I'm about to give is something of a sequel to one I gave in 2010, which was entitled theme is not meaning. I argued then that we need to stop assuming that the game's set, the theme or setting, determines its meaning and instead that meaning comes from the mechanics themselves.

Since then, I've spent a lot of time thinking about games which do a good job of constructing meaning from the mechanics and also about ones which do it poorly. I'd like to talk about some of these examples today and examine how best to build meaning in our games. Games have great power to affect players, but and I'm going to be bringing this up over and over again, that power can so so easily slip out of designers' hands and sometimes end up delivering the exact opposite message from what the designer intended. So first, let's talk about soccer and the 1994 Caribbean Cup where they introduced a unique rule concerning golden goals, which are overtime goals that instantly end the game. In this tournament, golden goals would now be worth two goals instead of one, which could matter if two teams are tied in the standings and need to use the difference in goals scored as a tiebreaker. So, here are the standings before the final game between Barbados and Grenada.

Let me explain what we're looking at here. These columns are the number of games played and the wins and losses so far. Note that if Barbados beats Grenada, there will be a three-way tie. In a three-way tie, each team will have three points in the standings because each win is worth three points. So, in the event of a three-way tie, the team which advances is the one with the best goal differential, which is goal for goals for subtracted by goals allowed. Thus, even though Barbados is currently in last place here, if they can beat Grenada by two goals, they will advance from the group by having the highest goal differential. Remember when I said earlier that a golden goal is worth double? That's called foreshadowing. Near the end of the game, Barbados is up by exactly two goals with the score of two to zero. So if the game were to end at that moment, Barbados would have the goal differential they need to win the tiebreaker. But then, in the 82nd minute, Grenada

scores and even though Barbados is still winning the game, they will not advance because they have lost a point in goal differential. Barbados needs another goal or they will be eliminated. So, if Barbados can score a third goal in the final 8 minutes of the game, the standings will look like the chart on the right. Barbados will get back to a plus one goal differential, win first place and advance to the next round. 5 minutes pass and Barbados is running out of time to score the third goal they need. If nothing changes, they will win the game but be eliminated. However, someone on the Barbados team remembers the special golden goal rule and realizes that if they score on themselves and force the game to overtime, they would have a full 30 minutes to score a golden goal, which would then be worth two goals and put Barbados into first place, as you can see on the right. And so this happens. Barbados brings the ball back to their own side and intentionally scores on themselves. Obviously, Grenada figures something is

up and they quickly realize that they now have two very different paths to first place, represented by both charts here. So either they score a goal to break the tie, you know, the old-fashioned way, or instead, they intentionally score on themselves to lose the game but win the group by goal differential. Which leads to what must be must be the most unusual soccer game of all time because Barbados now needs to defend both of the goals and Grenada just needs to score on either one, leading to this totally totally normal arrangement of players. Ultimately ultimately, Grenada fails to score another goal and the goal goes to overtime. Game goes to overtime. Naturally, Barbados does score a golden goal, now worth double, and goes on to the next round. Their plan to score on themselves and win in overtime actually worked. Here's the response of the Grenada

manager to this outcome. I feel cheated. The person who came up with these rules must be a candidate for a madhouse. Our players did not even know which direction to attack, our goal or their goal. In football, you're supposed to score against the opponents to win, not for them. Of course, Barbados did nothing wrong. They're just playing by the rules of the game and the rules put them in a situation where scoring against against themselves made sense. I've currently I've certainly had the same experience where a rule or mechanic I've added to a game ends up creating some perverse incentive that leads to the exact opposite player behavior that I wanted to encourage. One way to put this is that nobody knows anything. Here's the rest of the quote from screenwriter William Goldman. Not one person knows for certainty what's going to work. Every time out, it's a guess and if you're lucky, an educated one. Certainly, that could be said for video games. I would never have bet on an

ultra-detailed dwarf simulator using ASCII art or on a game with one winner and 99 losers or on a turn-based game that plays itself or on a twin-stick shooter minus one of the sticks. Much of game design is determined by constraints which are out of the hands of the developers. Dota 2 and League of Legends both inherited their design from the original Warcraft 3 mod, Defense of the Ancients, which had two distinctive mechanics that were just baked into how Warcraft 3 worked. Creep denial, which means being able to kill your own minions, and last hitting, meaning that the experience points go to the last hero to hit the target. Dota 2 kept creep denial and both games kept last hitting, which success suggests that their existence is a happy accident as no one actually {quote} {unquote} designed them. They were just inherited constraints from a game in a different genre. So is is game design just sorting through accidents like these like this

to see what works? Consider the case of Fortnite, which started as a game about building forts while fighting off waves of zombies. Even after Fortnite blew up into the world's largest Battle Royale game, these building mechanics stuck around as this weird inherited vestige of the original game. It took Epic years to finally do the obvious thing and just get rid of them entirely so that the end of a Fortnite match was no longer the strange frantic building contest. Indeed, it's hard to describe Fortnite as intentional design at all when you draw out the strange path things took. Here's a rough rough history of the various games and mods that led to Fortnite Battle Royale as we know it today. Arma is a realistic tactical shooter while DayZ is a free-form survival game while PUBG is a one versus 100 cage match. Nobody planned this all out, it just sort of happened. Fortnite was more discovered than designed. So, when we design a game, are we really just throwing darts? Do we have any idea what we're doing?

Another problem with game design is that we are offer we often overcorrect for whatever lesson we just learned. With Offworld Trading Company, because the game had random maps, each game started with a short exploration phase where you scanned the map and found your colony and only part with only part of the terrain revealed. We learned quickly during early access that the multiplayer community didn't want exploration at all because it added luck and they wanted no luck at the game start. So we added a mode with the fully revealed map for these players. So when we built Old World's multiplayer, we assumed that we would have a similar multiplayer community which would want us to minimize randomness. So at great effort, we maintained a no characters mode where the game has literally no characters, no events, no families, nothing that could add randomness to the game. However, almost no one uses this mode. To our surprise, the multi the multiplayer community loves the randomness. They love seeing and adapting to fresh events each game.

