More compelling than the film was the discussion that followed. Instead of talking about the film’s plot, editing, or its sometimes inconsistent acting, the title of our discussion might have been called “What would you do in the apocalypse?” A favorite and easy game of the imagination, perhaps only outmatched by the more pedestrian fantasy of sudden, boundless wealth.

In the case of Contagion, the end of the world scenario arrived in the form of a disease epidemic. In theory, the apocalypse could come any form. Many imagined events cause destruction and human extinction. And our generation of disaster movies doesn’t limit itself to a hotel or a ship — it’s the whole planet suffering a comet strike. Nuclear war. Zombies. Mad scientists. Climate change. Aliens. Dragons. Hackers.

Hmmm. Do we hate our lives or our world sufficiently enough to joyfully contemplate its catastrophic demise? Insert a partisan political joke here. Then again, human imagination has focused on the end of the world for a while now…

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice…

Sorry for the abuse, Robert. Anyway, our conversation rambled onto a realization of just how ill prepared for armageddon we were. Even ignoring such theoretical concerns of preparation for an afterlife, disaster readiness is pretty lacking. No significant store of food or water. No firearms. No weapon more likely than a kitchen knife. No store of medicines. I can say that’s the outcome of living the liberal, urban lifestyle of San Francisco, with grocery stores and restaurants on every street corner. But it doesn’t say much about our skill as gamers, does it? I played Gamma World, Nuclear War, and Left for Dead! And yet here we keep taking our chances that the world won’t end tomorrow. Seems pretty reasonable, actually.

Compared to classic American boardgames, the average Eurogame is also significantly less competitive. As a core player, my experience of boardgames leapt from Risk to Axis & Allies to Titan. With each step, the number of people I could convince to join me dwindled. It wasn’t just the complexity. It was the cutthroat commitment to winning, the essential zero-sum gameplay that in order to win, I don’t outrace you to a victory zone or a point total. I must destroy you and your armies, seize your territory, and genocide you out of the game. The last few turns of the competitive wargame aren’t much fun for the loser, are they? And thus most players wisely surrender once the outcome is clear.

So some boardgames aim for a less directly competitive model and increase their appeal. The last step, though, is a fully cooperative boardgame. The players pit themselves against the game itself, with some form of automated “AI opponent” performed by the players, since there’s no computer to do this work. Essentially, this is group solitaire, like Left for Dead in boardgame form. These are fun games. Pandemic, Shadows Over Camelot, Arkham Horror, to name some of thew few I’ve played lately. The simple version is that everyone takes turns working toward a common objective. With the exception of game variants in which one player is secretly some kind of traitor, these games lack any competitive element. The players win or lose together as a team.

Here’s my problem. Why aren’t these games best as solitaire games? Why don’t the players determine the best player and let this benevolent dictator take all of their turns? Team coordination will increase. Indeed, in most of these games, it is indecision, bickering, and lack of cohesive effort that threatens defeat. Difficulty only emerges from herding the cats (convincing players to optimize play) or from beating some form of random element (again akin to solitaire). Solutions?

• Steal something from sports. Make the primary objective cooperative, but add scoring elements so the game recognizes an MVP. Hand out a few such awards if you must. The players can win as a team, but still recognize an individual winner. More competitive players may elect to reduce the team’s chance of success in order to raise their own individual chances. I think that’s okay.
• Add elements that demand simultaneous play, instead of asynchronous. Even something primitive such as a eggtimer may do. Part of the problem is that the turn-based structure of most boardgames allows player A not only the time to watch player B, but to criticize and coach. This is essentially the answer in the cooperative digital games, whether a shooter or RPG.
• The traitor concept works well enough on paper, but it seems to change the nature of the game fairly significantly. The social dynamic of traitor identification quickly grows more important than actually winning the game. Acting is more important, rather more like Mafia or Werewolf, than whatever boardgame is nominally being played.

I suggest an addendum. First, add social pressure. Unfortunately, not all players will be susceptible to that.

