David2024patton · April 25, 2025 13:29
diff --git a/The Art of Game Design, 3rd Edition b/The Art of Game Design, 3rd Edition
 The Art of Game Design, 3rd Edition

 Tenth Anniversary
 The Art of Game Design
 A Book of Lenses
 3 Edition
 rd
 Tenth Anniversary
 The Art of Game Design
 A Book of Lenses
 3 Edition
 Jesse Schell
 rd
 CRC Press
 Taylor & Francis Group
 6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300
 Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742
 © 2020 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
 CRC Press is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa
 business
 No claim to original U.S. Government works
 Printed on acid-free paper
 International Standard Book Number-13: 978-1-138-63205-9
 (Paperback)
 International Standard Book Number-13: 978-1-138-63209-7
 (Hardback)
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 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 Names: Schell, Jesse, author.
 Title: The art of game design : a book of lenses / Jesse Schell.
 Description: Third edition. | Boca Raton : Taylor & Francis, a
 CRC title,
 part of the Taylor & Francis imprint, a member of the Taylor &
 Francis
 Group, the academic division of T&F Informa, plc, 2019. |
 Includes
 bibliographical references and index.
 Identifiers: LCCN 2019013713 | ISBN 9781138632059 (pbk. :
 acid-free paper) |
 ISBN 9781138632097 (hardback : acid-free paper)
 Subjects: LCSH: Computer games—Design.
 Classification: LCC QA76.76.C672 S34 2019 | DDC 794.8/1536—
 dc23
 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013713
 Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at
 http://www.taylorandfrancis.com
 and the CRC Press Web site at
 http://www.crcpress.com
 For Nyra
 who always listens
 CONTENTS
 Table of Lenses
 Hello
 1 In the Beginning, There Is the Designer
 Magic Words
 What Skills Does a Game Designer Need?
 The Most Important Skill
 The Five Kinds of Listening
 The Secret of the Gifted
 Other Reading to Consider
 2 The Designer Creates an Experience
 The Game Is Not the Experience
 Is This Unique to Games?
 Three Practical Approaches to Chasing Rainbows
 Psychology
 Anthropology
 Design
 Introspection: Powers, Perils, and Practice
 Peril #1: Introspection Can Lead to False Conclusions about
 Reality
 Peril #2: What Is True of My Experiences May Not Be True for
 Others
 Dissect Your Feelings
 Defeating Heisenberg
 Analyze Memories
 Two Passes
 Sneak Glances
 Observe Silently
 Essential Experience
 All That’s Real Is What You Feel
 3 The Experience Takes Place in a Venue
 The Shifting Sands of Platform
 Private Venues
 The Hearth
 The Workbench
 The Reading Nook
 Public Venues
 The Theater
 The Arena
 The Museum
 Half Private/Half Public Venues
 The Gaming Table
 The Playground
 Anywhere
 Venues Mixed and Matched
 Other Reading to Consider
 4 The Experience Rises Out of a Game
 A Rant about Definitions
 So What Is a Game?
 No, Seriously, What Is a Game?
 Problem Solving 101
 The Fruits of Our Labor
 Other Reading to Consider
 5 The Game Consists of Elements
 What Are Little Games Made Of?
 The Four Basic Elements
 Skin and Skeleton
 6 The Elements Support a Theme
 Mere Games
 Unifying Themes
 Resonance
 Back to Reality
 Other Reading to Consider
 7 The Game Begins with an Idea
 Inspiration
 State the Problem
 How to Sleep
 Your Silent Partner
 Subconscious Tip #1: Pay Attention
 Subconscious Tip #2: Record Your Ideas
 Subconscious Tip #3: Manage Its Appetites (Judiciously)
 Subconscious Tip #4: Sleep
 Subconscious Tip #5: Don’t Push Too Hard
 A Personal Relationship
 Sixteen Nitty-Gritty Brainstorming Tips
 Brainstorm Tip #1: The Write Answer
 Brainstorm Tip #2: Write or Type?
 Brainstorm Tip #3: Sketch
 Brainstorm Tip #4: Toys
 Brainstorm Tip #5: Change Your Perspective
 Brainstorm Tip #6: Immerse Yourself
 Brainstorm Tip #7: Crack Jokes
 Brainstorm Tip #8: Spare No Expense
 Brainstorm Tip #9: The Writing on the Wall
 Brainstorm Tip #10: The Space Remembers
 Brainstorm Tip #11: Write Everything
 Brainstorm Tip #12: Number Your Lists
 Brainstorm Tip #13: Destroy Your Assumptions
 Brainstorm Tip #14: Mix and Match Categories
 Brainstorm Tip #15: Talk to Yourself
 Brainstorm Tip #16: Find a Partner
 Look At All These Ideas! Now What?
 Other Reading to Consider
 8 The Game Improves through Iteration
 Choosing an Idea
 The Eight Filters
 The Rule of the Loop
 A Short History of Software Engineering
 Danger—Waterfall—Keep Back
 Barry Boehm Loves You
 The Agile Manifesto
 Risk Assessment and Prototyping
 Example: Prisoners of Bubbleville
 Prisoners of Bubbleville: Design Brief
 Prisoners of Bubbleville: Risk List
 Prisoners of Bubbleville: Risk Mitigation
 Ten Tips for Productive Prototyping
 Prototyping Tip #1: Answer a Question
 Prototyping Tip #2: Forget Quality
 Prototyping Tip #3: Don’t Get Attached
 Prototyping Tip #4: Prioritize Your Prototypes
 Prototyping Tip #5: Parallelize Prototypes Productively
 Prototyping Tip #6: It Doesn’t Have to Be Digital
 Tetris: A Paper Prototype
 Halo: A Paper Prototype
 Prototyping Tip #7: It Doesn’t Have to Be Interactive
 Prototyping Tip #8: Pick a “Fast Loop” Game Engine
 Prototyping Tip #9: Build the Toy First
 Prototyping Tip #10: Seize Opportunities for More Loops
 Closing the Loop
 Loop 1: “New Racing” Game
 Loop 2: “Racing Subs” Game
 Loop 3: “Flying Dinos” Game
 How Much Is Enough?
 Your Secret Fuel
 Other Reading to Consider
 9 The Game Is Made for a Player
 Einstein’s Violin
 Project Yourself
 Demographics
 The Medium Is the Misogynist?
 Five Stereotypes about What Males Like to See in Games
 Five Stereotypes about What Females Like to See in Games
 Psychographics
 LeBlanc’s Taxonomy of Game Pleasures
 Bartle’s Taxonomy of Player Types
 More Pleasure: MORE!
 Other Reading to Consider
 10 The Experience Is in the Player’s Mind
 Modeling
 Focus
 Empathy
 Imagination
 Other Reading to Consider
 11 The Player’s Mind Is Driven by the Player’s Motivation
 Needs…
 …And More Needs
 Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation
 Wanna vs. Hafta
 Novelty
 Judgment
 Other Reading to Consider
 12 Some Elements Are Game Mechanics
 Mechanic 1: Space
 Nested Spaces
 Zero Dimensions
 Mechanic 2: Time
 Discrete and Continuous Time
 Clocks and Races
 Controlling Time
 Mechanic 3: Objects
 Secrets
 Mechanic 4: Actions
 Emergent Gameplay
 Mechanic 5: Rules
 Parlett’s Rule Analysis
 Modes
 Enforcer
 Cheatability
 The Most Important Rule
 Wrapping Up Rules
 Mechanic 6: Skill
 Real vs. Virtual Skills
 Enumerating Skills
 Mechanic 7: Chance
 Invention of Probability
 Ten Rules of Probability Every Game Designer Should Know
 Rule #1: Fractions Are Decimals Are Percents
 Rule #2: Zero to One—and That’s It!
 Rule #3: “Looked For” Divided By “Possible Outcomes” Equals
 Probability
 Rule #4: Enumerate!
 Rule #5: In Certain Cases, OR Means Add
 Rule #6: In Certain Cases, AND Means Multiply
 Rule #7: One Minus “Does” = “Doesn’t”
 Rule #8: The Sum of Multiple Linear Random Selections Is NOT
 a Linear Random Selection!
 Rule #9: Roll the Dice
 Rule #10: Geeks Love Showing Off (Gombaud’s Law)
 Expected Value
 Consider Values Carefully
 The Human Element
 Skill and Chance Get Tangled
 Other Reading to Consider
 13 Game Mechanics Must Be in Balance
 The Twelve Most Common Types of Game Balance
 Balance Type #1: Fairness
 Symmetrical Games
 Asymmetrical Games
 Biplane Battle
 Rock, Paper, Scissors
 Balance Type #2: Challenge vs. Success
 Balance Type #3: Meaningful Choices
 Triangularity
 Balancing Type #4: Skill vs. Chance
 Balancing Type #5: Head vs. Hands
 Balance Type #6: Competition vs. Cooperation
 Balance Type #7: Short vs. Long
 Balance Type #8: Rewards
 Balance Type #9: Punishment
 Balance Type #10: Freedom vs. Controlled Experience
 Balance Type #11: Simple vs. Complex
 Natural vs. Artificial Balancing
 Elegance
 Character
 Balance Type #12: Detail vs. Imagination
 Game Balancing Methodologies
 Balancing Game Economies
 Dynamic Game Balancing
 The Big Picture
 Other Reading to Consider
 14 Game Mechanics Support Puzzles
 The Puzzle of Puzzles
 Aren’t Puzzles Dead?
 Good Puzzles
 Puzzle Principle #1: Make the Goal Easily Understood
 Puzzle Principle #2: Make It Easy to Get Started
 Puzzle Principle #3: Give a Sense of Progress
 Puzzle Principle #4: Give a Sense of Solvability
 Puzzle Principle #5: Increase Difficulty Gradually
 Puzzle Principle #6: Parallelism Lets the Player Rest
 Puzzle Principle #7: Pyramid Structure Extends Interest
 Puzzle Principle #8: Hints Extend Interest
 Puzzle Principle #9: Give the Answer!
 Puzzle Principle #10: Perceptual Shifts Are a Double-Edged
 Sword
 A Final Piece
 Other Reading to Consider
 15 Players Play Games through an Interface
 Between Yin and Yang
 Breaking It Down
 The Loop of Interaction
 Juiciness
 Primality
 Channels of Information
 Step 1: List and Prioritize Information
 Step 2: List Channels
 Step 3: Map Information to Channels
 Step 4: Review Use of Dimensions
 Modes
 Mode Tip #1: Use as Few Modes as Possible
 Mode Tip #2: Avoid Overlapping Modes
 Mode Tip #3: Make Different Modes Look as Different as
 Possible
 Other Interface Tips
 Interface Tip #1: Steal
 Interface Tip #2: Customize
 Interface Tip #3: Design around Your Physical Interface
 Interface Tip #4: Theme Your Interface
 Interface Tip #5: Sound Maps to Touch
 Interface Tip #6: Balance Options and Simplicity with Layers
 Interface Tip #7: Use Metaphors
 Interface Tip #8: If It Looks Different, It Should Act Different
 Interface Tip #9: Test, Test, Test!
 Interface Tip #10: Break the Rules to Help Your Player
 Other Reading to Consider
 16 Experiences Can Be Judged by Their Interest Curves
 My First Lens
 Interest Curves
 Patterns inside Patterns
 What Comprises Interest?
 Factor 1: Inherent Interest
 Factor 2: Poetry of Presentation
 Factor 3: Projection
 Interest Factor Examples
 Putting It All Together
 Other Reading to Consider
 17 One Kind of Experience Is the Story
 Story/Game Duality
 The Myth of Passive Entertainment
 The Dream
 The Reality
 Real-World Method 1: The String of Pearls
 Real-World Method 2: The Story Machine
 The Problems
 Problem #1: Good Stories Have Unity
 Problem #2: The Combinatorial Explosion
 Problem #4: Not Enough Verbs
 Problem #5: Time Travel Makes Tragedy Obsolete
 The Dream Reborn
 Ten Story Tips for Game Designers
 Story Tip #1: Respect the Story Stack
 Story Tip #2: Put Your Story to Work!
 Story Tip #3: Goals, Obstacles, and Conflicts
 Story Tip #4: Make It Real
 Story Tip #5: Provide Simplicity and Transcendence
 Story Tip #6: Consider the Hero’s Journey
 Vogler’s Synopsis of the Hero’s Journey
 Story Tip #7: Keep Your Story World Consistent
 Story Tip #8: Make Your Story World Accessible
 Story Tip #9: Use Clichés Judiciously
 Story Tip #10: Sometimes a Map Brings a Story to Life
 Story Tip #11: Surprise and Emotion
 Other Reading to Consider
 18 Story and Game Structures Can Be Artfully Merged with
 Indirect Control
 The Feeling of Freedom
 Indirect Control Method #1: Constraints
 Indirect Control Method #2: Goals
 Indirect Control Method #3: Interface
 Indirect Control Method #4: Visual Design
 Indirect Control Method #5: Characters
 Indirect Control Method #6: Music
 Collusion
 Other Reading to Consider
 19 Stories and Games Take Place in Worlds
 Transmedia Worlds
 The Power of Pokémon
 Properties of Transmedia Worlds
 Transmedia Worlds Are Powerful
 Transmedia Worlds Are Long Lived
 Transmedia Worlds Evolve over Time
 What Successful Transmedia Worlds Have in Common
 20 Worlds Contain Characters
 The Nature of Game Characters
 Novel Characters
 Movie Characters
 Game Characters
 Avatars
 The Ideal Form
 The Blank Slate
 Creating Compelling Game Characters
 Character Tip #1: List Character Functions
 Character Tip #2: Define and Use Character Traits
 Character Tip #3: Use the Interpersonal Circumplex
 Character Tip #4: Make a Character Web
 Archie
 Veronica
 Betty
 Reggie
 Jughead
 Character Tip #5: Use Status
 Character Tip #6: Use the Power of the Voice
 Character Tip #7: Use the Power of the Face
 Character Tip #8: Powerful Stories Transform Characters
 Character Tip #9: Let Your Characters Surprise Us
 Character Tip #10: Avoid the Uncanny Valley
 Other Reading to Consider
 21 Worlds Contain Spaces
 The Purpose of Architecture
 Organizing Your Game Space
 A Word about Landmarks
 Christopher Alexander Is a Genius
 Alexander’s Fifteen Properties of Living Structures
 Real vs. Virtual Architecture
 Know How Big
 Third-Person Distortion
 Level Design
 Other Reading to Consider
 22 Some Interfaces Create a Feeling of Presence
 The Power of Presence
 Six Presence Breakers
 Presence Breaker #1: Motion Sickness
 Presence Breaker #2: Counter-Intuitive Interactions
 Presence Breaker #3: Intensity Overload
 Presence Breaker #4: Unrealistic Audio
 Presence Breaker #5: Proprioceptive Disconnect
 Presence Breaker #6: Lack of Identity
 Six Presence Builders
 Presence Builder #1: Hand Presence
 Presence Builder #2: Social Presence
 Presence Builder #3: Familiarity
 Presence Builder #4: Realistic Audio
 Presence Builder #5: Proprioceptive Alignment
 Presence Builder #6: Comedy
 Encourage Looking Around
 Consider Brownboxing
 Different Hardware Enables Different Experiences
 23 The Look and Feel of a World Is Defined by Its Aesthetics
 Monet Refuses the Operation
 The Value of Aesthetics
 Learning to See
 How to Let Aesthetics Guide Your Design
 How Much Is Enough?
 Use Audio
 Balancing Art and Technology
 Other Reading to Consider
 24 Some Games Are Played with Other Players
 We Are Not Alone
 Why We Play with Others
 Other Reading to Consider
 25 Other Players Sometimes Form Communities
 More than Just Other Players
 Ten Tips for Strong Communities
 Community Tip #1: Foster Friendships
 Community Tip #2: Put Conflict at the Heart
 Community Tip #3: Use Architecture to Shape Your Community
 Community Tip #4: Create Community Property
 Community Tip #5: Let Players Express Themselves
 Community Tip #6: Support Three Levels
 Community Tip #7: Force Players to Depend on Each Other
 Community Tip #8: Manage Your Community
 Community Tip #9: Obligation to Others Is Powerful
 Community Tip #10: Create Community Events
 The Challenge of Griefing
 The Future of Game Communities
 Other Reading to Consider
 26 The Designer Usually Works with a Team
 The Secret of Successful Teamwork
 If You Can’t Love the Game, Love the Audience
 Designing Together
 Team Communication
 Other Reading to Consider
 27 The Team Sometimes Communicates through Documents
 The Myth of the Game Design Document
 The Purpose of Documents
 Memory
 Communication
 Types of Game Documents
 Design
 Engineering
 Art
 Production
 Writing
 Players
 So, Where Do I Start?
 Other Reading to Consider
 28 Good Games Are Created through Playtesting
 Playtesting
 My Terrible Secret
 Playtest Question the First: Why?
 Playtest Question the Second: Who?
 Playtest Question the Third: When?
 Playtest Question the Fourth: Where?
 Playtest Question the Fifth: What?
 The First What: Things You Know You Are Looking For
 The Second What: Things You Don’t Know You Are Looking For
 Playtest Question the Sixth: How?
 Should You Even Be There?
 What Do You Tell Them Up Front?
 Where Do You Look?
 What Other Data Should You Collect During Play?
 Will I Disturb the Players Midgame?
 What Data Will I Collect after the Play Session?
 Surveys
 Interviews
 FFWWDD
 Other Reading to Consider
 29 The Team Builds a Game with Technology
 Technology, At Last
 Foundational vs. Decorational
 Mickey’s First Cartoon
 Abalone
 Sonic the Hedgehog
 Myst
 Journey
 Ragdoll Physics
 The Touch Revolution
 The Hype Cycle
 The Innovator’s Dilemma
 The Law of Divergence
 The Singularity
 Look into Your Crystal Ball
 Other Reading to Consider
 30 Your Game Will Probably Have a Client
 Who Cares What the Client Thinks?
 Coping with Bad Suggestions
 Not That Rock
 The Three Layers of Desire
 Firenze, 1498
 Other Reading to Consider
 31 The Designer Gives the Client a Pitch
 Why Me?
 A Negotiation of Power
 The Hierarchy of Ideas
 Twelve Tips for a Successful Pitch
 Pitch Tip #1: Get in the Door
 Pitch Tip #2: Show You Are Serious
 Pitch Tip #3: Be Organized
 Pitch Tip #4: Be Passionate!!!!!
 Pitch Tip #5: Assume Their Point of View
 Pitch Tip #6: Design the Pitch
 Pitch Tip #7: Know All the Details
 Pitch Tip #8: Exude Confidence
 Pitch Tip #9: Be Flexible
 Pitch Tip #10: Rehearse
 Pitch Tip #11: Get Them to Own It
 Pitch Tip #12: Follow Up
 Hey, What about Kickstarter?
 Other Reading to Consider
 32 The Designer and Client Want the Game to Make a Profit
 Love and Money
 Know Your Business Model
 Retail
 Direct Download
 Free-to-Play
 Know Your Competition
 Know Your Audience
 Learn the Language
 General Game Business Terms
 Free-to-Play Business Terms
 Know the Top Sellers
 The Importance of Barriers
 Other Reading to Consider
 33 Games Transform Their Players
 How Do Games Change Us?
 Can Games Be Good for You?
 Emotional Maintenance
 Connecting
 Exercise
 Education
 Giving the Brain What It Wants
 Facts
 Problem Solving
 Systems of Relationships
 New Insights
 Curiosity
 Creating Teachable Moments
 Transformational Games
 Transformational Tip #1: Define Your Transformation
 Transformational Tip #2: Find Great Subject Matter Experts
 Transformational Tip #3: What Does the Instructor Need?
 Transformational Tip #4: Don’t Do Too Much
 Transformational Tip #5: Assess Transformation Appropriately
 Transformational Tip #6: Choose the Right Venue
 Transformational Tip #7: Accept the Realities of the Market
 Can Games Be Bad for You?
 Violence
 Addiction
 Experiences
 Other Reading to Consider
 34 Designers Have Certain Responsibilities
 The Danger of Obscurity
 Being Accountable
 Your Hidden Agenda
 The Secret Hidden in Plain Sight
 The Ring
 Other Reading to Consider
 35 Each Designer Has a Purpose
 The Deepest Theming
 Goodbye
 Acknowledgments
 Endnotes
 Bibliography
 Index
 TABLE OF LENSES
 #1 The Lens of Emotion
 #2 The Lens of Essential Experience
 #3 The Lens of the Venue
 #4 The Lens of Surprise
 #5 The Lens of Fun
 #6 The Lens of Curiosity
 #7 The Lens of Endogenous Value
 #8 The Lens of Problem Solving
 #9 The Lens of the Elemental Tetrad
 #10 The Lens of Holographic Design
 #11 The Lens of Unification
 #12 The Lens of Resonance
 #13 The Lens of Infinite Inspiration
 #14 The Lens of the Problem Statement
 #15 The Lens of the Eight Filters
 #16 The Lens of Risk Mitigation
 #17 The Lens of the Toy
 #18 The Lens of Passion
 #19 The Lens of the Player
 #20 The Lens of Pleasure
 #21 The Lens of Flow
 #22 The Lens of Needs
 #23 The Lens of Motivation
 #24 The Lens of Novelty
 #25 The Lens of Judgment
 #26 The Lens of Functional Space
 #27 The Lens of Time
 #28 The Lens of the State Machine
 #29 The Lens of Secrets
 #30 The Lens of Emergence
 #31 The Lens of Action
 #32 The Lens of Goals
 #33 The Lens of Rules
 #34 The Lens of Skill
 #35 The Lens of Expected Value
 #36 The Lens of Chance
 #37 The Lens of Fairness
 #38 The Lens of Challenge
 #39 The Lens of Meaningful Choices
 #40 The Lens of Triangularity
 #41 The Lens of Skill vs. Chance
 #42 The Lens of Head and Hands
 #43 The Lens of Competition
 #44 The Lens of Cooperation
 #45 The Lens of Competition vs. Cooperation
 #46 The Lens of Reward
 #47 The Lens of Punishment
 #48 The Lens of Simplicity/Complexity
 #49 The Lens of Elegance
 #50 The Lens of Character
 #51 The Lens of Imagination
 #52 The Lens of Economy
 #53 The Lens of Balance
 #54 The Lens of Accessibility
 #55 The Lens of Visible Progress
 #56 The Lens of Parallelism
 #57 The Lens of the Pyramid
 #58 The Lens of the Puzzle
 #59 The Lens of Control
 #60 The Lens of Physical Interface
 #61 The Lens of Virtual Interface
 #62 The Lens of Transparency
 #63 The Lens of Feedback
 #64 The Lens of Juiciness
 #65 The Lens of Primality
 #66 The Lens of Channels and Dimensions
 #67 The Lens of Modes
 #67½ The Lens of Metaphor
 #68 The Lens of Moments
 #69 The Lens of the Interest Curve
 #70 The Lens of Inherent Interest
 #71 The Lens of Beauty
 #72 The Lens of Projection
 #73 The Lens of the Story Machine
 #74 The Lens of the Obstacle
 #75 The Lens of Simplicity and Transcendence
 #76 The Lens of the Hero’s Journey
 #77 The Lens of the Weirdest Thing
 #78 The Lens of Story
 #79 The Lens of Freedom
 #80 The Lens of Help
 #81 The Lens of Indirect Control
 #82 The Lens of Collusion
 #83 The Lens of Fantasy
 #84 The Lens of the World
 #85 The Lens of the Avatar
 #86 The Lens of Character Function
 #87 The Lens of Character Traits
 #88 The Lens of the Interpersonal Circumplex
 #89 The Lens of the Character Web
 #90 The Lens of Status
 #91 The Lens of Character Transformation
 #92 The Lens of Inner Contradiction
 #93 The Lens of The Nameless Quality
 #93½ The Lens of Presence
 #94 The Lens of Atmosphere
 #95 The Lens of Spectation
 #95½ The Lens of Cheatability
 #96 The Lens of Friendship
 #97 The Lens of Expression
 #98 The Lens of Community
 #99 The Lens of Griefing
 #100 The Lens of Love
 #101 The Lens of the Team
 #102 The Lens of Documentation
 #103 The Lens of Playtesting
 #104 The Lens of Technology
 #105 The Lens of the Crystal Ball
 #106 The Lens of Utopia
 #107 The Lens of the Client
 #108 The Lens of the Pitch
 #109 The Lens of Profit
 #110 The Lens of Transformation
 #111 The Lens of Responsibility
 #112 The Lens of the Raven
 #∞ The Lens of Your Secret Purpose
 I will talk to you of art,
 For there is nothing else to talk about,
 For there is nothing else.
 Life is an obscure hobo,
 Bumming a ride on the omnibus of art.
 —Maxwell H. Brock
 HELLO
 Hello there! Come in, come in! What a nice surprise—I had no
 idea you would be visiting today. I’m sorry if it is a little messy
 in here, I’ve been writing. Please—make yourself comfortable.
 Good, good. Now let’s see… where should we begin? Oh—I
 should introduce myself!
 My name is Jesse Schell, and I have always loved designing
 games. Here’s picture of me:
 I was shorter then. Since that picture was taken, I’ve done a lot
 of different things. I’ve worked in circuses as a professional
 juggler. I’ve been a writer, comedian, and magician’s
 apprentice. I’ve worked at IBM and Bell Communications
 Research as a software engineer. I’ve designed and developed
 interactive theme park rides and massively multiplayer games
 for the Walt Disney Company. I’ve started my own game studio,
 and become a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. But
 when people ask me what I do, I tell them that I am a game
 designer.
 I mention all this only because at various times in this book, I
 will be drawing examples from these experiences, since every
 single one of them has taught me valuable lessons about the art
 of game design. That might sound surprising now, but
 hopefully, as you read this book, it will help you see the ways
 that game design meaningfully connects to the many
 experiences in your own life.
 One thing I should clarify: While the goal of this book is
 primarily to teach you how to be a better videogame designer,
 many of the principles we explore will have little to do with
 videogames specifically—you will find they are more broadly
 applicable than that. The good news is that much of what you
 read here will work equally well no matter what kind of game
 you are designing—digital, analog, or otherwise.
 What Is Game Design?
 As we begin, it is important for us to be absolutely clear about
 what is meant by “game design.” After all, it is what the rest of
 the book is about, and some people seem a bit confused about
 it.
 Game design is the act of deciding what a game should be.
 That’s it. On the surface, it sounds too simple.
 “You mean you design a game by just making one
 decision?”
 No. To decide what a game is, you must make hundreds, usually
 thousands of decisions.
 “Don’t I need special equipment to design a game?”
 No. Since game design is simply decision making, you can
 actually design a game in your head. Usually, though, you will
 want to write down these decisions, because our memories are
 weak, and it is easy to miss something important if you don’t
 write things down. Further, if you want other people to help
 you make decisions, or to help build the game, you need to
 communicate these decisions to them somehow, and writing
 them down is a good way to do that.
 “What about programming? Don’t game designers have to
 be computer programmers?”
 No, they don’t. First of all, many games can be played without
 the use of computers or technology; board games, card games,
 and athletic games, for example. Secondly, even for computer
 games or videogames, it is possible to make the decisions about
 what those games should be without knowing all the technical
 details of how those decisions are carried out. Of course, it can
 be a tremendous help if you do know these details, just as being
 a skilled writer or artist can help. This allows you to make
 better decisions more quickly, but it is not strictly necessary. It
 is like the relationship between architects and carpenters: an
 architect does not need to know everything the carpenter
 knows, but an architect must know everything the carpenter is
 capable of.
 “So, you mean that the game designer just comes up with
 the story for the game?”
 No. Story decisions are one aspect of a game design, but there
 are many, many others. Decisions about rules, look and feel,
 timing, pacing, risk-taking, rewards, punishments, and
 everything else the player experiences is the responsibility of
 the game designer.
 “So the game designer makes decisions about what the
 game should be, writes them down, and moves on?”
 Almost never. None of us has a perfect imagination, and the
 games we design in our heads and on paper almost never come
 out quite the way we expected. Many decisions are impossible
 to make until the designer has seen the game in action. For this
 reason, the designer is usually involved in the development of a
 game from the very beginning to the very end, making
 decisions about how the game should be all along the way.
 It is important to make the distinction between “game
 developer” and “game designer.” A game developer is anyone
 who has any involvement with the creation of the game at all.
 Engineers, animators, modelers, musicians, writers, producers,
 and designers who work on games are all game developers.
 Game designers are just one species of game developer.
 “So, the game designer is the only one allowed to make
 decisions about the game?”
 Let’s turn that around: Anyone who makes decisions about how
 the game should be is a game designer. Designer is a role, not a
 person. Almost every developer on a team makes some
 decisions about how the game will be, just through the act of
 creating content for the game. These decisions are game design
 decisions, and when you make them, you are a game designer.
 For this reason, no matter what your role on a game
 development team, an understanding of the principles of game
 design will make you better at what you do.
 Waiting for Mendeleev
 The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but
 in having new eyes.
 —Marcel Proust
 The goal of this book is to make you the best game designer you
 can be.
 Unfortunately, at present, there is no “unified theory of game
 design,” no simple formula that shows us how to make good
 games. So what can we do?
 We are in a position something like the ancient alchemists. In
 the time before Mendeleev (men-duh-lay-uv) discovered the
 periodic table, showing how all the fundamental elements were
 interrelated, alchemists relied on a patchwork quilt of rules of
 thumb about how different chemicals could combine. These
 were necessarily incomplete, sometimes incorrect, and often
 semimystical, but by using these rules, the alchemists were able
 to accomplish surprising things, and their pursuit of the truth
 eventually led to modern chemistry.
 Game designers await their Mendeleev. At this point we have
 no periodic table. We have our own patchwork of principles
 and rules, which, less than perfect, allows us to get the job done.
 I have tried to gather together the best of these into one place,
 so that you can study them, consider them, make use of them,
 and see how others have used them.
 Good game design happens when you view your game from as
 many perspectives as possible. I refer to these perspectives as
 lenses, because each one is a way of viewing your design. The
 lenses are small sets of questions you should ask yourself about
 your design. They are not blueprints or recipes, but tools for
 examining your design. They will be introduced, one at a time,
 throughout the book. A deck of cards, with one card
 summarizing each lens, has been created to accompany this
 book. It is available as a free smartphone app (search for “deck
 of lenses” on iOS or Android), and can also be purchased as a
 physical deck of cards (search for “deck of lenses” on Amazon),
 to make it easy to use the lenses while you are designing. Visit
 artofgamedesign.com for more information, and a free third
 edition booster pack.
 None of the lenses are perfect, and none are complete, but each
 is useful in one context or another, for each gives a unique
 perspective on your design. The idea is that even though we
 can’t have one complete picture, by taking all of these small
 imperfect lenses and using them to view your problem from
 many different perspectives, you will be able to use your
 discretion to figure out the best design. I wish we had one allseeing lens. We don’t. So, instead of discarding the many
 imperfect ones we do have, it is wisest to collect and use as
 wide a variety of them as possible, for as we will see, game
 design is more art than science, more like cooking than
 chemistry, and we must admit the possibility that our
 Mendeleev will never come.
 Focus on Fundamentals
 Many people assume that to best study the principles of game
 design, one would naturally study the most modern, complex,
 high-tech games that are available. This approach is completely
 wrong. Videogames are just a natural growth of traditional
 games into a new medium. The rules that govern them are still
 the same. An architect must understand how to design a shed
 before she can design a skyscraper, and so we will often be
 studying some of the very simplest games. Some of these will be
 videogames, but some will be far simpler: Dice games. Card
 games. Board games. Playground games. If we cannot
 understand the principles of these games, how can we have a
 hope of understanding more complex games? Some will argue
 that these games are old, and therefore not worth studying, but
 as Thoreau said, “We might as well omit to study Nature
 because she is old.” A game is a game is a game. The principles
 that make the classic games fun are the same principles that
 make the most modern games fun. The classic games have the
 added advantage that they have withstood the tests of time.
 Their success is not due to the novelty of their technology,
 which is the case with many modern games. These classic
 games have deeper qualities that, as game designers, we must
 learn to understand.
 As well as a focus on classic games, this book will strive to
 deliver the deepest and most fundamental principles of game
 design, as opposed to genre-specific principles (“Fifteen tips for
 a better story-based first-person shooter!”), because genres
 come and go, but the basic principles of game design are
 principles of human psychology that have been with us for
 ages, and will be with us for ages to come. Well-versed in these
 fundamentals, you will be able to master any genre that
 appears, and even invent new genres of your own. As opposed
 to other books on game design, whose goal often seems to be to
 cover as much ground as possible, this book will not strive to
 cover ground, but to teach you to dig in the most fertile places.
 And though this book will teach you principles you will be able
 to use to create traditional board and card games, it is very
 much slanted toward the videogame industry. Why? Because a
 game designer’s job is to create new games. The explosion of
 computer technology has allowed for innovation in the field of
 game design such as the world has never seen. There are more
 game designers alive today than have ever been alive in all of
 human history. Chances are, if you want to create games, you
 will be creating them somewhere on the cutting edge of this
 new technology, and this book is prepared to show you how to
 do just that, although most of the principles here will work just
 as well with more traditional game genres.
