Give Me a Choice

Whether it’s the decision of going to college or not going to college at the beginning of the Game of Life board game, or all of the decisions you make when playing Dungeons and Dragons, games are about choice. For some games, you have to choose which character you’re going to play, with each character having different attributes and abilities. In some games, you choose a specific play style. Are you going to play aggressively or defensively? Are you going to make allies, or be the lone wolf? Most games force you to make decisions throughout the entire game, decisions that are hopefully fun in some way. All of these decisions are what makes a game a game.

Beyond the simple existence of choice, it’s important that these choices be meaningful. If faced with a decision that will lead to the same outcome, regardless of what a player does, then there really isn’t a choice at all. Players have to feel like their choices matter, like they have some kind of impact on the game, whether that means advancing the storyline or helping them to win in some way. Otherwise, what’s the point of making those choices? What’s the point of playing the game? If your choices don’t matter, if the game just kind of happens to you, why not just watch a movie, instead?

People play games for lots of reasons. For a lot of people, it’s the challenge of pitting your knowledge and skills against those of another player, or sometimes against the game itself, if it’s a cooperative game. Others like the social aspect of gaming, or the fun of experiencing new game mechanics and themes. Of course, none of these are mutually exclusive, I personally like all three. And, there are lots of other reasons besides these to play games. But, I wouldn’t play games if I didn’t have some kind of agency while playing them. I want to feel like I’m influencing the outcome. It’s our job as game designers to make sure that our games offer players situations in which the choices they make feel like they matter, and to make sure that those choices actually mean something.

I used The Game of Life as an example of how you make choices in games, and I suppose you could say that, by definition, The Game of Life is in fact a game. But, it isn’t much of one. After a very few number of basic choices at the beginning of the game, there are then a bunch of random factors that determine what your experience in the game is like and who the winner is. That’s not much of a game at all, but at least it’s an entry point to gaming for young children. In Candyland, the only choice you ever make is what color you’re going to be, and that has no impact on the game at all. A person doesn’t really play Candyland so much as they watch it happen. And, although it would be hard to think of a scenario in which a person would accidentally make a game in which the player has no actual choices, there are some pitfalls to consider.

Let’s say you make a game with a character, let’s say a fire wizard, who has 2 abilities. The first ability to throw a fireball that does 10 damage and uses 1 point of magical energy. The wizard’s second ability is to throw a fireball that does 5 damage and also uses 1 point of magical energy. Now, the player has the choice to use either ability at any time, but why would a player ever choose the smaller fireball? This of course is an extreme example, but there will be times when your design might come out looking something like this. Sometimes, it’s hard to see. If your game mechanic forces a player to do the same thing over and over again, then you might need to consider if you’ve somehow inadvertently taken choice out of the equation.

Choices are what set games apart from other forms of entertainment. You don’t get to choose what the heroine does in a movie. You don’t usually get to pick where a character goes in a book. Games are fun because they engage us. We are the ones who choose, and we win or lose by those decisions. If the game is done right, if a player’s choices actually matter, then even if a player loses, they’ll still have a good time. And that way, everyone wins.

Good luck, and good gaming!

Play test, play test, play test...

Ultimately, there are two things you want to accomplish with your game: you want it to work, and you want it to be fun. And, there’s really only one way to find out if your game accomplishes these two things.

You have to play test.

I don’t mean just playing it a couple of times with your friends and calling it good. You have to play test it a lot, over and over again, with different kinds of people, and in different ways.

Play testing is really just the first step in the game refining process. After a play test, you need to evaluate what you saw. Who won the game? How did they win? How long did the game take? How was this play test different from other play tests? There are literally hundreds of questions you can ask about how a play test went, and it is your job as the game designer to figure out which of those questions are important for your game, and how the outcome of the play test should influence any changes you might need to make.

There are a lot of factors to consider when play testing. Some games play very differently depending on the number of players there are. Many games heavily favor players who are familiar with the game. You might be far enough along in your design process that you might want to find a group of people who have no experience with your game to do a blind play test, where they have to figure out how to play the game on their own without any guidance from you or anyone else who knows the game.

Now, a pitfall to watch out for: we spend so much time figuring out the rules and mechanics of our games, we sometimes overlook the single most important question: Is the game fun? It doesn’t matter how well the rules work, if the game isn’t fun, no one is going to want to play it. So, remember to check in with yourself, and try to get an honest read on how people are experiencing your game. Are you having fun? Are the play testers enjoying themselves? Sometimes, the most important thing you have to change is just to make the game more fun. I know doing that isn’t as easy as saying, and we’ll have to talk about this more at another time, but there are lots of ways to make a game more fun. It can be through the artwork, player interaction, theming, difficulty level, player choice, etc. Just remember, games are supposed to be fun, and play testing should be fun, too.