The lesson here is that every game finds a unique subset of players from the audience that you think you are targeting and from the ones that you aren't. You you might have made the same mistake if you listen to my GDC Offworld postmortem. None of us none of us really know what we're doing. Remember that at GDC, we are talking about why we think we were successful, not why we actually were successful, which is essentially unknowable. Like the chart says, half of what you hear at at GDC is BS, half of the rest doesn't apply to your game, most of what remains you can't implement, the rest might be useful, maybe. Keep in mind, this chart itself might also be BS. For example, the type of thing you might hear at GDC that turns out to be wrong, we've been told for years by product managers that people buy cosmetics in free-to-play games so that they can peacock, to show off their skins in front of everyone else. Well, in Valorant, all animations, graphical

effects, and sounds are only visible to the purchaser. Your enemies don't see them. So, it turns out people will pay for cosmetics even if they are the only ones who can see them. Besides the question of whether we know what we are doing as designers, what about the question of whether games can teach us anything about our world? Or maybe let's actually set the bar lower and see if games can teach at least teach us anything about sports. To do that, we need to talk about baseball analyst Voris McCracken. Who, despite his preposterous name, has no relation to either Zack McCracken or the alien mind benders. Instead, Voris McCracken revolutionized our understanding of baseball with an idea he first published on Usenet in 1999. He called it DIPS, which stands for defense independent independent pitching stats. The basic idea is that while pitchers do have control over balls and strikes, once the batter hits the ball, the results are no longer in their control.

In other words, barring a strikeout or a walk, pitchers don't control how many hits they allow. This may seem like a fairly simple observation, but baseball is a very old game, and for over a century everyone had assumed the opposite was true. That some pitchers were better at getting outs getting batters out than others. The initial response to McCracken's idea, which threatened to turn our understanding of pitching upside down, was shock, disbelief, even hostility. Although Bill James, the patron saint of progressive baseball analysts analysis, was initially skeptical, after doing the research, he determined that McCracken was correct and that he felt, quote, stupid for not having realized this 30 years ago. So, why am I talking about DIPS? What does this mean for video games? Well, one part of the appeal of games is that they can theoretically simulate the real world and teach us about it. That we can make choices and see those choices be modeled accurately.

But, to use just this one specific example, how could a game written before McCracken's insight on pitching have any claim to accurately model baseball? The programmers writing these games would absolutely make some pitchers better than others at preventing hits because that was how everyone thought baseball worked before McCracken. And of course, if garbage goes in, garbage comes out. These games could only simulate a faulty understanding of how baseball works. To underline this point even more, consider this Bill James this article Bill James wrote in 2015, arguing that baseball managers were using their starting pitchers incorrectly. For decades, teams have used a five-man rotation, meaning that there is a new starting pitcher every fifth day so that each one can pitch a full strength after four days of rest. James argued that teams should instead use a three-man rotation, but with much lower pitch counts, relying relying more on relief pitchers. Let's say someone wanted to test this theory with a baseball simulation. Well,

even with a sport like baseball that is ideally suited for simulation as it is essentially a turn-based game, there's no way to get good results on a three-man rotation because baseball simulations are written by trying to get their internal numbers to match real world real world results, not for some deeper understanding of how baseball actually works, which would then produce accurate results. Because no one has ever tried a three-man rotation in real life, no one knows what would actually happen, how a pitcher would hold up to pitching every three days instead of every five. Game designers would just be guessing. So, what can what can games simulate? Strangely, the best example I can think of is a game trying to recreate a situation much more difficult to simulate than baseball, life as a border guard in a totalitarian country. Papers, Please succeeds because instead of trying to simulate reality, it's trying to simulate the personal tensions someone in this position might feel. The game puts you in difficult situations as a border guard as border

agent processing immigrants who have compelling stories for why they are trying to cross the border. Would you stop a young girl fleeing fleeing from abuse just because she doesn't have all her papers in order? Who will let you in and who will keep you in who will you keep out? Oh, sorry. Who will you let in and who will you keep out? What laws will you enforce and what will you turn a blind eye towards? However, letting people in illegally can lead to citations, which carry fines that might lead to your son dying because you don't have enough medicine. Is this an accurate simulation? I mean, who knows? But, it creates a genuine emotional conflict which we can all relate to. Is there a right thing to do when helping someone in need will hurt your family? Losing your family is a loss condition, so you can't just perform as a paragon. Through this tension, Papers, Please gives players an understanding of why resistance against an oppressive system is so hard for people with real lives and thus why the powerful are able to stay in power.

So, to put it simply, games can simulate empathy much better than they can simulate reality. Speaking of which, here's a classic line in one of games' most famous simulations. SimCity doesn't actually simulate a real city, it simulates the inside of Will Wright's brain. Except that's not exactly true. Very crudely, here are the two poles of 20th century urban planning, Le Corbusier, who was a proponent of top-down rational rationalist city planning, which separated residential, commercial, and industrial areas. In contrast, Jane Jacobs challenged this idea with proposals for mixed used uh development, which reflected how cities traditionally grew without central planning. When when Will Wright talks about urban planning, he is much more likely to pray praise Jacobs than Corbusier. Her more contemporary ideas are the ones he would commonly refer to in his sprawling game design talks.