 Talk to Strangers
 Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some
 have unwittingly entertained angels.
 —Hebrews 13:2
 Game developers have a reputation for xenophobia, that is, fear
 of strangers. By this I mean not unfamiliar individuals, but
 rather unfamiliar techniques, practices, and principles. It
 almost seems like they believe that if it didn’t originate in the
 game industry, it isn’t worth considering. The truth is really that
 game developers are usually just too busy to look outside their
 immediate surroundings. Making good games is hard, so
 developers keep their heads down, stay focused, and get the job
 done. They usually don’t have the time to seek out new
 techniques, figure out how to integrate them into their games,
 and take the risk that a new technique might fail. So, they play
 it safe, and stick with what they know, which unfortunately
 leads to a lot of the “cookie-cutter” game titles that you see on
 the market.
 But to succeed, to create something great and innovative, you
 have to do something different. This is not a book about how to
 make cookie-cutter games. It is a book about how to create
 great new designs. If you were surprised by the focus this book
 places on non-digital games, you will be even more surprised to
 see how it uses principles, methods, and examples from things
 that aren’t even games. Examples from music, architecture,
 film, science, painting, literature, and everything else under the
 sun will be pulled in. And why not? Why should we have to
 develop all our principles from scratch, when hard work we
 can use has been going on in other fields, sometimes for
 hundreds or thousands of years? Design principles will come
 from everywhere because design is everywhere, and design is
 the same everywhere. Not only will this book draw design
 inspiration from everywhere, it will persuade you to do the
 same. Everything you know and everything you have
 experienced is fair game at the game design table.
 The Map
 It does not make much difference what a person studies. All
 knowledge is related, and the man who studies anything, if
 he keeps at it, will become learned.
 —Hypatia
 Game design is not an easy subject to write about. Lenses and
 fundamentals are useful tools, but to truly understand game
 design is to understand an incredibly complex web of creativity,
 psychology, art, technology, and business. Everything in this
 web is connected to everything else. Changing one element
 affects all the others, and the understanding of one element
 influences the understanding of all of the others. Most
 experienced designers have built up this web in their minds,
 slowly, over many years, learning the elements and
 relationships by trial and error. And this is what makes game
 design so hard to write about. Books are necessarily linear. One
 idea must be presented at a time. For this reason, many game
 design books have an incomplete feeling to them—like a guided
 nighttime tour with a flashlight, the reader sees a lot of
 interesting things, but can’t really comprehend how they all fit
 together.
 Game design is an adventure, and adventure needs a map. For
 this book, I have created a map that shows the web of game
 design relationships. You can see the complete map near the
 end of the book, but to see the entire map at once is confusing
 and overwhelming. Picasso once said, “To create, one must first
 destroy.” And so we will. We set everything aside, and begin our
 map as a blank slate. As we do this, I encourage you, too, to set
 aside your preconceptions about game design, so that you can
 approach this difficult but fascinating subject with an open
 mind.
 Chapter 1 will begin by adding a single element, the designer.
 Successive chapters will add other elements, one at a time,
 gradually building up the complex system of relationships
 between designer, player, game, team, and client, so you can
 see how they fit together, and why they fit together the way
 they do. By the end of the book, you will have, both on paper
 and in your mind, a map of these relationships. Of course, the
 map on paper is not the important one—the important one is
 the one in your mind. And the map is not the territory. It will
 necessarily be imperfect. But hopefully, after this book helps to
 create a map of relationships in your mind, you will test your
 mental map against reality, altering it and augmenting it, as you
 find parts of it that can be improved. Every designer goes
 through the journey of building their own personal map of
 these relationships. If you are new to game design, this book
 should be able to give you the beginnings of your map. If you
 are already a seasoned game designer, I hope that this book can
 give you some ideas about how to improve the map you have.
 Learning to Think
 Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one
 corner, and it is for you to find the other three.
 —Confucius
 What is Confucius talking about? Shouldn’t a good teacher show
 you all four corners, laying everything out plainly? No. To truly
 learn, remember, and understand, your mind must be in a state
 of questing, of seeking to find knowledge. If it is not in this state,
 a state of really wanting to deeply understand, the wisest
 principles will roll off you like water off a duck. There will be
 times in this book where things will not be laid out plainly—
 times where things are intentionally less clear so that when you
 do uncover the truth, it means something to you.
 There is another reason for this sometimes cryptic approach. As
 discussed earlier, game design is not an exact science. It is full
 of mysteries and contradictions. Our set of lenses will be
 incomplete and imperfect. To become a great game designer, it
 is not enough to be familiar with the set of principles this book
 has to offer. You must be ready to think for yourself, to figure
 out why certain principles don’t work in certain cases, and to
 invent new principles of your own. We await our Mendeleev.
 Perhaps it is you.
 Why I Hate Books
 I hate books, for they only teach people to talk about what
 they don’t understand.
 —Jean-Jacques Rousseau
 It is very important to have a balanced approach to study
 and practice.
 —The Dalai Lama
 Please do not think that reading this book, or any book, will
 make you into a game designer, much less a great game
 designer. Game design is not a set of principles, it is an activity.
 You could no sooner become a singer, pilot, or basketball player
 by reading a book than you could become a game designer.
 There is only one path to becoming a game designer, and that is
 the path of designing games—and more to the point, designing
 games that people really like. That means that simply jotting
 down your game idea isn’t enough. You must build the game,
 play it yourself, and let others play it. When it doesn’t satisfy
 (and it won’t), you must change it. And change it. And change it
 again, dozens of times, until you have created a game that
 people actually enjoy playing. When you have been through
 this a few times, then you will start to understand what game
 design is. There’s a saying among game designers: “Your first
 ten games will suck—so get them out of the way fast.” The
 principles in this book will help to guide your designs, and give
 you useful perspectives on how to make better designs faster,
 but you can only become a good designer through practice. If
 you are not really interested in becoming a good game designer,
 put this book down now. It has nothing for you. But if you truly
 do want to be a game designer, then this book is not an end, but
 a beginning—the beginning of a continuous process of study,
 practice, assimilation, and synthesis that is going to last the rest
 of your life.
 CHAPTER ONE
 In the Beginning, There Is the Designer
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-1
 FIGURE
 1.1
 Magic Words
 Would-be designers often ask me, “How do you become a game
 designer?” And the answer is easy: “Design games. Start now!
 Don’t wait! Don’t even finish this conversation! Just start
 designing! Go! Now!”
 And some of them do just that. But many have a crisis of
 confidence and feel stuck in a catch-22: If only game designers
 can design games and you can only become a game designer by
 designing games, how can anyone ever get started? If this is
 how you feel, the answer is easy. Just say these magic words:
 I am a game designer.
 I’m serious. Say them out loud, right now. Don’t be shy—there’s
 no one here but us.
 Did you do it? If so, congratulations. You are now a game
 designer. You might feel, at this moment, that you aren’t really a
 game designer yet, but that you’re just pretending to be one.
 And that’s fine, because as we’ll explore later, people become
 what they pretend to be. Just go on pretending, doing the things
 you think a game designer would do, and before long, to your
 surprise, you will find you are one. If your confidence wavers,
 just repeat the magic words again: I am a game designer.
 Sometimes, I repeat them like this:
 Who are you?
 I am a game designer.
 No, you’re not.
 I am a game designer.
 What kind of a designer?
 I am a game designer.
 You mean you play games.
 I am a game designer.
 This game of confidence building may seem silly at first. But it is
 far from the silliest thing you will do as a designer. And it is
 terribly important that you get good at building your
 confidence, for doubts about your abilities will forever plague
 you. As a novice designer, you will think, “I’ve never done this
 —I don’t know what I’m doing.” Once you have a little
 experience, you will think, “My skills are so narrow—this new
 title is different. Maybe I just got lucky last time.” And when you
 are a seasoned designer, you will think, “The world is different
 now. Maybe I’ve lost my touch.”
 Blow away these useless thoughts. They can’t help you. When a
 thing must be attempted, one must never think about
 possibility or impossibility. If you look at the great creative
 minds, all so different, you will find they have one thing in
 common: they lack a fear of ridicule. Some of the greatest
 innovations have come from people who only succeeded
 because they were too dumb to know that what they were
 doing was impossible. Game design is decision making, and
 decisions must be made with confidence.
 Will you fail sometimes? Yes, you will. You will fail again, and
 again, and again. You will fail many, many more times than you
 will succeed. But these failures are your only path to success.
 You will come to love your failures, because each failure brings
 you a step closer to a truly phenomenal game. There is a saying
 among jugglers: “If you aren’t dropping, you aren’t learning.
 And if you aren’t learning, you aren’t a juggler.” The same is
 true for game design: If you aren’t failing, you aren’t trying
 hard enough, and you aren’t really a game designer.
 What Skills Does a Game Designer Need?
 I have taken all knowledge to be my province.
 —Francis Bacon
 In short, all of them. Almost anything that you can be good at
 can become a useful skill for a game designer. Here are some of
 the big ones, listed alphabetically:
 Animation: Modern games are full of characters that need to
 seem alive. The very word “animation” means “to give life.”
 Understanding the powers and limits of character animation
 will let you open the door for clever game design ideas the
 world has yet to see.
 Anthropology: You will be studying your audience in their
 natural habitat, trying to figure out their heart’s desire, so
 that your games might satisfy that desire.
 Architecture: You will be designing more than buildings;
 you’ll be designing whole cities and worlds. Familiarity with
 the world of architecture, that is, understanding the
 relationship between people and spaces, will give you a
 tremendous leg up in creating game worlds.
 Brainstorming: You will need to create new ideas by the
 dozens, nay, by the hundreds.
 Business: The game industry is just that, an industry. Most
 games are made to make money. The better you understand
 the business end of things, the better chance you have of
 making the game of your dreams.
 Cinematography: Many games will have movies in them.
 Almost all modern videogames have a virtual camera. You
 need to understand the art of cinematography if you want to
 deliver an emotionally compelling experience.
 Communication: You will need to talk with people in every
 discipline listed here, and even more. You will need to
 resolve disputes, solve problems of miscommunication, and
 learn the truth about how your teammates, your client, and
 your audience really feel about your game.
 Creative writing: You will be creating entire fictional worlds
 and populations to live in them and deciding the events that
 will happen there.
 Economics: Many modern games feature complex
 economies of game resources. An understanding of the rules
 of economics can be surprisingly helpful.
 Engineering: Modern videogames involve some of the most
 complex engineering in the world today, with some titles
 counting their lines of code in the millions. New technical
 innovations make new kinds of gameplay possible.
 Innovative game designers must understand both the limits
 and the powers that each technology brings.
 Games: Naturally, familiarity with games will be of great use
 to you, but not just familiarity with the kind of games you
 intend to create. Your knowledge of the workings of every
 kind of game from pin the tail on the donkey to Portal 2 will
 give you the raw materials you need when you create new
 games.
 History: Many games are placed in historical settings. Even
 the ones placed in fantasy settings can draw incredible
 inspiration from history.
 Management: Anytime a team works together toward a goal,
 there must be some management. Good designers can
 succeed even when management is bad, secretly “managing
 from below” to get the job done.
 Mathematics: Games are full of mathematics, probability,
 risk analyses, and complex scoring systems, not to mention
 the mathematics that stands behind computer graphics and
 computer science in general. A skilled designer must not be
 afraid to delve into math from time to time.
 Music: Music is the language of the soul. If your games are
 going to truly touch people, to immerse, and embrace them,
 they cannot do it without music.
 Psychology: Your goal is to make a human being happy. You
 must understand the workings of the human mind or you are
 designing in the dark.
 Public speaking: You will frequently need to present your
 ideas to a group. Sometimes you will speak to solicit their
 feedback; sometimes you will speak to persuade them of the
 genius of your new idea. Whatever the reason, you must be
 confident, clear, natural, and interesting, or people will be
 suspicious that you don’t know what you are doing.
 Sound design: Sound is what truly convinces the mind that it
 is in a place; in other words, “hearing is believing.”
 Technical writing: You need to create documents that clearly
 describe your complex designs without leaving any holes or
 gaps.
 Visual arts: Your games will be full of graphic elements. You
 must be fluent in the language of graphic design and know
 how to use it to create the feeling you want your game to
 have.
 And of course, there are many more. Daunting, isn’t it? How
 could anyone possibly master all of these things? The truth is
 that no one can. But the more of these things you are
 comfortable working with, however imperfectly, the better off
 you will be, for growth only happens when we exceed our
 limits. This is another reason that game designers must be
 confident and fearless. But there is one skill that is the key to all
 the others.
 The Most Important Skill
 Of all the skills mentioned in the previous section, one is far
 and away the most important, and it sounds so strange to most
 people that I didn’t even list it. Many people guess “creativity,”
 and I would argue that this is probably the second most
 important skill. Some guess “critical thinking” or “logic,” since
 game design is about decision making. These are indeed
 important, but by no means the most important skills.
 Some say “communication,” which starts to get close. The word
 communication has unfortunately become corrupted over the
 centuries. It once referred to an exchange of ideas but now has
 become a synonym for talking, as in “I have something to
 communicate to you.” Talking is certainly an important skill,
 but good communication and good game design are rooted in
 something far more basic and far more important.
 Listening.
 The most important skill for a game designer is listening.
 Game designers must listen to many things. These can be
 grouped into five major categories: team, audience, game,
 client, and self. Most of this book will be about how to listen to
 these five things.
 This may sound absurd to you. Is listening even a skill? We are
 not equipped with “earlids.” How can we help but listen?
 By listening, I don’t mean merely hearing what is said. I mean a
 deeper listening, a thoughtful listening. For example, you are at
 work, and you see your friend Fred. “Hi Fred, how are you?”
 you say. Fred frowns, looks down, shifts his weight
 uncomfortably, seems to be hunting for words, and then says
 quietly, without eye contact, “Uh, fine, I guess.” And then, he
 collects himself, takes a breath, and looks you in the eye as he
 determinedly, but not convincingly, says a little louder, “I’m, uh,
 fine. How are you?”
 So how is Fred? His words say, “He’s fine.” Great. Fred is fine. If
 you are just “surface listening,” you might draw that
 conclusion. But if you listen more deeply, paying full attention
 to Fred’s body language, subtle facial expression, tone of voice,
 and gestures, you might hear a very different message:
 “Actually, I’m not fine. I have a serious problem that I think I
 might want to discuss with you. But I won’t do that unless I get
 some kind of commitment from you that you really care about
 my problem, because it is kind of a personal issue. If you don’t
 want to get involved with it, though, I won’t bother you with it,
 and I’ll just pretend that everything is okay.”
 All of that was right there, in Fred’s “I’m fine.” And if you were
 listening deeply to what he said, you heard it all, clear as a bell,
 plain as day, as if he’d said it out loud. This is the kind of
 listening that game designers must engage in, day in and day
 out, with every decision that they make.
 When you listen thoughtfully, you observe everything and
 constantly ask yourself questions: “Is that right?” “Why is it that
 way?” “Is this how she really feels?” “Now that I know that,
 what does it mean?”
 Game designer Brian Moriarty once pointed out that there was
 a time when we didn’t use the word “listen,” instead we said
 “list!” And where did this come from? Well, what do we do
 when we listen? We tip our head to one side—our head literally
 lists, as a boat at sea. And when we tip to one side, we put
 ourselves off balance; we accept the possibility of upset. When
 we listen deeply, we put ourselves in a position of risk. We
 accept the possibility that what we hear may upset us and may
 cause everything we know to be contradicted. It is the ultimate
 in open-mindedness. It is the only way to learn the truth. You
 must approach everything as a child does, assuming nothing,
 observing everything, and listening as Herman Hesse describes
 in Siddhartha:
 To listen with a silent heart, with a waiting, open soul.
 Without passion, without desire, without judgment, without
 rebuke.
 The Five Kinds of Listening
 Because game design is such an interconnected web, we will be
 visiting and revisiting the five kinds of listening and exploring
 their interconnections throughout this book.
 You will need to listen to your team (Chapters 26 and 27), since
 you will be building your game and making crucial game
 design decisions together with them. Remember that big list of
 skills? Together, your team might have all of them. If you can
 listen deeply to your team and truly communicate with them,
 you will all function as one unit, as if you all shared the same
 skills.
 You will need to listen to your audience (Chapters 9 through 11,
 24, 25, and 33) because these are the people who will be playing
 your game. Ultimately, if they aren’t happy with your game, you
 have failed. And the only way to know what will make them
 happy is to listen to them deeply, getting to know them better
 than they know themselves.
 You will need to listen to your game (most chapters in this
 book). What does this even mean? It means you will get to know
 your game inside and out. Like a mechanic who can tell what is
 wrong with a car by listening to the engine, you will get to know
 what is wrong with your game by listening to it being played.
 You will need to listen to your client (Chapters 30 through 32).
 The client is the one who is paying you to design the game, and
 if you don’t give them what they want, they’ll go to someone
 else who does. Only by listening to them, deeply, will you be
 able to tell what they really want, deep in their hearts.
 And last, you will need to listen to your self (Chapters 1, 7, and
 35). This sounds easy, but for many, it is the most difficult kind
 of listening. If you can master it, however, it will be one of your
 most powerful tools and the secret behind your tremendous
 creativity.
 The Secret of the Gifted
 After all that fancy talk, your confidence might be fading
 already. You might be wondering whether game design is really
 for you. You might have noticed that skilled game designers
 seem to have a special gift for the work. It comes easily and
 naturally to them, and though you love games, you wonder if
 you are gifted enough to succeed as a designer. Well, here is a
 little secret about gifts. There are two kinds. First, there is the
 innate gift of a given skill. This is the minor gift. If you have this
 gift, a skill such as game design, mathematics, or playing the
 piano comes naturally to you. You can do it easily, almost
 without thinking. But you don’t necessarily enjoy doing it.
 There are millions of people with minor gifts of all kinds, who,
 though skilled, never do anything great with their gifted skill,
 and this is because they lack the major gift.
 The major gift is love of the work. This might seem backward.
 How can love of using a skill be more important than the skill
 itself? It is for this simple reason: If you have the major gift, the
 love of designing games, you will design games using whatever
 limited skills you have. And you will keep doing it. And your
 love for the work will shine through, infusing your work with
 an indescribable glow that only comes from the love of doing it.
 And through practice, your game design skills, like muscles, will
 grow and become more powerful, until eventually your skills
 will be as great, or greater than, those of someone who only has
 the minor gift. And people will say, “Wow. That one is a truly
 gifted game designer.” They will think you have the minor gift,
 of course, but only you will know the secret source of your skill,
 which is the major gift: love of the work.
 But maybe you aren’t sure if you have the major gift. You aren’t
 sure if you truly love game design. I have encountered many
 students who started designing games just to see what it was
 like, only to find that to their surprise, they truly love the work.
 I have also encountered those who were certain that they were
 destined to be game designers. Some of them even had the
 minor gift. But when they experienced what game design really
 was like, they realized it wasn’t for them.
 There is only one way to find out if you have the major gift.
 Start down the path, and see if it makes your heart sing.
 So recite your magic words, for down the path we go!
 I am a game designer.
 I am a game designer.
 I am a game designer.
 I am a game designer.
 Other Reading to Consider
 Cirque du Soleil: The Spark—Igniting the Creative Fire
 that Lives within Us All by Lyn Heward and John U.
 Bacon. This is a wonderful little book about finding your
 path.
 Challenges for Game Designers by Brenda Brathwaite
 and Ian Schreiber. A magnificent collection of exercises for
 when you are ready to stretch your game design muscles.
 CHAPTER TWO
 The Designer Creates an Experience
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-2
 FIGURE
 2.1
 I already know the ending
 it’s the part that makes your face implode
 I don’t know what makes your face implode
 but that’s the way the movie ends.
 —They Might Be Giants, Experimental Film
 Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the
 heart, the intellect, or the soul is susceptible, what one shall
 I, on the present occasion, select?
 —Edgar Allen Poe, The Philosophy of Composition
 In Chapter 1, we established that everything begins with the
 game designer and that the game designer needs certain skills.
 Now it is time to begin talking about what a game designer uses
 those skills for. Put another way, we need to ask, “What is the
 game designer’s goal?” At first, the answer seems obvious: a
 game designer’s goal is to design games.
 But this is wrong.
 Ultimately, a game designer does not care about games. Games
 are merely a means to an end. On their own, games are just
 artifacts—clumps of cardboard or bags of bits. Games are
 worthless unless people play them. Why is this? What magic
 happens when games are played?
 When people play games, they have an experience. It is this
 experience that the designer cares about. Without the
 experience, the game is worthless.
 I will warn you right now: we are about to enter territory that is
 very difficult to talk about, not because it is unfamiliar—in fact,
 quite the opposite. It is hard to talk about because it is too
 familiar. Everything we’ve ever seen (look at that sunset!), done
 (have you ever flown a plane?), thought (why is the sky blue?),
 or felt (this snow is so cold!) has been an experience. By
 definition, we can’t experience anything that is not an
 experience. Experiences are so much a part of us; they are hard
 to think about (even thinking about experiences is an
 experience). But as familiar as we are with experiences, they
 are very hard to describe. You can’t see them, touch them, or
 hold them—you can’t even really share them. No two people
 can have identical experiences of the same thing—each
 person’s experience of something is completely unique.
 And this is the paradox of experiences. On one level, they are
 shadowy and nebulous, and on another, they are all we know.
 But as tricky as experiences can be, creating them is all a game
 designer really cares about. We cannot shy away from them,
 retreating into the concreteness of our material game. We must
 use every means we can muster to comprehend, understand,
 and master the nature of human experience.
 The Game Is Not the Experience
 FIGURE
 2.2
 We must be absolutely clear on this point before we can
 proceed. The game is not the experience. The game enables the
 experience, but it is not the experience. This is a hard concept
 for some people to grasp. The ancient Zen question addresses
 this directly: “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to
 hear it, does it make a sound?” This has been repeated so often
 that it sounds hackneyed, but it is exactly what we are talking
 about. If our definition of “sound” is air molecules vibrating,
 then yes, the tree makes a sound. If our definition of sound is
 the experience of hearing a sound, then the answer is no, the
 tree makes no sound when no one is there. As designers, we
 don’t really care about the tree and how it falls—we care only
 about the experience of hearing it. The tree is just a means to an
 end. And if no one is there to hear it, well, we don’t care at all.
 Game designers only care about what seems to exist. The player
 and the game are real. The experience is imaginary—but game
 designers are judged by the quality of this imaginary thing
 because it is the reason people play games.
 If we could, through some high-tech magic, create experiences
 for people directly, with no underlying media—no game boards,
 no computers, no screens—we would do it. In a sense, this is the
 dream of “artificial reality”—to be able to create experiences
 that are in no way limited by the constraints of the medium that
 delivers the experiences. It is a beautiful dream, but only a
 dream. We cannot create experiences directly. Perhaps in the
 distant future, using technologies hard to imagine, such a thing
 could happen. Time will tell. For now, we live in the present,
 where all we can do is create artifacts (rule sets, game boards,
 computer programs) that are likely to create certain kinds of
 experiences when a player interacts with them.
 And it is this that makes game design so very hard. Like
 building a ship in a bottle, we are far removed from what we
 are actually trying to create. We create an artifact that a player
 interacts with and cross our fingers that the experience that
 takes place during that interaction is something they will enjoy.
 We never truly see the output of our work, since it is an
 experience had by someone else and, ultimately, unsharable.
 This is why deep listening is so essential for game design.
 Is This Unique to Games?
 You might well ask what is so special about games, compared to
 other types of experiences, that require us to get into all of this
 touchy-feely experience stuff. And really, on one level, there is
 nothing special about games in this regard. Designers of all
 types of entertainment—books, movies, plays, music, rides,
 everything—have to cope with the same issue: How can you
 create something that will generate a certain experience when
 a person interacts with it?
 But the split between artifact and experience is much more
 obvious for game design than it is for other types of
 entertainment, for a not-so-obvious reason. Game designers
 have to cope with much more interaction than the designers of
 more linear experiences. The author of a book or screenplay is
 designing a linear experience. There is a fairly direct mapping
 between what they create and what the reader or viewer
 experiences. Game designers don’t have it so easy. We give the
 player a great deal of control over the pacing and sequence of
 events in the experience. We even throw in random events!
 This makes the distinction between artifact and experience
 much more obvious than it is for linear entertainment. At the
 same time, though, it makes it much harder to be certain just
 what experience is really going to arise in the mind of the
 player.
 So, why do we do it? What is so special about game experiences
 that we would give up the luxuries of control that linear
 entertainers enjoy? Are we simply masochists? Do we just do it
 for the challenge? No. As with everything else game designers
 do, we do it for the experience it creates. There are certain
 feelings: feelings of choice, feelings of freedom, feelings of
 responsibility, feelings of accomplishment, feelings of
 friendship, and many others, which only game-based
 experiences seem to offer. This is why we go through all the
 trouble—to generate experiences that can be had no other way.
 Three Practical Approaches to Chasing
 Rainbows
 There ain’t no rules around here! We’re trying to accomplish
 something!
 —Thomas Edison
 So—we’ve established what we need to do—create games that
 will somehow generate wonderful, compelling, memorable
 experiences. To do this, we must embark on a daunting
 endeavor: to uncover both the mysteries of the human mind
 and the secrets of the human heart. No one field of study has
 managed to perfectly map this territory (Mendeleev, where are
 you?), but several different fields have managed to map out
 parts of it. Three, in particular, stand out: psychology,
 anthropology, and design. Psychologists want to understand the
 mechanisms that make people tick, anthropologists want to
 understand people on a human level, and designers just want to
 make people happy. We will be using approaches borrowed
 from all three of these fields, so let’s consider what each one has
 to offer us.
 Psychology
 Who better for us to learn the nature of human experience
 from than psychologists, the scientists who study the
 mechanisms that govern the human mind? And truly, they have
 made some discoveries about the mind that are incredibly
 useful, some of which will be covered in this book. In fact, you
 might expect that our quest for understanding how to create
 great human experiences might end right here and that the
 psychologists should have all the answers. Sadly, this is not the
 case. Because they are scientists, they are forced to work in the
 realm of what is real and provable. Early in the twentieth
 century, a schism in psychology developed. On one side of the
 battle were the behaviorists who focused only on measurable
 behavior, taking a “black box” approach to the study of the
 mind. Their primary tool was objective, controlled
 experimentation. On the other side were the phenomenologists,
 who study what game designers care about most—the nature of
 human experience and “the feeling of what happens.” Their
 primary tool was introspection—the act of examining your
 experiences as they happen.
 Unfortunately for us, the behaviorists won out and for very
 good reasons. The behavioristic focus on objective, repeatable
 experiments makes for very good science. One behaviorist can
 do an experiment, publish a paper about it, and other
 behaviorists can repeat the experiment under the same
 conditions, almost certainly getting the same results. The
 phenomenological approach, on the other hand, is necessarily
 subjective. Experiences themselves cannot be directly
 measured—only described and described imperfectly. When an
 experiment takes place in your mind, how can you possibly be
 sure the experimental conditions are controlled? As fascinating
 and useful as it might be to study our own internal thoughts
 and feelings, it makes for shaky science. As a result, for as much
 progress that has been made by modern psychology, it
 generally feels obligated to avoid the thing we care about the
 most—the nature of human experience.
 Though psychology does not have all the answers we need, it
 does provide some very useful ones, as we’ll see. More than
 that, it provides approaches we can use quite effectively. Not
 bound by the strict responsibilities of good science, game
 designers can make use of both behavioristic experiments and
 phenomenological introspection to learn what we need to
 know, since ultimately, as designers, we are not concerned with
 what is definitely true in the world of objective reality but only
 with what seems to be true in the world of subjective
 experience.
 But perhaps there is another scientific approach that lies
 somewhere between the two extremes of behaviorism and
 phenomenology?
 Anthropology
 Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the
 most scientific of the humanities.
 —Alfred L. Kroeber
 Anthropology is another major branch of study about human
 beings and what they think and do. It takes a much more
 holistic approach than psychology, looking at everything about
 people including their physical, mental, and cultural aspects. It
 is very concerned with studying the similarities and differences
 between the various peoples of the world, not just today, but
 throughout history.
 Of particular interest to game designers is the approach of
 cultural anthropology, which is the study of living peoples’ ways
 of life, mostly through fieldwork. Cultural anthropologists live
 with their subjects of study and try to immerse themselves
 completely in the world of the people they are trying to learn
 about. They strive for objective observation of culture and
 practices, but at the same time, they engage in introspection
 and take great pains to put themselves in the place of their
 subjects. This helps the anthropologist better imagine what it
 “feels like” to be their subjects.
 We can learn a number of important things about human
 nature from the work of anthropologists—but much more
 important, by taking a cultural anthropologist’s approach to our
 players, interviewing them, learning everything we can about
 them, and putting ourselves in their place, we can gain insights
 that would not have been possible from a more objective point
 of view.
 Design
 The third field that has made important study of human
 experience is, not surprisingly, the field of design. We will be
 able to learn useful things from almost every kind of designer:
 musicians, architects, authors, filmmakers, industrial designers,
 web designers, choreographers, visual designers, and many
 more. The incredible variety of design “rules of thumb” that
 comes from these different disciplines does an excellent job of
 illustrating useful principles about human experience. But
 unfortunately, these principles can often be hard for us to use.
 Unlike scientists, designers seldom publish papers about their
 discoveries. The very best designers in various fields often
 know little about the workings of other fields of design. The
 musician may know a lot about rhythm but probably has given
 little thought to how the principles of rhythm might apply to
 something nonmusical, such as a novel or stage play, even
 though they may have meaningful practical application there,
 since they are ultimately rooted in the same place—the human
 mind. So, to use principles from other areas of design, we will
 need to cast a wide net. Anyone who creates something that
 people are meant to experience and enjoy has something to
 teach us, and so we will pull rules and examples from designers
 of every stripe, being as “xenophilic” as possible.
 Ideally, we would find ways to connect all the varied principles
 of design to each other through the common ground of
 psychology and anthropology, since ultimately all design
 principles are rooted in these. In some small ways, we will do
 that in this book. Perhaps one day these three fields will find a
 way to unify all their principles. For now, we will need to be
 content with building a few bridges here and there—this is no
 small accomplishment, since these are three fields that seldom
 have much cross-pollination. Further, some of the bridges will
 prove to be surprisingly useful! The task before us, game
 design, is so difficult that we cannot afford to be snobbish about
 where we get our knowledge. None of these approaches can
 solve all our problems, so we will mix and match them, trying
 to use them appropriately, like we might use tools from a
 toolbox. We must be both open-minded and practical—good
 ideas can come from anywhere, but they are only good for us if
 they help us create better experiences.
 Introspection: Powers, Perils, and Practice
 A dedicated scientist never hesitates to experiment on
 himself.
 —Fenton Claypool
 We have discussed some of the places to find useful tools for
 mastering human experience. Let’s now focus on one tool that
 has been used by all three disciplines: introspection. This is the
 seemingly simple act of examining your own thoughts and
 feelings—that is, your own experiences. While it is true you can
 never truly know the experience of another, you certainly can
 know your own. In one sense, it is all you can know. By deeply
 listening to your own self, that is, observing, evaluating, and
 describing your own experiences, you can make rapid, decisive
 judgments about what is and is not working in your game and
 why it is or is not working.
 “But wait,” you might say. “Is introspection really such a good
 idea? If it isn’t good enough for the scientists, why is it good
 enough for us?” And this is a fair question. There are two main
 perils associated with using introspection.
 Peril #1: Introspection Can Lead to False Conclusions
 about Reality
 This is the scientists’ main reason to reject introspection as a
 valid method of inquiry. Many pseudoscientists over the years
 have come up with crackpot theories based mainly on
 introspection. This happens so often because what seems to be
 true in our personal experience is not necessarily really true.
 Socrates, for example, noted that when we learn something
 new, it often feels like we knew it all along and that in learning
 it, it feels as if we were just reminded of something we already
 knew but had forgotten. This is an interesting observation, and
 most people can remember a learning experience that felt this
 way. But Socrates then goes too far and forms an elaborate
 argument that since learning can feel like recollection, we must
 then be reincarnated souls who are just now remembering
 what we learned in past lives.
 This is the problem with drawing conclusions about reality
 based on introspection—just because something feels true, it
 doesn’t mean it is true. People very easily fall into the trap of
 building up structures of questionable logic to back up
 something that feels like it must be true. Scientists learn to be
 disciplined about avoiding this trap. Introspection certainly has
 its place in science—it allows one to examine a problem from
 points of view that mere logic won’t allow. Good scientists use
 introspection all the time—but they don’t draw scientific
 conclusions from it.
 Fortunately for us, game design is not science! While “objective
 truth about reality” is interesting and sometimes useful to us,
 we primarily care about what “feels like it is true.” Aristotle
 gives us another classical example that illustrates this perfectly.