Second, and more helpfully, systemize social pressure in the form of cross-game scoring with the introduction an organized metagame.  For example, play a card game in which you track points (whether for money or just bragging rights) over time. Each player must then play to maximize his point total at all points of the game, rather than throwing the game or playing kingmaker once winning that individual match becomes unlikely or impossible. This works for all sorts of games where point totals determine that game’s winner. Games without an embedded scoring mechanism (e.g., Diplomacy) likely resort to assigning metagame point values to ranking the finishing position of players. If that gets you turtling you don’t want, you may have to add a scoring metric for offensive successes in games that don’t have it.

Mix in point decay over time to give the historically weaker players a better chance to climb the game standings. For years at WotC, such a scoring system was used to track play across hundreds of games of hearts (or their version of the card game). Last I checked, it was still in use. For the record, my score, if still in their database, was pretty abysmal. My math on when to shoot the moon was more than a bit faulty. Sigh.

Leaving behind analog games, a more modern example can be found in current-gen shooters, in which the player has a persistent account with currency or experience points attached. Earning xp for each kill, or each completed objective, means that play remains fundamentally pure, even in multi-sided contests. This metagame functions more like a true economy instead of just scoring, but it produces the same effect.

Admittedly, the attachment of a persistent metascore can’t help one-off matches with random players at the game store or outside of a persistent social network. Sorry, board game conventions. You’re going to have to rely more on social pressure, or the sorts of rules that Pulsipher adopted.

Plenty of developers despise use of the term, but I’ll apply it here: LoL is addictive. I continue to play for some reasons obvious and others less clear. In truth, I’m right in its core target audience. As a recovering DoTA player, I spent countless hours with WotC co-workers as we moved from one Blizzard RTS game to another, culminating in DoTA. Along the way, we became better players and got to see another form of exception-based design take hold in RTS games of the 90’s and 00’s.

Generally, interdependencies are encouraged in RPG-like and class-based systems. A good way to make each player feel special is to make them simply different from one another. That’s doubly true when you’re selling the unique bits for real cash. Even outside of the considerations of the business model, player differentiation adds to the variety and longevity of the experience. The addition of RPG-like leveling during an RTS match creates something like WoW PvP at Alvin and the Chipmunks’ speed. You level to cap in fifteen minutes, and you can outfit your character with gear equally quickly. The complexity is certainly there, but players can be exposed to complexity over time in a way that doesn’t overwhelm them. In truth, then, the issue with LoL’s team-orientated play lies in its non-character structures.

To review as briefly as possible the design: teams of five face off, with each player controlling a unique character. Once begun, a match takes place inside a sealed environment that lasts until a team loses its citadel. Destroying the enemy citadel is the winning condition, but throughout most of the game, players focus on killing enemy champions. This is not unlike behavior in the typical shooter match: most players play for kills, regardless of game mode or objective.

That’s okay, though: the rewards for killing an enemy are huge. While a player gleefully sniping away on a Conquest map may do nothing to help you win Battlefield 3, a player with a good k/d ratio in League of Legends can win the game without ever assisting in the invasion of the enemy base. Killing an enemy has all sorts of good things going for it:

• XP. Leveling makes the killer stronger.
• Gold. Buying upgrades makes the killer stronger.
• Free time. With your enemy dead, you have time (30 seconds or more) to farm additional experience and gold in relative safety.
• Negative gold and negative XP for your victim. Each death invokes both respawn time and time to get back to the battlefront. Nothing is being earned during this period.
• Feelings of dominance and confidence. The endorphin-winning psychology of “I beat you” and all that.

Are such benefits necessary? Of course it “feels appropriate” that you get rewarded, but kills have to be rewarded to some degree. Kills don’t directly help you to destroy the enemy’s base, but indirectly, they help like nothing else in the game does. The material gains for the winner and the opportunity costs for the victim make team kill/death ratios highly predictive of which team wins. Kills bring the game to its conclusion. The positive feedback loop puts one team into a commanding position, and ultimately it is common to destroy the enemy base when its defenders are dead and waiting to respawn.