For example, in this interview, when asked about the inspirations for SimCity, the one urban planner he mentions is Jane Jacobs, not Corbusier. However, Wright was not making a game in the abs- in the abstract. He was trying to create a whole city on a very real Commodore 64. And the ideas of these two designers required very different types of coding. Jacobs' mixed use urbanism, which focused on pedestrian flow, would require agent simulation, which would be much too complex for an 8-bit system. On the other hand, Corbusier's residential, commercial, and industrial sub superblocks could be handled by much simpler cellular automata, which is what Wright chose to use. In other words, the limits of the technology determined what type of city SimCity would simulate, regardless of what Will Wright might actually have believed. So, SimCity ended up with the famous residential, commercial, industrial split that rationalist planner like Corbusier might admire, and which, it

needs to be said, is today considered bad urban design that leads to crimes, slums, and general economic and social decline. As an admirer of Jacobs, Wright probably understood this, too. So, that leaves us with the question, what meaning should we take from the first SimCity if it represents an urban model that the designer himself doesn't even believe in? Is this intentional design? Accidental design? Something something else? There is actually a successful city builder based on this type of agent simulation based on the type of agent simulation needed to support Jacobs' ideas. Pharaoh doesn't use districts. Instead, its systems are built around little walkers that move around your city and do their jobs so that the layout of your streets and the adjacency of your buildings actually matter. The game is considered a high water mark for city builders and a testament to how choosing the right model can matter.

So, next I'd like to talk about another game, Kent Hudson's narrative simulation, The Novelist, which explores the story of the title character who has trouble who has trouble balancing his three biggest priorities, his wife, his work, and his son. The game presents you with choices over the course of nine chapters, moving you up or down in those three different categories. The inner math is zero sum, so if you gain two points in your marriage, you lose two points between your work and your son and your son. However, after play testing, Hudson realized that his game's meaning was the exact opposite from what he wanted. My game is telling players, you can't have it all. Life is zero sum, you can't win. I don't believe that statement to be true, but people were taking a message from the game that I fundamentally disagreed with. Games can escape the intentions of their designers just so easily. I think one of the issues games like The Novelist face is that it's it's hard to

find human meaning in a game with just simple math at its core. Yet, games absolutely can teach us about ourselves. Telltale's Walking Dead games provide a great example of this by showing you how your choices compare to everyone else's. If you are one of the 25% of players who killed Stephanie, you might reflect on why you made that choice when so many others didn't. Maybe the best way for games to be about people is simply to inject more real people into the game. Let's talk about another example of designer intent gone awry. This is Spent, a well-intentioned game that wants to build empathy for the poor by showing players just how difficult their life can be, how they sometimes need to choose between paying the gas bill, repairing the car, and attending their grandfather's funeral. That's a bold goal, but is it effective? One researcher actually aimed to find out. Here's an article from Psychology Today about an experiment she ran to see how effective Spent was at increasing empathy for the poor.

She writes, "After analyzing the results from the study, I was dismayed to find that playing the game had no effect on positive feelings towards the poor. In fact, the game had a negative effect on attitudes among certain participants, including some people who were sympathetic to the poor to begin with." The problem is agency. When holding the mouse and making the decisions, it's very natural to assume that the poor have the same agency that you do as the player. Consider this choice right here. Should you spend the money to attend your grandfather's funeral? The problem is that it's very easy for the player to not spend the money by just hitting the skip memorial button and then end up thinking, "Why do these poor people have such a hard time saving their money?" One very interesting finding was that the game did produce empathy when people watched the game instead of playing it. From my perspective, this is a devastating finding because the whole thing we as game designers have been going on and on and on about for decades is how games are empathy machines because they put you in the shoes of someone else's life. But here we see the

exact opposite effect and to make it worse, a passive, non-interactive medium is the one that produces empathy instead. However, maybe things are not so dire. Why, for example, does Papers, Please succeed where Spent fails? The answer is actually just game design. Papers, Please took the time and energy to give weight to your decisions. Either from what happens when you turn away those in need or from how your acts of defiance hurt your family. In Spent, there's no actual cost to pressing the skip the memorial button and saving the money, which prevents the player from actually empathizing with the protagonist. However, even if designers take the time to build out all the mechanics needed to create real emotional tension, things can still go awry. Consider Sweatshop, a game designed to raise awareness about the hostile labor conditions in modern sweatshops. Indeed, this game earned the honor of being banned from the Apple App Store for its depiction of child labor and unsafe working conditions, which perhaps hit a little too close to home for them.

The game puts you in the role of the sweatshop manager who, in order to meet increasingly unreasonable quota demands from the corporation, has to cut corners by lowering safety standards, hiring children, and pushing workers past their limits. This is what Simon Parkin, one of the designers, had to say about their intentions in the game's meaning. Whereas a film documentary might piece together the sweatshop story through footage and anecdote, the game allows players to experience the system from the inside with all its cat's cradle of pressures and temptations. A game can present the system in a more objective manner, thereby building a different sort of empathy and understanding. However, trying to get a game across with interactivity is playing with fire. This is what journalist and game designer Tom Francis said about his his experience playing Sweatshop. At the end of it, I thought, "Shit, it's hard to run a sweatshop." Previously, I was like, "Oh, it's terrible, these conditions in the sweatshop." Now I'm

like, "Man, you don't know what pressures they're under. It's It's hard to meet these quotas." The problem is that the game puts you in the role of the manager, so your empathy is for the pressure he is under and not for the workers. You end up understanding why managers make the compromises they do and why children end up being mutilated. Now, there are a couple of different ways to look at that. If players are able to step back and think about what they just did, it's sort of amazing that a game could get you could that a game could get you to kill kids to hit your t-shirt quota. But I think it's just as likely that in less obviously baleful situations like a sweatshop, players will always subconsciously identify with whoever they control in a video game. What does that mean for games where you play the king, the queen, the ruler, or more generally the status quo, the existing power structure? Perhaps the most famous example of a designer's intent being thwarted is Elizabeth Magie's The Landlord's Game from 1906.