 He wrote a number of works on a variety of topics, such as
 logic, physics, natural history, and philosophy. He is famous for
 the depth of his personal introspection, and when we examine
 his works, we find something interesting. His ideas about
 physics and natural history are largely discredited today. Why?
 Because he relied too much on what felt true and not enough on
 controlled experiments. His introspection led him to all kinds of
 conclusions we now know to be false, such as the following:
 Heavier objects fall faster than light ones.
 The seat of consciousness is in the heart.
 Life arises by spontaneous generation.
 So why do we remember him as a genius and not as a crackpot?
 Because his other works, about metaphysics, drama, ethics, and
 the mind, are still useful today. In these areas where what feels
 true matters more than what is objectively, provably true, most
 of his conclusions, reached through deep introspection, stand
 up to scrutiny thousands of years later.
 The lesson here is simple: when dealing with the human heart
 and mind and trying to understand experience and what things
 feel like, introspection is an incredibly powerful and
 trustworthy tool. As game designers, we don’t need to worry
 much about this first peril. We care more about how things feel
 and less about what is really true. Because of this, we can often
 confidently trust our feelings and instincts when making
 conclusions about the quality of an experience.
 Peril #2: What Is True of My Experiences May Not Be
 True for Others
 This second danger of introspection is the one we must take
 seriously. With the first peril, we got a “Get Out of Jail Free”
 card because we are designers, not scientists. But we can’t get
 away from this one so easily. This peril is the peril of
 subjectivity and a place where many designers fall into a trap:
 “I like playing this game; therefore, it must be good.” And
 sometimes, this is right. But other times, if the audience has
 tastes that differ from your own, it is very, very wrong. Some
 designers take extreme positions on this ranging from “I will
 only design for people like me, because it is the only way I can
 be sure my game is good” to “introspection and subjective
 opinions can’t be trusted. Only playtesting can be trusted.” Each
 of these is a “safe” position but also has its limits and problems:
 “I only design for people like me” has these problems:
 Game designers tend to have unusual tastes. There may not
 be enough people like you out there to make your game a
 worthwhile investment.
 You won’t be designing or developing alone. If different team
 members have different ideas about what is best, they can be
 hard to resolve.
 There are many kinds of games and audiences that will be
 completely off limits to you.
 “Personal opinions can’t be trusted” has these problems:
 You can’t leave every decision to playtesting, especially early
 in the process, when there is no game yet to playtest. At this
 point, someone has to exert a personal opinion about what is
 good and bad.
 Before a game is completely finished, playtesters may reject
 an unusual idea. They sometimes need to see it completed
 before they can really appreciate it. If you don’t trust your
 own feelings about what is good and bad, you may, at the
 advice of your playtesters, throw out an “ugly duckling” that
 could have grown up to be a beautiful swan.
 Playtesting can only happen occasionally. Important game
 design decisions must be made on a daily basis.
 The way out of this peril, without resorting to such limiting
 extremes, is again to listen. Introspection for game design is a
 process of not just listening to yourself but also listening to
 others. By observing your own experiences, and then observing
 others, and trying to put yourself in their place, you start to
 develop a picture of how your experiences differ from theirs.
 Once you have a clear picture of these differences, you can, like
 a cultural anthropologist, start to put yourself in the place of
 your audience and make predictions about what experiences
 they will and will not enjoy. It is a delicate art that must be
 practiced—and with practice, your skill at it will improve.
 Dissect Your Feelings
 Work in the invisible world at least as hard as you do in the
 visible.
 —Rumi
 It is not such a simple thing to know your feelings. It is not
 enough for a designer to simply have a general sense about
 whether they like something or not. You must be able to clearly
 state what you like, what you don’t like, and why. A friend of
 mine in college was notoriously bad at this. We would
 frequently drive each other crazy with conversations like the
 following:
 Me: What did you eat at the cafeteria today?
 Him: Pizza. It was bad.
 Me: Bad? What was bad about it?
 Him: It was just … bad.
 Me: Do you mean it was too cold? Too hard? Too soggy? Too
 bitter? Too much sauce? Not enough sauce? Too cheesy? What
 was bad about it?
 Him: I don’t know—it was just bad!
 He was simply unable to clearly dissect his experiences. In the
 case of the pizza, he knew he didn’t like it but was unable to (or
 didn’t bother to) analyze the experience to the point where he
 could make useful suggestions about how the pizza might
 improve. This kind of experience dissection is a main goal of
 your introspection—it is something designers must do. When
 you play a game, you must be able to analyze how it made you
 feel, what it made you think of, and what it made you do. You
 must be able to state this analysis clearly. You must put words
 to it, for feelings are abstract, but words are concrete, and you
 will need this concreteness to describe to others the
 experiences you want your game to produce. You need to do
 this kind of analysis not only when designing and playing your
 own games but also when playing games other people have
 created. In fact, you should be able to analyze any experience
 you might have. The more you analyze your own experiences,
 the more clearly you will be able to think about the kinds of
 experiences your games should create.
 We have a special word for the feelings that rise up from within
 us: emotions. Our logical mind can easily dismiss emotions as
 unimportant, but they are the foundation of all memorable
 experience. So that we never forget the importance of emotions
 for experience design, let’s make them our first lens.
 #1 THE LENS OF EMOTION
 People may forget what you said, but they’ll never forget
 how you made them feel.
 —Maya Angelou
 To make sure the emotions you create are the right ones, ask
 yourself these questions:
 What emotions would I like my player to experience? Why?
 What emotions are players (including me) having when they
 play now? Why?
 How can I bridge the gap between the emotions players are
 having and the emotions I’d like them to have?
 Illustration by Rachel Dorrett
 Defeating Heisenberg
 But there is still a greater challenge of introspection. How can
 we observe our own experiences without tainting them, since
 the act of observation itself is an experience? We face this
 problem quite often. Try to observe what your fingers are doing
 as you type at a computer keyboard and you will quickly find
 yourself typing slowly and making many errors, if you can still
 type at all. Try to observe yourself enjoying a movie or a game,
 and the enjoyment can quickly fade away. Some call this
 “paralysis by analysis,” and others refer to it as the Heisenberg
 principle. This principle, in reference to the Heisenberg
 uncertainty principle from quantum mechanics, implies that
 the attributes of a particle cannot be observed without affecting
 those attributes. Similarly, the nature of an experience cannot
 be observed without affecting the nature of that experience.
 This makes introspection sound hopeless. While it is a
 challenging problem, there are ways around it that are quite
 effective, though some take practice. Most of us are not in the
 habit of openly discussing the nature of our thought processes,
 so some of the following is going to sound a little strange.
 Analyze Memories
 One good thing about experiences is that we remember them.
 Analyzing an experience while it is happening can be hard,
 because the part of your mind used for analysis is normally
 focused on the experience itself. Analyzing your memory of an
 experience is much easier. Memory is imperfect, but analyzing
 a memory is better than nothing. Of course, the more you
 remember, the better, so working either with memories of
 powerful experiences (these often make the best inspiration,
 anyway) or with fresh memories is best. If you have the mental
 discipline, it also can be very useful to engage in an experience
 (such as playing a game), with the intention of not analyzing it
 while you play, but with the intention of analyzing the memory
 of it immediately after. Just having this intention can help you
 remember more details of the experience without interfering
 with the experience itself. This does require you to remember
 that you are going to analyze it without letting that thought
 interfere with the experience. Tricky!
 Two Passes
 A method that builds on analyzing memories is to run through
 your experience twice. The first time, don’t stop to analyze
 anything—just have the experience. Then, go back and do it
 again, this time, analyzing everything—maybe even pausing to
 take notes. You have the untainted experience fresh in your
 mind, and the second run-through lets you “relive it” but gives
 you a chance to stop and think, considering how it felt and why.
 Sneak Glances
 Is it possible to observe your experience without spoiling it? It
 is, but it takes some practice. It sounds strange to say this, but if
 you “sneak quick glances” at your experience while it is
 happening, you can often observe it quite well without
 degrading or interrupting it significantly. It is kind of like trying
 to get a good look at a stranger in a public place. Take a few
 short glances at them, and they won’t notice you are observing
 them. But look too long, and you will catch their attention, and
 they will notice you staring. Fortunately, you can learn a lot
 about an experience with a few short “mental glances.” Again,
 this takes some mental discipline or you will get carried away
 with analysis. If you can make these mental glances habitual,
 just doing them all the time without thinking about it, they will
 interrupt things even less. Most people find what really
 interrupts their train of thought, or train of experience, is
 interior mental dialog. When you start asking and answering
 too many questions in your head, your experience is doomed. A
 “quick glance” is more like “Exciting enough? Yes.” Then, you
 immediately stop analyzing and get back to the experience,
 until the next glance.
 Observe Silently
 Ideally, though, you want to observe what is happening to you
 while it is happening, not just through a few quick glances but
 through continuous observation. You want it to be as if you
 were sitting outside yourself, watching yourself, except that you
 see more than a normal observer. You can hear all of your
 thoughts and feel all of your feelings. When you enter this state,
 it is almost as if you have two minds: one moving, engaged in
 an experience, and one still, silently observing the other. This
 may sound completely bizarre, but it is quite possible and quite
 useful. It is a difficult state to achieve, but it can be reached. It
 seems to be something like the Zen practice of self-observation,
 and it is not unlike the meditation exercise of trying to observe
 your own breathing cycle. Normally we breathe without
 thinking, but at any moment, we may consciously take control
 of our breathing process—consequently interfering with it.
 With practice however, you can observe your natural,
 unconscious breathing without disturbing it. But this takes
 practice, just as observing your experiences takes practice.
 Observing your experiences can be practiced anywhere—while
 watching TV, while working, while playing, or while doing
 anything at all. You won’t get it right at first, but if you keep
 experimenting and practicing, you will start to get the hang of
 it. It will take a great deal of practice. But if you truly want to
 listen to your self and understand the nature of human
 experience, you will find the practice worthwhile.
 Essential Experience
 But how does all this talk about experience and observations
 really fit in with games? If I want to make a game about, say, a
 snowball fight, does analyzing my memories of a real snowball
 fight have any bearing on the snowball fight game I want to
 make? There is no way I can perfectly replicate the experience
 of a real snowball fight without real snow and real friends
 outside in the real world—so what is the point?
 The point is that you don’t need to perfectly replicate real
 experiences to make a good game. What you need to do is to
 capture the essence of those experiences for your game. What
 does “the essence of an experience” really mean? Every
 memorable experience has some key features that define it and
 make it special. When you go over your memory of a snowball
 fight experience, for example, you might think of a lot of things.
 There are some you might even consider essential to that
 experience: “There was so much snow, school was canceled.”
 “We played right in the street.” “The snow was just right for
 packing.” “It was so cold, but sunny—the sky was so blue.”
 “There were kids everywhere.” “We built this huge fort.” “Fred
 threw a snowball really high—when I looked up at it, he
 chucked one right at my head!” “We couldn’t stop laughing.”
 There are also parts of that experience that you don’t consider
 essential: “I was wearing corduroy pants.” “I had some mints in
 my pocket.” “A man walking his dog looked at us.”
 As a game designer trying to design an experience, your goal is
 to figure out the essential elements that really define the
 experience you want to create and find ways to make them part
 of your game design. This way, the players of your game get to
 experience those essential elements. Much of this book will be
 about the many ways you can craft a game to get across the
 experience you want players to have. The key idea here is that
 the essential experience can often be delivered in a form that is
 very different from a real experience. To follow up on the
 snowball fight example, what are some of the ways you could
 convey the experience “it was so cold” through a snowball fight
 game? If it is a videogame, you could certainly use artwork: the
 characters could breathe little puffs of condensation, and they
 could have a shivering animation. You could use sound effects—
 perhaps a whistling wind could convey coldness. Maybe there
 wasn’t a cold wind on the day you are imagining, but the sound
 effect might capture the essence and deliver an experience that
 seems cold to the player. You could use the rules of the game,
 too, if cold was really important to you. Maybe players can
 make better snowballs without gloves, but when their hands get
 too cold, they have to put gloves on. Again, that might not have
 really happened, but that game rule helps deliver an experience
 of coldness that will be an integral part of your game.
 Some people find this approach strange—they say, “Just design
 a game and see what experience comes out of it!” And I suppose
 it is true—if you don’t know what you want, you might not care
 what you get. But if you do know what you want—if you have a
 vision of how you would like your game to feel to the players—
 you need to consider how you are going to deliver the essential
 experience. And this brings us to our next lens.
 #2 THE LENS OF ESSENTIAL EXPERIENCE
 To use this lens, you stop thinking about your game and start
 thinking about the experience of the player. Ask yourself these
 questions:
 What experience do I want the player to have?
 What is essential to that experience?
 How can my game capture that essence?
 Illustration by Zachary D. Coe
 If there is a big difference between the experience you want to
 create and the one you are actually creating, your game needs
 to change: you need to clearly state the essential experience you
 desire and find as many ways as possible to instill this essence
 into your game.
 The design of the very successful baseball game in Wii Sports is
 an excellent example of the Lens of Essential Experience in use.
 Originally, the designers had intended to make it as much like
 real baseball as possible with the added bonus that you could
 swing your controller like a bat. As they proceeded, though,
 they realized they wouldn’t have time to simulate every aspect
 of baseball as much as they wanted. So they made a big decision
 —since swinging the controller was the most unique part of this
 game, they would focus all their attention on getting that part of
 the baseball experience right—what they felt was the essential
 part. They decided that other details (nine innings, stealing
 bases, etc.) were not part of the essential experience they were
 trying to create.
 Designer Chris Klug made masterful use of the Lens of Essential
 Experience when he created the tabletop role-playing game
 James Bond 007. Klug had been frustrated with previous
 attempts to create secret agent role-playing games, such as
 TSR’s Top Secret, because they played too much like war games
 —the essence of what made spy movies exciting just wasn’t
 there. For the Bond game, Klug designed the mechanics to feel
 like the exciting James Bond films every way he could. One
 outstanding example was the creation of something called
 “Hero Points.” In traditional RPGs, when players would
 undertake a risky action, say, jumping out a window onto a
 moving helicopter, the game master would make some
 calculation of the probability of it succeeding, the player would
 roll the dice, and that was that. This gives the game master a
 difficult problem of balance: if the probability of succeeding at
 dangerous actions is too low, the players won’t risk it. But if the
 chance is too high, the players will all act like superheroes,
 attempting and succeeding at all kinds of impossible feats.
 Klug’s solution was to give players a budget of Hero Points,
 which they could use in risky situations to alter dice rolls to
 their favor. Since each player only got a small number of points
 to use on each adventure, players had to be very careful about
 when to use them—but when they did use them, it was to enact
 spectacular events that truly captured the essence of the James
 Bond books and films.
 It is true that many designers do not use the Lens of Essential
 Experience. They just kind of follow their gut instinct and
 stumble across game structures that happen to enable
 experiences that people enjoy. The danger with this approach is
 that it relies on luck to a large extent. To be able to separate the
 experience from the game is very useful: if you have a clear
 picture in your mind of the experiences your players are having
 and what parts of your game enable that experience, you will
 have a much clearer picture of how to make your game better,
 because you will know which elements of the game you can
 safely change and which ones you cannot. The ultimate goal of
 the game designer is to deliver an experience. When you have a
 clear picture of your ideal experience and its essential
 elements, your design has something to aspire to. Without that
 goal, you are just wandering in the dark.
 All That’s Real Is What You Feel
 All this talk of experience brings out an idea that is very strange
 indeed. The only reality that we can know is the reality of the
 experience. And we know that what we experience is “not
 really reality.” We filter reality through our senses and through
 our minds, and the consciousness we actually experience is a
 kind of illusion—not really reality at all. But this illusion is all
 that can ever be real for us, because it is us. This is a headache
 for philosophers, but a wonderful thing for game designers,
 because it means that the designed experiences that are created
 through our games have a chance of feeling as real and as
 meaningful (and sometimes more so) than our everyday
 experiences.
 We will explore that further in Chapter 10: The Player’s Mind,
 but right now we should take a moment to consider where
 these experiences actually take place.
 CHAPTER THREE
 The Experience Takes Place in a Venue
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-3
 FIGURE
 3.1
 The Shifting Sands of Platform
 A tremendous amount of discussion takes place in the digital
 game realm about platforms. Players and designers are
 constantly debating about PC vs. console vs. mobile vs. tablet vs.
 web vs. handheld vs. arcade vs. etcetera vs. etcetera. Which is
 the best? The most profitable? The most fun? The most likely to
 still be here in three years? It is human nature to assume that
 when something is successful, it will remain that way forever.
 But it isn’t the case. Some things stay, and some go. Television
 mostly replaced radio, but it didn’t replace movies. Arcade
 gaming was replaced by PC gaming, which was replaced by
 console gaming, but then PC gaming came back, and mobile and
 tablet gaming rose up. Is it random? Absolutely not. The thing
 that makes specific technologies come and go from our lives is
 as old and persistent as humanity itself. The mistake that we
 make again and again is to focus too much on the existing
 technologies (which, though new and shiny, are ephemeral) and
 to forget to focus on something so familiar as to be invisible: the
 places in our lives that we use those technologies. I like to call
 these venues.
 It takes a bit of a mental shift to look past the technologies we
 use and instead to see the patterns of how we use them, but it is
 a good exercise, as it helps to give us insight about the past,
 present, and future of gameplay. I’ll share with you here the
 system of venues that I use to think about gameplay. It’s not a
 perfect system—it has both gaps and overlaps—but again and
 again I have found it useful when thinking about what kind of
 gameplay works best where and why.
 FIGURE
 3.2
 Private Venues
 Gameplay is often aided by privacy. To take the risk of
 immersing yourself in a fantasy world, we like to be in a safe
 place, either alone or surrounded by people we know and trust.
 Naturally, some of the most important play spaces are in the
 home.
 The Hearth
 One of the defining aspects of the human species is our
 relationship with fire. Before we understood how to use fire, we
 lived much more like animals. Once we mastered and tamed
 fire, it changed us culturally, psychologically, and physically. It
 gave us light, warmth, and safety. It let us cook our food,
 allowing a simpler digestive system and larger brains. Tending
 a fire was an around-the-clock responsibility, making families
 and large social groups more important than ever. Today, open
 fires are obsolete, but homes are still built with fireplaces,
 because it just “feels wrong” not to have one. Some
 anthropologists have theorized that the trance we fall into
 when staring at a fire may be an evolved behavior—if your
 mind finds it peaceful and tranquil to stare at a fire for hours
 on end, you have a tremendous survival advantage over
 someone else who gets distracted and lets it go out.
 In most modern homes, the TV screen has replaced the
 fireplace. And it makes a pretty good substitute. It’s the right
 size, it gives light in the darkness, it flickers in a similar way,
 and instead of relying on family members to entertain each
 other by telling stories, this modern fire tells its own stories.
 Not surprisingly, the hearth is also a good place for
 gameplaying. It seems to work best for games that can entertain
 multiple people, either by letting them play together or by being
 fun to watch. Nintendo’s Wii proved an excellent game system
 for hearth play, with a collection of games that not only could
 the whole family play but were also quite entertaining just to
 watch because of all the physical involvement in a virtual
 world. From the hearth point of view, it is hardly surprising
 that Nintendo’s follow-up system, the Wii U, was largely a
 disappointment, with a focus on a separate handheld screen
 unable to leave the hearth that only one player could see and
 enjoy. Similarly, popular games about singing and dancing, such
 as SingStar and Dance Central, are natural fits for the hearth, as
 we’ve been singing and dancing around the fire for over a
 million years.
 When new technologies arrive, people are quick to suggest an
 end to the hearth. “The end of television” or “the end of game
 consoles” is often shouted in the press. And surely, yes, the way
 we enjoy stories, songs, and gameplay in the heart of our home
 will continue to change and evolve, but the hearth has been
 with us since the dawn of humanity—don’t expect it to vanish
 anytime soon.
 The Workbench
 Most homes have some kind of private space set aside for
 working on hard problems. Whether it be an actual workbench
 in the basement for woodworking and repair projects, a sewing
 machine for making and fixing clothes, or a desk in a quiet
 corner for doing homework or writing, I refer to these
 collectively as “the workbench.” These places tend to be solitary
 and quiet and often a bit messy, since work is messy and guests
 to the home don’t usually visit these places. When computers
 came into the home, they very quickly found their way to
 “workbench” areas, since both work and play on a computer
 tend to be intense and solitary. It is interesting to note the
 differences between “workbench” and “hearth” games. MOBAs
 like League of Legends and MMOs like World of Warcraft, for all
 their popularity, have tended to stay at the “workbench” and
 out of the hearth. The success of Valve’s Steam network stems
 greatly from the fact that other game networks (e.g., Sony,
 Microsoft, Nintendo, and Apple) are focused mostly on other
 venues, leaving Steam to own the workbench.
 Workbench games tend to be difficult and intense and can
 require hours of play at a time. They tend not to involve family
 members but may involve online play with others who are likeminded about the importance of the challenges the games
 provide. As of 2019, it seems that head-mounted virtual reality
 display systems, which favor intensity and privacy, are more at
 home at the workbench than at the hearth.
 The Reading Nook
 Reading is a relatively new pastime for humans, only coming
 into popularity in the last few thousand years, but it has taken
 firm root. There is something magical about sitting alone with a
 text and letting it carry your mind away to a different world full
 of exciting and interesting people and places. Books are
 portable—we can read anywhere, but there are places we very
 much prefer to read. Most people prefer not to read in the
 hearth unless they are home alone, as it tends to be noisy and
 full of interruptions. Reading at the workbench isn’t very
 preferable either, because though it is private and quiet, it
 generally isn’t very comfortable. The workbench is a very “lean
 forward” place, whereas reading is more of a “lean back”
 activity. Typical reading nooks are in the bedroom or whatever
 room in the house that has a quiet chair or couch away from
 the TV.
 But what does reading have to do with playing games? The
 connection isn’t obvious. PC gaming and game consoles are not
 good fits for the reading nook. When Apple announced the iPad,
 the game industry was not impressed. It didn’t have the
 convenience of a mobile phone that let you play games
 anywhere, and it didn’t have a control system that let players
 play the kinds of experiences so popular at the hearth and the
 workbench, so the game industry largely dismissed it. But the
 iPad did catch on as a platform for reading and watching
 videos, and then became a significant force in gaming. Why?
 Because it is the perfect platform for gameplay in the reading
 nook. Playing tablet games in bed, or on a couch, or in some
 quiet corner is very peaceful and relaxing, much like reading a
 book. And the games that succeed on tablets are very different
 than ones that succeed on game consoles or on PC. They are
 easier, simpler, and more relaxing—the right kind of play to
 suit the reading nook.
 Public Venues
 Not all gameplay happens in the home, of course. The world is
 an exciting place, full exciting people, places, and things to visit.
 The secret to location-based entertainment (LBE) has been well
 known for thousands of years. Whether you are running a
 tavern, a theater, a restaurant, a brothel, a theme park, or a
 video arcade, the rule is the same: give them something they
 can’t get at home.
 The Theater
 There is something magic about theaters. They come in many
 shapes and sizes and many purposes. Whether they be for
 plays, movies, musical performances, sporting events, or even
 planetarium shows, they have one thing in common: a large
 number of people gather to witness something together.
 Something magical happens when a crowd focuses on a
 sequence of events simultaneously. Somehow, we get something
 from the other people in the audience. I sometimes think we
 are able to subconsciously sense how others are feeling about
 the performance, and it helps focus our own feelings. This is
 probably why so many TV shows feature laugh tracks—there is
 something about appreciating an experience together that feels
 very satisfying.
 But it is this very crowd that makes playing games in the
 theater such a problem. Games, being interactive, want to be a
 unique experience for each player. Time and again, people have
 tried to make theatrical experiences where everyone in the
 audience participates, but there have not been any long-term
 successes yet. The joy of interactivity is watered down
 proportionately by the number of seats, either making for an
 experience that gets tiresome quickly or for a theater so small
 as to be unprofitable. It is possible that someone will find a way
 to use technology to overcome this difficulty—but any solution
 that does so will have to be very clever indeed.
 The Arena
 For thousands of years, competitive games have taken place in
 specialized fields of play. From chariot racing, to boxing, to
 team sports of all kinds, they all take place in the arena. Most of
 the time, the arena is large and out of doors, in a place specially
 designed for that type of gameplay. Baseball diamonds, golf
 courses, soccer fields, tennis courts, horse tracks, even a
 courtroom—all of these are a kind of arena. In addition to being
 specialized for this kind of gameplay, most of the time, the
 arena is in a public place, making it possible for others to
 witness what takes place there—in other words, who wins and
 who loses is not private, but rather a matter of public record.
 And since people can get pretty excited about watching these
 games, in many cases, a theater forms around the arena,
 creating two venues in one!
 So far, digital gameplay has made little impact in the traditional
 outdoor sports arena. But that hasn’t stopped digital gameplay
 from taking on the characteristics of arena play. Multiplayer
 first-person shooters are very much a kind of arena play:
 though the players are technically in the workbench or the
 hearth, their minds are in the arena. And, more and more,
 virtual theaters are springing up around this play, as more and
 more people are watching each other play digital games, either
 live (esports tournaments are sometime watched by millions of
 simultaneous players) or recorded, via YouTube or twitch.tv.
 While certainly the lines are blurring, I suspect that over time,
 with new mobile and augmented reality technology, we will see
 traditional sporting arenas become ever more digital.
 The Museum
 Sometimes we need a break from the things in our day-to-day
 life, and we have a sense that by examining exotic things and
 places, we will get a dose of much-needed variety, we will
 expand our knowledge of the world, and perhaps most
 importantly, we will return home with a new perspective that
 gives new life to the commonplace things around us. Of course,
 museums of every sort fall into the category I call the museum,
 but so do many other things. Zoos and aquariums are sorts of
 museums, and when we go sightseeing, we treat the city we
 visit as a sort of museum. Even shopping trips to unusual stores
 are a sort of museum visit, as we look at, and imagine owning,
 all sorts of new and exotic objects.
 Gameplay might seem like an unusual partner for the museum,
 but many games are right at home there. More and more, actual
 museums incorporate gameplay experiences as a way to
 introduce visitors to information about what they are viewing.
 And visiting a video arcade has a very museum-like quality, as
 you pass from game to game, trying each and thinking about
 which ones you like best.
 Half Private/Half Public Venues
 Other venues exist somewhere between the privacy of the
 home and the openness of a public venue, or they find a way to
 exist in both. The flexibility of these spaces that live on the
 boundary between public and private is what makes them
 interesting and important.
 The Gaming Table
 There is something very special about the games that are
 played around a table. There is a special face-to-face intimacy
 as the players sit like gods over the toy world they control.
 Certainly, we can do this in the home, but we have a tendency
 to do it mostly when guests are over, making our home a bit
 more public than it normally is. But table games also exist in
 more public places, such as a pool table at a bar or a poker table
 in a casino. There is something about table games that creates a
 special intensity in players. Curiously, both the sandwich and
 the sushi roll were invented at about the same time (the
 eighteenth century), though in very different parts of the world,
 by table gameplayers who were so obsessed with their games
 that they needed a way to eat without having to stop the game.
 Board, card, and dice games have long been the mainstay of the
 gaming table. So far, excepting some experimental board
 games, digital games have not found much of a home at this
 venue, probably because of their reliance on vertical screens.
 As touch screens grow cheaper and larger, and augmented
 reality glasses enter the marketplace, it is entirely possible that
 a whole new world of digital games will come into the table
 games venue.
 The Playground
 As adults who are excited about games, we can sometimes
 forget that play is largely the domain of children. And while
 children like to play in different ways in the home and they
 sometimes enjoy the formality of playing sports in arena-like
 venues, they also like to play out-of-doors with their friends.
 When we hear the world “playground” our first thought is often
 of play equipment at public parks. And while that is one sort of
 playground, any space where children gather for
 improvisational play, be it a backyard, a street, a vacant lot, or a
 cave in the woods, is a kind of playground.
 Playground play is easy for adults to forget about, because we
 mostly don’t play that way anymore. But children always will,
 and they must—it is an important part of their development.
 The video game industry has largely ignored playground play
 so far, because it hasn’t been feasible for them to create games
 that work there—but as technology becomes more rugged and
 more mobile, that will likely change.
 Anywhere
 Some games don’t really care where they are played. Crossword
 puzzles, Sudoku, and Word Find games are classic paper
 examples of “play anywhere” games, which can be very useful
 on the bus or when you have a few spare minutes at work or
 school. Of course, the explosion of smartphone games has
 changed the anywhere venue forever, creating a vastly richer
 set of games that can be played anywhere, at any time.
 However, it is worth noting that these games, due to their
 interruptibility and small screen size, have some distinct
 qualities. They tend to be playable in tiny bites, and they tend to
 have very simple interfaces and stories. Additionally, because
 they are just filling a few minutes here and there during one’s
 day, players are generally not willing to pay very much for them
 up front, preferring them to be free if possible. In Chapter 32:
 Profit, we’ll talk more about the specifics of these games and the
 peculiarities of their business models.
 Venues Mixed and Matched
 It’s easy to find gaps and overlaps in this system of venues.
 What venue am I in when I play a game of pinball at a
 restaurant? What venue is a bowling alley? Is a casino a
 museum, an arena, a collection of table games, or something
 else entirely? The Nintendo Switch is a remarkable platform
 because it works well in the Hearth, the Reading Nook, the
 Gaming Table, and even Anywhere. The important thing isn’t to
 have a perfect taxonomy of venues; the important thing is to
 see past the games and platforms so that you are aware of the
 venues and their properties, because while games and
 technologies change constantly, venues change very little. To
 that end, here is a lens to help you see the truth.
 Now that we’ve talked about experiences and where they take
 place, we need to confront a more troubling question. What
 exactly makes a game a game?
 #3 THE LENS OF THE VENUE
 The places that we play exert tremendous influence on the
 design of our games. To make sure you aren’t designing in a
 vacuum, ask yourself these questions:
 What type of venue best suits the game I’m trying to create?
 Does my venue have special properties that will influence my
 game?
 What elements of my game are in harmony with my venue?
 What elements are not?
 Illustration by Zachary D. Coe
 Other Reading to Consider
 A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al. This
 is an incredibly thought-provoking book about the
 relationship between humans and the spaces they live in.
 We’ll see this book again in Chapter 21: Spaces.
 CHAPTER FOUR
 The Experience Rises Out of a Game
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-4
 FIGURE
 4.1
 It is wonderful to talk about the design of experiences. Creating
 great experiences is indeed our goal. But we cannot touch
 experiences. We cannot manipulate them directly. What a game
 designer can control, can get their hands in, is the game. The
 game is your clay, and you will shape it and mold it to create all
 kinds of fabulous game experiences.
 So, what kind of games are we talking about? In this book, we
 mean all kinds of games: board games, card games, athletic
 games, playground games, party games, gambling games,
 puzzle games, arcade games, electronic games, computer
 games, videogames, and just about any other game that you
 might think of, for, as we’ll see, the same principles of design
 apply to all of them. It is a little surprising that with such
 variety between these kinds of games, we recognize them all as
 one kind; that is, as different as they are, we intuitively
 recognize them all as games.
 What is it that these things have in common? Or, to put it
 another way, how do we define “game”?
 A Rant about Definitions
 Before we continue, I want to be clear about why we should
 seek such a definition. Is it so that we know what we mean
 when we say “game”? No. For the most part, we all know what
 we are talking about when we say “game.” It is true that the
 idea of what “game” (or any term) means will vary a bit from
 person to person, but mostly, we all know what a game is.
 Sometimes, in a discussion, a debate may arise about whether
 something is “truly a game,” forcing the discussion participants
 to clarify their own personal definition of what a game is, and
 once that is settled, the discussion moves on. There is nothing
 wrong with people having their own personal opinions about
 the proper definition of a game and what is or is not really a
 game, just as they may have similar opinions about what really
 is or not “music,” “art,” or “a sport.”
 Some people, mostly academics, do not hold this view. They
 view the lack of standardized definitions in the world of game
 design as “a crisis” that is holding back the art form. Usually, the
 people most concerned about this are the farthest removed
 from the actual design and development of games. So how do
 real-world designers and developers get by without a
 standardized vocabulary? Just like everyone else: when there is
 ambiguity, they simply explain what they mean. Does this
 sometimes slow down discussions and therefore the design
 process? Yes and no. Yes, it requires that at times, designers
 have to stop and explain what they mean, which can slow
 things down a little (and only a little). On the other hand, this
 pause for clarification often saves time in the long run, since
 after the pause, the designers are definitely each clear about
 what the other means.
 Would it be best if there was some centralized dictionary of
 standard terms we could all refer to when discussing issues of
 game design? It would certainly be convenient, but it is far from
 necessary, and the fact that we don’t have such a dictionary is
 far from a “barrier” or a “crisis.” It is just a slight
 inconvenience, because it means we sometimes have to stop
 and think about what we mean and what we are trying to say.