During the play testing process, people are going to have opinions about your game.  They are also going to have ideas about ways they think your game could be better, sometimes even before they’ve played it! They mean well, but remember to take these opinion and ideas with a grain of salt. These comments about your game are important; you want them. When you look at your play testers, you’re probably looking a the target audience for your game. Some of the comments will be really good, and you’ll definitely want to try them out, but at the end of the day, you know your game better than anyone else, and you simply can’t make every change and addition that someone suggests to you. This is one of the fastest ways to ruin your game. Ultimately, you are the one who decides what your game will be like. You understand the goals you have for your game, and whether or not it is reaching those goals.

After collecting all of this data, which includes your observations of the play test, as well as the opinions and ideas from your play testers, you’ll need to figure out if anything in your game needs to be changed. Once you’ve made those changes, or not made changes as the case may sometimes be, it’s time to play test again. I’ve found this repeated play testing to be a challenge, as I worry I am burning my friends out with my games, but do not be discouraged. If you have a halfway decent design, and if your play testers have any interest at all in gaming, being involved in helping a designer like this is actually quite fun. I’ve found that the people I ask are more than happy to give me a hand with play testing, and after a while, once your game is far enough along, they may start looking forward to playing the great game you’ve designed!

Here’s an example, from Rabbit Ranch again, about the importance of play testing.

 

The picture on the left is a hand of the old version of the cards. On the right is the new version. Notice the difference? In the old version, the card symbols are on the right side, so when you fan out the cards in your hand the way that most people do, you can’t see them. I had done dozens and dozens of play tests, and no one ever said anything about this. I think a lot of people just decided to hold the cards differently, or just spent more time looking through them and remembering what they had, but this was a simple design fix that someone finally mentioned during a play test, and I have to say the game design is much better for it.

Sometimes it seems like you will never finish play testing, and in a way you never will. Like many things in life, it is possible to continuously refine your game more and more and more, and still feel like it’s not perfect. It may never be perfect. But, you will eventually have to reach a point where you decide that it’s time to stop play testing, and it’s now time to introduce your game to the world. How you do this is a topic for another time, but only you will know when your game is ready to take that next step.

Well, that’s about it for now. Good luck, and good gaming!

First Steps

Those first few moments when you start thinking about creating a new game are filled with wondrous possibilities. What is your game going to be about? How are the players are going to interact with each other? What kinds of amazing new mechanics are you going to introduce to the gaming world? The sky’s the limit! It can be a little overwhelming, all these ideas swirling around in your head. Where do you even start?

What you have to do is to just start writing it down. It doesn’t even matter what you write. It could be all of the cool concepts you have, ideas for the art, the different kinds of cards or tokens you’ll need, anything, as long you just start writing it down.

Whatever you write will lead to something else, and that will lead to another thing, and so on and so forth until you have 10 pages of rules for a game that doesn’t exist, and don’t make sense to anyone in the world except for you.

And, that’s OK!

Because that’s how everyone starts, and you need to start somewhere.

But, now that you have this glorious mess, you’ll need to turn it into something that people can actually use. The tendency when designing a new game, especially for people who are doing it for the first time, is to throw every idea, plus the kitchen sink, into their game. While an idea dump is helpful for getting started, it does not actually make for a great end product. Complexity is not your friend here. I’m gonna talk more about this in another post, but essentially, you want to find the cleanest, most streamlined, and easy to understand version of your game that’s hidden underneath of all of the stuff that might be holding it back from being truly great.

But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Just because something sounds good on paper, doesn’t mean it will translate into something that works in real life. The only way to find out if it works if to play test, and in order to do that, you need to make something that people can hold on to. We’re not talk anything fancy here, just some really basic cards that you print out on your home computer, and if necessary, a simple board for people to play on that you made with cardboard and a black marker. 

Of course, the actual items you make will depend entirely on the game you’re trying to make; you might not need cards or a board. The point is, you need to figure out what the bare essentials are for the game you want to make, create those items, and just start playing. This is the only way to find out if those rules you wrote actually make sense, and if they work together.

I wish I had taken pictures, but when I was first starting out, I created cards using actual Magic: The Gathering cards in cheap plastic sleeves, the kind where you get 100 for $1.00, and a piece of paper cut out to the size of the card. I put the text for my game on the paper, and cut out a window, so you could see the picture on the Magic card behind it. It was a pain in the ass, took a long time, and didn’t look all that great, but it gave me and my friends something to work with so I could figure out if this idea that I had was going anywhere.

Don’t stress out too much about making these initial play testing materials look nice, because it’s pretty much a guarantee that you’ll need to change things and you’ll end up throwing it all away after you make a new batch of stuff with your updates. Printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids on the planet. Don’t waste it!

A slightly fancier board than cardboard and black marker. I did end up throwing this board away, BTW.