It was designed to show the negative effects of rampant capitalism with an alternate set of rules to show how all the players would be better off if they adopted a tax system where rents were paid into the public treasury instead of into the landlord's pockets. The original rule set contains a very interesting passage that lays out the designer's intentions. Magie points out that players will quickly realize that under the default monopolistic rule set, one player will will own everything on the board. The Landlord's Game was Das Kapital made of cardboard and dice. She invented player elimination to prove out the evils of monopoly. Unfortunately for Magie, collecting rents from your properties and pushing your rivals into bankruptcy proved to be a lot more fun than having all the money going to the public treasury and you know, today the game is known as Monopoly minus the socialist tax rule set. The lessons here are subtle. Monopoly absolutely does demonstrate how how a capitalist system will concentrate

wealth in the hands of the few and impoverish the many, which is what Magie intended after all, but somehow doubt that this is exactly what she had in mind or if players perceive of the game as a critique of capitalism. Fun is an insidious an insidious requirement for a game to be played and perhaps more importantly replayed. Games that aren't much fun tend to just tend to just disappear and we have to grapple with that as designers. The very nature of a game makes it extremely difficult to express a strong position on an issue. In order to be a game with different potential strategies, Prison Architect has to suggest that rehabilitation and punishment are both equally viable options. The game shaped box it is in prevents it from picking a side regardless of what the designers think. What it can do is show the problems with each path. You can punish prisoners by searching for contraband every day, which means your addicts will go into withdrawal when they can't get their drugs and act out violently.

On the other hand, you can create job training programs, but that lets the prisoners get their hands on screwdrivers and other items that can be turned into weapons. You can have visitation programs, but then you'll discover a pipeline of drugs being smuggled into the prison. The game is not and never could be an accurate simulation of prison because that's impossible. But it can help players understand the tradeoffs, compromises, and tensions that they may not have considered before playing. Now, let's talk about DEFCON, a game about nuclear holocaust. We really are hitting the high points, aren't we? An interesting study was conducted on how playing the game affected players' opinions of nuclear war. The experiment separated the subjects into two groups, a control group that read articles on the dangers of nuclear war and a treatment group which played DEFCON

instead. There were significant differences in how these two groups changed their opinion after the experiment. Although the control group became more worried about a nuclear war in the near future, the DEFCON players strangely became less concerned. On the other hand, the game players were more pessimistic that they would survive a war. The researchers' conclusion, based also on qualitative data, was that playing DEFCON was more effective at showing players how destructive nuclear war would be so that they then assumed that our governments would be more incentivized to never resort to it. However, there is one important wrinkle in the overall results, which are divided up here by high, medium, and low frequency gamers. Note that every single group became more concerned about the threat of nuclear warfare except for one. The high frequency gamers in the treatment group, meaning the ones who play games the most frequently. The hypothesis is that core gamers quickly saw past the setting and no longer saw a game about nuclear war and instead saw

an RTS with an unusual art style. This highlights a huge challenge for trying to communicate using game design. If you are working within familiar genre constraints, over time both the game's setting and meaning will eventually disappear. A similar finding showed up in a study but run by Dr. Stephen Blessing and Elena Sakowski based on a Jeff Engelstein thought experiment about whether players of Incan Gold would change their behavior based on simply changing the setting of the game. Incan Gold is a push-your-luck game where you delve into an ancient temple for gems and artifacts but risk losing it all the farther you go. To see if the setting affected players, they reskinned the game twice. First, as a firefighter game where you rescue victims instead. And second, as an abstract app version where you're just playing for points. The results they found were that players did change their behavior based on the setting, at least at first.

This graph shows how often players return to the base, which means that they have stopped pressing their luck. In the firefighter setting, this means rescuing less of the victims, while in the abstract version, it simply means scoring less points. In this experiment, the firefighters would push their luck more, taking more risks to save more people. However, and this is the important part, by the fourth game, the results had largely converged and players of all three versions were playing the same way. Players were now seeing past the setting and just optimizing to scoring the most points, whether they were called gems or victims or just points. Setting can matter, but we need to be aware that players will eventually gravitate to the game's inner logic and start to ignore the setting. The The the setting and the rules are disconnected, the bigger problem this becomes. These four games have very different settings and meanings with a very different different set of messages and emotions for the player. And yet there are significant parts of these four games that play out the exact

same way, could even be built on the same shared code base. Putting players into an established genre dulls the designer's intent because over time players will stop engaging with the message and meaning of the game and instead just fall back on instinct. They are now playing shooter number 34, not a philosophical game about a submerged dystopia or a jaunty adventure with a lovable rogue or contemporary high-tech military thriller. Instead, players are warped back into their dorm room in 1994 and booting up Doom. Meaning is not a layer built on top of someone else's game. The game's meaning starts with its basic building blocks, the core actions that the player is going to be repeating over and over again. Conflict between designer intent intent and player behavior actually predates video games as it is a common issue with historical war games. One of the basic challenges of war game design is how to encourage historical play when no one knows what the likely or even plausible alternate results

could be. For example, could the South have ever won the Civil War? And how to recreate the pressures that led to bad decisions even when we all know the outcome. Maybe Napoleon should have known better than to invade Russia, but even my kids know not to start a land war in Asia. A good example of this problem is Volko Ruhnke's uh Labyrinth, a game about the war on terror that starts in 2001 and pits the US against Al-Qaeda. It must have been a difficult game to design for many reasons, uh one of which is that many of the US's historical actions such as the invasion of Iraq backfired horribly, which players would presumably want to avoid. However, when you read the rules for the game, it comes across like a Bush administration neocon fantasy world. The mechanics enable a domino effect of Western support throughout the region. Establishing a democracy in one Middle Eastern country will cause it to spread to its neighbors just like we were told would happen in Iraq back in 2003. When I first encountered the game, I was

actually a little shocked because it's easy to assume the designer had fallen for this neocon propaganda. Years later, the designer actually addressed that question head-on. What if you, as the designer, have a different view of how the world works than the historical contestants? To get your players to behave historically, for your model to work and produce historically plausible outcomes, you have to incentivize your players the way people of the time were incentivized. What was the US administration's strategy and what did they think would work? I have to allow that to work in the game. Otherwise, the US player doesn't play like the US in the war on terror, regardless of whether Volko thinks those ideas are correct. This raises the question of what is the point of a historical game? Is it an attempt to model history? To actually experiment with alternate outcomes? Or is it to help us understand why people made decisions that we find baffling or shocking today? With Labyrinth, Ruhnke is not trying to recreate history. Instead, he's trying