 In fact, having to do this, in the long run, may make us better
 designers, not weaker ones, since we are forced to think just a
 little bit more. Further, such a dictionary would hardly be a
 gold standard for all time—as technologies change, they force
 us to reconsider some of our old definitions and terms, redefine
 some of them, and create new terms—so the process of
 definition and redefinition is likely to continue indefinitely or at
 least as long as there are advances in technology that are
 relevant to games.
 Others say that the “real problem” with a lack of game design
 vocabulary is not a problem of standardized definitions, but a
 lack of terms, at all, to discuss some of the complex ideas that
 arise as part of the game design process. Therefore, they argue
 it is urgent that we try to put names on all these things. This is
 putting the cart before the horse, though, for the real problem
 we have is not a lack of words to describe elements of game
 design—the problem is a lack of clear thinking about what
 these ideas really are. As with many fields of design, game
 designers follow their gut instincts and feelings about what
 makes a good or a bad game and sometimes have difficulty
 articulating what exactly it is about a certain design that is good
 or bad—they just know it when they see it, so they are able to
 design great things. And you can certainly get by this way. What
 is important is to state clearly what you mean when you say a
 design is good or bad and how, specifically, it can improve. It is
 not a matter of knowing the vocabulary of game design—it is a
 matter of knowing the ideas of game design—what we call them
 matters little. Standardized terms for these things will evolve
 over time—this is not a process that can be rushed. The terms
 designers find useful will survive, the ones they don’t will fall
 by the wayside.
 That said, clear statements about important game design ideas,
 and terms to refer to them, are introduced all the time, and
 several are introduced in this book. These are not meant to be
 canonical definitions, but rather a clear expression of ideas that
 I hope you can use. If you have better ideas, or better terms,
 please use them instead—if your ideas and terms are indeed
 clear and strong, they will catch on and help other people more
 clearly think and express what they mean.
 Some of the ideas we will have to deal with are necessarily
 murky. Terms like “experience,” “play,” and “game” are defined
 differently by different people, and considering that the ideas
 these terms represent do not have clear definitions even after
 the thousands of years we’ve been thinking and talking about
 them, it is unlikely they will be rigidly defined anytime soon.
 Does this mean we should shy away from trying to define them?
 By no means. Defining things forces you to think about them
 clearly, concisely, and analytically. Having a list of terms and
 their definitions would teach you little. Embarking on the
 journey of trying to define these terms will teach you a great
 deal and strengthen your ability to think about design, even
 though the definitions you end up with may prove imperfect.
 For this reason, you may find this chapter offers you more
 questions than it does answers. But that’s okay: the goal of this
 book is to make you a better designer, and a good designer must
 think.
 So What Is a Game?
 The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.
 —Socrates
 Now that we have discussed why we should define these things,
 let’s give it a try, beginning with some things we can say for
 sure about games. Here’s a start:
 A game is something you play.
 I don’t think anyone will disagree with that. But it doesn’t tell us
 very much. For example, is a game different than a toy? Yes.
 Games are more complex than toys and involve a different kind
 of play. We even use different language:
 A toy is something you play with.
 Okay, interesting. Since toys are simpler than games, maybe we
 should try defining them first. Let’s see if we can do better with
 our definition of toy. You can play with friends, and they aren’t
 toys. Toys are objects.
 A toy is an object you play with.
 Well, that’s something. But I might play with a roll of tape while
 I talk on the phone. Does that make it a toy? Technically, yes, but
 probably not a very good one. In fact, anything you play with
 could be classified as a toy. Perhaps it is a good idea for us to
 start considering what makes for a good toy. “Fun” is one word
 that comes to mind in conjunction with good toys. In fact, you
 might say:
 A good toy is an object that is fun to play with.
 Not bad. But what do we mean when we say “fun?” Do we
 simply mean pleasure, or enjoyment? Pleasure is part of fun,
 but is fun simply pleasure? There are lots of experiences that
 are pleasurable, for example, eating a sandwich or lying in the
 sun, but it would seem strange to call those experiences “fun.”
 No, things that are fun have a special sparkle, a special
 excitement to them. Generally, fun things involve surprises. So a
 definition for fun might be:
 Fun is pleasure with surprises.
 Can that be right? Can it be that simple? It is strange how you
 can use a word your whole life and know for certain what it
 means, but not be able to express it clearly when asked. A good
 way to test definitions is to come up with counterexamples. Can
 you think of things that are fun, but not pleasurable, or fun, but
 don’t involve some feeling of surprise? Conversely, can you
 think of things that are pleasurable and have surprises but
 aren’t fun? Surprise and fun are such important parts of every
 game design that they become our next two lenses.
 #4 THE LENS OF SURPRISE
 Surprise is so basic that we can easily forget about it. Use this
 lens to remind yourself to fill your game with interesting
 surprises. Ask yourself these questions:
 What will surprise players when they play my game?
 Does the story in my game have surprises? Do the game
 rules? Does the artwork? The technology?
 Do your rules give players ways to surprise each other?
 Do your rules give players ways to surprise themselves?
 Illustration by Diana Patton
 Surprise is a crucial part of all entertainment—it is at the root
 of humor, strategy, and problem solving. Our brains are
 hardwired to enjoy surprises. In an experiment where
 participants received sprays of sugar water or plain water into
 their mouths, the participants who received random sprays
 considered the experience much more pleasurable than
 participants who received the sprays according to a fixed
 pattern, even though the same amount of sugar was delivered.
 In other experiments, brain scans revealed that even during
 unpleasant surprises, the pleasure centers of the brain are
 triggered.
 #5 THE LENS OF FUN
 Fun is desirable in nearly every game, although sometimes fun
 defies analysis. To maximize your game’s fun, ask yourself these
 questions:
 What parts of my game are fun? Why?
 What parts need to be more fun?
 Illustration by Jon Schulte
 So, back to toys. We say that a toy is an object you play with,
 and a good toy is an object that is fun to play with. But what do
 we mean by play? This is a tricky one. We all know what play is
 when we see it, but it is hard to express. Many people have tried
 for a solid definition of what play means, and most of them
 seem to have failed in one way or another. Let’s consider a few.
 Play is the aimless expenditure of exuberant energy.
 —Friedrich Schiller
 This is an expression of the outdated “surplus energy” theory of
 play that the purpose of play is to expend extra energy.
 Throughout the history of psychology, there has been a
 tendency to oversimplify complex behaviors, and this is an
 early example of that. It also uses the word “aimless,” as if play
 did not have goals, which it most certainly does. Surely we can
 do better than this.
 Play refers to those activities which are accompanied by a
 state of comparative pleasure, exhilaration, power, and the
 feeling of self-initiative.
 —J. Barnard Gilmore
 That certainly covers some of the territory. Those are certainly
 things that are often associated with play. But it doesn’t seem
 complete, somehow. Other things are also associated with play,
 like imagination, competition, and problem solving. At the same
 time, this definition is too broad. For example, an executive
 might work hard to land a contract and in doing so experience
 “comparative pleasure, exhilaration, power, and the feeling of
 self-initiative,” but it would seem strange to call that an act of
 play. Let’s try something else.
 Play is free movement within a more rigid structure.
 —Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
 This unusual definition, from the book Rules of Play, is an
 attempt to create a definition of play so open that it can include
 things like “the play of the light along the wall” and “the play of
 a car’s steering wheel.” And while it is hard to find something
 we would call play that is not covered by this definition, one
 can easily come up with examples of what seem to be nonplay
 activities that do fit. For example, if a child is forced to scrub the
 kitchen floor, the child is enjoying (enjoying may be the wrong
 word) free movement (can slide the brush around freely)
 within a more rigid structure (the floor), but it would sound
 strange to classify this activity as play. Nonetheless, thinking
 about your game from the point of view of this definition can
 be interesting. Perhaps a different definition can better capture
 the spirit of play.
 Play is whatever is done spontaneously and for its own sake.
 —George Santayana
 This one is interesting. First, let us consider spontaneity. Play is
 quite often spontaneous. When we talk about someone being
 “playful,” that is part of what we mean. But is all play
 spontaneous? No. Someone might plan a softball game months
 in advance, for example, but when the game finally happens, it
 is still “play.” So spontaneity is sometimes part of play, but not
 always. Some consider spontaneity so important to the
 definition of play that any attempt to dampen it renders an
 activity not play. Bernard Mergen states his view: “Games,
 competitive games, which have a winner or a loser, are not, in
 my definition, play.” This viewpoint is so extreme as to seem
 ridiculous—by this logic, games (as we typically think of them)
 are not something you can play. This extreme aside, spontaneity
 does seem to be an important part of play.
 But how about the second part of Santayana’s definition: “done
 for its own sake”? By this, he seems to mean “we play because
 we like to.” As trivial as it sounds, this is an important
 characteristic of play. If we don’t like to do it, it probably isn’t
 play. That is, an activity itself cannot be classified as a “work
 activity” or “play activity.” Instead, what matters is one’s
 attitude about the activity. As Mary Poppins tells us in the
 Sherman brothers’ wonderful song, “A Spoonful of Sugar,”
 In ev’ry job that must be done
 There is an element of fun.
 You find the fun and snap!
 The job’s a game.
 But how do we find the fun? Consider the story that
 psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “Chick sent
 me high”) relates about how factory worker Rico Medellin turns
 his job into a game:
 The task he has to perform on each unit that passes in front
 of his station should take forty-three seconds to perform—
 the same exact operation almost six hundred times in a
 working day. Most people would grow tired of such work
 very soon. But Rico has been at this job for over five years,
 and he still enjoys it. The reason is that he approaches his
 task in the same way an Olympic athlete approaches his
 event: How can I beat my record?
 This shift in attitude turned Rico’s job from work into play. How
 has it affected his job performance? “After five years, his best
 average for a day has been twenty-eight seconds per unit.” And
 he still loves doing it: “‘It’s better than anything else,’ Rico says.
 ‘It’s a whole lot better than watching TV.’”
 What is going on here? How does simple goal setting suddenly
 redefine an activity we would normally classify as work into an
 activity that is clearly a kind of play? The answer seems to be a
 change in the reason he is doing the activity. He is no longer
 doing it for someone else; he is now doing it for his own
 personal reasons. Santayana actually elaborates on his
 definition, stating that upon further examination,
 Work and play … become equivalent to servitude and
 freedom.
 When we work, we do it because we are obligated to. We work
 for food because we are slaves to our bellies. We work to pay
 the rent because we are slaves to our safety and comfort. Some
 of this servitude is willing servitude, such as willingness to earn
 money to care for our families, but it is servitude nonetheless.
 We are doing it because we have to, not because “we feel like
 it.” The more obligated you are to do something, the more it
 feels like work. The less obligated you are to do something, the
 more it feels like play. Stated differently, “It is an invariable
 principle of all play … that whoever plays, plays freely.
 Whoever must play cannot play.”
 Building off of this, I’d like to share my own definition of play,
 which, though imperfect like these others, has its own
 interesting perspective. I often find when trying to define things
 about human activity, it can be useful to pay less attention to
 the activity itself and more attention to the thoughts and
 feelings that motivate the activity. I can’t help but notice that
 most play activities seem to be attempts to answer questions
 like the following:
 “What happens when I turn this knob?”
 “Can we beat this team?”
 “What can I make with this clay?”
 “How many times can I jump this rope?”
 “What happens when I finish this level?”
 When you seek to answer questions freely, of your own volition,
 and not because you are obligated to, we say you are curious.
 But curiosity doesn’t immediately imply you are going to play.
 No, play involves something else—play involves willful action,
 usually a willful action of touching or changing something—
 manipulating something, you might say. So one possible
 definition would be:
 Play is manipulation that indulges curiosity.
 When Rico tries to beat his assembly line goal, he is trying to
 answer the question: “Can I beat my record?” Suddenly, the
 reason for his activity is not to earn money to pay the rent, but
 instead to indulge his curiosity about a personal question.
 This definition calls some things play that we might not
 ordinarily think of as play, such as an artist experimenting on
 canvas. On the other hand, he might say he is “playing with
 color.” A chemist who tries an experiment to test a pet theory—
 is she playing? She might say she is “playing with an idea.” This
 definition has flaws (can you find them?), but I do find it a
 useful perspective, and personally, it is my favorite definition of
 play. It also brings us to Lens #6.
 #6 THE LENS OF CURIOSITY
 To use this lens, think about the player’s true motivations—not
 just the goals your game has set forth but the reason the player
 wants to achieve those goals. Ask yourself these questions:
 What questions does my game put into the player’s mind?
 What am I doing to make them care about these questions?
 What can I do to make them invent even more questions?
 Illustration by Emma Backer
 For example, a maze-finding videogame might have a time-limit
 goal such that at each level, players are trying to answer the
 question: “Can I find my way through this maze in 30 seconds?”
 A way to make them care more would be to play interesting
 animations when they solve each maze, so players might also
 ask the question: “I wonder what the next animation will be?”
 No, Seriously, What Is a Game?
 We’ve come up with some definitions for toys and fun and even
 made a good solid run at play. Let’s try again to answer our
 original question: How should we define “game”?
 Earlier we stated that “a game is something you play,” which
 seems to be true, but isn’t narrow enough. As with play, many
 people have tried to define “game.” Let’s look at a few of these.
 Games are an exercise of voluntary control systems, in
 which there is a contest between powers, confined by rules
 in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome.
 —Elliot Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith
 Wow. Very scientific! Let’s pick it apart.
 First, “an exercise of voluntary control systems”: that is, like
 play, games are entered willfully.
 Second, “a contest of powers”: that does seem to be part of most
 games. Two or more things are striving for dominance. Some
 single-player games don’t always feel this way (would you
 really call Tetris a contest of powers?), but this phrase gets
 across two things: games have goals, and games have conflict.
 Third, “confined by rules”: a very important point! Games have
 rules. Toys do not have rules. Rules are definitely one of the
 defining aspects of games.
 Fourth, “a disequilibrial outcome”: disequilibrial is an
 interesting word. It does not simply mean “unequal”; it instead
 implies that at one time, there was equilibrium, but that it was
 then lost. In other words, things started out even, but then
 somebody won. This is certainly true of most games—if you
 play, you either win or lose.
 So this definition points out some key qualities important to
 games:
 Q1. Games are entered willfully.
 Q2. Games have goals.
 Q3. Games have conflict.
 Q4. Games have rules.
 Q5. Games can be won and lost.
 Let’s consider another definition—this time, not from academia
 but from the world of design:
 [A game is] an interactive structure of endogenous meaning
 that requires players to struggle toward a goal.
 —Greg Costikyan
 Some of this is pretty clear, but what in the world is
 “endogenous”? We’ll get to that shortly. Let’s take this one apart,
 like the last one.
 First, “an interactive structure”: Costikyan wants to make it
 very clear that the player is active, and not passive, and that the
 player and game interact with one another. This is definitely
 true of games—they have a structure (defined by the rules) with
 which you can interact and which can interact with you.
 Second, “struggle toward a goal”: again, we see the idea of a
 goal, and struggle implies some kind of conflict. But it implies
 more—it implies challenge. Partly, Costikyan seems to be trying
 to define not just what makes a game but what makes a good
 game. Bad games have little challenge or too much challenge.
 Good games have just the right amount.
 Third, “endogenous meaning”: endogenous is an excellent term
 that Costikyan brought from the world of biology to game
 design, and it means “caused by factors inside the organism or
 system,” or “internally generated.” So what is “endogenous
 meaning?” Costikyan is making the very important point that
 things that have value inside the game have value only inside
 the game. Monopoly money only has meaning in the context of
 the game of Monopoly. It is the game itself that gave it that
 meaning. When we play the game, the money is very important
 to us. Outside the game, it is completely unimportant.
 Endogenous value is a very useful idea for us, because it is an
 excellent measure of how compelling a game really is. The
 game of roulette does not have to be played with real money—it
 can be played with tokens or play money. But the game, on its
 own, generates little endogenous value. People will only play it
 when real money is at stake, because it just isn’t that compelling
 a game. The more compelling a game is, the greater the
 endogenous value that is created within the game. Some
 massively multiplayer role playing games have proved so
 compelling to people that imaginary game items are actually
 bought and sold for real money outside the game. Endogenous
 value is such a useful perspective that it becomes Lens #7.
 #7 THE LENS OF ENDOGENOUS VALUE
 A game’s success hinges on the players’ willingness to pretend it
 is important. To use this lens, think about your players’ feelings
 about items, objects, and scoring in your game. Ask yourself
 these questions:
 What is valuable to the players in my game?
 How can I make it more valuable to them?
 What is the relationship between value in the game and the
 players’ motivations?
 Illustration by Melanie Lam
 Remember, the value of the items and score in the game is a
 direct reflection of how much players care about succeeding in
 your game. By thinking about what the players really care
 about and why, you can often get insights about how your game
 can improve.
 An example of the Lens of Endogenous Value: The game Bubsy
 for the SNES and Sega Genesis is a fairly standard platform
 game. You play a cat who tries to navigate to the end of levels,
 defeating enemies and avoiding obstacles and collecting yarn
 balls for extra points. However, the points serve no purpose
 other than to measure how many things you have collected. No
 other in-game reward is given for earning points. Most players
 gather yarn balls at first, with the expectation that they are
 valuable, but after playing a short while, they completely ignore
 them, focusing only on defeating enemies, avoiding obstacles,
 and getting to the end of the level. Why? Because the player’s
 motivation (see Lens #6: Curiosity) is merely to complete the
 levels. A higher score doesn’t help that, and thus the yarn balls
 have no endogenous value. Theoretically, a player who defeated
 all the levels might have a new motivation: defeat them again,
 but this time getting the highest score possible. In practice, the
 game itself was so difficult that the number of players who
 actually completed the game must have been small indeed.
 Sonic the Hedgehog 2, for the Sega Genesis, was a similar
 platform game, but did not suffer from this problem. In Sonic 2,
 you collect rings instead of yarn balls, and the number of rings
 collected is very important to players—the rings have a lot of
 endogenous value. Why? Because carrying rings helps protect
 you from enemies, and every time you collect one hundred
 rings, you receive an extra life, which increases the chances you
 will be able to complete all the levels. In the end, Sonic 2 was a
 much more compelling game than Bubsy, and one of the
 reasons was this mechanism, which clearly shows its
 importance through endogenous value.
 Costikyan’s definition gives us three new qualities that we can
 add to our list:
 Q6. Games are interactive.
 Q7. Games have challenge.
 Q8. Games can create their own internal value.
 Let’s consider one more definition of game:
 A game is a closed, formal system, that -engages players in
 structured conflict, and resolves in an unequal outcome.
 —Tracy Fullerton, Chris Swain, and Steven Hoffman
 Most of this has been covered by the previous definitions, but
 there are two parts of this one I want to pick out:
 First, “engages players”: it is a good point that players find
 games to be engaging, that is, they make players feel “mentally
 immersed.” Technically, we might argue this is a quality of good
 games, though not all games, but it is an important point.
 Second, “a closed, formal system”: this implies a lot of things.
 “System” means games are made of interrelated elements that
 work together. “Formal” is just a way of saying that the system
 is clearly defined, that is, it has rules. “Closed” is the interesting
 part here. It means that there are boundaries to the system.
 This hasn’t been mentioned explicitly yet in the other
 definitions, although the idea of endogenous value does imply
 it. Much has been made of this boundary at the edge of the
 game. Johan Huizinga called it “the magic circle,” and it does
 indeed have a kind of magical feeling to it. When we are
 mentally “in the game,” we have very different thoughts,
 feelings, and values than when we are “out of the game.” How
 can games, which are nothing more than sets of rules, have this
 magical effect on us? To understand, we have to look to the
 human mind.
 Let’s review the list of game qualities we have picked out of
 these various definitions:
 Q1. Games are entered willfully.
 Q2. Games have goals.
 Q3. Games have conflict.
 Q4. Games have rules.
 Q5. Games can be won and lost.
 Q6. Games are interactive.
 Q7. Games have challenge.
 Q8. Games can create their own internal value.
 Q9. Games engage players.
 Q10. Games are closed, formal systems.
 That’s a lot, isn’t it? Alan Kay, the computer researcher, once
 advised me: “If you’ve written a software subroutine that takes
 more than ten arguments, look again. You probably missed a
 few.” This was his way of saying that if you need a long list to
 convey what you mean, you should find a better way to regroup
 your ideas. And indeed, this list of ten things does not seem
 complete. It is likely that we have missed a few.
 It does seem odd that something as simple, compelling, and
 innate to us as the playing of games would require such an
 unwieldy definition. But maybe we’re approaching this the
 wrong way. Instead of approaching the gameplay experience
 from the outside in, that is, focusing on how games relate to
 people, as we have been doing, perhaps we should look from
 the other direction: How do people relate to games?
 What is it that people like so much about games? People give
 many answers to this question that are true for some but not all
 games: “I like playing with my friends,” “I like the physical
 activity,” “I like feeling immersed in another world,” and many
 more. But there is one answer that people often give when they
 talk about playing games, which seems to apply to all games: “I
 like solving problems.”
 That’s kind of weird, isn’t it? Normally, we think of problems as
 something negative. But we really do get pleasure from solving
 them. And, as humans, we are really good at solving problems.
 Our big complex brains can solve problems better than any of
 the other animals, and this is our primary advantage as a
 species. So it should not seem strange that it is something we
 enjoy. The enjoyment of problem solving seems to be an
 evolved survival mechanism. People who enjoy solving
 problems are going to solve more problems and probably get
 better at solving problems and be more likely to survive.
 But is it really true that most games involve problem solving?
 One is hard pressed to come up with a game that does not. Any
 game with a goal effectively has presented you with a problem
 to solve. Examples might be:
 Find a way to get more points than the other team.
 Find a way to get to the finish line before the other players.
 Find a way to complete this level.
 Find a way to destroy the other player before they destroy
 you.
 Gambling games, at first, seem like a possible exception. Is
 someone playing craps really trying to solve a problem? Yes.
 The problem is how to take the right calculated risks and make
 as much money as possible. Another tricky example is a game
 where the outcome is completely random, such as the children’s
 card game of War. In War, the two players each have a stack of
 playing cards. In unison, they each flip over the top card from
 their stack to see who has the higher card. The player with the
 higher card wins the round keeping both cards. In the case of a
 tie, more cards are flipped, and the winner gets a larger take.
 Play continues until one player has all the cards.
 How could a game like that possibly involve any problem
 solving? The outcome is predetermined—the players make no
 choices; they just gradually reveal who the winner will be.
 Nonetheless, children play this game just as happily as any
 other and draw no special distinction about this game differing
 somehow from other games. This baffled me for some time, so I
 took the cultural anthropologist point of view. I played the game
 with some children and tried hard to remember what it felt like
 to be a child playing War. And the answer quickly became
 obvious. For children, it is a problem-solving game. The
 problem they are trying to solve is “can I control fate and win
 this game?” And they try all kinds of ways to do it. They hope,
 they plead to the fates, they flip over the cards in all kinds of
 crazy ways—all superstitious behaviors, experimented with in
 an attempt to win the game. Ultimately, they learn the lesson of
 War: you cannot control fate. They realize the problem is
 unsolvable, and at that point, it is no longer a game, just an
 activity, and they soon move on to games with new problems to
 solve.
 Another possible objection one might raise is that not every
 activity associated with gameplaying is a problem-solving
 activity. Often, the things people enjoy most about games, such
 as social interaction or physical exercise, have nothing to do
 with problem solving. But while these other activities might
 improve a game, they are not essential to the game. When
 problem solving is removed from a game, it ceases to be a game
 and becomes just an activity.
 So if all games involve some kind of problem solving and
 problem solving is one of the things that define us as a species,
 perhaps we should look more closely at the mental mechanisms
 we use for problem solving to see if they have anything to do
 with the properties of games.
 Problem Solving 101
 Let’s consider what we do when we solve a problem and how it
 might relate to our numbered list of game qualities.
 One of the first things we do is to state the problem we are
 trying to solve, that is, define a clear goal (Q2). Next, we frame
 the problem. We determine its boundaries and the nature of the
 problem space. We also determine what methods we are
 allowed to use to solve the problem; that is, we determine the
 rules of the problem (Q4). How we do this is kind of hard to
 describe. It is not a completely verbal process. It is almost as if
 our minds are equipped to set up an internal, minimized,
 simplified version of reality that only includes the necessary
 interrelationships needed to solve the problem. This is like a
 cleaner, smaller version of the real-world situation, which we
 can more easily consider and manipulate or interact with (Q6).
 In a sense, we are establishing a closed, formal system (Q10)
 with a goal. We then work to reach that goal, which is usually
 challenging (Q7), because it involves some kind of conflict (Q3).
 If we care about the problem, we quickly become engaged (Q9)
 in solving it. When we are occupied in doing so, we kind of
 forget about the real world, since we are focused on our
 internal problem space. Since this problem space is not the real
 world and just a simplified version of it and solving the
 problem is important to us, elements in the problem space
 quickly gain an internal importance, if they get us closer to our
 goal of solving the problem, and this importance does not need
 to be relevant outside the context of the problem (Q8).
 Eventually, we defeat the problem or are defeated by it, thus
 winning or losing (Q5).
 Now we see the magic circle for what it really is: our internal
 problem-solving system. This does not make it any less magical.
 Somehow, our minds have the ability to create miniature
 realities based on the real world. These microrealities have so
 effectively distilled the essential elements of reality for a
 particular problem that manipulations of this internal world,
 and conclusions drawn from it, are valid and meaningful in the
 real world. We have little idea of how this really works—but it
 does work very, very well.
 Could our definition of game possibly be this simple?
 A game is a problem-solving activity.
 That can’t be right. It might be a true statement, but it is too
 broad. There are lots of problem-solving activities that are not
 play. Many of them feel more like work. Many of them (“How
 can we reduce the production costs of these widgets by 8%?”)
 literally are work. But we’ve already determined that the
 difference between a play activity and a work activity has
 nothing to do with the activity itself, but one’s motivation for
 doing the activity. Astute readers will notice that only nine of
 our ten qualities were covered in our problem-solving analysis.
 A key quality “games are entered willfully” (Q1) was omitted.
 No, games cannot simply be problem-solving activities. One
 who plays them must also have that special, hard-to-define
 attitude that we consider essential to the nature of play. So a
 definition that nicely covers all ten qualities might be:
 A game is a problem-solving activity, approached with a
 playful attitude.
 This is a simple, elegant definition, which has the advantage of
 no fancy jargon. Whether you accept this definition or not,
 viewing your game as a problem to be solved is a useful
 perspective, and that perspective is Lens #8.
 #8 THE LENS OF PROBLEM SOLVING
 To use this lens, think about the problems your players must
 solve to succeed at your game, for every game has problems to
 solve. Ask yourself these questions:
 What problems does my game ask the player to solve?
 Are there hidden problems to solve that arise as part of
 gameplay?
 How can my game generate new problems so that players
 keep coming back?
 Illustration by Cheryl Ceol
 The Fruits of Our Labor
 So we have embarked on a long journey of defining our terms.
 Let’s review what we came up with:
 Fun is pleasure with surprises.
 Play is manipulation that satisfies curiosity.
 A toy is an object you play with.
 A good toy is an object that is fun to play with.
 A game is a problem-solving activity, approached with a
 playful attitude.
 So are these the keys to the secrets of the universe? No. They
 only have value if they give you some insight into how to make
 better games. If they do, great! If not, then we had best move on
 and find something that will. You might not even agree with
 these definitions—if that’s the case, then good for you! It means
 you are thinking. So keep thinking! See if you can come up with
 better examples than what I have here. The whole point of
 defining these terms is to gain new insights—it is the insights
 that are the fruits of our labors, not the definitions. Perhaps
 your new definitions will lead to new and better insights that
 can help us all. One thing I feel certain of:
 The whole truth regarding play cannot be known until the
 whole truth regarding life itself is known.
 —Lehman and Witty
 So let’s not dawdle here. We’ve spent enough time thinking
 about what a game is. Now let’s go see what a game is made of.
 Other Reading to Consider
 Man, Play, and Games by Roger Callois. This 1961 book has
 long been a favorite of academics who study games. Despite
 that, it is pleasing to read and contains a number of
 thoughtful insights about the nature of gameplay.
 Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse. This brief but
 inspiring book is a fascinating philosophical statement about
 the relationship between games and life.
 Why We Play Games: Four Keys to Emotion without Story
 by Nicole Lazzaro. A provocative exploration into the
 dimensions of “fun.”
 Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman,
 Chapters 7 and 8. These two chapters contain some very
 thoughtful consideration of the definition of a game.
 The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia by Bernard
 Suits (pronounced “sweets”). An incredibly thoughtprovoking philosophical examination of the nature of games.
 Suits’ definition of “game” infuriates me, yet I have never
 been able to refute it.
 CHAPTER FIVE
 The Game Consists of Elements
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-5
 FIGURE
 5.1
 What Are Little Games Made Of?
 FIGURE
 5.2
 When my daughter was three years old, she became quite
 curious one day about what different things were made of. She
 ran around the room, excitedly pointing to things, trying to
 stump me with her questions:
 “Daddy, what is the table made of?”
 “Wood.”
 “Daddy, what is the spoon made of?”
 “Metal.”
 “Daddy, what is this toy made of?”
 “Plastic.”
 As she looked around for a new object, I turned it around on
 her, with a question of my own.
 “What are you made of?”
 She paused to consider. She looked down at her hands, turning
 them over and studying them. And then, brightly, she
 announced:
 “I’m made of skin!”
 And for a three-year old, this is a perfectly reasonable
 conclusion. As we get older, of course, we learn more about
 what people are really made of—the complex relations between
 bones, muscles, organs, and the rest. Even as adults, though, our
 understanding of human anatomy is incomplete (can you point
 to your spleen, for instance, or describe what it does or how?),
 and this is acceptable for most of us, because we generally
 know enough to get by.
 But we expect more from a doctor. A doctor needs to know,
 really know, how everything works inside us, how it all
 interrelates, and, when something goes wrong, how to figure
 out the source of the problem and fix it.
 If you have just been a gameplayer up until now, you probably
 haven’t thought too much about what a game is made of.
 Thinking about a videogame, for example, you might, like most
 people, have a vague idea that a game is this kind of story
 world, with some rules and a computer program lurking
 around somewhere in there that somehow makes it all go. And
 that’s enough for most people to know in order to get by.
 But guess what? You’re a doctor now. You need to know,
 intimately, what your patients (games) are really made of, how
 their pieces all fit together, and what makes them tick. When
 things go wrong, you’ll need to spot the true cause and come up
 with the best solution, or your game will surely die. And if that
 doesn’t sound hard enough, you’ll be asked to do things that
 most doctors are never asked: to create new kinds of organisms
 (radically new games) no one has ever seen before and bring
 them to life.
 Much of this book is devoted to developing this essential
 understanding. Our study of anatomy begins with an
 understanding of the four basic elements that comprise every
 game.
 The Four Basic Elements
 There are many ways to break down and classify the many
 elements that form a game. I have found that the categories
 shown in Figure 5.3, which I call the elemental tetrad, are very
 useful. Let’s look briefly at each of the four and how they relate
 to the others:
 1. Mechanics: These are the procedures and rules of your
 game. Mechanics describe the goal of your game, how
 players can and cannot try to achieve it, and what happens
 when they try. If you compare games to more linear
 entertainment experiences (books, movies, etc.), you will
 note that while linear experiences involve technology, story,
 and aesthetics, they do not involve mechanics, for it is
 mechanics that make a game a game. When you choose a set
 of mechanics as crucial to your gameplay, you will need to
 choose technology that can support them, aesthetics that
 emphasize them clearly to players, and a story that allows
 your (sometimes strange) game mechanics to make sense to
 the players. Mechanics will be given detailed attention in
 Chapters 12 through 14.
 FIGURE
 5.3
 2. Story: This is the sequence of events that unfolds in your
 game. It may be linear and pre-scripted, or it may be
 branching and emergent. When you have a story you want to
 tell through your game, you have to choose the mechanics
 that will both strengthen that story and let that story emerge.
 Like any storyteller, you will want to choose the aesthetics
 that help reinforce the ideas of your story and the technology
 that is best suited to the particular story that will come out of
 your game. Story, and its special relationship with game
 mechanics, will be studied in Chapters 17 and 18.
 3. Aesthetics: This is how your game looks, sounds, smells,
 tastes, and feels. Aesthetics are an incredibly important
 aspect of game design since they have the most direct
 relationship to a player’s experience. When you have a
 certain look, or tone, that you want players to experience and
 become immersed in, you will need to choose a technology
 that will not only allow the aesthetics to come through but
 amplify and reinforce them. You will want to choose the
 mechanics that make players feel like they are in the world
 that the aesthetics have defined, and you will want a story
 with a set of events that let your aesthetics emerge at the
 right pace and have the most impact. The skill of choosing
 aesthetics that reinforce the other elements of the game to
 create a truly memorable experience will be examined in
 Chapter 23.
 4. Technology: We are not exclusively referring to “high
 technology” here, but to any materials and interactions that
 make your game possible such as paper and pencil, plastic
 chits, or high-powered lasers. The technology you choose for
 your game enables it to do certain things and prohibits it
 from doing other things. The technology is essentially the
 medium in which the aesthetics take place, in which the
 mechanics will occur, and through which the story will be
 told. We will talk in detail about how to choose the right
 technology for your game in Chapter 29.