Which brings us to the point of today’s blog post: player interdependency and its consequences. Generally speaking, the effective way to kill an enemy character is to bring a friend to the fight. Outnumber your enemy, push some buttons, profit. This 101-level strategy encourages players to work together and coordinate, and it rewards map knowledge and awareness during offensive and defensive play. A small edge in strategic teamwork can easily hand victory to a team composed of players that are individually weaker.  In terms of consequences, teamwork encouragement is beneficial. So far, so good.

The corollary is that after slaying an enemy champion three or so times without reciprocity, the victim’s state becomes debilitating. The player must bring in assistance to stay even, or risk additional deaths. Here’s the big kicker: killing an enemy player makes you more effective not just against that player, but against all other players. That’s true even with the inclusion of diminishing gold returns for an individual player’s subsequent deaths and the reduction of XP for killing lower level enemies. Both work to nullify the effect of one player dying repeatedly, but it’s not enough to change much. Once one of your allies has died a few times, he’s likely to have empowered an enemy so much that not only can your ally not handle a 1-on-1 encounter, but you can’t either. Hence your team’s Achilles heel is your worst or least experienced player. His failure is a single point of failure capable of bringing the entire team down.

That’s a fundamental difference from what we see in other multiplayer games genres. It’s this point that a mass audience has trouble accepting. The propensity for teammates, especially players new to LoL, to lose matches through poor play (or intentionally poor play, aka “griefing”) causes a poisonous social atmosphere. In-game player ranting, often the only form of in-game discussion to take place, showcases the sewer of anonymous internet interaction, made in colorful four-letter invectives. Why such passion and hatred? Because your teammates’ poor play not only makes it difficult for your team to win long-term, it also directly hurts your own moment-to-moment play.

It isn’t a good sign that players would quit many of their LoL games if they could do so without fear of being “punished.” In fact, they continue to ragequit when sufficiently broken of spirit.

There are excellent, team-based tactics to respond to a struggling teammate. Get a gank of your own in against the emergent threat. The increased bounty rewards for ending an enemy kill streak try to encourage this. Or have your weaker player switch lanes to be with a more successful player. Do some more jungling. Those strategies work well enough for an organized team. The fact is that LoL is so highly player interdependent that it’s best when played with premade teams. In other words, tournament-style play. Great for e-sport, but not the game I would design for a larger audience.

A Conquest/Domination map should be more approachable than DoTA-style laning

How to increase LoL’s accessibility? Well, you can adopt a new game mode entirely. You could change the game to support either more players (each player thus having less effect, for good or ill) or fewer players (reducing the chance for a random player to throw things off). Five versus five may be a un-sweet spot of player interdependency. But what if you wanted to make alterations to the current game mode? The solution is less clear. If you reduce the bonus for killing or the penalties for dying, would games drag on too long? Game length is already a problem. I’d still start there — reduce the respawn time during the early game to zero, reduce some of the kill bonuses — and see what happens.

Meanwhile, the virtual escape offers a cornucopia of delights that his characters and I find irresistible. Somehow escaping a host of impossible-to-solve legal issues, OASIS includes every intellectual property (film, music, and video game) that has ever existed. For OASIS is an MMO, certainly, with classes, levels, AI monsters, and experience points. Yet it includes and exceeds every definition of what we would call a single game. With time or money, you can engage in every activity you can imagine, be it economic, political, creative, or sexual. An absolute virtual reality. PvP can be enjoyed in the right (or wrong) zones, though you should be careful. OASIS is a permadeath server; once you die, it’s time to make a new character.