However, there is something to say about the functionality of what you make for the purposes of play testing. It is much easier to shuffle cards of uniform size made of sturdier material, than it is to shuffle un-sleeved flimsy pieces of unevenly cut paper. And if your play pieces are constantly falling down and you have to stop play to fix everything all the time, this will not only be annoying, but will hinder your ability to find out if your game actually works. Play testing should be fun, not a chore.

Going into this, you have to realize that your initial idea is just that: an idea. More than likely, it won’t have that much resemblance to the final product. You have to start with an idea, play test it, figure out what’s working and what’s not, make adjustments, and play test again. It’s kind of like refining ore to get precious metals. You need to extract the gold from that unassuming piece of rock.

Hopefully, that’s enough to get you started. Good luck, and good gaming! See you nest time.

Human Nature in Gaming

If you play games long enough, you’re eventually going to think, “I wonder if I could make a game?” Maybe you get this really cool idea that you’ve never seen done before, or paly a fun game and think, “I could make something like that!” Maybe there’s something about a game that just annoys you and you start thinking about all the ways you could make it better. Whatever the catalyst, now you have all these ideas swirling around in your head, but where do you start?

Hopefully, I can help you with that.

Welcome to my new blog for aspiring game designers! Every week, I am going to talk about some of the fundamentals of board game and card game design. If video games are more your speed, I encourage you to stick around, because a lot of what goes into designing tabletops games is going to apply to any game you make, and that includes video games.

Just a disclaimer, I am not a game design expert by any means, just a hobby game designer who’s happened to read a lot on the topic, and has been designing games for a long time.

This is mostly an introduction for the blog, but I am going to talk about the influence of human nature and game design in this post. My goal is to post once a week, with each post tackling a different aspect of game design.

So, if you get nothing else from this blog, if you never read another post ever again, I want you to take away one thing:

YOU CANNOT FIGHT HUMAN NATURE!

What this means is that as a game designer, you just have to accept the fact that people are prone to do and want certain things, and that is simply never going to change. Design with this concept in mind, and you will have a much easier time developing your game. Design against human nature, and you will be fighting a battle you cannot win.

Human beings are pattern-seeking creatures. If we see something done the exact same way 99 times, we are going to expect that 100^th time to turn out just the same. This is as true in life as is it is in games. If you design a game where at the beginning of each player’s turn, they draw a card, but on the fifth turn, they don’t draw a card, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that everyone is still going to try to draw a card on turn five. Every time you play this game, you are going to have to remind people that they are not supposed to draw a card on their fifth turn, and players will start having to repeat to themselves every time they play this game, “Don’t draw a card on turn five. Don’t draw a card on turn five. Don’t draw a card on turn five.”

And then, they’ll forget what turn they’re on.

Just don’t do it. Create the pattern; stick to the pattern. Your play testers will thank you for it.

If you must deviate from the standard rules of your game, make sure you are doing it for the right reasons. Rules that make sense are infinitely easier to remember and understand than rules that are arbitrary. People want things to make sense. We want cause and effect, we want an ordered world.

Here’s an example of how I had to deal with the issue of human nature in one of my games, Rabbit Ranch.

 

Some of the cards in Rabbit Ranch have purple stars on them, and some have yellow stars. The original concept was that some bunnies were male and some were female. When you played a female bunny next to a male bunny, or vice versa, you were allowed to immediately play another bunny. The idea, of course, was that the bunnies had a baby. I quickly became uncomfortable with this concept because I imagined parents across the country being forced into conversations with their children about how babies were made before they were ready to have those conversations, and it would be my fault because of this bunny game! So, I changed it from male bunnies and female bunnies to bunnies with purple and yellow stars.

The problem was, and this was a problem even before when we were still dealing with male and female bunnies, was that I had to constantly remind players that when you played a yellow star bunny next to a purple star bunny, the only bonus you got was the ability to play another bunny. You couldn’t play anything else. Now, this actually made sense when we were talking about male and female bunnies, but it made less sense when we were talking about purple and yellow stars. Also, the limitation wasn’t adding anything to the game, so I changed it. Now, when you played a purple star next to a yellow star, you could play anything you want.

But, that created a whole new problem. See, Rabbit Ranch is a pretty simple game. During your turn, you only have two options: you can draw a card, or play a card. That’s it. So now, whenever someone played a purple star next to a yellow star, I was constantly having to remind them that they were not allowed to draw a card, they could only play a card. It was human nature coming into the equation again. The ability to play another card felt so much like getting another turn, that in players’ minds, they did have another turn, and one of your options on your turn is to draw a card! Again, this limitation was not adding anything to the game, so again, I changed it.

In the current version of the game, when you play a purple star next to a yellow star you simply get another turn, and that is how the game stands today. The game is clean, and no one has be reminded of how anything works because I stopped fighting against the players’ natural inclination to do things in a certain way. Human nature is a beast, but if you can work with it, you will end up with a much better game.

So, that’s it for this week! I hope you all learned something that will help in your quest to making a game of your own!

Join me next time where we'll discuss the first steps in game design.