 It is important to understand that none of the elements are
 more important than the others. The tetrad is arranged here in
 a diamond shape not to show any relative importance but only
 to help illustrate the “visibility gradient,” that is, the fact that
 technological elements tend to be the least visible to the players,
 aesthetics are the most visible, and mechanics and story are
 somewhere in the middle. It can be arranged in other ways. For
 example, to highlight the fact that technology and mechanics
 are “left brain” elements, whereas story and aesthetics are
 “right brain” elements, you might arrange the tetrad in a
 square. To emphasize the strong connectedness of the elements
 to one another, they could be arranged as a tetrahedral
 pyramid—it really doesn’t matter.
 The important thing to understand about the four elements is
 that they are all essential. No matter what game you design, you
 will make important decisions about all four elements. None is
 more important than the others, and each one powerfully
 influences each of the others. I have found that it is hard to get
 people to believe in the equality of the four elements. Game
 designers tend to believe that mechanics are primary; artists
 tend to believe the same about aesthetics; engineers,
 technology; and writers, story. I suppose it is human nature to
 believe your piece is the most important. But, believe me, as a
 game designer, they are all your piece. Each has an equally
 powerful effect on the player’s experience of your game, and
 thus, each deserves equal attention. This point of view is crucial
 when using Lens #9.
 #9 THE LENS OF THE ELEMENTAL TETRAD
 To use this lens, take stock of what your game is truly made of.
 Consider each element separately and then all of them together
 as a whole.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 Is my game design using elements of all four types?
 Could my design be improved by enhancing elements in one
 or more of the categories?
 Are the four elements in harmony, reinforcing each other
 and working together toward a common theme?
 Illustration by Reagan Heller
 Consider the design of the game Space Invaders (Taito 1978) by
 Toshihiro Nishikado. If (somehow) you aren’t familiar with the
 game, do a quick web search so that you understand the basics.
 We will consider the design from the points of view of the four
 basic elements.
 Technology: All new games need to be innovative in some way.
 The technology behind Space Invaders was custom designed for
 the game. It was the first video game that allowed a player to
 fight an advancing army, and this was only possible due to the
 custom motherboard that was created for it. An entirely new
 set of gameplay mechanics was made possible with this
 technology. It was created solely for that purpose.
 Mechanics: The gameplay mechanic of Space Invaders was
 new, which is always exciting. But more than that, it was
 interesting and well balanced. Not only does a player shoot at
 advancing aliens that shoot back at him, the player can hide
 behind shields that the aliens can destroy (or that the player
 can choose to destroy themself). Further, there is the possibility
 to earn bonus points by shooting a mysterious flying saucer.
 There is no need for a time limit, because the game can end two
 ways: the player’s ships can be destroyed by alien bombs and
 the advancing aliens will eventually reach the player’s home
 planet. Aliens closest to the player are easier to shoot and worth
 fewer points. Aliens farther away are worth more points. One
 more interesting game mechanic is that the more of the 48
 aliens you destroy, the faster the invading army gets. This builds
 excitement and makes for the emergence of some interesting
 stories. Basically, the game mechanics behind Space Invaders
 are very solid and well balanced and were very innovative at
 the time.
 Story: This game didn’t need to have a story. It could have been
 an abstract game where a triangle shoots at blocks. But having
 a story makes it far more exciting and easier to understand. The
 original story for Space Invaders, though, was not a story of
 alien invaders at all. It was originally a game where you fired at
 an army of advancing human soldiers. It is said that Taito
 decided this sent a bad message, so the story was changed. The
 new story, a story about advancing aliens, works much better
 for several reasons:
 Several war-themed games had already been released (e.g.,
 Sea Wolf, 1976). A game where you could be in a space battle
 was actually novel at the time.
 Some people are squeamish about war games where you
 shoot people (Death Race, 1976, had made violence in
 videogames a sensitive issue).
 The “high-tech” computer graphics lent themselves well to a
 game with a futuristic theme.
 Marching soldiers are necessarily walking on the ground,
 which means the game would have had a “top-down” view.
 Space Invaders gives the sense that the aliens are gradually
 lowering toward the surface of your planet and you are
 shooting up at them. Somehow, hovering, flying aliens are
 believable and make for a more dramatic story—“if they
 touch down, we’re doomed!” A change in story allowed for a
 change in camera perspective with a dramatic impact on
 aesthetics.
 Aesthetics: Some may sneer at the visuals, which now seem so
 primitive, but the designer did a lot with a little. The aliens are
 not all identical. There are three different designs, each worth a
 different amount of points. They each perform a simple twoframe “marching” animation that is very effective. The display
 was not capable of color—but a simple technology change took
 care of that! Since the player was confined to the bottom of the
 screen, the aliens to the middle, and the saucer to the top,
 colored strips of translucent plastic were glued to the screen so
 that your ship and shields were green, the aliens were white,
 and the saucer was red. This simple change in the technology of
 the game worked only because of the nature of the game
 mechanics and greatly improved the aesthetics of the game.
 Audio is another important component of aesthetics. The
 marching invaders made a sort of heartbeat noise, and as they
 sped up, the heartbeat sped up, which had a very visceral effect
 on the player. There were other sound effects that helped tell
 the story too. The most memorable was a punishing, buzzing
 crunch noise when your ship was hit with an alien missile. But
 not all aesthetics are in the game! The cabinet for Space
 Invaders had a design that was attractive and eye-catching that
 helped tell the story of the evil alien invaders.
 Part of the key to the success of Space Invaders was that the four
 basic elements were all working hard toward the same goal—to
 let the player experience the fantasy of battling an alien army.
 Each of the elements made compromises for the other, and
 clearly deficits in one element often inspired the designer to
 make changes in another. These are the sort of clever insights
 you are likely to have when you view your design through the
 Lens of the Elemental Tetrad.
 FIGURE
 5.4
 Skin and Skeleton
 We will be discussing the four basic elements in more detail
 throughout this book as well as many other aspects of game
 anatomy. It is a wonderful thing to learn enough so that you can
 see past the skin of a game (the player’s experience) into the
 skeleton (the elements that make up the game). But you must
 beware of a terrible trap that many designers fall into. Some
 designers, thinking constantly about the detailed internal
 workings of games, forget about the player experience. It is not
 enough to merely understand the various game elements and
 how they interrelate with one another—you must always
 consider how they relate to the experience. This is one of the
 great challenges of game design: to simultaneously feel the
 experience of your game while understanding which elements
 and elemental interactions are causing that experience and
 why. You must see skin and skeleton at once. If you focus only
 on skin, you can think about how an experience feels, but not
 understand why it feels that way or how to improve it. If you
 focus only on skeleton, you can make a game structure that is
 beautiful in theory, but potentially horrible in practice. If you
 can manage to focus on both at once, you can see how it all
 works while feeling the power of your game’s experience at the
 same time.
 In Chapter 2, we discussed the importance and the challenge of
 observing and analyzing your own experiences. As challenging
 as that is, it is not enough. You must also be able to think about
 the elements in your game that make the experience possible.
 This takes practice, just as the observation techniques of
 Chapter 2 take practice. Essentially, the skill you need to
 develop is the ability to observe your own experience while
 thinking about the underlying causes of that experience.
 This important skill is called holographic design, and it is
 detailed in Lens #10.
 #10 THE LENS OF HOLOGRAPHIC DESIGN
 To use this lens, you must see everything in your game at once:
 the four elements and the player experience, as well as how
 they interrelate. It is acceptable to shift your focus from skin to
 skeleton and back again, but it is far better to view your game
 and experience holographically.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 What elements of the game make the experience enjoyable?
 What elements of the game detract from the experience?
 How can I change game elements to improve the experience?
 Illustration by Zachary D. Coe
 In future chapters, we will say much more about the elements
 that make up a game. Now let’s turn our attention to the reason
 these elements need to work together.
 CHAPTER SIX
 The Elements Support a Theme
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-6
 FIGURE
 6.1
 To write a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
 —Herman Melville
 Mere Games
 Great themes and deep meanings are often associated with
 literature or with great works of art. Is it pretentious for a
 “mere game” to aspire to the same levels of greatness?
 As game designers, we must confront the painful truth that
 many people view games, in all their forms, as meaningless
 diversions. Usually, when I press people who hold this view, I
 can get them to admit some game that is very important to
 them. Sometimes it is a sport, either one they have played or
 one they watch religiously. Sometimes it is a card or board
 game that formed the cornerstone of their relationship with
 someone important to them. Sometimes it is a videogame with a
 storyline and characters that they identify with. When I point
 out the hypocrisy of games as meaningless, but a game as
 meaningful, they explain, “Well, it really wasn’t the game I
 cared about—it was the experience that went with the game.”
 But as we’ve discussed, experiences aren’t just associated with
 games at random; they are what emerge when players interact
 with a game. The parts of the experience that are important to
 people, such as the drama of a sporting event, the camaraderie
 between bridge players, or the rivalry of chess enthusiasts, all
 are determined by the design of the game.
 Some people make the argument that games, especially
 videogames, cannot be deep and meaningful because they are
 simply too primitive in nature. The same argument was made
 about film at the beginning of the twentieth century when it
 was silent and black and white. As technology increased, this
 argument faded away. And the same is happening for games. In
 the 1970s, videogames were so simplified as to be almost
 completely abstract. Today, they can include text, pictures,
 video, sound, and music. As technology advances, more and
 more aspects of human life and expression will be integrated
 into games. There is nothing that cannot be part of a game. You
 can put a painting, a radio broadcast, or a movie into a game,
 but you cannot put a game into these other things. All these
 other types of media, and all media that is to come, are subsets
 of games. At their technological limit, games will subsume all
 other media.
 Really, the problem is that games have only recently emerged as
 anything like a serious medium of expression. It will take time
 for the world to grow used to this idea. But we have no reason
 to wait. We can create games with powerful themes right now.
 But why? Why do this? Out of a selfish need for artistic
 expression? No. Because we are designers. Artistic expression is
 not our goal. Our goal is to create powerful experiences. It is
 possible to create games that do not have themes or that have
 very weak themes. However, if our games have unifying,
 resonant themes, the experiences we create will be much, much
 stronger.
 Unifying Themes
 The primary benefit of basing your design around a single
 theme is that all of the elements of your game will reinforce one
 another, since they will all be working toward a common goal.
 Sometimes it is best to let a theme emerge as you are creating
 the game. The sooner you have settled on a theme, the easier
 things will be for you, because you will have an easy method of
 deciding if something belongs in your game or not: If it
 reinforces the theme, it stays, but if it doesn’t, it goes.
 There are two simple steps to using a theme to strengthen the
 power of your game’s experience:
 Step 1: Figure out what your theme is.
 Step 2: Use every means possible to reinforce that theme.
 Sounds easy, but what is a theme? The theme is what your game
 is about. It is the idea that ties your entire game together—the
 idea that all the elements must support. If you don’t know what
 your theme is, it is very likely that your game is not engaging
 people as much as it could. Most game themes are experience
 based; that is, the goal of the design is to deliver an essential
 experience to the player.
 Designer Rich Gold describes an elementary example of
 theming in his book The Plenitude. As a child, he had a book
 about elephants. The idea of the book was simple: to deliver an
 experience to children that lets them understand what
 elephants were. In a sense, you could say the theme was “What
 are elephants?” So, step 1 is done. This brings us to step 2: use
 every means possible to reinforce that theme. The authors did
 the obvious—the book contained text about elephants and
 pictures of elephants. But they took it a step further and cut the
 entire book, cover and pages, into the shape of an elephant, as
 well. At every turn, you need to look for opportunities to
 reinforce your theme in clever and unexpected ways.
 Let me give a more detailed example based on a virtual reality
 game I worked on for Disney called Pirates of the Caribbean:
 Battle for the Buccaneer Gold. Our team (the Disney VR Studio)
 was given the assignment of creating an interactive adaptation
 of the popular Pirates of the Caribbean theme park ride, which
 can be seen in various incarnations at all the Disney parks. We
 knew we were going to put it in a Computer Augmented Virtual
 Environment (CAVE), which is basically a small room with 3D
 projections on the walls at DisneyQuest (Disney’s virtual reality
 center at Disney World), and the experience had to be about
 five minutes long, but no storyline or specific game goals had
 been set.
 We already had the beginnings of a theme: this attraction was
 going to be about pirates, which narrowed things down, but we
 were hoping to be more specific. What point of view did we
 want to take about pirates? There are several we could have
 taken:
 A historical documentary about pirates.
 A battle between competing pirate ships.
 A search for hidden pirate treasure.
 Pirates are villains and must be destroyed.
 Several others came to mind as well. You can see that even with
 something as narrow as “pirates,” we still didn’t really have a
 theme, because there are many possible experiences around
 the idea of pirates that we could create. We started doing
 research, looking for game ideas, aesthetic ideas, and hopefully
 a clear, unifying theme.
 We read a lot about the history of pirates, and we looked at
 pirate-themed video games other people had made. We talked
 to people who had been involved in the creation of the original
 Pirates of the Caribbean ride. We got lots of good details but
 were not getting much closer to a theme. One day, we all piled
 into a car and headed down to Disneyland to study the ride up
 close. We rode the ride dozens of times before park hours
 frantically scribbling notes and snapping pictures. There is a
 huge amount of detail in the ride—it is incredibly compelling.
 We could see that details were going to be very important. But
 what about the story? Weirdly, the Pirates of the Caribbean ride
 doesn’t tell a coherent story. It just features several immersive
 tableaus of pirates doing pirate things. In a sense, this is a real
 strength: the story is left to the rider’s imagination.
 So, we learned some good things from riding, but we still didn’t
 have a theme. We interviewed park employees, and when the
 park opened, we chatted with guests about their feelings about
 the ride. We got lots of great details about how the ride looks,
 how it makes people feel, and what their favorite parts were,
 but none of it really clued us into a solid point of view for our
 theme.
 On the way home in the car, as we talked over the thousands of
 details we had observed, we fretted a little that we still didn’t
 have a clear path forward. As we sat and thought, it was almost
 impossible not to hum the catchy theme song from the ride,
 having heard it so many times… “Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for
 me.” And suddenly it became clear! The Pirates of the Caribbean
 ride is not about pirates; it is about being a pirate! The whole
 goal of the ride is to fulfill the fantasy of what it is like to throw
 aside the rules of society and just start being a pirate! It might
 sound obvious in retrospect, but this shift in our thinking
 crystallized everything. This was not a historical recreation,
 and it was not about destroying pirates. It was about fulfilling
 the pirate fantasy that everyone has bubbling just below the
 surface, and what better way to create this feeling of being a
 pirate than through an immersive, interactive experience? We
 now had our experience-based theme: the fantasy of being a
 pirate.
 And so step one was completed. We knew our theme. Now for
 step two, use every means possible to reinforce that theme. And
 we really did work hard to use everything we could to do just
 that. Some examples include the following:
 CAVE shape: In the past, we had used square and hexagonal
 CAVES. We created a new, four-screen CAVE shape that was
 better suited to a pirate ship simulation.
 Stereoptics: Not every CAVE experience uses stereoptics, but
 we chose to do so, because of the sense of depth they give.
 Letting your eyes focus on infinity really helped make it feel
 like you were out at sea.
 Modified 3D glasses: Many off-the-shelf 3D glasses for
 theaters have blinders on the side to reduce distractions
 when watching a movie. We knew that a person’s sense of
 motion is strongly influenced by their peripheral vision, so
 these blinders were a problem—they were detracting from
 our theme, since players weren’t getting enough of a sense of
 sailing at sea. We made arrangements with the manufacturer
 to have the blinders cut off.
 Motion platform: We wanted to give the feeling of a rocking,
 swaying boat. A motion platform seemed like a good idea, but
 what kind? Eventually, we custom-built a platform using
 pneumatics, because it felt the most like a ship at sea.
 Interface: Part of the pirate fantasy is steering a ship, and
 part of it is firing cannons. We could have used joysticks or
 other off-the-shelf hardware, but that wouldn’t be very good
 theming. Instead, the ship is steered with a ship’s wheel, and
 we had real metal cannons that players would use to aim and
 fire.
 Visuals: We had to make things look beautiful. The ride
 features a kind of “hyperreal” look, which fits perfectly with
 our theme. We used high-end graphics hardware and rich
 textures and models to achieve a similar look.
 Music: Through some pains, we got permission to use the
 music from the ride. It captures the theme so well and
 connects the game to the ride, in a powerful nostalgic way.
 Audio: Our sound designers created a custom ten-speaker
 sound system that could play sounds from all directions,
 making you feel like you were out at sea. Some of the
 speakers were designed only to play cannon blasts and were
 placed at precisely the right distance from the boat so that
 the waveform would collapse in your stomach, so you would
 not just hear but feel the cannons firing.
 A feeling of freedom: Piracy is all about freedom. Our
 gameplay mechanics were designed to let players sail
 wherever they chose but at the same time ensure the players
 have an exciting time. Details of how this was accomplished
 will be discussed in detail in Chapter 18: Indirect Control.
 Dead men tell no tales: How to handle death in the game
 was a real question. Some advocated that this was a
 videogame, and we should handle it like video-games
 traditionally do: if you die, there is some penalty, and then
 you come back to life, to play again. This didn’t fit in well
 with our theme of living the pirate fantasy—in the fantasy,
 you don’t die, or if you do, it is in an incredibly dramatic way,
 and you do not return. Further, we were trying very hard to
 maintain a dramatic interest curve (explained in Chapter 16)
 for our five-minute experience, since drama is part of the
 pirate fantasy. If the players could suddenly die in the middle
 of the game, it would spoil that. Our solution was to make
 players invulnerable throughout the majority of the game,
 but if they took too many hits over the course of the
 experience, their ship would sink dramatically at the end of
 the final battle. This broke with videogame tradition, but
 theme is more important than tradition.
 Treasure: Collecting vast hordes of treasure is an essential
 part of the pirate fantasy. Unfortunately, piles of gold are
 actually pretty hard to render convincingly in a videogame.
 We came up with a special technique that made flat, handpainted treasures seem to be solid, dimensional objects that
 sat prominently on the ship’s deck.
 Lighting: We needed to light the room the players stood in.
 How could we theme that? We used special filters on the light
 that made it look like it was light reflected off of water.
 A place for my stuff: People who step up to the controls
 need a place to put their bags, purses, etc. We could have just
 made a shelf. Instead, we created bags out of fishing nets that
 really look like they belong on a boat.
 Air conditioning: The people in charge of facilities in the
 building where the game was going to go asked if we cared
 where the air conditioning vents in the room were placed.
 Our first thought was “who cares?” But then we thought,
 “How can we use this to reinforce our theme?” The vents
 were placed at the front of the ship, blowing back, so players
 feel a breeze as they sail their ship.
 The eyes of Bluebeard: One thing we never figured out how
 to theme was the 3D glasses. We experimented with making
 them look like pirate hats and bandanas, but it didn’t really
 work. One witty gentleman suggested that players should be
 forced to wear eye patches, so the 3D effect was unnecessary.
 In the end, we gave up and let that detail go unthemed. To
 our surprise, when the game had been installed at Disney
 World and we went to try it out, the cast member who was
 about to lead us on board proclaimed, “Before ye board, ye
 must wear the Eyes of Bluebeard.” This was surprising,
 because it was not in the “official script” given to cast
 members. The ride attendants succeeded where we had
 failed. It was a simple and effective way to theme a detail
 that escaped us and a powerful illustration that when you
 have a strong unifying theme, it makes it easier for everyone
 on the team to make useful contributions.
 This is not a complete list. Everything we did and every decision
 we made were focused on whether it would reinforce the
 theme and deliver the essential experience we wanted to get
 across. You might argue that without a big budget, you can’t
 afford to do fancy theming. But many theming details are really
 quite inexpensive. They can be a line of text, or a color choice,
 or a sound effect. And theming is fun—once you get in the habit
 of trying to make as many things as possible fit your theme, it’s
 hard to stop. But why would you stop? And this gives us Lens
 #11.
 #11 THE LENS OF UNIFICATION
 To use this lens, consider the reason behind it all. Ask yourself
 these questions:
 What is my theme?
 Am I using every means possible to reinforce that theme?
 Illustration by Diana Patton
 The Lens of Unification works very well with Lens #9: The
 Elemental Tetrad. Use the tetrad to separate out the elements of
 your game, so you can more easily study them from the
 perspective of a unified theme.
 Resonance
 A unifying theme is good—it focuses your design toward a
 single goal. But some themes are better than others. The best
 themes are ones that resonate with players—themes that touch
 players deeply. The “fantasy of being a pirate” theme is
 powerful because it is a fantasy that everyone—kids, adults,
 men, and women—has had at one time or another. In a sense, it
 resonates with our desire to be free—free from our obligations,
 free from our worries and cares, free to do what we want, when
 we want to.
 When you manage to tap into one of these resonant themes,
 you have something deep and powerful that has a true ability to
 move people and to give them an experience that is both
 transcendent and transforming. Earlier we discussed that some
 themes are experience based, that is, they are all about
 delivering a certain essential experience. When this experience
 is one that resonates with the fantasies and desires of your
 players, it will be an experience that quickly becomes
 important to them. But there is another kind of theme that can
 be just as resonant as an experience-based theme, sometimes
 more so. This is the truth-based theme.
 Consider the movie Titanic. This film deeply moved audiences
 the world over. Why? Sure, it was well executed, and it had
 great special effects and a sweet (though sometimes schmaltzy)
 love story, but lots of movies have those things. What was
 special here was a deep and resonant theme reinforced by
 every element of the film. So, what was the theme? At first, you
 might say that the theme was the Titanic itself and its tragic
 accident. And that is an important component of the movie. In
 fact, you could argue that it is a theme of the movie, but it is not
 the main theme. The main theme is not experience based.
 Instead, it is a simple statement, which I would phrase as
 something like “love is more important than life and stronger
 than death.” This is a powerful statement. But it is a statement
 that many of us believe deeply in our heart of hearts. It is
 certainly not a scientific truth, but for many, it is a deeply held,
 though rarely expressed, personal truth.
 Many Hollywood insiders did not believe this movie could
 possibly be successful: audiences would know the ending. But
 where better to tell a story that fits this powerful theme than in
 a place where we know almost everyone is going to die? The
 expensive special effects were not gratuitous—to fully grasp the
 import of this theme, we must feel like it is all real, like we are
 right there, like we are dying ourselves.
 Truth-based themes can sometimes be hard to spot. Part of the
 power of these deep truths is that they are hidden. Often, a
 designer might not even consciously know they have chosen a
 particular theme or be able to express it verbally—they just
 have a certain feeling about how the experience should be. But
 it is worth the trouble to explore your feelings about these
 things to the point that you can express your theme concretely.
 It will make it much easier for you to decide what should and
 shouldn’t go into your game and make it easier for you to
 explain the rationale of these decisions to others in your team.
 When Stephen King was writing his famous novel Carrie, it was
 not until he was working on the second draft that he realized
 that this was a novel about blood, not just horror movie blood,
 but an exploration of the many meanings of blood, from injury,
 to family ties, to coming of age. And realizing this, he saw many
 opportunities to tune and strengthen the story.
 An excellent example of a truth-based theme can be seen in Rob
 Daviau’s fascinating board game Risk: Legacy. In this unusual
 game, Daviau did something never before attempted in the
 world of board games—he created game mechanics such that
 when you play, choices you make change the game
 permanently, for all time. The rules insist you modify the board
 with irremovable stickers, write on the board in permanent
 marker to claim territories, rip up and discard game cards, and
 even make permanent modifications to the game rulebook.
 These unusual game mechanics are novel and intriguing, but
 more importantly, they reinforce the game’s central theme:
 “war changes a world.”
 Another example of a truth-based theme is the Hercules story.
 The VR Studio team was asked to create a game based upon
 Disney’s version of the ancient Hercules myth. When a story
 stays alive, told, and retold, for thousands of years like this
 story has, it is a pretty good clue that there is a truth-based
 theme hiding inside it. Sure, Hercules was a strong man, but
 that doesn’t seem quite important enough that it would so
 deeply resonate with people. We looked at the various versions
 of the story. Interestingly, there was not one canonical telling,
 even in ancient times. Sometimes Hercules had ten labors,
 sometimes twelve, and sometimes twenty. But there were
 certain aspects of the story that were always the same. In every
 story, Hercules is a man so virtuous that he defeats death. And
 this is a truth so deep that it is at the heart of many religions: if
 you are virtuous enough, you can defeat death. The Disney
 animators embodied this theme in Hercules’ conflict with
 Hades, Lord of the Underworld. We continued this theme in our
 game, by having it take place mostly in the Underworld, until
 the end, when you triumphantly break through to the world of
 the living for a final aerial battle against Hades. There were
 subthemes too, such as a theme about the importance of
 teamwork, but ultimately, we placed these subthemes in the
 service of the main theme.
 Sometimes you figure out your theme a piece at a time. Here’s
 another Disney story: when we started work on the Toontown
 Online project (Disney’s first massively multiplayer game), we
 were again unsure of our theme. We had done our homework
 on Toontown, studying both the Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
 movie and the Toontown section of Disneyland. Curiously,
 Toontown was not well defined in either place. We could see
 Toontown was powerful, though. The reason it was so ill
 defined was that everyone seemed to already have a sense of
 what it was—as if they had known all along that there was a
 special place where cartoon characters lived when they weren’t
 on the screen. This (slightly creepy) fact gave us a sense we
 were tapping into something fundamental and hidden. We
 started making lists of things we thought Toontown seemed to
 be about. Three big ones stood out:
 1. Having fun with your friends
 2. Escaping from reality
 3. Simplicity and transcendence
 The first one lent itself really well to online networked play, and
 we liked that. The second one made a lot of sense—cartoons are
 a good form of escapism. The third one (which we’ll be
 exploring in more detail in Chapter 19: Worlds) is basically the
 idea that things are simpler in Toontown than they are in the
 real world, but you are also more powerful in Toontown than
 you are in the real world.
 All of this helped clarify what we wanted to see in the game, but
 none of it really established a clear theme. These felt more like
 subthemes. At some point, we realized that these three things
 together strongly characterize something that back in Chapter 4
 we discussed in detail: play. Play is about having fun with your
 friends and escaping from reality, and a play world is simpler
 than the real world, but you have much more power. But we
 didn’t feel like play was a powerful theme on its own. We
 needed something with more bite, with more conflict. This led
 us to play’s natural opponent: work. And then it was clear
 —“work vs. play” would be a very strong theme. Stated in more
 detail, “work wants to destroy play, but play must survive” was
 the truth-based theme we arrived at. Replace “work” and “play”
 with “slavery” and “freedom” as we did in Chapter 4, and the
 power of this theme becomes clear. It really felt right. We
 wanted to create a game that kids and parents could play
 together, with a theme they could both relate to—how better to
 do that than by playfully exploring one of the primary conflicts
 in their lives? And so we did. The story of Toontown Online
 became a story of robot executives (the Cogs) trying to turn
 colorful Toontown into a dingy office park. The Toons team up
 to fight off the Cogs with gags and practical jokes, and the Cogs
 fight back with office supplies. This story was strange enough
 that it raised some eyebrows inside the company, but we were
 confident it would work because it was an expression of a
 theme that we knew would resonate with our audience.
 Resonant themes elevate your work from craft to art. An artist
 is someone who takes you where you could never go alone, and
 a theme is the vehicle for getting there. Not every theme needs
 to be a resonant theme, of course. But when you find a deep
 resonant theme, it makes sense to use it for all it is worth. Some
 will be experience based, while others will be truth based. You
 can never tell which themes are resonant just through logic—
 you have to feel the resonance, deep inside yourself. It is an
 important form of self-listening and is also Lens #12.
 #12 THE LENS OF RESONANCE
 To use the Lens of Resonance, you must look for hidden power.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 What is it about my game that feels powerful and special?
 When I describe my game to people, what ideas get them
 really excited?
 If I had no constraints of any kind, what would this game be
 like?
 I have certain instincts about how this game should be. What
 is driving those instincts?
 Illustration by Nick Daniel
 The Lens of Resonance is a quiet, delicate instrument. It is a tool
 for listening to yourself and listening to others. We bury
 important things deep inside ourselves, and when something
 causes them to resonate, it shakes us to our very core. The fact
 that these things are hidden gives them power but also makes
 them hard for us to find.
 Back to Reality
 You may think that all this talk of resonant themes is too lofty
 for game design. And for some games, maybe it is. Does Angry
 Birds have a deep resonant theme? Maybe not, but it certainly
 does have a unifying theme that helped to drive the design.
 Resonant themes can add great power to your work, but even if
 your game doesn’t seem to have one, it will still be strengthened
 by a unifying theme to focus the experience.
 Some designers reject the notion of theme, because they say,
 “the players will never notice.” And it is certainly true that the
 players cannot always state clearly the theme of a work that
 truly moves them—and that is because theme often operates at
 a subconscious level. Players know they like a game, but they
 can’t quite say why. Often, the reason is that all of the elements
 are reinforcing a theme that is interesting or important to them.
 Theme is not about some puzzle-based symbolism where the
 designer intends a secret message. Theme is about focusing
 your work toward something that holds meaning for your
 players.
 Different designers use theme in different ways as part of their
 design process. Now it is time for us to explore the many other
 aspects of the overall process of game design.
 Other Reading to Consider
 The Plenitude by Rich Gold. Theming is just one of the many
 topics in this treasure trove of wisdom by the designer of the
 Nintendo Power Glove.
 CHAPTER SEVEN
 The Game Begins with an Idea
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-7
 FIGURE
 7.1
 Hopefully, this book will inspire you to try designing some
 games of your own. When you do that (maybe you have
 already), you might be thinking that you aren’t going about it
 the right way, not using the methods that “real” game designers
 use. I’m guessing the method you used to design your games
 was something like:
 1. Think of an idea.
 2. Try it out.
 3. Keep changing it and testing it until it seems good enough.
 Which sounds kind of amateurish. Well, guess what? That is
 exactly what real game designers do. And this chapter would
 end here, except for the fact that some ways to do these things
 are better than others. You already know what to do. In this
 chapter and the next, we are going to discuss how to do it as
 well as possible.
 Inspiration
 As I mentioned earlier, I worked for several years as a
 professional juggler. When I was about fourteen years old, and
 my repertoire of tricks was limited to two, I attended my first
 juggling festival. If you haven’t attended one, they are
 remarkable to see—they mainly consist of jugglers of all levels
 of skill and ability standing around in a large gymnasium,
 talking about, experimenting with, and sharing new techniques.
 It is a place where you can attempt the impossible and drop
 without shame. But attending alone, my first time, it didn’t feel
 that way. I was incredibly nervous—after all, I wasn’t a “real”
 juggler. I mostly walked around, eyes wide, hands in my
 pockets, terrified that someone would point and shout, “Hey!
 What’s HE doing here?” But of course, that didn’t happen.
 Everyone at the festival had learned just like I had—they had
 taught themselves. Once I grew comfortable, I shyly took out my
 beanbags and did a little practicing of my own. I watched other
 people do tricks, and I tried imitating them—sometimes I could
 do it. But as I looked around for more examples of techniques to
 try, there was one juggler who stood out from the rest. He was
 an old man in a powder blue jumpsuit, and his tricks were not
 like the others at all. He used patterns and rhythms that were
 unique, and his tricks, though not astonishing in their difficulty,
 were simply beautiful to watch. I had to watch a long time
 before I realized that some of the tricks that seemed so special
 and unique when he did them were things I could already do—
 but when he did them, they had such a different style, a
 different feeling, that they seemed like something completely
 new. I watched him for about twenty minutes, and suddenly he
 looked at me and said, “Well?”
 “Well, what?” I said, kind of embarrassed.
 “Aren’t you going to try to copy me?”
 “I—I don’t think I would know how,” I stammered out.
 He laughed. “Yeah, they never can. Know why my tricks look
 so different?”
 “Uh, practice?” I managed.
 “No—everybody practices. Look around! They’re all
 practicing. No, my tricks look different because of where I get
 them. These guys, they get their tricks from each other.
 Which is fine—you can learn a lot that way. But it will never
 make you stand out.”
 I thought about it. “So where do you get them?” I asked.
 “Books?”
 “Ha! Books. That’s a good one. No, not books. You wanna
 know the secret?”
 “Sure.”
 “The secret is: don’t look to other jugglers for inspiration—look
 everywhere else.” He proceeded to do a beautiful looping
 pattern, where his arms kind of spiraled, and he turned
 occasional pirouettes. “I learned that one watching a ballet in
 New York. And this one…” he did a move that involved the balls
 popping up and down as his hands fluttered delicately back and
 forth. “I learned that from a flock of geese I saw take off from a
 lake up in Maine. And this,” he did a weird mechanical looking
 movement where the balls almost appeared to move at right
 angles. “I learned that from a paper punch machine on Long
 Island.” He laughed a little and stopped juggling for a minute.