More important to Ready Player One’s reader, inside OASIS you can find a re-creation of every fantasy world ever conceived (Tattoine, Middle Earth, Norrath, Azeroth, Greyhawk, Vulcan, etc.). You can play any video game ever made, from Tempest in coin-op to Yars’ Revenge on the 2600. You can watch any movie or TV show. Or hell, you can dive into Wargames and play it as David Lightman. You can listen to any song. It’s this breadth and depth that makes the Cline’s book so damnably fun to read. I counted more than two dozen cultural allusions in the first chapter alone, and I’m sure that I missed some. Cline’s novel embraces geek culture, especially 1980s geek culture in a way that only Stephenson’s Snow Crash with its Metaverse came close to approaching.

If you know me, you know I love Snow Crash. It blew my 20-year-old mind, and I still love it to this day. Ready Player One did something a little different. It kept me in a smile for a solid couple days. It tickled my funny bone. I laughed out loud, repeatedly to the annoyance of a girlfriend trying to sleep. Finally, it made proud to be a geek, and ridiculously and overly proud to have grown up a child of the 80s. If you’re anything at all like me… you will totally enjoy it.

To explain what went wrong, I’ll take a stab at what used to work so right. And then compare…

J.R.R. Tolkien

Our father of medieval-ish fantasy settings. To this day, the great advantage of producing fantasy kitsch, over science fiction kitsch, is that fantasy has a default setting. John’s gift to us, ready to use. Elves, dwarves, and men. Maybe hobbits. Definitely magic. D&D absolutely benefits from, and is part of, this tradition.

So the original D&D allowed players to pretend to be heroes in a genericized roleplaying setting that could easily be mistaken for Middle Earth (sorry, Iron Crown). Elements that disturb that fantasy, even those that experienced players consider new and cool, don’t really belong. Especially not in a new edition’s core playbook. It is designed to appeal to the widest possible audience, right? Unique fantasy elements have no business here, sorry. Goodbye, 4th edition’s genre-confusing races of eladrin, dragonborn, and tiefling. Warlocks. Controllers. Power sources.

Leveling Up

Self-evident psychological value. In the last few years, every game genre has embraced the power of the ding. Social games depend on it for revenue. Shooters support leveling to increase attachment, longevity, and the obvious sense of achievement. Even RTS games, that theoretically require greater devotion to balance and fairness, incorporate the leveling of players and units.

The acquisition of power, ranks and titles, however imaginary, demonstrate a hold on the psyche that I sometimes find scary. We seem so vulnerable to manipulation in this regard that it appears difficult to design a character-based leveling system that fails to capture the audience. And yet, gaining a level is less meaningful in this new edition. And we have weaker concepts such as power replacement.

Exception-based Design

A smarter man than I, Richard Garfield, credited Cosmic Encounter as the inspiration behind Magic: the Gathering’s exception-based game design. While that passes the test for the world of strategic board and card games, I’ve always considered D&D (released three years prior to Cosmic) to be the most popular exemplar of this design. What’s more, the long-term persistent nature of roleplaying required this “game design of specials” to a greater degree than short-lived strategy games such as Dominion.

D&D fulfilled a fantasy. On the character level, this meant doing things that no one else could do. At least, no one else in your party. Prior to 4th edition, just about every class ability, spell, magic item, and monster wrote new rules for the game. Even if your character couldn’t cast spells, you looked forward to potent magic items that did the same. Today’s embrace of miniatures, rules standardization, automation of the Dungeon Master, and a prioritization of balance over fun have undermined the principles of game design by exception. Do 4th edition abilities do something other than damage, grant a bonus, slide a figure, stun, or knock a figure prone? Class differentiation (the feeling that your class and thus you are unique) seems statistically present, but effectively missing. I miss command, heat metal, rope trick, rod of lordly might, and illusions, as difficult as they could be to arbitrate. The specialness is gone. Including any uniqueness of your character could aspire to become or acquire.

The troubling finale is this. If you agree that D&D has more value going forward as intellectual property than as the paper game, the latest edition should be faulted with doing some damage to that brand.