to recreate the historical mindset of the time. As we've covered, the ability of a game to simulate the actual world is extremely limited and thus misleading. Labyrinth shows a clear example of an alternative, simulating the pressures, the desires, and the fears of historical actors, which can be much more illuminating. The study of the past is not just about what people did, but also about why they did it. And a game can probably do a better job of teaching the question of why people made choices they did than any other media. Let's move that question to a different era. The medieval world of Crusader Kings. Now, they could have made the game with a very different focus. Maybe how best to conquer the world or what is the fastest way to advance out of the Middle Ages, made it more like Civilization in other words. Instead, they leaned into empathizing with medieval rulers, putting you under the same pressures that made it difficult to maintain a dynasty and keep your realm from fracturing,

which leads to lots of posts like these. How to kill off your heir? Is it worth it to kill off your brothers? Indeed, what is the best way to kill off your brothers? Now, that's an interesting question for players to ask because fratricide was actually official policy during a certain period of Ottoman history. For example, when Selim I assumed the throne in 1512, he quickly executed executed his two brothers. Mehmed III had 19 of his brothers and half-brothers murdered. Eventually, they began imprisoning their family members instead, which was quite an improvement. So, Crusader Kings certainly meets Ruhnke's goal for a historical game, to encourage players to behave historically regardless of whether the designers regardless of what the designers of Paradox think, who presumably have neither killed nor imprisoned their own brothers. It requires creativity for a game to recreate a historical mindset as opposed to being just a historical reenactment. For example, Europa Universalis includes

a randomized New World mode, which makes the game less realistic, but instead more true to the human experience of the age of being an explorer and not knowing what is over the horizon. There is a similar similar issue with Victoria, which designer Chris King outlined a number of years ago. Historically, colonies just didn't pay. They tended to be a net loss for the controlling countries that it cost as it costs more to subjugate, manage, and defend than it brought back home to the colonizer. However, a game about 19th century Europe in which those nations did not race for colonies, even if to the detriment of literally everyone in the world, would clearly put players in an ahistorical mindset. In Victoria, they solved this problem by making colonies a necessary part of their economic model, providing the raw goods and eventually markets that players' factories and businesses needed. It's not a realistic model of history, but it is a realistic model of what 19th century Europeans thought was important to them at the time.

An important consideration here is whether players will understand the line between the game incentivizing historical behavior and the game espousing a worldview. In Cole Wehrle's infamous Traffic, you play in the English aristocrats who are profiting from selling opium in China during the 19th century. You are playing bad people doing bad things, and the designer underlines this by how victory works. The money you earn in China gets converted into frivolous prizes back home in London, including my favorite, a fancy hat. The game is telling you that it knows you're doing bad things and you shouldn't feel good about the fancy hat you ended up with as your prize. A game's framing can matter a great deal to help players separate a historical mindset from actual reality. What if at the end of Civilization, instead of telling you how much land you conquered, the wrap-up screen told you how many cultures you destroyed and how many languages had disappeared? I started my career very passionate about making games about history, games that could sit next to a book or a

document as a legitimate secondary source of on world history. My history thesis paper in college was a game that simulated the life of a shopkeeper living in early modern Oxford based on my research in the Oxfordshire archives. It didn't just model the change in prices over time, but also your standing in the local mercers and grocers guild, as well as your family life as the line between personal and business affairs was not as fixed back then. So, you have to worry about your children and their future. Two years later, I started working on Civilization III and I was super pumped. I just read Guns, Germs, and Steel and was inspired to make the video game version. However, I quickly ran into the goofy reality of video games, of how players will twist your games into what they want to play. I learned that you can't just put horses and wheat and pigs on one continent, but not on another, and expect players to be okay with starting in the wrong place. And then I met the twin evils of Civilization, infinite city sprawl, which is how the game encourages cramming cities into every possible spot

on the map, and the eternal China syndrome, which is how once the initial expansion expansion phase is over, the game becomes static and dull. These effects have nothing to do with history and everything everything to do with players seeing past the historical setting to the game's inner math. So, after making Civ III and abandoning the idea that I was making a history simulator, I had to ask myself, what could I actually communicate with Civ IV? Why make that game at all? Uh in doing so, I started on a path that led me to why I make strategy games. Here is the Civ IV civic screen. In Civs 1 through 3, you adopted an ideology, monarchy, despotism, communism, democracy, which came with a bunch of bonuses and penalties, basically judgments on the designer's part on what those ideologies meant. I dropped that entirely for Civ IV and implemented a build-your-own government system where you choose where power lies, the type of economy, how the legal

system works, and so on. You could have a police state with a free market, or you could have slavery mixed with free speech, or you could mix universal suffrage with state property. The whole point was to to defy ideological labels to get the player to see past them. If the 20th century has a single theme, it's that ideology itself is a failure. Dogmatic leaders used ideologies to demonize the opposition, which usually meant helping the strong to terrorize the weak. From Nazi death camps to the Soviet gulags to China's Cultural Revolution, to America's McCarthyism, the 20th century was full was 20th century was full of ideas that gave power to autocratic leaders not afraid to destroy the lives of those who resisted. Much as we hate to admit it, those leaders were often supported by masses of people who believed in the stories those leaders told, the ideologies they

espoused. Demagogues love the labels that ideologies provide because they obscure and dehumanize the opposition. Both sides of the Cold War made liberal use of the term terms communist and capitalist to define and differentiate each other. Even though the US government has slowly adopted communist programs piecemeal over the last century. Why exactly was the US, a country with social security, Medicare, welfare, a minimum wage, labor laws, and trade unions killing people to keep communism out of Vietnam? In fact, if you took a typical red-fearing, union-busting industrialist from 1923 and sent him 100 years into the future and explained to him how America works now, he would probably assume that the communists won after all. Labels exist to separate and control people, and I wanted the civic system to encourage people to look past these labels and at the actual choices a society makes a society needs to make when governing