 “People try to copy these moves, but they can’t. They always
 try… yeah, look at that fella, over there!” He pointed to a juggler
 with a long ponytail across the gym who was doing the “ballet”
 move. But it just looked dumb. Something was missing, but I
 couldn’t say what.
 “See, these guys can copy my moves, but they can’t copy my
 inspiration.” He juggled a pattern that made me think of a
 spiraling double helix. Just then, the PA announced a beginner’s
 workshop—I thanked him and ran off. I didn’t see him again,
 but I never forgot him. I wish I knew his name, because his
 advice changed my approach to creativity forever.
 #13 THE LENS OF INFINITE INSPIRATION
 When you know how to listen, everybody is the guru.
 —Ram Dass
 To use this lens, stop looking at your game and stop looking at
 games like it. Instead, look everywhere else.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 What is an experience I have had in my life that I would
 want to share with others?
 In what small way can I capture the essence of that
 experience and put it into my game?
 Using this lens requires an open mind and a big imagination.
 You need to search your feelings and observe everything
 around you. You must be willing to try the impossible—for
 surely it is impossible for a roll of the dice to capture the
 excitement of a swordfight or for a videogame to make a player
 feel afraid of the dark—isn’t it? Use this lens to find the
 nongame experiences that will inspire your game. Your choices
 in the different quadrants of the tetrad (technology, mechanics,
 story, and aesthetics) can each be united by a single inspiration,
 or each can build on different inspirations, blending them
 together to create something entirely new. When you have
 concrete visions based on real life that guide your decision
 making, your experience will acquire an undeniable power,
 strength, and uniqueness.
 This lens works hand in hand with Lens #1: Essential
 Experience. Use the Lens of Infinite Inspiration to seek and find
 beautiful experiences and the Lens of Essential Experience to
 bring them into your game.
 Illustration by Sam Yip
 Designer Chris Klug encourages all designers to find one key
 emotional experience to build your game around, which he
 calls “the emotional heart of art direction.” This notion is
 backed up by others. Four graduate students (Kyle Gabler, Kyle
 Gray, Matt Kucic, and Shalin Shodhan) undertook to create fifty
 videogames in a single semester and wrote about what they
 learned in the excellent essay “How to Prototype a Game in
 Under 7 Days.” The following is an excerpt:
 As an alternative to brainstorming, we found that gathering
 art and music with some personal significance was
 particularly fruitful. People have commented that many of
 the games like “Gravity Head” or “On a Rainy Day” create a
 strong mood and have strong emotional appeal. It’s no
 accident. In these and many other cases, the soundtrack and
 initial art created a combined feeling that drove much of the
 gameplay decisions, story, and final art.
 Mr. Gabler: “The idea behind ‘Tower of Goo’ came up while I
 was listening to (for some reason) the opening to Astor
 Piazzolla’s ‘Tango Apasionado’ after walking home, and had
 this drizzly vision of a town at sunset where everyone was
 leaving their houses, carrying out chairs, tables, and
 anything they could to build a giant tower in the center of
 their city. I didn’t know why exactly, but they wanted to
 climb up and up and up - but they weren’t very good civil
 engineers so you had to help them. The final prototype ended
 up a little more cheery, and I replaced the final music with
 Piazzolla’s more upbeat ‘Libertango,’ but here’s a case
 where an initial emotional target basically wrote the entire
 game.”
 Inspiration is one of the secrets behind the strongest games. But
 how can you turn inspiration into a great game design?
 The first step is admitting you have a problem.
 State the Problem
 Don’t fall in love with your solution. Fall in love with your
 problem.
 —Anonymous
 The purpose of design is to solve problems, and game design is
 no exception. Before you start coming up with ideas, you need
 to be certain of why you are doing it, and a problem statement
 is a way to state that clearly. Good problem statements tell both
 your goal and your constraints. For example, your initial
 problem statement might be:
 “How can I make a browser-based game that teenagers will
 really like?”
 This makes clear both your goal (something teenagers will
 really like) and your constraints (it must be a browser-based
 game). One advantage of stating things so clearly is that it can
 make you realize that you might be mistakenly
 overconstraining the real problem. Maybe you’ve been thinking
 “browser-based game,” but really, there is no reason that what
 you create has to be a game at all—maybe some kind of
 browser-based toy or activity would be okay as long as
 teenagers really like it. So, you might restate your problem in
 broader terms:
 “How can I make a browser-based experience that teenagers
 really like?”
 It is crucial that you get the problem statement right—if you
 make it too broad, you might come up with designs that don’t
 meet your true goal, and if you make it too narrow (because
 you were focusing on solutions instead of the problem), you
 might cut yourself off from some clever solutions because you
 assumed that a certain kind of solution was the only valid one
 for your problem. People who come up with clever solutions
 are almost always the same people who take the time to figure
 out the real problem. It’s a dangerous temptation to fall in love
 with your solution—why not consider falling in love with your
 problem, instead?
 There are three advantages of clearly stating your problem:
 1. Broader creative space. Most people jump to solutions too
 fast and start their creative process there. If you start your
 process at the problem instead of at a proposed solution, you
 will be able to explore a broader creative space and find
 solutions that are hiding where no one else is looking.
 2. Clear measurement. You have a clear measurement of the
 quality of proposed ideas: How well do they solve the
 problem?
 3. Better communication. When you are designing with a team,
 communication is much easier if the problem has been
 clearly stated. Very often, collaborators will be trying to solve
 quite different problems and not realize it if the problem has
 not been clearly stated.
 Sometimes, you will have already explored several ideas before
 you realize what the problem “really” is. That’s fine! Just make
 sure you go back and restate the problem clearly, once you see
 what it is.
 A completed game design will cover all four elements of the
 elemental tetrad: technology, mechanics, story, and aesthetics.
 Often, your problem statement will constrain you to some
 established decisions about one (or more) of the four elements,
 and you will have to build from there. As you try to state your
 problem, it can be useful to examine it from the point of view of
 the tetrad to check where you have design freedom and where
 you don’t. Take a look at these four problem statements: Which
 ones have already made decisions in what parts of the tetrad?
 1. How can I make a board game that uses the properties of
 magnets in an interesting way?
 2. How can I make a videogame that tells the story of Hansel
 and Gretel?
 3. How can I make a game that feels like a surrealist painting?
 4. How can I improve on Tetris?
 What if, by some miracle, you have no constraints? What if
 somehow you have the liberty to make a game about anything,
 anything at all, using any medium you like? If that is the case
 (and it seems highly unlikely!), you need to decide some
 constraints. Pick a story you might like to pursue or a game
 mechanic you would like to explore. The moment you pick
 something, you will have a problem statement. Viewing your
 game as the solution to a problem is a useful perspective and
 also Lens #14.
 #14 THE LENS OF THE PROBLEM STATEMENT
 To use this lens, think of your game as the solution to a
 problem.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 What problem, or problems, am I really trying to solve?
 Have I been making assumptions about this game that really
 have nothing to do with its true purpose?
 Is a game really the best solution? Why?
 How will I be able to tell if the problem is solved?
 Illustration by Cheryl Ceol
 Defining the constraints and goals for your game as a problem
 statement can help move you to a clear game design much
 more quickly.
 How to Sleep
 We have stated our problem and are ready to brainstorm! At
 least we will be, once we have properly prepared. Sleep is
 crucial to the process of idea generation—a good designer uses
 the tremendous power of sleep to its maximum advantage. No
 one explains this better, I think, than surrealist painter
 Salvador Dali. The following (Dali’s Secret #3) is an excerpt from
 his book Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship:
 In order to make use of the slumber with a key you must
 seat yourself in a bony armchair, preferably of Spanish style,
 with your head tilted back and resting on the stretched
 leather back. Your two hands must hang beyond the arms of
 the chair, to which your own must be soldered in a
 supineness of complete relaxation…
 In this posture, you must hold a heavy key which you will
 keep suspended, delicately pressed between the extremities
 of the thumb and forefinger of your left hand. Under the key
 you will previously have placed a plate upside down on the
 floor. Having made these preparations, you will have merely
 to let yourself be progressively invaded by a sense of serene
 afternoon sleep, like the spiritual drop of anisette of your
 soul rising in the cube of sugar of your body. The moment
 the key drops from your fingers, you may be sure that the
 noise of its fall on the upside-down plate will awaken you,
 and you may be equally sure that this fugitive moment
 during which you cannot be assured of having really slept is
 totally sucient, inasmuch as not a second more is needed
 for your whole physical and psychic being to be revivified by
 just the necessary amount of repose.
 Your Silent Partner
 We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective
 consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that
 God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.
 —Carl Jung
 Is Dali crazy? The benefits of a good night’s sleep are easy to
 believe—but what possible benefit could there be in a nap that
 lasts only a fraction of a second? The answer becomes clear
 only when you consider where your ideas come from. Most of
 our good, clever, creative ideas are not arrived at through a
 process of logical, reasoned argument. No, the really good ideas
 just seem to pop up out of nowhere; that is, they come from
 somewhere below the surface of our consciousness—a place we
 call the subconscious. The subconscious mind is not well
 understood, but it is a source of tremendous, and possibly all,
 creative power.
 Proof of this power is evident when we consider our dreams.
 Your subconscious has been creating these fascinating little
 comedies and dramas, each one different, three shows nightly,
 since before you were born. Far from a sequence of random
 images, most people frequently have dreams that are quite
 meaningful. There are many known instances of important
 problems solved in dreams. One of the most famous is the story
 of the chemist Friedrich Von Kekule who had long been
 puzzling over the structure of benzene (C H ). No matter how
 he or anyone else tried to make the chains of atoms fit together,
 it didn’t work. Nothing about them made sense, and some
 scientists were wondering if this pointed to a fundamental
 misunderstanding about the nature of molecular bonding. And
 then, his dream:
 Again the atoms danced before my eyes. My mind’s eye,
 sharpened by many previous experiences, distinguished
 larger structures of diverse forms, long series, closely joined
 together; all in motion, turning and twisting like serpents.
 But see what was that? One serpent had seized its own tail
 and this image whirled defiantly before my eyes. As by a
 lightning flash, I awoke.
 6 6
 And upon awakening, he knew that benzene’s structure was a
 ring shape. Now, would you say Kekule himself thought of the
 solution? From his description, he merely watched the solution
 play out in front of him and recognized it when he saw it. It was
 as if the author of the dreams had solved the problem and was
 merely presenting it to Kekule. But who is the author of these
 dreams?
 On one level, the subconscious mind is part of us, but on
 another, it seems to be quite separate. Some people become
 quite uncomfortable at the idea of regarding one’s subconscious
 mind as another person. It is an idea that sounds, well, kind of
 crazy. But creativity is crazy, so that shouldn’t stop us—in fact, it
 should encourage us. So, why not treat it like a separate entity?
 No one has to know—it can be your little secret. Bizarre as it
 sounds, treating your subconscious like another person can be
 quite useful, because as humans, we like to anthropomorphize
 things, because it gives us a well-understood model for thinking
 about and interacting with them. You won’t be alone in this
 practice—creative minds have been doing it for thousands of
 years. Stephen King describes his silent partner in his book On
 Writing:
 There is a muse (traditionally, the muses were women, but
 mine’s a guy; I’m afraid we’ll just have to live with that), but
 he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing
 room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter
 or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement
 guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down
 there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in.
 You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the
 muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling
 trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think this is
 fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that
 muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist
 (what I get out of mine is mostly surly grunts, unless he’s on
 duty), but he’s got the inspiration. It’s right that you should
 do all the work and burn all the midnight oil, because the
 guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of
 magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life.
 Believe me, I know.
 So, if we pretend our creative subconscious is another person,
 what is that person like? You might already have a mental
 picture of yours. Here are some common characteristics of the
 creative subconscious that most people seem to share:
 Can’t talk, or at least chooses not to. Not in words, anyway.
 Tends to communicate through imagery and emotions.
 Impulsive. Tends not to plan ahead, tends to live in the
 moment.
 Emotional. Gets swept up in whatever you are feeling—
 happy, angry, excited, afraid—the subconscious seems to feel
 things more deeply and more powerfully than the conscious
 mind.
 Playful. It has a constant curiosity and loves wordplay and
 pranks.
 Irrational. Not bound by logic and rationality, the
 subconscious comes up with ideas that often make no sense.
 Need to go to the moon? Perhaps a long ladder will work.
 Sometimes these ideas are a useless distraction, but
 sometimes they are the clever perspective you have sought
 all along—whoever heard of a ring molecule, for example?
 I sometimes wonder if the long-term appeal of the character of
 Harpo Marx, from the Marx Brothers films, has to do with the
 fact that he matches the profile of the creative subconscious
 almost perfectly—perhaps this is his resonant theme. Harpo
 doesn’t speak (or doesn’t care to), is impulsive (eats whatever
 he sees, chases girls, gets into fights), is very emotional (always
 laughing, crying, or having fits of anger), is always playful, and
 is certainly irrational. However, his crazy solutions to problems
 often save the day, and in quiet moments, he plays music of
 angelic beauty—not for the praise of others but simply for the
 joy of doing it. I like to think of Harpo as the patron saint of the
 creative subconscious (see Figure 7.2).
 FIGURE
 7.2
 Sometimes, though, working with the creative subconscious can
 make you feel like you have a deranged four-year-old living
 inside your head. Without the rational mind to plan things out,
 take precautions, and set things straight, this guy would never
 survive on his own. For this reason, many people get in the
 habit of ignoring what the subconscious mind suggests. If you
 are doing your taxes, that is probably a good idea. But if you are
 brainstorming about games, your silent partner is more
 powerful than you are. Keep in mind that your partner has
 been creating entertaining virtual worlds for you each night,
 since before you were born, and he is more in touch with the
 essence of experience than you can ever hope to be. Here are
 some tips for getting the most out of this unusual creative
 partnership.
 Subconscious Tip #1: Pay Attention
 “Should we be mindful of dreams?” Joseph asked. “Can we
 interpret them?”
 The Master looked into his eyes and said tersely: “We should
 be mindful of everything, for we can interpret everything.”
 —Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
 As usual, the key is listening, this time to your self (sort of). The
 subconscious is no different than anyone else: if you get in the
 habit of ignoring it, it is going to stop making suggestions. If you
 get in the habit of listening to it, seriously considering its ideas,
 and thanking it when you get a good one, it will start to offer
 more and better suggestions. So, how do you listen to something
 that can’t talk? What you must do is pay closer attention to your
 thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, and your dreams, for
 those are the ways the subconscious communicates. This
 sounds really strange, but it really does work—the more you
 pay attention to what the subconscious has to say, the more
 work it will do for you.
 For example, say you are brainstorming ideas for a surfing
 game. You are thinking about which beaches it should be set at
 and what kind of camera systems are going to be best for a
 surfing game. Suddenly, you have this inkling of an idea: “What
 if the surfboards were bananas?” which is crazy, of course—and
 where do you think it came from? Now, you could say to
 yourself, “That’s stupid—let’s constrain this to reality, please.”
 Or you could take a few moments and seriously consider the
 idea: “Okay, so what if the surfboards were bananas?” And then
 another thought comes: “With monkeys surfing on them.” And
 suddenly, this doesn’t seem so dumb—maybe this banana
 surfing monkey game could be something different, something
 new, something that might gain you a wider audience than the
 more realistic game you had originally planned. And even if
 you ultimately reject the idea, your subconscious might feel a
 little more respected and take part more seriously in the
 brainstorming process because of the time you spent
 considering its suggestions—and what did it cost you? Only a
 few seconds of quiet reflection.
 Subconscious Tip #2: Record Your Ideas
 Certainly you will record your ideas during a brainstorming
 session, but why not record them all the time? The human
 memory is terrible. By recording all of your ideas, two things
 happen. First, you’ll have a record of many ideas that you
 would likely have forgotten otherwise, and second, you’ll free
 up your mind to think of other things. When you think of an
 important idea and you don’t write it down, it kind of bangs
 around up there, taking up space and mental energy, because
 your mind recognizes it as important and doesn’t want to forget
 the important idea. Something magic happens when you record
 it—it is like your mind doesn’t feel the need to think about the
 idea as much. I find it makes my mind feel clean and open, as
 opposed to cluttered and cramped. The Japanese call this
 mental state “mizu no kokoro,” often translated as “mind like
 water.” It leaves the freedom to think seriously about the design
 of the day, without tripping over the clutter of important
 unrecorded ideas. An inexpensive voice recorder or voice
 recorder app can be an invaluable tool for a game designer.
 Whenever an interesting idea comes to you, just speak it into
 the recorder and deal with it later. You have to have the
 discipline to periodically transcribe those recordings, but really,
 that is a small price to pay for a huge idea collection and a clean
 mental workspace.
 Subconscious Tip #3: Manage Its Appetites
 (Judiciously)
 Let’s be honest here—the subconscious mind has appetites,
 some of which are primal. These appetites seem to be part of its
 job—just as it is the rational mind’s job to determine which
 appetites can be safely fed and how to go about doing that. If
 the subconscious mind feels one of these appetites too strongly,
 it will obsess about it. When it is obsessing, it can’t do good
 creative work. If you are trying to come up with new ideas for a
 real-time strategy game and all you can think about is candy
 bars or how your boyfriend or girlfriend left you or how much
 you hate your roommate, you aren’t going to be able to get
 much good work done, because these intrusive thoughts will
 distract you and the source of these intrusive thoughts, your
 subconscious mind, isn’t getting any work done either and it’s
 the one who has to do the heavy lifting. Maslow’s hierarchy,
 which we’ll discuss in Chapter 11: Motivation, is a pretty good
 guide here—if you don’t have food, safety, and healthy personal
 relationships, it will be hard to do self-actualizing creative
 work. So, make it a priority to get these things worked out, and
 come up with compromises that will keep your subconscious
 satisfied so it can spend its time coming up with genius ideas.
 Use good judgment, of course—some appetites are dangerous
 and should be curbed, not fed, for if you feed them, they tend to
 grow, which makes everything much worse in the long term. It
 is possible that the tendency for so many creative types to selfdestruct may be the result of a close, but poorly managed,
 relationship with their subconscious mind.
 Subconscious Tip #4: Sleep
 It is a common experience that a problem dicult at night is
 resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has
 worked on it.
 —John Steinbeck
 As Salvador Dali points out, sleep is crucial and not just the
 slumber with a key. We used to think that sleep was for the
 body—but it has become clear that sleep is primarily for the
 benefit of the mind. Some strange process of sorting, filing, and
 reorganizing seems to be going on when we sleep. Clearly, the
 subconscious is wide awake and active for at least a part of the
 sleep cycle—the part that features dreams. I have built up my
 relationship with my own creative subconscious to the point
 that I sometimes get a sense of when he “is around” or “is not
 around,” and I certainly find that when I haven’t had enough
 sleep, often he isn’t around. It feels like he takes naps when I
 (we?) haven’t had enough sleep or at least he isn’t participating
 much in what I’m doing, and this absence shows in my work. I
 have been in more than one brainstorming meeting where I
 was contributing almost nothing useful, and then just following
 a feeling of him “showing up,” a flood of useful ideas came
 forth.
 Subconscious Tip #5: Don’t Push Too Hard
 So now you must labor with your brains, and now you must
 forbear your activity, and see what the great Soul showeth.
 —Ralph Waldo Emerson
 You don’t have ideas – they just let you know when they’re
 ready.
 —Stephen Moffat
 Did you ever try to think of a name during a conversation,
 maybe someone you know, maybe some movie star, and you
 know you know it, but just can’t think of it? So you squint your
 eyes and try and force the answer out of your mind—but it just
 doesn’t come. So, you give up and move on, talking about
 something else. A few minutes later, suddenly the answer pops
 into your mind. Now, where do you think that came from? It is
 as if the subconscious was working on the problem of finding
 that name in the background while you moved on to other
 things. When it found the answer, it gave it to you. No amount
 of concentration or straining was going to move it along faster;
 in fact, this seems to slow the process down, because who can
 work with someone looming over their shoulder? The same
 goes for your creative work. Don’t expect immediate answers
 from your subconscious. Give it a problem to solve (one more
 advantage of a clear problem statement!), make clear the
 problem is important, and leave it to do its work. The answer
 might come quickly, it might come slowly, or it might not come
 at all. But nagging and looming won’t make it come any faster—
 it will just slow things down.
 A Personal Relationship
 You may find that your relationship with your subconscious is
 different than what I describe here. This is expected—different
 people’s minds work in different ways. The important thing is
 that you find the techniques that work best for you, and the
 only way you can do that is by following your instincts (hints
 from the subconscious) about what will be creatively
 productive and start trying experiments. Some of these will be
 necessarily strange. Slumber with a key is strange, but it
 worked for Dali. Treating your subconscious mind like a fulltime roommate is strange, but it works for Stephen King. To
 become the best game designer you can be, you must find the
 techniques that work for you, and no one can tell you what
 those are—you must discover them yourself.
 Sixteen Nitty-Gritty Brainstorming Tips
 Creativity is for people who don’t have a good idea in the
 first place.
 —Anonymous
 You and your silent partner are ready to tackle your problem.
 Now comes the fun part: brainstorming! That is, it’s fun when
 the ideas come—when they don’t, it’s terrifying! So, how can
 you make sure they do come?
 Brainstorm Tip #1: The Write Answer
 You’ve stated your problem. Now, start writing down solutions!
 Why write them down? Why not just sit and think until that
 brilliant idea comes to you? Because your memory is terrible!
 You are going to want to mix and match little pieces from
 dozens, if not hundreds, of ideas and you will never be able to
 remember them all. Even worse, as we discussed earlier, when
 you have many disconnected ideas in your head, they can
 crowd out new ideas. So make room! Were you ever really mad
 at someone so you wrote them a nasty letter (which you might
 have never sent) and immediately felt better? Something magic
 happens when you put your ideas on paper. So do it!
 Brainstorm Tip #2: Write or Type?
 What is the best way to record your ideas? Whatever works
 best for you! Some people like typing best, some like writing.
 Cartoonist and writer Lynda Barry insists that there is magic in
 a moving pen that pulls ideas out of your mind in a way that a
 computer keyboard can never match, and I tend to agree.
 I personally like writing on unlined paper, because it allows for
 more expression and creativity—you can circle ideas, draw
 little sketches, connect ideas with arrows, cross things out, etc.
 You can always type up the good stuff later.
 Brainstorm Tip #3: Sketch
 Not all ideas can be easily expressed through text. So draw
 some pictures! It doesn’t matter that you can’t draw—try! When
 you express your ideas visually, not only will you remember
 them more easily, the pictures you draw will trigger more ideas.
 Try this out. You’ll be surprised at how well it works. Need to
 make a game about mice? Start drawing some mice—real rough
 —just crude little mouse blobs. I guarantee you will find ideas
 popping into your head that simply weren’t there a minute ago.
 Brainstorm Tip #4: Toys
 Another way to get your mind visually engaged in your
 problem is to bring some toys to the table. Pick some that have
 something to do with your problem and some that have nothing
 to do with it! Why do you think that restaurants like TGI
 Friday’s have all that crazy stuff on the walls? Is it just
 decoration? No. When people see it, they think of things to talk
 about, and the more things they think of to talk about, the more
 enjoyable their restaurant experience. If it works for
 restaurateurs, it can work for you. Toys don’t just visually
 engage your creativity—they also engage it in a tactile way.
 Even better, why not bring a big lump of clay, or Play-Doh, so
 you can make little sculptures of your ideas? It sounds silly, but
 creativity is silly.
 Brainstorm Tip #5: Change Your Perspective
 The whole point of the lenses in this book is that they get you
 looking at your game from different perspectives. But why stop
 there? Don’t just brainstorm sitting in your chair—stand up on
 your chair—things look different up there! Go to different
 places—immerse yourself in different things. Brainstorm on the
 bus, at the beach, at the mall, or in a toy store, while standing
 on your head—anything that sparks your imagination and
 makes you think of new things is worth doing.
 Brainstorm Tip #6: Immerse Yourself
 You’ve stated your problem; now immerse yourself in it! Find
 people in your target audience at a local store—what are they
 buying? Why? Eavesdrop on them—what are they talking
 about? What is important to them? You need to know these
 people intimately. Have you settled on a technology already?
 Learn everything you can about it—cover your walls with its
 specs—find that secret thing it can do that no one has noticed
 yet. Are you locked into a theme or storyline? Find other
 adaptations of similar stories and read or watch them. Do you
 need to do something new with an old gameplay mechanic?
 Play as many games that use that mechanic as you can find—
 and some that don’t!
 Brainstorm Tip #7: Crack Jokes
 Some people are nervous about using humor to do serious
 work, but when you are brainstorming, sometimes jokes are
 what get the job done. Jokes (Can you be a closet
 claustrophobic?) loosen up our minds (Is it possible to be totally
 partial?) and make us see things from a perspective that we
 missed before (Save the whales! Collect the whole set!)—and
 new perspectives are how great ideas happen! Be warned,
 though! Jokes can get you off track, especially in a group setting.
 It’s fine to get off track sometimes (the good ideas might not be
 on the track); just make it your responsibility to get things back
 on track. A brainstorming commandment to live by: “He who
 derails, rerails.”
 Brainstorm Tip #8: Spare No Expense
 From childhood, most of us are trained not to waste resources:
 “Don’t use the good markers!” “Don’t waste paper!” “Don’t
 waste money!” Brainstorming is not the time to be frugal. Never
 let materials get in the way of your creativity. You are going to
 be trying to find the million-dollar ideas—you can’t let a few
 pennies for paper or ink get in the way. When brainstorming, I
 like to use a fancy pen and heavy gauge paper, and I like to
 write in big letters, only using one side of the paper. Why?
 Partly because I can lay out all the sheets on the table, or on the
 floor, and consider all the ideas from a distance if I need to.
 Partly because it gives the process a certain dignity. But partly
 because it just feels right! And when brainstorming, you need to
 do what feels right for you—every little thing you do that makes
 you a little more creatively comfortable increases the chances
 that the great idea will come. And what is right for one person
 isn’t right for everyone—you must constantly experiment to
 find what works best. But if you can’t get the materials you
 prefer, don’t you dare whine about it—use what you’ve got!
 There is work to be done!
 Brainstorm Tip #9: The Writing on the Wall
 You might prefer writing on a whiteboard to writing on paper.
 If so, do it! If you are brainstorming in a team setting, you will
 need some kind of solution that everyone can see at once. Some
 people like to use index cards to write down their ideas. These
 can be tacked to a bulletin board and have the advantage of
 being easily repositioned. The downside is that they are
 sometimes too small for a big idea. I find I prefer giant (2 ft ×
 2.5 ft) Post-It sheets (expensive, but we spare no expense!) or
 sheets of butcher paper with masking tape. This way, you can
 write lists on the wall but easily reposition them when you run
 out of room. Even better, you can take them down, stack them,
 roll them up, and store them. A year later, when someone says,
 “Hey, what were some of those robot game ideas we had last
 year?” you can go pull them out, stick them up, and restart your
 brainstorming session as if it had never stopped.
 Brainstorm Tip #10: The Space Remembers
 This excellent phrase is from the book The Art of Innovation by
 Tom Kelley. One more reason to put things on the wall: our
 memory for lists is bad, but our memory for where things are
 positioned around us is very good. By posting your ideas in the
 room all around you, you can more easily remember where
 they are. This is crucial, since you will be trying to find
 connections between dozens of different ideas and you need
 any help you can get—particularly if you will be brainstorming
 over several sessions. It is quite remarkable. If you put a bunch
 of ideas up on the walls and you go away for a few weeks, you
 will forget most of it. But walk back into that room where the
 ideas are posted, and it feels like you never left.
 Brainstorm Tip #11: Write Everything
 The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
 —Linus Pauling
 You’ve got your fancy pens, your fancy paper, your fancy coffee,
 some toys, some modeling clay, everything you think you might
 need to be creative. Now you are waiting for that brilliant idea
 to come. Mistake! Don’t wait—just start writing down
 everything you can think of that is remotely connected to your
 problem. Write down every stupid idea that comes into your
 head. And a lot of them will be stupid. But you have to get the
 stupid ones out of the way before the good ones start showing
 up. And sometimes a stupid idea becomes the inspiration for a
 genius idea, so write it all down. Don’t censor yourself. You
 have to give up your fear of being wrong and your fear of
 looking silly. This is hard for most of us to do, but it comes with
 practice. And if you are brainstorming with other people,
 certainly don’t censor them—their stupid ideas are just as good
 as your stupid ideas!
 Brainstorm Tip #12: Number Your Lists
 Much of your brainstorming will consist of lists. When you
 make lists, number them! This does two things: First, it makes
 the lists easier to discuss (“I like ideas 3 through 7, but 8 is my
 favorite!”) and, secondly, and this is extremely weird, when a
 list of things is numbered, the numbers somehow give a certain
 dignity to the things in the list. Consider these two lists:
 1. Chicken broth
 2. Umbrellas
 3. Wind
 4. Spatulas
 Chicken broth
 Umbrellas
 Wind
 Spatulas
 Don’t the items in the numbered list seem more important,
 somehow? If one of them suddenly disappeared, you would be
 much more likely to notice. This dignity will make you (and
 others) more likely to take the ideas on the list seriously.
 Brainstorm Tip #13: Destroy Your Assumptions
 I learned this excellent tip from designer Rob Daviau. Make a
 list of everything about your game that you are assuming to be
 true, such as “I assume that it is designed to be played indoors,”
 “I assume that the player will look at the screen,” and “I assume
 the player only uses one finger to touch the screen.” This can be
 a long list, because we assume so much. Once you have a good
 list, go through each item, and think about how your game
 would work if that assumption wasn’t true. Most of the time,
 the assumption must stand. But once in a while, blowing up one
 of your assumptions will give you a great insight. Rob says he
 arrived at the design for Risk Legacy when he considered
 destroying the standard board game assumption: “One game
 does not affect the next one.”
 Brainstorm Tip #14: Mix and Match Categories
 It’s great when game ideas, Athena-like, spring forth from your
 head, fully formed. But it doesn’t happen that way every time. A
 great technique for helping ideas come together is to
 brainstorm in categories. The elemental tetrad comes in handy
 here. For example, you might have decided you want to make a
 game for teenage girls. You might make separate lists, which
 you can start to mix and match, something like the following:
 Technology Ideas
 1. Smartphone game
 2. Virtual reality headset game
 3. PC
 4. Integrated with instant messaging
 5. Game console
 Mechanics Ideas
 1. Sims-like game.
 2. Interactive fiction game.
 3. The winner makes the most friends.
 4. Try to spread rumors about the other players.
 5. Try to help as many people as possible.
 6. Tetris-like game.
 Story Ideas
 1. High school drama.
 2. College themed.
 3. You play Cupid.
 4. You’re a TV star.
 5. Hospital theme.
 6. Music theme.
 1. You’re a rock star.
 2. You’re a dancer.
 Aesthetic Ideas
 1. Cel shaded.
 2. Anime style.
 3. All characters are animals.
 4. R&B music defines the game.
 5. Edgy rock/punk music defines the feel.
 Once you have lists like these (though you should have dozen
 more entries on each list!), you are free to start mixing and
 matching ideas—maybe a smartphone-based Tetris-like game,
 which has a hospital theme, where all the characters are
 animals…. Or how about a Sims-like console game based on
 high school with an anime style? By having all these lists of
 partial ideas that can easily be mixed and matched, fully
 formed game ideas that you might never have thought of start
 springing up all over the place, each taking on a life of their
 own. Don’t be afraid to make up other categories, either, as you
 need them!
 Brainstorm Tip #15: Talk to Yourself
 There is tremendous social stigma against talking to yourself.
 But when brainstorming alone, some people find it really
 helpful—there is something about saying things out loud that
 makes them more real than just thinking them in your head.
 Find a place where you can freely talk to yourself without
 getting funny looks. Another trick, if you are brainstorming in a
 public place, hold a cell phone next to your head while you talk
 to yourself—it’s silly, but it works.
 Brainstorm Tip #16: Find a Partner
 When you brainstorm with other people, it is a very different
 experience than brainstorming alone. Finding the right
 brainstorming partner can make a world of difference—
 sometimes the two of you can get to great solutions many times
 faster than either of you could alone, as you bounce ideas back
 and forth and complete one another’s sentences. Just having
 someone to talk out loud to, even if they say nothing, can
 sometimes move the process along faster. Do keep in mind that
 adding more and more people doesn’t necessarily help, though.
 Usually, small groups of no more than four are best. Groups
 work best when brainstorming a narrow problem, not a broad,
 open-ended one. And, honestly, most groups go about
 brainstorming all wrong. Research shows that a group just
 showing up in a room trying to brainstorm cold on an idea is a
 recipe for wasted time. Much better is to have each individual
 brainstorm independently first and only then get together to
 share ideas, mix and match them, and solve problems together.
 Also, certain people make bad brainstorming partners—these
 are usually people who try to poke holes in every idea or people
 who have very narrow tastes. These people are best avoided,
 and you’ll be more productive without them. Team
 brainstorming can have tremendous benefits and tremendous
 perils, which we will discuss in greater detail in Chapter 25:
 Team.