There’s more than one reason. Much of the fade in popularity can only be blamed on William Shockley and Al Gore. These days, if you’re the socially rejected, moderately escapist child who D&D has historically appealed to, we have things for you. They’re called video games. And the internet. Sure, they may be more expensive than a Player’s Handbook, but they demand a lot less work. It is easier to learn to play WoW than it is to make a single roleplaying character, much less build dungeons or whole campaign worlds. And more importantly, these virtual fantasy worlds are open 24/7/365. I believe this is true: The history of what we call progress is a catalogue of ways in which the desire for convenience has trumped almost every other concern. 

Back when I was working at Wizards of the Coast, I remember someone from the marketing team relaying the following point of disappointing data. The average D&D gamer grew nine months older for every calendar year. The audience is aging, and as it loses fans (to death or disinterest), the younger generation does not replace them. This is not a formula for building or sustaining entertainment. Paper-based roleplaying can foresee a happy march to the grave. There it joins similar victims of time and technology—model trains, marbles, ham radio, scrapbooking, and stamp collecting. To continue with the line of thought above, these are inconvenient forms of entertainment. While a diligent few soldier on, the masses abandon them.

Demographics and technology represent epic-level,  impossibly fatal challenges. I recommend a healthy, stoic attitude to the slow-paced Ragnarok. Tell a good story, and remember the good times. With luck, D&D survives as an idea, in divine ascension to other media, like video games. That’s already happened, though the best incarnations to date have come without the D&D logo. Hasbro appears to agree with me about D&D’s digital future, today reclaiming the rights they foolishly gave away to Atari a decade ago. It’s a start, I suppose.

P.S.: This apologia doesn’t mean that 4th edition is free from imperfection. In fact, I believe it has a fundamental design flaw right at its core. I’ll write something about this soon. Also, you may also wonder why we care about paper roleplaying. Beyond the sentimental reasons, for me the fate of D&D is of interest because its design influenced the work I do today. I stand on its shoulders, and I live in its shadow. I continue to enjoy a weekly D&D game with friends, despite the commute down US-101 and difficulties of scheduling six working professionals.

No topsoil, sure, but the tradeoff is giant worms, magic spice, psychic powers, and FTL travel.

First, let me refine my topic. I’m not concerned with game currencies: money, crystals, experience points, or ammo. Barring significant error, those resources persist through a game and remain valuable. With such in-game currencies, the designer makes an implicit promise to the player that currency will flow in (insert obligatory “the spice must flow” reference). Thus, the player might as well spend it, since he’s going to keep getting more. Games that break this promise are likely to be considered poorly balanced or frustratingly hardcore. How players spend those currencies represents major strategic decision-making, and the game incentivizes the player to acquire and spend currency for a variety of benefits. As a side note, virtual currencies have never been more important in games. They form the backbone of half of what constitutes game design going on right now.

In any event, currencies aren’t what I’m focused on. The game I have in development has made me curious about tactical decision-making (as opposed to strategic). How and when do players use items and abilities that we broadly call power-ups? In this category, I’m including consumables, grenades, buffs, cooldown-based abilities, limited-use weapons, special ammo, etc. Regardless of the incarnations in an individual game, I want a better understanding of how players choose to use their items and abilities. What triggers the decision? That’s a question I’ve been discussing with players, developers, and playtest victims. How to best design power-ups for our games?

A core problem with power-ups is there is no guarantee of resource replenishment. Barring the use of a hint guide or online walkthrough, the player can’t predict when he or she will find a power-up. The player can’t make informed decisions. In more competitive multiplayer, the player may learn where objects spawn, but perhaps not when, or if they have been claimed. So, point one about good power-up design should be: keep the player as informed as the game design will allow. Try to introduce greater reliability.

A similar lack of prognostication obscures when to use a power-up once acquired. The game’s narrative, if such a thing exists, can provide clues that “this is a high challenge moment.” That can do the job, to be sure. And if the power-ups only exist in order to be activated during boss fights, so be it. The downside? The more explicit we get here, the less agency we’re reserving for the player. If a challenge explicitly calls for power-ups, and is balanced to assume power-up usage, what have we gained?