itself. It was no accident that I attached Mount Rushmore to fascism. Carving mammoth statues of your country's leaders into a mountain is fascist, even if we do not live under capital F fascism. Our own self-labeling as a capitalist democracy does not protect us from charges that our country is damaging the world when our policies hurt real people. I often get asked whether Offworld is a free trade game or an anti-capitalist game or some other statement on the world economy. I don't think games should make broad statements like capitalism is good or capitalism is bad. It's just too simplistic, and as we discussed, injecting a heavy-handed message so easily go off the rails. In Offworld, if iron costs more than steel, something has gone wrong, and you win by taking advantage of those discrepancies. There's a reason why everything costs what it does. Sometimes that goes Sometimes that goes just Sometimes that goes beyond just supply and demand to government policy and cultural factors,

but there's always a reason. And if we don't like what something costs, we should find out why instead of just complaining about it. More broadly, I made Offworld for the same reason I made Civ 4, to push against dogmatic, ideological thinking, the idea that there is one solution to everything. In a good strategy game, the answer to every question, which resource is most important, what should I research first, must always be, well, it depends. The point of having to make tough choices and to adapt to the environment is that there is never ever just one right approach to every situation. Ideologies inevitably lead to a belief that there is one set of solutions to the world's problems, and I believe that a good strategy game always challenges this type of thinking. So, let's go back to the question about whether games can teach us anything about our world. I hope I've demonstrated the folly of thinking that we can simulate the world even on a scale as small as a baseball season, while still showing the value in

using games to build empathy for others across place and time. How can we do more of that, and how can we do it better than we have so far? Okay. Now, I'm going to tell you something that is definitely in the 10% useful chart but in the 10% useful part of this pie chart. We game designers have no idea what we're doing. To be a good designer, you have to abandon the idea that you're anything other than an explorer. You know how we all feel like we are imposters? Well, what if we were actually right? It's actually bad to lose this feeling. If you think you have figured out game design, your career is over. We are not creating ordered systems. We are creating chaos for the player to find order in. I would extend this quote to say that designers who try to make ordered systems put their intentions, the meaning of their game, at risk because players will break those systems. Players don't care about the imaginary game you have in your head.

Indeed, players understand our games better than we do. When evaluating design talent, the most important trait I look for is humility. Designers need to be able to hold two contradictory ideas in their heads at all times, to hold true to their design vision even when success is uncertain, but also to always assume that their vision is meaningless until they see it in the hands of real players. They need to have both a big enough ego to follow their own path, but a small enough ego to assume that they are probably wrong. So, why make games at all if the players ultimately take them away from us? Why am I still here trying to climb up that hill? Well, what if that infamous Barbados-Grenada match was actually the most interesting game of soccer ever played? Maybe it's amazing that the soccer team ended up defeating both goals. Maybe it's amazing that the socialist

landlord's game turned into the capitalist monopoly. Maybe it's amazing that Sweatshop created more empathy for sweatshop managers than for the sweatshop the suffering workers. Maybe it's even amazing that Spent somehow made people less sympathetic towards the poor. Strictly speaking, these four examples are all failures, but the way they failed doesn't at all suggest that games are useless. Instead, their failures show us just how powerful games can be. Right now, we are like children playing with fire. We don't know what we are doing, and we might up setting the wrong thing ablaze. So, in the spirit of humility, I don't I don't have the answers for how to make sure our games don't end up conveying a message that is the opposite of what we intended, but I knew but I do know of some games that have succeeded better than others, and I bet you do, too. Just remember that simply stating that your game is about X or Y doesn't make it so. The only people who truly understand your game are your players. So, if you want to know what your game means, make

sure you ask them. And uh thank you for your time. All right, thanks everyone. Um be sure to fill out your evaluations. I know I'm supposed to say that. I actually did it this time. Um and uh I know it's a broad talk, but we do have time for questions if anyone wants to ask anything. Hello, Chris. Uh great talk. Um I wanted to talk about Fortnite. Okay, that's funny. We were just talking about this last night. Yeah. Okay, go ahead. but I play way too much Fortnite, and I wanted you to I mean the the the arc you laid out was slightly wrong in that the pros don't play zero build. Okay. And I'm curious what you think is since players are the ones who are the final arbiter of what's actually the game about, like zero build is kind of considered a thing for casuals, like get

those people out of the game, and building is where the actual magic is, which I think actually is true, like there's that aspect of the question about pros versus amateurs in games. And then the second thing is like one thing about building is they managed to not it up. Like they took They made the game as a fast follow of PUBG, obviously. Right. was in there. They left it in there. They were and it the pros like found the amazing thing there, and Epic eventually, after trying to slow it down and stuff, realized, "No, this is where the real game is." Right. And so that that kind of reading the game, listening to the game, and the players, and like doubling down on that is really important, I think. Right. So, I I did spend some time you know, I saw that they you know, they took out building, and to me building was always like it's so bizarre that this is this part of this game because obviously that was not that was not the Sorry to put this. You know, PUBG or whatever doesn't have building, right? Like that's not always the key part of what made the game work, right? And Fortnite did you know, whatever, the

fast follow, right? They're like, "We're going to We're going to adapt, but we've got all this other baggage that comes along with it, and we'll just see if it works, right?" And so, you know, it's like that for sure is accidental design, right? Like who knows what happens. Maybe that's great, maybe it's not. And so, yeah, I I spent some time trying to figure out cuz I saw that okay, great, they took it out, or at least there's a mode without it. So, that means they at least have understood that, and I couldn't quite figure out what the community thought. I saw that some people said that that was good, and they were they were happy with it. But I know I knew that like you know, it's possible that that would not But that's kind of the whole point. Like I know that the player is going to choose one of those paths or not. Yeah, I mean it was a parallel mode. They didn't actually take it out. They leave the mode in the game. Yeah. Like I mean, that's good. Like first of all, that's that is that is a great way to do development, right? Like if you're making a radical shift to your game, and you can make it that simple, like it's them admitting they don't know. Yeah. Right? It's just Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um I mean, yeah, it's it it kind of just comes back to the idea that like