 Look At All These Ideas! Now What?
 Our goal in this chapter was to “think of an idea.” After a little
 brainstorming, you probably have a hundred! And this is how it
 should be. A game designer must be able to come up with
 dozens of ideas on any topic. As you practice, you will be able to
 come up with more and better ideas in less time. But this is just
 the beginning of your design process. The next step is to narrow
 down this broad list of ideas and start doing something useful
 with them.
 Other Reading to Consider
 What It Is and Picture This by Lynda Barry. These
 magnificent books, where text and artwork are seamlessly
 merged, will simultaneously assault and inspire you with the
 gory realities of the creative process.
 Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship by Salvador Dali.
 This book is largely unknown but an excellent window into
 the mind of a creative genius.
 Prototyping a Game in 7 Days by Kyle Gray, Kyle Gabler,
 Matt Kucic, and Shalin Shodhan. This short essay is densely
 packed with excellent advice about prototyping great games
 fast.
 The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
 Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, Chapter 1. This
 controversial book will make you think twice about the
 nature of consciousness and your relationship with your
 subconscious.
 Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth by Jonah Lehrer in
 The New Yorker. January 30, 2012. An excellent overview of
 the past, present, and future of brainstorming.
 Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch. This brief book by a
 famous filmmaker provides excellent snapshots of creativity
 in action.
 Thinkertoys: a Handbook of Creative-Thinking
 Techniques by Michael Michalko. If you are looking for a
 collection of simple brainstorming tools, this book is for you.
 CHAPTER EIGHT
 The Game Improves through Iteration
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-8
 FIGURE
 8.1
 Choosing an Idea
 Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it
 happen.
 —Emerson
 After a painfully rapturous brainstorming session, you have a
 huge list of ideas in front of you. This is where many designers
 trip up. They have so many ideas they like, they aren’t sure
 what to pick. Or they have a lot of mediocre ideas, but nothing
 spectacular, so again they aren’t sure what to pick. So they float
 around for too long, in a vague haze of indecision, hoping that
 the “right idea” will suddenly become clear, if they just wait a
 little longer.
 But something magic happens when you pick an idea and
 decide you are going to make it happen. As Steinbeck says in Of
 Mice and Men, “A plan is a real thing.” Once you make the
 internal decision, “Yes, I’m going to do this,” flaws you missed
 before suddenly become evident, as do benefits. It is kind of like
 flipping a coin to make a decision—when the coin comes down,
 you suddenly know what you really want. There is something
 inside us that makes us think about things differently before
 we’ve decided to do them than after we’ve committed. So take
 advantage of this quirk of human nature—make snap decisions
 about your design, commit to sticking with them, and
 immediately start thinking about the consequences of the
 choice you have just made.
 But what if, with the enlightenment that suddenly comes with
 commitment, you realize you’ve made the wrong choice? The
 answer is easy: be ready to reverse your decision when you
 realize it is wrong. Many people find this difficult—once they
 have made a design decision, they are uncomfortable letting it
 go. You can’t afford this kind of sentimentality. Ideas are not
 like fine china, ideas are like paper cups—they are cheap to
 manufacture, and when one has holes in it, go get another one.
 Some people are quite disconcerted by this combination of snap
 decisions combined with sudden reversals. But it is the most
 efficient way to make full use of your decision-making power,
 and game design is all about making decisions—you need to
 make the best decisions possible, as fast as possible, and this
 slightly eccentric behavior is the way to do it. It’s always better
 to commit to an idea sooner, rather than later—you will get to a
 good decision much faster than if you bide your time
 considering potential alternatives. Just don’t fall in love with
 your decision and be ready to reverse it the moment it isn’t
 working for you.
 So how do you pick? In one sense, the answer is, “Best guess,
 Mr. Sulu.” More analytically, there are many factors you will
 need to consider as you start developing a seed idea. It can pay
 to keep in mind what your idea must grow into before you even
 choose a seed.
 The Eight Filters
 Your finished design will eventually have to make it through
 eight tests, or filters. Only when it passes all of them is your
 design “good enough.” Whenever it fails one of these tests, you
 will have to change the design and then run it through all eight
 tests, or “filters,” again, because a change that makes it past one
 filter might make it fail in another one. In a sense, the design
 process mainly consists of stating your problem, getting an
 initial idea, and finding a way to get it past all eight filters.
 The eight filters are as follows:
 Filter #1: Artistic impulse: This is the most personal of the
 filters. You, as the designer, basically ask yourself whether
 the game “feels right” to you, and if it does, it passes the test.
 If it doesn’t, something needs to change. Your gut feelings and
 the gut feelings of your team are important. They won’t
 always be right, but the other filters will balance that out.
 Key Question: “Does this game feel right?”
 Filter #2: Demographics: Your game is likely to have an
 intended audience. This might be an age bracket, or a gender,
 or some other distinct audience (e.g., “golf enthusiasts”). You
 have to consider whether your design is right for the
 demographic you are targeting. Demographics will be
 discussed in more detail in Chapter 9: Player.
 Key Question: “Will the intended audience like this game
 enough?”
 Filter #3: Experience design: To apply this filter, take into
 account everything you know about creating a good
 experience, including aesthetics, interest curves, resonant
 theme, and game balancing. Many of the lenses in this book
 are about experience design—to pass this filter, your game
 must stand up to the scrutiny of many lenses.
 Key Question: “Is this a well-designed game?”
 Filter #4: Innovation: If you are designing a new game, by
 definition, there needs to be something new about it,
 something players haven’t seen before. Whether your game
 is novel enough is a subjective question, but a very important
 one.
 Key Question: “Is this game novel enough?”
 Filter #5: Business and marketing: The games business is a
 business, and designers who want their games to sell must
 consider the realities of this and integrate them into their
 game’s design. This involves many questions. Are the theme
 and story going to be appealing to consumers? Is the game so
 easily explainable that one can understand what it is about
 just by looking at the overview? What are the expectations
 consumers are going to have about this game based on the
 genre? How do the features of this game compare to other
 similar games in the marketplace? Will the cost of producing
 this game be so high as to make it unprofitable? Does the
 business model for the game make sense? The answers to
 these and many other questions are going to have an impact
 on your design. Ironically, the innovative idea that drove the
 initial design may prove to be completely untenable when
 viewed through this filter. This will be discussed in detail in
 Chapter 32: Profit.
 Key Question: “Will this game be profitable?”
 Filter #6: Engineering: Until you have built it, a game idea is
 just an idea, and ideas are not necessarily bound by the
 constraints of what is possible or practical. To pass this filter,
 you have to answer the question, “How are we going to build
 this?” The answer may be that the limits of technology do not
 permit the idea as originally envisioned to be constructed.
 Novice designers often grow frustrated with the limits that
 engineering imposes on their designs. However, the
 engineering filter can just as often grow a game in new
 directions, because in the process of applying this filter, you
 may realize that engineering makes possible features for
 your game that did not initially occur to you. The ideas that
 appear during the application of this filter can be
 particularly valuable, since you can be certain that they are
 practical. More issues of engineering and technology will be
 discussed in Chapter 29: Technology.
 Key Question: “Is it technically possible to build this game?”
 Filter #7: Social/Community: Sometimes, it is not enough for
 a game to be fun. Some of the design goals may require a
 strong social component, a strong viral component, or the
 formation of a thriving community around your game. The
 design of your game will have a strong impact on these
 things. This will be discussed in detail in Chapters 24 and 25.
 Key Question: “Does this game meet our social and
 community goals?”
 Filter #8: Playtesting: Once the game has been developed to
 the point that it is playable, you must apply the playtesting
 filter, which is arguably the most important of all the filters.
 It is one thing to imagine what playing a game will be like,
 and quite another to actually play it, and yet another to see it
 played by your target audience. You will want to get your
 game to a playable stage as soon as possible, because when
 you actually see your game in action, important changes that
 must be made will become obvious. In addition to modifying
 the game itself, the application of this filter often changes
 and tunes the other filters as you start to learn more about
 your game mechanics and the psychology of your intended
 audience. Playtesting will be discussed in detail in Chapter
 28.
 Key Question: “Do the playtesters enjoy the game enough?”
 Sometimes, in the course of design, you may find a need to
 change one of the filters—perhaps originally you targeted one
 demographic (say, males ages 18–35), but while designing, you
 stumbled into something that better fits another demographic
 (say, females over 50). Changing the filters is fine, when your
 design constraints will allow it. The important thing is that
 somehow, by changing the filters or by changing your design,
 you find a way to get through all eight.
 You will be using these filters continuously throughout the rest
 of the design and development process of your game. When
 picking an initial idea, it makes sense to evaluate which of your
 ideas is going to have the best shot of being molded and shaped
 to the point it can survive this gauntlet. The perspective of the
 eight filters is a very useful way to evaluate your game, so let’s
 make it Lens #15.
 #15 THE LENS OF THE EIGHT FILTERS
 To use this lens, you must consider the many constraints your
 design must satisfy. You can only call your design finished when
 it can pass through all eight filters without requiring a change.
 Ask yourself the eight key questions:
 Does this game feel right?
 Will the intended audience like this game enough?
 Is this a well-designed game?
 Is this game novel enough?
 Will this game sell?
 Is it technically possible to build this game?
 Does this game meet our social and community goals?
 Do the playtesters enjoy this game enough?
 Illustration by Chris Daniel
 In some situations, there may be still more filters; for example,
 an educational game will also have to answer questions like
 “Does this game teach what it is supposed to?” If your design
 requires more filters, don’t neglect them.
 The Rule of the Loop
 It is somewhat daunting to consider that all of Chapter 7 and
 the first part of this one have merely been an elaboration of “(1)
 Think of an idea.” On the other hand, ideas are at the root of
 design, and their production is so mysterious as to be almost
 magical, so perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that there is so
 much to say about this single step.
 At this point in the process, you have thought of many ideas and
 chosen one, and now it is time to move on to the next step: “(2)
 Try it out.” And many designers and developers do just that—
 leap in and try out their game. And if your game is simple—
 such as a card game, board game, or very simple computer
 game—and you have plenty of time to test it and change it, over
 and over, until it is great, you probably should do just that.
 But what if you can’t just build a working prototype of your
 game in an hour or two? What if your game vision requires
 months of artwork and programming before you will even be
 able to try it out? If this is the case (as it is for many modern
 videogame designs), you need to proceed cautiously at this
 point. The process of game design and development is
 necessarily iterative, or looping. It is impossible to accurately
 plan how many loops it is really going to take before your game
 passes all eight filters and is “good enough.” This is what makes
 game development so incredibly risky—you are gambling that
 you will be able to get your game to pass all eight filters on a
 fixed budget, when you really don’t know if that will be
 possible.
 The naïve strategy, which many still use today, is to start
 slapping the game together and hope for the best. Sometimes
 this works. But when it doesn’t, you are in a horrible mess. You
 either have to ship a game that you know isn’t good enough or
 suffer the expense of continuing development until it is. And
 often, this extra time and expense is enough to make the project
 completely unprofitable.
 In truth, this is a problem for all software projects. Software
 projects are so complex that it is very difficult to predict how
 long they will take to build and how long it will take to find and
 fix all of the bugs that will surely appear during development.
 On top of all that, games have the added burden of needing to
 be fun—game developers have a couple of extra filters that
 nongame software developers don’t need to worry about.
 The real problem here is the Rule of the Loop.
 The Rule of the Loop: The more times you test and improve
 your design, the better your game will be.
 The Rule of the Loop is not a lens, because it is not a perspective
 —it is an absolute truth. There are no exceptions to the Rule of
 the Loop. You will try, at times in your career, to rationalize it
 away, to convince yourself that “this time, the design is so good,
 we don’t have to test and improve,” or “we really have no
 choice—we’ll have to hope for the best,” and you will suffer for
 it each time. The horrible thing about computer games is that
 the amount of time and money it takes to test and adjust the
 system is so much greater than for traditional games. It means
 computer game developers have no choice but to loop fewer
 times, which is a terribly risky thing to do.
 If you are indeed embarking on the design of a game that is
 likely to involve long “test and improve” loops, you need to
 answer these two questions:
 Loop question 1: How can I make every loop count?
 Loop question 2: How can I loop as fast as possible?
 The software engineering people have thought about this
 problem a lot over the last forty years, and they have come up
 with some useful techniques.
 A Short History of Software Engineering
 Danger—Waterfall—Keep Back
 In the 1960s, when software development was still relatively
 new, there was very little in the way of formal process.
 Programmers just made their best guesses about how long
 things would take, and they would start coding. Often the
 guesses were wrong, and many software projects went
 disastrously over budget. In the 1970s, in an attempt to bring
 some order to this unpredictable process, many developers
 (usually at the behest of nontechnical management) tried to
 adopt the “waterfall model” of software development, which
 was an orderly seven-step process for software development. It
 was generally presented looking something like this:
 FIGURE
 8.2
 And it certainly looks appealing! Seven orderly steps, and when
 each is complete, nothing remains but to move on to the next
 one—the very name “waterfall” implies that no iteration is
 needed, since waterfalls generally do not flow uphill.
 The waterfall model had one good quality: it encouraged
 developers to spend more time in planning and design before
 just jumping into the code. Except for that, it is complete
 nonsense, because it violates the Rule of the Loop. Managers
 found it incredibly appealing, but programmers knew it to be
 absurd—software is simply too complex for such a linear
 process to ever work. Even Winston Royce, who wrote the
 paper that was the foundation for all of this, disagreed with the
 waterfall model as it is commonly understood. Interestingly, his
 original paper emphasizes the importance of iteration and the
 ability to go back to previous steps as needed. He never even
 used the word “waterfall”! But what was taught at universities
 and corporations everywhere was this linear approach. The
 whole thing seems to have been wishful thinking, mostly
 promulgated by people who did not actually have to build real
 systems themselves.
 Barry Boehm Loves You
 Then, in 1986, Barry Boehm (pronounced “beam”) presented a
 different model, which was based more closely on how real
 software development actually happens. It is usually presented
 as a somewhat intimidating diagram, where development starts
 in the middle and spirals out clockwise, passing through four
 quadrants again and again (Figure 8.3).
 FIGURE
 8.3
 The spiral model of software development.
 His model has a lot of complex detail, but we don’t need to go
 into all of that. There are basically three great ideas wrapped
 up in here: risk assessment, prototypes, and looping. In brief,
 the spiral model suggests that you do the following:
 1. Come up with a basic design.
 2. Figure out the greatest risks in your design.
 3. Build prototypes that mitigate those risks.
 4. Test the prototypes.
 5. Come up with a more detailed design based on what you
 have learned.
 6. Return to step 2.
 And basically, you repeat this loop until the system is done. This
 beats the waterfall model hands down, because it is all about
 the Rule of the Loop. Also, it answers the questions we stated
 earlier:
 Loop question 1: How can I make every loop count?
 Spiral model answer: Assess your risks and mitigate them.
 Loop question 2: How can I loop as fast as possible?
 Spiral model answer: Build many rough prototypes.
 There have been many descendants of the spiral model, but by
 far the most successful has been the spread of agile
 development.
 The Agile Manifesto
 The event that most shaped modern game design and
 development occurred in 2001 at a ski resort in Snowbird, Utah,
 when a group of software engineers put together the Agile
 Manifesto. Continuing in the vein of Barry Boehm, they
 attempted to put forth the values and principles that were
 behind the creation of excellent software. The manifesto and its
 12 key principles are reprinted in full here:
 Individuals and Interactions -over- Processes and
 Tools
 Working Software -over- Comprehensive
 Documentation
 Customer Collaboration -over- Contract Negotiation
 Responding to Change -over- Following a Plan
 That is, while there is value in the items on
 the right, we value the items on the left more.
 We follow these principles:
 1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through
 early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
 2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in
 development. Agile processes harness change for the
 customer’s competitive advantage.
 3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of
 weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the
 shorter timescale.
 4. Business people and developers must work together daily
 throughout the project.
 5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them
 the environment and support they need, and trust them to
 get the job done.
 6. The most ecient and effective method of conveying
 information to and within a development team is face-toface conversation.
 7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
 8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The
 sponsors, developers, and users should be able to
 maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
 9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good
 design enhances agility.
 10. Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not
 done—is essential.
 11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge
 from self-organizing teams.
 12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become
 more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior
 accordingly.
 These principles have been translated into concrete practices
 that take many forms and names but are most often referred to
 as “scrum.” Agile and scrum made a huge impact on the
 software world and a bigger impact on videogame developers,
 who have been especially passionate about embracing these
 principles. My observations are that at this point in time, over
 80% of videogame developers claim to be using some version of
 agile development. Looking at the nature of agile development,
 it’s not hard to see why.
 A full description of agile methods and processes is beyond the
 scope of this book, but here are the core elements used by most
 developers:
 Flexible goals: Central to the agile philosophy is the notion
 that we can’t know precisely what we are going to have time
 to create. By planning around a more flexible set of goals,
 and not merely tolerating changes to the plan, but planning
 for changes to the plan, the team can adapt to new ideas and
 information throughout the course of development.
 Prioritized backlog: Instead of working toward a rigid set of
 features, agile teams instead work with a backlog, which is a
 list of features sorted by priority. Anytime someone has a
 new idea for a feature, it can be added to the backlog. In each
 sprint, the team revisits the backlog and reprioritizes the
 features—important ones get a high ranking, less important
 ones get a low ranking. This makes it easy to decide what to
 work on next—just look at the top of the backlog. It is
 important to realize that there is no guarantee that
 everything on the backlog will get done—there is only
 guarantee that the most important things will get done with
 whatever time is available.
 Sprints: Instead of focusing primarily on working toward a
 long-term (multimonth) goal, agile developers work in a
 series of “sprints,” where each sprint is a few weeks long and
 has a concrete working deliverable at the end of it. Atari
 founder Nolan Bushnell once said, “The ultimate inspiration
 is the deadline,” and it is true—deadlines have a special way
 of making things happen, and that is precisely the philosophy
 behind sprinting: more deadlines means more things get
 done.
 Scrum meetings: Instead of weekly “status meetings,” agile
 developers have daily “scrum” meetings, designed for brevity
 and effectiveness. These meetings are typically 10–15
 minutes long and are often held standing up, to underline
 their brief nature. During these meetings, each member
 explains exactly three things and nothing more: what they
 accomplished yesterday, what they plan to accomplish today,
 and what problems they are facing. Solutions to these
 problems are discussed one-on-one by the appropriate team
 members after the meeting is over. In this system, each team
 member stays aware of what the others are doing and gives
 them a chance to get help from team members.
 Demo day: At the end of each sprint, everyone gets together,
 face to face, to see and experiment with what was produced.
 Working from this new baseline, the team does risk analysis
 and works together to plan the next sprint.
 Retrospectives: Also at the end of each sprint, the team has a
 “retrospective” meeting, which is not about the product they
 are working on, but rather about the process they are using.
 This is a chance for the team to discuss what they are doing
 right, what they are doing wrong, and how they should
 adjust their process for the next sprint.
 It is important to keep in mind that agile is a philosophy, not a
 prescribed methodology, and that there is some significant
 variety in the way different developers carry it out. While these
 approaches have their differences, they are all designed to
 create as many loops as possible and to make each loop count.
 Necessarily, all feature risk assessment and prototyping at their
 core.
 Risk Assessment and Prototyping
 Example: Prisoners of Bubbleville
 Let’s say you and your team have decided you want to make a
 videogame all about parachuting into a city. You have a brief
 design description that you based on the elemental tetrad:
 Prisoners of Bubbleville: Design Brief
 Story: You are “Smiley,” a parachuting cat. The good people
 of Bubbleville are trapped in their houses by an evil wizard.
 You must find a way to defeat the wizard, by repeatedly
 parachuting into the city and sliding down chimneys to visit
 the citizens and get clues about how to stop the wizard.
 Mechanics: As you parachute toward the city, you are trying
 to grab magic bubbles that rise up from the city and use their
 energy to shoot rays at evil vultures that try to pop the
 bubbles and rip your parachute. Simultaneously, you must
 navigate down to one of several target buildings in the city.
 Aesthetics: A cartoony look and feel.
 Technology: Multiple platform 3D console game using a
 third-party engine.
 One approach you could take would be to just start building the
 game. Start writing code, designing detailed levels, and
 animating the characters, while you wait for it all to come
 together, to see what it will really be like. But this could be
 incredibly dangerous. Assuming this is an eighteen-month
 project, it might take as long as six months before you even
 have anything you can playtest. What if you learned, at that
 point, that your game idea wasn’t fun? Or your game engine
 wasn’t up to the job? You would be in real trouble. You would
 be one-third of the way through the project and would only
 have completed a single loop!
 Instead, the right thing is to sit down with your team and do a
 risk analysis. This means making a list of all the things that
 might jeopardize the project. A sample list for this game might
 be the following:
 Prisoners of Bubbleville: Risk List
 Risk #1: The bubble collecting/vulture shooting mechanic
 might not be as fun as we think.
 Risk #2: The game engine might not be able to handle drawing
 an entire city and all those bubbles and vultures at once.
 Risk #3: Our current thinking is that we need thirty different
 houses to make a full game—creating all the different interiors
 and animated characters might take more time than we have.
 Risk #4: We aren’t sure people will like our characters and
 story.
 Risk #5: There is a chance the publisher might insist we theme
 this game to a new summer movie about stunt parachuting.
 In reality, you will probably have many more risks, but for the
 sake of our example, we’ll just consider these. So what do you
 do about these risks? You could just cross your fingers and hope
 these things don’t happen, or you could do the smart thing: risk
 mitigation. The idea is to reduce or eliminate the risks as soon
 as possible, often by building small prototypes. Let’s look at how
 each of these risks could be mitigated:
 Prisoners of Bubbleville: Risk Mitigation
 Risk #1: The bubble collecting/vulture shooting mechanic
 might not be as fun as we think.
 Game mechanics can often be abstracted and played in a
 simpler form. Have a programmer make a very abstract
 version of this gameplay mechanic, perhaps in 2D, with
 simple geometric shapes instead of animated characters. You
 can probably have a working game in a week or two and
 start answering questions about whether it is fun right away.
 If it isn’t, you can make quick modifications to the simple
 prototype, until it is fun, and then begin work on the
 elaborate 3D version. You’ll be doing more loops sooner,
 wisely taking advantage of the Rule of the Loop. You might
 object to this approach, thinking that throwing out the 2D
 prototyping code, which the players will never see, is
 wasteful. In the long run, though, you would have saved
 time, because you will be coding the right game sooner and
 not endlessly coding and recoding the wrong game.
 Risk #2: The game engine might not be able to handle drawing
 an entire city and all those bubbles and vultures at once.
 If you wait for all the final artwork to answer this question,
 you could put yourself in a horrible situation: if the game
 engine can’t handle it, you now have to ask the artists to redo
 their work so it is less strain on the game engine or ask the
 programmers to spend extra time trying to find tricks to
 render everything more efficiently (or most likely, both of
 these things). To mitigate the risk, build a quick prototype,
 right away, that does nothing but show the approximate
 number of equivalent items on screen, to see if the engine
 can handle it. This prototype has no gameplay; it is purely to
 test technical limits. If it can handle it, great! If it can’t, you
 can figure out a solution now, before any art has been
 generated. Again, this prototype will be a throwaway.
 Risk #3: Our current thinking is that we need 30 different
 houses to make a full game—creating all the different interiors
 and animated characters might take more time than we have.
 If you get halfway into development before you realize that
 you don’t have the resources to build all the artwork, you are
 doomed. Have an artist create one house and one animated
 character immediately to see how long it takes, and if it takes
 longer than you can afford, change your design immediately
 —maybe you could have fewer houses, or maybe you could
 reuse some of the interiors and characters.
 Risk #4: We aren’t sure people will like our characters and
 story.
 If you really are concerned about this, you cannot wait until
 the characters and story are in the game to find out. What
 kind of prototype do we build here? An art prototype—it
 might not even be on a computer—just a bulletin board.
 Have your artists draw some concept art or produce test
 renders of your characters and settings. Create some
 storyboards that show how the story progresses. Once you
 have these, start showing them to people (hopefully people in
 your target demographic) and gauge their reactions. Figure
 out what they like, don’t like, and why. Maybe they like the
 look of the main character but hate his attitude. Maybe the
 villain is exciting, but the story is boring. You can figure most
 of this out completely independent of the game. Each time
 you do this and make a change, you’ve completed another
 loop and gotten one step closer to making a good game.
 Risk #5: There is a chance we might have to theme this game
 to a new summer movie about stunt parachuting.
 This risk might sound absurd, but this kind of thing happens
 all the time. When it happens in the middle of a project, it
 can be horrible. And you can’t ignore this kind of thing—you
 must seriously consider every risk that might threaten your
 project. Will a prototype help in this case? Probably not. To
 mitigate this risk, you can lean on management to get a
 decision as fast as possible, or you could decide to make a
 game that could more easily be rethemed to the movie. You
 might even come up with a plan for making two different
 games—the key idea is that you consider the risk
 immediately and take action now to make sure it doesn’t
 endanger your game.
 Risk mitigation is such a useful perspective to take that it
 becomes Lens #16.
 #16 THE LENS OF RISK MITIGATION
 Because the sage always confronts diculties, he never
 experiences them.
 —Tao Te Ching
 To use this lens, stop thinking positively, and start seriously
 considering the things that could go horribly wrong with your
 game.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 What could keep this game from being great?
 How can we stop that from happening?
 Illustration by Chris Daniel
 Risk management is hard. It means you have to face up to the
 problems you would most like to avoid and solve them
 immediately. But if you discipline yourself to do it, you’ll loop
 more times, and more usefully, and get a better game as a
 result. It is tempting to ignore potential problems and just work
 on the parts of your game you feel most confident about. You
 must resist this temptation and focus on the parts of your game
 that are in danger.
 Ten Tips for Productive Prototyping
 It is widely understood that rapid prototyping is crucial for
 quality game development. Here are some tips that will help
 you build the best, most useful prototypes for your game.
 Prototyping Tip #1: Answer a Question
 Every prototype should be designed to answer a question and
 sometimes more than one. You should be able to state the
 questions clearly. If you can’t, your prototype is in real danger
 of becoming a time-wasting boondoggle, instead of the timesaving experiment it is supposed to be. Here are some sample
 questions a prototype might answer:
 How many animated characters can our technology support
 in a scene?
 Is our core gameplay fun? Does it stay fun for a long time?
 Do our characters and settings fit together well aesthetically?
 How large does a level of this game need to be?
 Resist the temptation to overbuild your prototype, and focus
 only on making it answer the key question.
 Prototyping Tip #2: Forget Quality
 Game developers of every stripe have one thing in common:
 they are proud of their craft. Naturally, then, many find the idea
 of doing a “quick and dirty” prototype completely abhorrent.
 Artists will spend too much time on early concept sketches—
 programmers will spend too much time on good software
 engineering for a piece of throwaway code. When working on a
 prototype, all that matters is whether it answers the question.
 The faster it can do that, the better—even if it just barely works
 and looks rough around the edges. In fact, polishing your
 prototype may even make things worse. Playtesters (and
 colleagues) are more likely to point out problems with
 something that looks rough than with something that looks
 polished. Since your goal is to find problems immediately so
 you can solve them early, a polished prototype can actually
 defeat your purpose by hiding real problems, thus lulling you
 into a false sense of security.
 There is no getting around the Rule of the Loop. The faster you
 build the prototype that answers your question, the better,
 despite how ugly it may look.
 Prototyping Tip #3: Don’t Get Attached
 In The Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks made the famous
 statement: “Plan to throw one away—you will anyway.” By this
 he means that whether you like it or not, the first version of
 your system is not going to be a finished product, but really a
 prototype that you will need to discard before you build the
 system the “right” way. But in truth, you may throw away many
 prototypes. Less experienced developers often have a hard time
 doing this—it makes them feel like they have failed. You need to
 enter the prototyping work with the mind-set that it is all
 temporary—all that matters is answering the question. Look at
 each prototype as a learning opportunity—as practice for when
 you build the “real” system. Of course, you won’t throw out
 everything—you’ll keep little pieces here and there that really
 work and you’ll combine them to make something greater. This
 can be painful. As designer Nicole Epps once put it, “You must
 learn how to cut up your babies.”
 Prototyping Tip #4: Prioritize Your Prototypes
 When you make your list of risks, you might realize that you
 need several prototypes to mitigate all the risks that you face.
 The right thing to do is to prioritize them like the agile
 developers do, so that you face the biggest risks first. You should
 also consider dependence—if the results of one prototype have
 the potential to make the other prototypes meaningless, the
 “upstream” prototype is definitely your highest priority.
 Prototyping Tip #5: Parallelize Prototypes
 Productively
 One great way to get more loops in is to do more than one at a
 time. While the system engineers work on prototypes to answer
 technology questions, the artists can work on art prototypes,
 and the game scripters can work on gameplay prototypes.
 Having lots of small, independent prototypes can help you
 answer more questions faster.
 Prototyping Tip #6: It Doesn’t Have to Be Digital
 Your goal is to loop as usefully and as frequently as possible. So
 if you can manage it, why not just get the software out of the
 way? If you are clever, you can prototype your fancy videogame
 idea as a simple board game, or what we sometimes call a
 paper prototype. Why do this? Because you can make board
 games fast and often capture the same gameplay. This lets you
 spot problems sooner—much of the process of prototyping is
 about looking for problems and figuring out how to fix them, so
 paper prototyping can be a real time saver. If your game is turn
 based to start with, this becomes easy. The turn-based combat
 system for Toontown Online was prototyped through a simple
 board game, which let us carefully balance the many types of
 attacks and combos. We would keep track of hit points on paper
 or on a whiteboard and play again and again, adding and
 subtracting rules until the game seemed balanced enough to try
 coding up.
 Even real-time games can be played as paper prototypes.
 Sometimes they can be converted to a turn-based mode that
 still manages to capture the gameplay. Other times, you can just
 play them in real time or nearly. The best way to do it is to have
 other people help you. We’ll consider two examples.
 Tetris: A Paper Prototype
 Let’s say you wanted to make a paper prototype of Tetris. You
 could cut out little cardboard pieces and put them in a pile. Get
 someone else to choose them at random and start sliding them
 down the “board” (a sketch you’ve drawn on a piece of paper),
 while you grab them, and try to rotate them into place. To
 complete a line, you have to just use your imagination or pause
 the game while you cut the pieces with an X-Acto knife. This
 would not be the perfect Tetris experience, but it might be close
 enough for you to start to see if you had the right kinds of
 shapes and also enough to give you some sense of how fast the
 pieces should drop. And you could get the whole thing going in
 about fifteen minutes.
 Halo: A Paper Prototype
 Would it be possible to make a paper prototype of a first-person
 shooter? Sure! You need different people to play the different
 game characters as well as different players. Draw out the map
 on a big piece of graph paper, and get little game pieces to
 represent the different players and enemies. You need one
 person to control each of the players and one for each of the
 enemies. You could then either make some turn-based rules
 about how to move and shoot or get yourself a metronome! It is
 easy to find free metronome apps. Configure your metronome
 to tick once every five seconds, and make a rule that you can
 move one square of graph paper with every tick. When there is
 a line of sight, you can take a shot at another player or monster,
 but only one shot per tick. This will give the feeling of playing
 the whole thing in slow motion, but that can be a good thing,
 because it gives you time to think about what is working and
 not working while you are playing the game. You can get a great
 sense of how big your map should be, the shapes of hallways
 and rooms that make for an interesting game, the properties
 your weapons should have, and many other things—and you
 can do it all lightning fast!
 Prototyping Tip #7: It Doesn’t Have to Be Interactive
 All your prototypes need not be digital; they don’t even need to
 be interactive. Simple sketches and animations can go a long
 way toward answering questions about gameplay. Prince of
 Persia: Sands of Time, with its novel jumping and time-reversal
 mechanics, was originally prototyped purely with
 noninteractive animations of the incredible acrobatics the
 designers imagined, so the team could more easily look at, think
 about, and discuss how to create interactive systems that would
 achieve this vision.
 Prototyping Tip #8: Pick a “Fast Loop” Game Engine
 The traditional method of software development is kind of like
 baking bread:
 1. Write code.
 2. Compile and link.
 3. Run your game.
 4. Navigate through your game to the part you want to test.
 5. Test it out.
 6. Go back to step 1.
 If you don’t like the bread (your test results), there is no choice
 but to start the whole process over again. It takes way too long,
 especially for a large game. By choosing an engine with the
 right kind of scripting system, you can make changes to your
 code while the game is running. This makes things more like
 working with clay—you can change them continuously:
 1. Run your game.
 2. Navigate through your game to the part you want to test.
 3. Test it out.
 4. Write code.
 5. Go back to step 3.
 By recoding your system while it is running, you can get in
 more loops per day, and the quality of your game goes up
 commensurately. I have used Scheme, Smalltalk, and Python for
 this in the past, but any late-binding language will do the job.
 Today, the Unity engine makes it possible with JavaScript or C#.