So, an essential problem is the player has an incentive to hoard power-ups, like some unfortunate creature from the reality tv show of the same name. An imagined challenge always lurks in the hazy future. So consumables pile up in the inventory, often languished until the end of the game. How to stop hoarding? Here’s the irony. Ask any player, and they’ll tell you they need more inventory space. Many roleplaying games embrace this, creating an economy in which players spend currency (even real-world currency) for the privilege of more inventory to manage. Hmmm.

Good luck finding the health potion, hoarder

Back to design. So what is the point of power-ups? Is the value in finding them, or using them? If the acquisition is the end, the specifics of how we use or store them is barely relevant. Why use power-ups as pure reward? We have other, less utilitarian, devices for that — hand out experience points, game currency, cinematics, or achievements. Power-ups allow a player to become more powerful than the game balance generally allows. To exceed normal limits. In as much as the game design supports choice, a power-up represents a chance for the developer to make the player feel like his choices make a difference. For the player to demonstrate his intelligence and mastery of the game.

If large inventories present twin dangers of hoarding and interface nightmares, simplification offers hope. My playtesting is showing that with tight inventory maximums, players use more power-ups. At the far end of the design spectrum: a max inventory of zero. Players activate power-ups in the act of finding them or walking over them (e.g. the Mario approach). It solves the problem, but it does takes away most of the decision-making. A player can remain adjacent to a power-up until it is needed, but this confines player behavior to a great degree. Good for some games, especially more casual games.

What’s next after an inventory of zero? Well, one. Left 4 Dead offers a solution revolving around an inventory of one for offensive power-ups (grenade-like objects) and defensive power-ups (health packs). Inventory remains visible onscreen and hence obvious at all times, confronting the player with options to recover health (with voice-over reminders from AI) or throw the dynamite (with audio cues from fast-paced action music).

After one, we arrive at few. The best solution I’ve found along this line is in the now-classic MMO, City of Heroes. The “inspiration” system remains onscreen and presents a reasonable number of options to the player without significant inventory management. The temptation, though, is to save valuable inspirations (such as “awaken”). And  even at the low levels when the inspiration inventory cap is small,  players hoard these power-ups, waiting for the perfect moment. Which never comes. Unless it’s a heal or resurrect. We do seem better, as players, of responding when defensive power-ups should be used. A low health bar is an easy stimulus.

I do think the offensive power-up problem needs more thought, and we may need to abandon the inventory metaphor altogether. But this post has gone on long enough for the day. More to come soon.

In the wtf are you on this list list: Wheel of Time, Belgariad, Drizzt, Thrawn, Xanth, Malazan, Kushiel, Alera… Okay, to be fair, I quibble. It’s not a bad reading list — if you remove all of the fantasy series and stick with the stand-alone novels. That makes Tolkien a casualty of war, but I can live with that.

Update (8/12/11): Scalzi does a good job listing good books that are missing from the list, as do some of his commenters. If I had to pick one to add, it’d be something from Kay – Tigana or perhaps The Lions of Al-Rassan.

Of course, we can say that nuclear weapons and AK-47s aren’t intrinsically evil, either. But we can expect that the ends that humans will put them to are foreseeably bad. For gamification, like weapons of mass destruction, the genie is out of the bottle. Now, that doesn’t mean that your social game is going to result in deaths (well, probably not). It doesn’t mean that it produces anything good, though.

If gamification is a tool to incentivize behavior, the question is what behavior are you trying to encourage? If you’re after pure commercialization, pure profit drive, then well, yes you are manipulating human psychology to turn a quick buck. It’s pretty much bullshit that you’re selling. A Skinner box with a game wrapper that validates someone’s feelings of esteem or accomplishment. Don’t feel too bad, you’re in a long history of marketing and advertising. No shame in that. You hack.

What I take exception to is the lofty rhetoric of Jesse Schell or Jane McGonigal that lay out hopes that gamification will make the world a better place. Maybe, maybe. I haven’t seen it yet, though. Have you? Have you seen a game designer using gamification principles for anything more nobler than dollars?