it's you know, and it's also interesting that that different layers of the game, people have different opinions, right? Like casuals versus hardcore, right? They have a different uh purpose when they're playing the game. No, and in fact, streamers came back to play zero build because those people all aged out cuz you have to be 12 with your 12-year-old reflexes to build. Like it's so crazy now. Yep. And then, you know, somebody like Tfue or whatever, who's 23, just can't do it anymore. But they came back for zero build. So, it's like it's it's a lot it's a very high-dimensional space they were playing in. Yep. All right. Does anyone have a non-Fortnite question? Uh yeah, hi. Um, so I was curious with those games that were considered failures, it seemed like that and maybe this is a bit reductionist as a way of looking at it. It seems like the best thing to have fixed those would have been to find the right, you know, POV instead of, you know, maybe playing as a sweatshop owner, you're playing as one of the workers. Do you think that a lot of those problems could have been solved

just from changing the the vantage point of where those games were being designed from? Um, possibly. I mean, the hard part is I really have to think through how to how what's the right way to make a game about sweatshops. And I don't necessarily think that the game is a failure. I think it's just it's complicated, right? Like I think for some people, they'll play the game and, you know, they'll they'll go down the path of like, oh, I'm making the, you know, if I do these choices and, you know, like maybe later they'll be like, wow, I can't believe I did that stuff. You know, I I see, you know, it makes me think sweatshops are horrible. Whereas other people, I mean, I I I I think generally speaking, what I was really trying to get at was that I think I don't think anyone plays Sweatshop and comes away thinking like, I guess sweatshops are fine. Right? I don't think anyone actually thinks that. I was trying to like use that point to kind of illustrate like, okay, fine, but guess what? We have a bunch of games where you play the government. Right? Or you play the status quo or you play the king or whatever. And like we need to

think about like, okay, that framing very much affects what you think is okay or not okay. Right. Right. Where are we engendering like empathy? Yep, exactly. Yeah. Thank you. Hello. Thank you very much for a very inspirational talk. It was fantastic. In his 2006 GDC talk, Clint Hocking described the self-exploration systems that would drive player values into conflict. Maybe that's a solution to make people conflicted about their values instead. Um, as you were asking the question, I was really realizing, oh, I forgot to repeat the questions. And then I need you to repeat your question. Okay. Uh, in his 2006 GDC talk, exploration from spaces from from systems to spaces to self, Clint Hocking has proposed a self-exploration system, a method of attaching core verbs into various hidden values that would drive those values into conflict and make players question about themselves. Maybe that's a solution to make people conflicted about their own values

uh, instead of the objectives of the game. Uh, okay, could you give me an an example? I'm trying to that's it's a little abstract, so I'm trying to understand what you mean. I I understand. In Clint Hocking has suggested an Ultima IV where there are various hidden values that the player did not directly see, but sort of allow those specific values to explore themselves. Um, You mean that to be less explicit about this are your values? It's more of like you're you're performing them or like you're you're given a chance to be them? Is that what you mean? Right. Like we usually have in games that you lose you you make enemy NPCs lose morale, uh, but you don't feel like you've broken their will. Sort of drive their conflict to let them actually experience what they were doing. Right. Right. Okay. Um, yeah, I mean, I think that um, I think a lot of times in games, um, you know, we can

but you put labels of something, this is honorable, this is good, this is evil, this is whatever, right? But like, you know, we should be what's much more interesting is like what's actually happening. Like it you know, I think that's why I say at the end like just saying something is X or Y doesn't kind of make it make it that way. So, Sure. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, I was wondering what is the origin story of this talk? Like what made you wake up one day and say, I'm going to teach a master class on empathy in game design? Right. Okay, so I got that one. That's what the question is, what is the origin of this talk? Um, so I've been basically squirreling away like I mentioned I I gave that talk in 2010 on and that one that was really initiated by just me being bugged by the rules of Ticket to Ride. Um, that was like it's a really bizarre game because if you ask you take anyone, you say, hey, have you played Ticket to Ride? Like, yeah, Ticket to Ride is great. What's it about? Oh, you're you're a train company and you're building trains train tracks across the country and you're monopolizing markets and you're controlling everything. It's

like, yeah, that's right. That is what it's about. Then you crack open the rules and like, no, it's actually about a contest across the US the fastest or the hit the most cities or whatever. It's like a across the US in 80 days type thing. I don't know. Um, and it makes no sense especially because like the mechanics don't support that at all, right? Like there's no reason why one person can, you know, why if someone gets the, you know, Chicago to St. Louis route, why can't no Anyway, I'm going on too long. But anyway, the point is there was this huge mismatch and I was like, okay, it really makes the the designer does not have the right to determine what the game is about when the the players clearly realize the game is about something else, right? And so, you know, I kind of did that talk and then, you know, I just kept noticing these kind of examples come up of like a designer was trying to do this and then it ends up kind of ended up in the wrong place, at the opposite place. And so, you know, I I would just wanted this I wanted to kind of like frame that for people to

to, you know, remember that that it's kind of like this is a spirit of humility. They're like it's it's very easy to get the stuff wrong and I thought it'd be important to like highlight places where it's gone wrong, but also places where like it's people have done a really good job with it. So, I don't know. I hope that's I hope that's a good answer. Thank you. All right. Go ahead. This is kind of following up on things going wrong. Um, I was interested in like Spent where it was sort of a more successful message when it sort of failed as a game, like when it was a screen recording rather than something with player agency. And I was wondering what are you thinking about like how to get across a message? If there's times when you feel like sacrificing things that are generally considered like traditionally like just like good game design works best for the message rather than like always shooting for like best design that then also conveys it. Like are there places where you have to sacrifice things like player agency that maybe is like a worse quote unquote game, but ends up being better in terms of message? If that makes sense. Um, you're asking uh,

uh, let me just say that I mean, to me the issue with Spent is that they they needed to go farther, right? They needed to kind of build out the rest of the world, which is like, you know, more gameplay, like surround it so like you actually see what's happening. Could you kind of like what what what are you asking exactly in that context? Yeah, cuz I guess I was thinking about like things like feeling like a lack of agency and like one of the ways to do it is like make people feel like there's, you know, a cost to their decisions. But do you feel like in general are there ways where you can like make people feel bad, I guess, and have it be a like what do you sort of like Papers, Please or are there I don't know, like sort of less Right. Yeah. Yeah, so the question is how to make people feel bad. Yeah. Um, Yeah. Well, that's a good question. Uh, maybe that'll be my next talk. Uh, how to make people feel bad. I mean, you know, I've often kind of wondered about this. Like because like in Papers, Please, it's just a simple thing. You don't even see a picture of your son, you don't see a you know, you guys throwing the ball back and forth or whatever they do in, you know, their their dystopian country. You know, like

he doesn't have a name, you know, you just see son, son is sick, son is dead, right? Um, you know, we're humans, so we we map our lives onto that. So, you know, you don't necessarily have to do all that much and so it's kind of amazing that that kind of works. You know, I I I the thing that pops in my head right is the uh, uh, uh, No, no, the guy the guy who does the comic book uh, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud. Yeah, you know, like that the thing of like, okay, the thing we can most relate to is just the simplest happy face, right? Like it's it's it's kind of like in that ballpark, right? Like you don't you you actually if you give a lot of room for the player to map their their lives onto, it kind of like there's probably more there. So, you know, maybe less is more in that regard, but you got to do you got to do something, right? You got to give give some bite to it. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. I think I think the fact that it allows there's a stage before dead, the sick, matters cuz you failed. Yes. Chris, our our Fortnite fan, uh, just just mentioned mentioned that it it helps that there's a stage

between healthy and dead, you know, sick. Um, and yeah, I think I think that's true. You know, like hey, you know, you know, seeing some sort of process, right? Where you can feel like you can correct. Like good. Hey man, so there's a similar conversation happening right now in AI ethics about what they're calling the Waluigi effect. Okay. It's a real thing, Google it. But basically the idea is that like in order to teach an AI to be anti-racist, you are essentially also teaching them to be racist, right? Like, you know, whatever you like don't do X, don't do Y, don't do Z. All you have to do is invert those things and yes. Yes. And now suddenly, you know, so you can teach it to be an anti-racist and then suddenly say, oh, by the way, you're a secret Nazi and then it pulls the mask off and suddenly, right? And so, one of the questions that's kind of coming up is like how bidirectional is that, right? Like can you then say you're a secret like and and and and yeah, if you can sort of bring maybe we can bring this back to the like to the games going opposite to people's

design intentions, how easy is it to do we think to like flip it back, right? If that makes any sense. Um, how easy Okay. Uh, can you explain just the the the actual question? Again? Sorry. Um, so like you talk about like is so you talk about games that are failures that that convey the opposite of what they mean. Like is there like another layer you can put on top of it to get it to once again convey uh, to convey your intention? So like if the game is such a failure, uh, then like you could theoretically get the negative of it. Suddenly it's a success. Right, right, right. Yeah, okay. So, the question is Or is there is there a gravity towards badness? Or like can we like actually somehow you like fail on purpose and then end up uh, end up in a good place? Right. So, I mean to some extent that was like my my section on framing was about that, right? Like if if

um, you know, all these things, you know, it's definitely there's nothing in my talk anyone I like I would interpret as like this is this is like absolutely good and this is absolutely bad. As like, you know, like even even stuff like spent, you know, it's kind of interesting to see some of some of the stuff going on there, right? And um, Mhm. It's hard to really put this. Um, so, yeah, it's it's it you know, you have to you have to delve in in difficult areas if you're if you're dealing with like okay, you're playing you're playing to people doing bad things, you're taking bad actions, um, and so you got to have to you have to figure out you have to think about the framing of it, right? Uh, I think that that's super important. I don't I'll need some more time to think through a better answer. Uh, maybe we have time for one more. So, you think in some of these like situations where the emotional response is sort of misapplied? Like it creates the empathy just in the wrong spot.

Right. You think a lot of it could just be a matter of like over subtlety? Like kind of without for lack of a better term being too cute? Like I think of games like This War of Mine or uh, and of course I blank on the name now. Uh, Frostpunk where oh, you're you're basically playing a totalitarian dictator, but we're sort of being explicit about it so we can kind of make you feel bad in the right place. Do you think like maybe it's a just trying to be too subtle all of a sudden is the thing that makes you misapply that empathy? Um, the question is is being too subtle causing us to misapply the empathy? Yeah, like is that like being really you know, like going into like like like hey, you're playing sweatshop manager and you know, that's not a you know, you already you should feel bad before you start the game maybe, right? Like uh, I got to I'm having a hard time thinking on the spot to like figure out exactly what to do about this, but um, uh, yeah, I don't know. I mean that

you know, I do think a lot about, you know, people a person playing a game where you know, they're they're they're controlling a country and the country does bad things, right? And they don't they don't think about their own responsibility because that's just they don't think necessarily about um, they don't necessarily apply that to their own thinking about the world, um, because you know, that's just what you do in the video game, right? And to some extent I don't think we'll ever get away from that. a little bit, right? Because like it is still fun to play Civ and conquer the world, but you know, you we we need we we do need to be a little more explicit I agree you know, I think we do need to be a little more explicit in games like that to I don't know. I don't we don't need like a Civ content warning or something, but like, you know, like warning you know, warning might be colonial. Yeah, you're going to wipe out cultures, right? Like, but yeah, I mean I think I think it's you want to think about having some correctives in the presentation of the game to account for that for sure.

Awesome. Thank you. Okay. All right. Thank you everyone.