 The Unreal engine chooses instead to use a drag and drop
 scripting system (Blueprints) that works in concert with C++
 programming. Scripting languages run more slowly than lowlevel languages like Assembly and C++, but this extra computing
 time is a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of
 improvement you will get by making many more iterations on
 your game, taking full advantage of the Rule of the Loop.
 Prototyping Tip #9: Build the Toy First
 Back in Chapter 4, we distinguished between toys and games.
 Toys are fun to play with for their own sake. In contrast, games
 have goals and are a much richer experience based around
 problem solving. We should never forget, though, that many
 games are built on top of toys. A ball is a toy, but baseball is a
 game. A little avatar that runs and jumps is a toy, but Donkey
 Kong is a game. You should make sure that your toy is fun to
 play with before you design a game around it. You might find
 that once you actually build your toy, you are surprised by what
 makes it fun, and whole new ideas for games might become
 apparent to you.
 Game designer David Jones says that when designing the game
 Lemmings, his team followed exactly this method. They thought
 it would be fun to make a little world with lots of little creatures
 walking around doing different things. They weren’t sure what
 the game would be, but the world sounded fun, so they built it.
 Once they could actually play with the “toy,” they started talking
 seriously about what kinds of games could be built around it.
 Jones tells a similar story about the development of Grand Theft
 Auto: “Grand Theft Auto was not designed as Grand Theft Auto.
 It was designed as a medium. It was designed to be a living,
 breathing city that was fun to play.” Once the “medium” was
 developed and the team could see that it was a fun toy, they had
 to decide what game to build with it. They realized the city was
 like a maze, so they borrowed maze game mechanics from
 something they knew was good. Jones explains: “GTA came
 from Pac-Man. The dots are the little people. There’s me in my
 little, yellow car. And the ghosts are policemen.”
 By building the toy first and then coming up with the game, you
 can radically increase the quality of your game, because it will
 be fun on two levels. Further, if the gameplay you create is
 based on the parts of the toy that are the most fun, the two
 levels will be supporting each other in the strongest way
 possible. Game designers often forget to consider the toy
 perspective. To help us remember, we’ll make it Lens #17.
 #17 THE LENS OF THE TOY
 To use this lens, stop thinking about whether your game is fun
 to play, and start thinking about whether it is fun to play with.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 If my game had no goal, would it be fun at all? If not, how
 can I change that?
 When people see my game, do they want to start interacting
 with it, even before they know what to do? If not, how can I
 change that?
 There are two ways to use the Lens of the Toy. One way is to use
 it on an existing game, to figure out how to add more toylike
 qualities to it—that is, how to make it more approachable and
 more fun to manipulate. But the second way, the braver way, is
 to use it to invent and create new toys before you even have
 any idea what games will be played with them. This is risky if
 you are on a schedule—but if you are not, it can be a great
 “divining rod” to help you find wonderful games you might not
 have discovered otherwise.
 Illustration by Camilla Kydland
 Prototyping Tip #10: Seize Opportunities for More
 Loops
 As things change in the course of game development,
 sometimes more time becomes available. Some of the greatest
 successes in the game industry have come from unexpected
 events allowing for more loops. Halo, for instance, was
 originally in development as a Macintosh game. When a deal
 with Microsoft meant a change to PC, the team used it as an
 opportunity to throw out things that weren’t working and to
 iterate further on what they knew was good. A second windfall
 came when Microsoft asked them to change from PC to the
 newly announced Xbox! The extra time necessary to make
 technical changes also afforded time to iterate and improve
 gameplay. Because the designers took savvy advantage of those
 unplanned loops, the quality of the game went through the roof.
 Closing the Loop
 Once you have built your prototypes, all that remains is to test
 them, and then based on what you have learned, start the
 whole process over again. Recall the informal process we
 discussed earlier:
 The Informal Loop
 1. Think of an idea.
 2. Try it out.
 3. Keep changing it and testing it until it seems good enough.
 We have now made the preceding loop a bit more formal:
 The Formal Loop
 1. State the problem.
 2. Brainstorm some possible solutions.
 3. Choose a solution.
 4. List the risks of using that solution.
 5. Build prototypes to mitigate the risks.
 6. Test the prototypes. If they are good enough, stop.
 7. State the new problems you are trying to solve, and go to step
 2.
 With each round of prototyping, you will find yourself stating
 the problems in more detail. To give an example, let’s say you
 are given the task of creating a racing game—but there has to
 be something new and interesting about it. Here is a summary
 of how a few loops of that process might play out.
 Loop 1: “New Racing” Game
 Problem statement: Come up with a new kind of racing game.
 Solution: Underwater submarine races (with torpedoes!)
 Risks
 Not sure what underwater racetracks should look like.
 This might not feel innovative enough.
 Technology might not be able to handle all the water
 effects.
 Prototypes
 Artists working on concept sketches of underwater
 racetracks.
 Designers prototyping (using paper prototypes and by
 hacking an existing racecar game) novel effects (subs that
 can also rise out of water and fly, tracking missiles, depth
 charges, racing through a minefield).
 Programmers testing out simple water effects.
 Results
 Underwater racetracks look okay if there is a “glowing
 path” in the water. Underwater tunnels will be cool! So
 will flying submarines following tracks that go in and out
 of the water!
 Early prototypes seem fun, provided the submarines are
 very fast and maneuverable. It will be necessary to make
 them “racing subs.” The mix of flying and swimming feels
 very novel. Subs should go faster when flying, so we will
 need to find a way to limit the amount of time they can
 spend in the air. The little playtesting we have done makes
 it clear this game must support networked multiplay.
 Some water effects are easier than others. Splashes look
 good, so do underwater bubbles. Making the whole screen
 waver takes too much CPU and is kind of distracting
 anyway.
 Loop 2: “Racing Subs” Game
 New problem statement: Design a “racing sub” game, where
 subs can fly.
 Detailed problem statements
 Not sure what “racing subs” look like. We need to define
 the look of both subs and racetracks.
 Need to find a way to balance the game, so that subs spend
 the right amount of time in and out of the water.
 Need to figure how to support networked multiplay.
 Risks
 If the racing subs look “too cartoony,” they might turn off
 older players. If they look too realistic, they might just
 seem silly with this kind of gameplay.
 Until we know how much time we are spending in and out
 of the water, it is impossible to design levels or to do the
 artwork for the landscapes.
 The team has never done networked multiplay for a racing
 game. We aren’t completely sure we can do it.
 Prototypes
 Artists will sketch different kinds of subs, in a number of
 different styles: cartoony, realistic, hyperrealistic subs that
 are living creatures. The team will vote on them, and we
 will also informally survey members of our target
 audience.
 Programmers and designers will work together on a very
 crude prototype that lets them experiment with how much
 time should be spent in and out of the water and different
 mechanics for managing that.
 Programmers will build a rough framework for networked
 multiplay that should handle all the kinds of messages this
 kind of game will need.
 Results
 Everyone loves the “dino-sub” designs. There is strong
 agreement between team members and potential audience
 members that “swimming dinosaurs” are the right look
 and feel for this game.
 After several experiments, it becomes clear that for most
 levels, 60% of time should be spent underwater, 20% in the
 air, and 20% near the surface, where players who grab the
 right power-ups can fly above the water for a speed
 advantage.
 The early networked experiments show that mostly the
 racing is not a problem for multiplay, but if we can avoid
 using rapid-fire machine guns, multiplay will be a lot
 easier.
 Loop 3: “Flying Dinos” Game
 Problem statement: Design a “flying dino” game where
 dinosaurs race in and above the water.
 Detailed problem statements
 We need to figure out if we can schedule all the animation
 time needed for the dinosaurs.
 We need to develop the “right” number of levels for this
 game.
 We need to figure out all the power-ups that will go into
 this game.
 We need to determine all the weapons that this game
 should support (and avoid rapid-fire machine guns
 because of networking constraints).
 Notice how the problem statements gradually evolved and got
 more specific with each loop. Also notice how ugly problems
 bubbled to the surface quickly: What if the team hadn’t tried
 out all the different character designs so early? What if three
 levels of the game had already been designed and modeled
 before anyone noticed the problem of keeping players in the air
 for the right amount of time? What if the machine gun system
 had already been coded up and the whole gameplay mechanic
 centered around it, before anyone realized it would break the
 networking code? These problems got addressed quickly
 because of so many early loops. It looks like just two complete
 loops and the beginning of a third one, but because of the wise
 use of parallelism, there were really six design loops.
 Also notice how the whole team was involved in important
 design decisions. There is no way that a lone designer could
 have done this—much of the design was informed by the
 technology and the aesthetics.
 How Much Is Enough?
 …and now I saw, though too late, the folly of beginning a
 work before we count the cost, and before we judge rightly
 of our own strength to go through with it.
 —Robinson Crusoe
 You might wonder how many loops are needed before the game
 is done. This is a very hard question to answer, and it is what
 makes game development so difficult to schedule. The Rule of
 the Loop implies that one more loop will always make your
 game a little better. So as the saying goes, “the work is never
 finished—only abandoned.” The important thing is to make
 sure you get enough loops in to produce a game you are proud
 of before you’ve used up the entire development budget.
 So when you stand there at the beginning of the first loop, is it
 possible to make an accurate estimate of when you will have a
 finished, high-quality game? No. It is simply not possible.
 Experienced designers, after a time, get better at guessing, but
 the large number of game titles that ship later than originally
 promised, or with lower quality than originally promised, is
 testament to the fact that there is just no way to know. Why is
 this? Because at the beginning of the first loop, you don’t yet
 know what you are going to build! With each loop, though, you
 get a more solid idea of what the game will really be, and this
 allows for more accurate estimates.
 Game designer Mark Cerny has described a system for game
 design and development that he calls “The Method.” Not
 surprisingly, this features a system of iteration and risk
 mitigation. But The Method makes an interesting distinction
 between what Cerny calls “preproduction” and “production”
 (terms borrowed from Hollywood). He argues that you are in
 preproduction until you have finished two publishable levels of
 your game, complete with all necessary features. In other
 words, until you have two completely finished levels, you are
 still figuring out the fundamental design of your game. Once
 you reach this magic point, you are now in production. This
 means that you know enough about what your game really is
 that you can safely schedule the rest of development. Cerny
 states that usually this point is generally reached when 30% of
 the necessary budget has been spent. So if it costs you $1
 million to get to this point, it will probably cost you another $2.3
 million to actually complete the game. This is a great rule of
 thumb, and realistically, this might be the most accurate way to
 really plan the release date for a game. The problem with it is
 that you won’t really know what the game will cost or when it
 will be complete until you have already spent 30% of what it
 will take to get there. In truth, this problem is unavoidable—
 The Method just guides you toward reaching a point of
 predictability as soon as is realistically possible.
 Over the years, I have developed my own rules of thumb for
 getting games done on time and under budget, which I call the
 Plan-To-Cut Rule and the 50% Rule.
 The Plan-To-Cut Rule: When planning your game, make sure
 that you build it in such a way that if 50% of your budget were
 removed, you could still have a shippable game. This rule will
 force you to keep your systems simple and will help guarantee
 that when things go wrong (and they will go wrong) and you
 have to cut some features, you will still be guaranteed a
 shippable game.
 The 50% Rule: All core gameplay elements should be fully
 playable at the halfway mark in your schedule. If this is true, it
 means you’ll spend about half the time getting the game
 working and half the time making it great. All too often,
 developers plan to spend 80% of the time getting it working and
 20% of the time making it great. And of course, things go wrong,
 and that 20% gets eaten up, and in the end, you have a game
 that is late and weak. If you plan to have all systems playable at
 the 50% mark, even when things go wrong, you will have time
 for the important loops that make your game great.
 Your Secret Fuel
 Much of this chapter has been very analytical, and that’s as it
 should be, since thoughtful analysis will do a great deal to help
 ensure that your game design and development are optimized.
 But with all that analysis, it can be easy to forget why you
 pursued this idea in the first place.
 #18 THE LENS OF PASSION
 At the end of each prototype, when you are carefully mitigating
 risks and planning what to do next, don’t forget to check how
 you feel about your game with these important questions:
 Am I filled with blinding passion about how great this game
 will be?
 If I’ve lost the passion, can I find it again?
 If the passion isn’t coming back, shouldn’t I be doing
 something else?
 Illustration by Rachel Dorrett
 At the end of every sprint, when you are studying your
 prototypes and planning what to do next, you must remember
 to also do a “passion check.” Passion is the way your
 subconscious tells you that it is excited about your game. If the
 passion has gone away, something has gone wrong—if you can’t
 figure out what it is, it is very likely your game will be dead on
 arrival. Passion has its dangers—it is an irrational emotion,
 after all, but you must take it seriously, for more often than not,
 passion is what knocks down obstacles and carries a game to
 success.
 Now that we have discussed how games should be made, it’s
 time to consider who we are making them for.
 Other Reading to Consider
 Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton. This book
 examines the notion of sketching (Hint: prototypes are a kind
 of sketch) across a wide variety of disciplines, with eyeopening results.
 Have Paper, Will Prototype by Bill Lucas. This lecture is a
 series of case studies about how to successfully create paper
 prototypes of computer interfaces.
 The Kobold Guide to Board Game Design by Mike
 Selinker. The very best book there is on how to design great
 board games.
 Less Talk, More Rock by Superbrothers. This article argues
 that games are a medium of action, not of words, and
 convincingly argues that too much talking about design can
 be fatal.
 Agile Software Development. The Wikipedia entry about
 Agile Software Development is quite well written and has
 excellent references if you’d like to learn more about agile.
 The 4Fs of Game Design: Fail Faster, and Follow the Fun
 by Jason Vandenberghe. This article (based on an idea from
 Marc LeBlanc) boils down the key aspects of great game
 design process to clear, basic elements.
 CHAPTER NINE
 The Game Is Made for a Player
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-9
 FIGURE
 9.1
 Einstein’s Violin
 At one point in his career, Albert Einstein was asked by a small
 local organization to be the guest of honor at a luncheon and to
 give a lecture about his research. He agreed to do so. The
 luncheon was quite pleasant, and when the time came, the host
 anxiously announced that Albert Einstein, the famous scientist,
 was there to talk about his theories of special and general
 relativity. Einstein took the stage, and looking out a largely
 nonacademic audience consisting of mostly old ladies, he
 explained to them that he certainly could talk about his work,
 but it was a bit dull, and he was thinking perhaps instead the
 audience would prefer to hear him play the violin. The host and
 audience both agreed that it sounded like a fine idea. Einstein
 proceeded to play several pieces he knew well, creating a
 delightful experience the entire audience was able to enjoy and
 surely one they remembered for the rest of their lives.
 FIGURE
 9.2
 Einstein was able to create such a memorable experience
 because he knew his audience. As much as he loved thinking
 and talking about physics, he knew that it wasn’t something
 that his audience would be really interested in. Sure, they asked
 him to talk about physics, because they thought it would be the
 best way to get what they really wanted—an intimate
 encounter with the famous Albert Einstein.
 To create a great experience, you must do the same as Einstein.
 You must know what your audience will and will not like, and
 you must know it even better than they do. You would think
 that finding out what people want would be easy, but it isn’t,
 because in many cases, they don’t really know. They might
 think they know, but often there is a big difference between
 what they think they want and what it is they will actually
 enjoy.
 As with everything else in game design, the key here is a kind of
 listening. You must learn to listen to your players, thoroughly
 and deeply. You must become intimate with their thoughts,
 their emotions, their fears, and their desires. Some of these will
 be so secret that your players themselves are not even
 consciously aware of them—and as we discussed in Chapter 6:
 Theme, it is often these that are the most important.
 Project Yourself
 So how can you do this kind of deep listening? One of the best
 ways is to use your power of empathy (discussed further in
 Chapter 10: Player’s Mind) to put yourself into their place. In
 1954, when Disneyland Park was being constructed, Walt
 Disney would frequently walk around the park inspecting the
 progress. Often, he would be seen to walk for a distance, stop,
 and suddenly crouch to the ground, peering at something in the
 distance. Then he would get up, walk a few steps, and crouch
 again. After seeing him do this repeatedly, some of his designers
 asked what he was doing—was there something wrong with his
 back? His explanation was simple: How else could he know
 what Disneyland would look like to children?
 In retrospect, this seems obvious—things look different at
 different eye heights, and the perspective of children at
 Disneyland is just as important as, if not more than, the
 perspective of adults. And physical perspective is not enough—
 you must adopt their mental perspective as well, actively
 projecting yourself into the mind of your player. You must
 actively try to become them, trying to see what they see, hear
 what they hear, and think what they think. It is very easy to get
 stuck in the high and mighty mind of the designer and forget to
 project yourself into the mind of the player—it is something
 that requires constant attention and vigilance, but you can do it
 if you try.
 If you are creating a game for a target audience that you used to
 be part of (e.g., a woman creating a game for teen girls), you
 have an advantage—you can get in touch with your memories
 about how you thought, what you liked, and how things felt
 when you were that age. People are surprisingly good at
 forgetting what things were really like when they were
 younger. As a designer, you can’t afford to forget. Work hard to
 bring back your old memories, and make them vivid and strong
 again. Keep these old memories well oiled—they are some of
 your most valuable tools.
 But what if you are making something for an audience that you
 have never been a part of, and perhaps never will be (e.g., a
 young man creating a game for middle-aged women)? Then you
 must use a different tactic—you must think hard about people
 you have known who are in the target demographic and
 imagine what it is like to be them. Like a cultural
 anthropologist, you should spend time with your target
 audience, talking with them, observing them, and imagining
 what it is like to be them. Everyone has some innate power to
 do this—but if you practice it, you will improve. If you can
 mentally become any type of player, you can greatly expand the
 audience for your games, because your designs will be able to
 include people that other designers have ignored.
 Demographics
 Age doesn’t make us childish, as they say. It only finds us
 real children still.
 —Goethe
 We know that all individuals are each unique, but when
 creating something meant to be enjoyed by vast numbers of
 people, we have to consider ways that groups of people are the
 same. We call these groups demographics, or sometimes market
 segments. There is no “official” means of establishing these
 groups—different professions have different reasons for
 grouping them differently. For game designers, the two most
 significant demographic variables are age and gender. We all
 play differently as we get older, and, historically, males and
 females have played differently than one another at all ages.
 What follows is an analysis of some of the typical age
 demographics that a game designer has to consider.
 FIGURE
 9.3
 0–3, infant/toddler: Children in this age bracket are very
 interested in toys, but the complexity and problem solving
 involved in games is generally too much for them. Abstract
 interfaces (like a gamepad) are generally beyond them, but
 direct interfaces (like a touch screen), they find fascinating.
 4–6, preschooler: This is the age where children generally
 show their first interest in games. The games are very simple
 and played with parents more often than with one another,
 because the parents know how to bend the rules to keep the
 games enjoyable and interesting.
 7–9, kids: The age of seven has long been called the “age of
 reason.” At this age, children have entered school, are
 generally able to read, and are able to think things through
 and solve hard problems. Naturally, they become very
 interested in gameplaying. This is also the age where
 children start making their own decisions about what kinds
 of toys and games they like and dislike, no longer just
 accepting whatever their parents choose for them.
 10–13, preteen or “tween”: It is only recently that marketers
 have started to recognize this group as distinct from both
 “kids” and “teens.” Children of this age are going through a
 period of tremendous neurological growth and are suddenly
 able to think about things more deeply and with more
 nuance than they were a few years back. This age is
 sometimes called the “age of obsession,” because children of
 this age start to get quite passionate about their interests. For
 boys especially, these interests are often games.
 13–18, teen: The job of a teenager is to start getting ready for
 adulthood. At this age, we often see a significant divergence
 between male and female interests. All teens, however, are
 very interested in experimenting with new kinds of
 experiences, and some of those can happen through
 gameplay.
 18–24, young adult: This is the first “adult” age grouping and
 the mark of an important transition. Adults, in general, play
 less than children do. Most adults do continue to play, but at
 this point, with their teenage experiments out of the way,
 they have established certain tastes about the kind of play
 and entertainment they enjoy. Young adults usually have
 both time and money on their hands, which makes them big
 consumers of games.
 25–35, twenties and thirties: At this age, time starts to
 become more precious. This is the age of “peak family
 formation.” As the responsibilities of adulthood start to add
 up, most adults in this age bracket are only casual
 gameplayers, playing games as an occasional amusement or
 playing games with their young children. On the other hand,
 “hardcore gamers” in this age bracket—that is, people for
 whom playing games is their primary hobby—are an
 important target market because they purchase a lot of
 games and are often quite vocal about what they do and
 don’t like, potentially influencing the buying decisions of
 their social network.
 35–50, thirties and forties: Sometimes referred to as the
 “family maturation” stage, most adults in this bracket are
 very caught up in career and family responsibilities and are
 only casual gameplayers. As their children become older,
 adults in this age group are often the ones who make
 decisions about expensive game purchases, and when
 possible, they look for gameplaying opportunities the whole
 family can enjoy together.
 50+, fifties and up: Often called the “empty nesters,” adults
 in this age bracket suddenly have a lot of time on their hands
 —their children have moved out, and they will soon be
 facing retirement. Some return to games they enjoyed when
 they were younger, and others, looking for a change, turn to
 new game experiences. Adults in this age group are
 particularly interested in game experiences that have a
 strong social component, such as golf, tennis, bridge, and
 online multiplayer games. Online social games, in particular,
 have been very successful with this age group. Their eyes
 and hands aren’t what they used to be, and so games that
 involve tiny screens or complex fine motor control can be
 frustrating to them.
 There are other ways to break up groups by age, but these nine
 groups are how the game industry usually does it, because they
 reflect changes in play patterns. It is interesting to consider the
 transitional experiences that separate each group from the
 next. Most of the younger groups are separated by periods of
 mental development, while the older groups are primarily
 separated by family transitions.
 Something important to remember when creating games for
 any age group: all play activities are connected to childhood,
 since childhood is centered around play. Therefore, to create
 games for someone of a particular age, you must be in tune
 with the games and themes that were popular when they were
 children. To put it another way: to truly communicate with
 someone, you must speak the language of their childhood.
 The Medium Is the Misogynist?
 PETER PAN: We have fun, don’t we? I taught you to fly and
 to fight! What more could there be?
 WENDY: There is so much more.
 PETER PAN: What? What else is there?
 WENDY: I don’t know. I guess it becomes clearer as you
 grow up.
 It is an outdated stereotype to say that certain types of play are
 “inherently male” or “inherently female,” especially in an age
 when the very nature of gender has been called into question.
 No generalization about gender can fit every individual. Despite
 this, when we look at large groups, some gender-based patterns
 of play are clear; there are certain types of play that females
 engage in more than males, and vice versa. This is a touchy
 subject, for when we say things like “men tend to prefer…” or
 “women tend to prefer…” we are excluding individuals who go
 against those tendencies.
 Some people would prefer to dodge the entire question of
 gender-based play and act as if these large-group patterns don’t
 exist. But to do so would be to deny reality, which is a
 dangerous thing for a designer to do, because these patterns
 and tendencies do exist. More men play Call of Duty than
 women do, and more women play Candy Crush than men do. Is
 this because of something innate in what it means to be a man
 or a woman? Or is it something learned from society that
 causes these differences? We do not know. But knowing and
 understanding these stereotypical patterns can be useful to a
 designer, because by understanding them, you can be inclusive
 of many more players.
 As an example, I once worked on a target-shooting game
 designed for families to play together. The game was designed
 to be light and simple, so of course, we created a simple scoring
 system. Another designer approached me, explaining that our
 scoring system was a problem: it had gender bias. That seemed
 impossible to me—the theming had been focus testing very well
 with boys, girls, men, and women. But she was right. When we
 looked at the playtest data, we could see that, in general, boys
 and men had higher scores than girls and women. Reviewing
 videos of the playtesters revealed the reason: males tended
 toward a rapid-fire approach, while females preferred an
 approach based on careful aiming.
 Our solution? We created a slightly more complex scoring
 system. The final score was now presented as two numbers:
 total points, and % accuracy. When we tested this, it worked
 well. For example, our first playtesters were an elderly married
 couple. At the end of the game, the husband proudly
 proclaimed, “I got the most points!” and his wife gave a
 superior smile and said, “True… but I was much more
 accurate.”
 And this is the irony of stereotypes. While they can be used to
 make people outside the norm feel excluded, used wisely they
 can become tools of inclusion, creating play patterns that
 support a much wider variety of player interests and
 motivations. To this end, instead of turning from stereotypes in
 disgust, we can get significant benefit from dissecting them and
 studying them closely. Generalizations and stereotypes are
 never true for every individual, but when making games for
 large audiences, they can be useful tools of inclusion.
 Five Stereotypes about What Males Like to See in
 Games
 If you are a woman and you don’t understand men, chances
 are you are thinking too hard.
 —Louis Ramey
 1. Mastery: Males enjoy mastering things. It doesn’t have to be
 something important or useful—it only has to be challenging.
 Females tend to be more interested in mastery when it has a
 meaningful purpose.
 2. Competition: Males enjoy competing against others to prove
 that they are the best. For females, the bad feelings that can
 come from losing the game (or causing another player to
 lose) often outweigh the positive feelings that come from
 winning.
 3. Destruction: Males like destroying things. A lot. Often, when
 young boys play with blocks, the most exciting part for them
 is not the building, but knocking down the tower once it is
 built. Videogames are a natural fit for this kind of gameplay,
 allowing for virtual destruction of a magnitude far greater
 than would be possible in the real world.
 4. Spatial puzzles: Studies have shown that males generally
 have stronger skills of spatial reasoning than females.
 Accordingly, puzzles that involve navigating 3D spaces are
 often quite intriguing to males, while they can sometimes
 prove frustrating for females.
 5. Trial and error: Women often joke that men hate reading
 directions, and there is some truth to that. Males tend to have
 a preference for learning things through trial and error. In a
 sense, this makes it easier to design interfaces for them, since
 they actually sometimes prefer an interface that requires
 some experimentation to understand, which ties into the
 pleasure of mastery.
 Five Stereotypes about What Females Like to See in
 Games
 Females want experiences where they can make emotional
 and social discoveries that they can apply to their own lives.
 —Heidi Dangelmeier
 1. Emotion: Females like experiences that explore the richness
 of human emotion. For males, emotion is an interesting
 component of an experience but seldom an end in itself. A
 somewhat crass but telling example of this contrast can be
 found at the ends of the “romantic relationship media”
 spectrum. At one end are romance novels (one-third of all
 fiction books sold are romance novels), which focus
 primarily on the emotional aspects of romantic relationships
 and are purchased almost exclusively by women. At the
 other end of the spectrum is pornography, which focuses
 primarily on the physical aspects of romantic relationships
 and is purchased primarily by men. When Gene
 Roddenberry was creating the TV show Star Trek, he very
 intentionally wove in emotional storylines with the action of
 the show to increase the chances that families would watch it
 together. Similarly, Dragon Age: Inquisition has more female
 players than the average action RPG, and the rich emotional
 relationships between characters in the game seem to have
 something to do with that.
 2. Real world: Females tend to prefer entertainment that
 connects meaningfully to the real world. If you watch young
 girls and young boys play, girls will more frequently play
 games that are strongly connected to the real world (playing
 “house,” pretending to be a veterinarian, playing dress-up,
 etc.), whereas boys will more frequently take on the role of
 fantasy characters. One of the all-time best-selling computer
 game titles for girls was Barbie Fashion Designer, which let
 players design, print, and sew custom clothes for their realworld Barbie dolls. Compare this to Barbie as Rapunzel, an
 adventure game in a fantasy setting. Although it featured the
 same character (Barbie), it did not have a real-world
 component and was not nearly as popular.
 This trend continues through adulthood—when things are
 connected to the real world in a meaningful way, women
 often become more interested. Sometimes this is through the
 content (the Sims games, e.g., have more female players than
 male, and their content is a simulation of the day-to-day life
 of ordinary people), and sometimes it is through the social
 aspects of the games. The popularity of online social games
 with female players seems to be connected to the centrality
 of the friends’ list as a game feature. Playing with virtual
 players is “just pretend,” but playing with real players can
 build real relationships.
 3. Nurturing: Stereotypically, females enjoy nurturing. Girls
 enjoy taking care of baby dolls, toy pets, and children
 younger than themselves. It is not uncommon to see girls
 sacrifice a winning position in a competitive game to help a
 weaker player, partly because the relationships and feelings
 of the players are more important than the game, but partly
 out of the joy of nurturing. The success of farming games and
 pet games with girls and women is due in large part to their
 nurturing mechanics. In the development of Toontown
 Online, a “healing” game mechanic was required for the
 combat system. We observed that healing other players was
 very appealing to girls and women we discussed the game
 with, and it was important to us that this game work equally
 well for males and females, so we made an unusual decision.
 In most role-playing games, players mostly heal themselves
 but have the option of healing others. In Toontown, you
 cannot heal yourself—only others. This increases the value of
 a player with healing skill and encourages nurturing play. A
 player who wants to can make healing their primary activity
 in Toontown.
 4. Dialog and verbal puzzles: It is often said that what females
 lack in spatial skills they make up for in increased verbal
 skills. Women purchase many more books than men do, and
 the audience for crossword puzzles is mostly women. The
 popular mobile game Words with Friends has a majority
 (63% as of 2013) of players who are female.
 5. Learning by example: Just as males tend to eschew
 instructions, favoring a trial-and-error approach, females
 tend to prefer learning by example. They have a strong
 appreciation for clear tutorials that lead you carefully, stepby-step, so that when it is time to attempt a task, the player
 knows what she is supposed to do.
 There are many other stereotypes, of course. For example,
 males have a reputation for preferring to focus on one task at a
 time, whereas females can more easily work on many parallel
 tasks, and not forget about any of them. Games like the Sims
 and Farmville demand significant multitasking skill, and both
 have a majority of players who are female. “Hidden picture”
 games have become a very popular genre with women, leading
 some to speculate that it engages primal gathering behaviors,
 which some believe to be more powerful in the female brain
 than in the male. Whether that is the true reason women like
 hidden picture games is controversial, but the success of the
 games with this demographic is not.
 Looking closely at your game while thinking about gender
 stereotypes can sometimes lead to fascinating discoveries. The
 designers of Hasbro’s Pox, a wireless electronic handheld game,
 knew that their game was going to be an inherently social
 experience, and so they reasoned that it should have features
 that girls would like as well as boys. As they observed children
 playing in playgrounds, however, they noticed something very
 interesting: girls almost never play games spontaneously in
 large groups. On the surface, this is strange—girls tend to be
 more social than boys, so you might expect that games
 involving large gatherings would appeal to them more. The
 problem seems to lie in conflict resolution. Generally, when a
 group of boys play a game and there is a dispute, play stops,
 there is a (sometimes heated) discussion, and the dispute is
 resolved. At times, this involves one boy going home in tears,
 but despite that, play continues. When a group of girls play a
 game and there is a dispute, it is a different story. Most of the
 girls will take sides on the dispute, and it generally cannot be
 resolved right away. Play stops, and often cannot continue. Girls
 will play team sports when they are formally organized, but
 two informal competing teams seem to put too much stress on
 their personal relationships to be worth the trouble. The
 Hasbro designers realized that though their game concept was
 social, it was also inherently competitive, and ultimately, they
 decided to design it focused on stereotypically male play
 patterns.
 The introduction of digital technology has done a great deal to
 make clear gender differences in gameplay. In the past, most
 games were very social, played in the real world, with real
 people. The introduction of affordable computers gave us a type
 of game that
 Had all social aspects removed
 Had most verbal and emotional aspects removed
 Was largely divorced from the real world
 Was generally hard to learn
 And offered the possibility for unlimited virtual destruction
 Based on this, it is hardly surprising that early computer and
 videogames were primarily popular with a male audience. As
 digital technology has evolved to the point that videogames can
 now support emotional character portrayals, richer stories, and
 the opportunity to play with real friends at convenient times,
 we have finally reached an age where women and men play
 digital games in roughly equal numbers. Hopefully, one day
 soon, we will see the community of game developers reach a
 similar level of balance and representation.
 Whether you consider age, gender, or other factors, the
 important thing is that you put yourself in the perspective of
 the player, so you can carefully consider what will make the
 game the most fun for them. This important perspective is Lens
 #19.
 #19 THE LENS OF THE PLAYER
 To use this lens, stop thinking about your game, and start
 thinking about your player.
 Ask yourself these questions about the people who will play
 your game:
 In general, what do they like?
 What don’t they like? Why?
 What do they expect to see in a game?
 If I were in their place, what would I want to see in a game?
 What would they like or dislike about my game in particular?
 A good game designer should always be thinking of the player
 and should be an advocate for the player. Skilled designers hold
 The Lens of the Player and Lens #10: Holographic Design, in the
 same hand, thinking about the player, the experience of the
 game, and the mechanics of the game all at the same time.
 Thinking about the player is useful, but even more useful is
 watching them play your game. The more you observe them
 playing, the more easily you’ll be able to predict what they are
 going to enjoy.
 Illustration by Nick Daniel
 When developing Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the
 Buccaneer Gold for DisneyQuest, we had to consider a wide
 range of demographics. Many arcades and interactive locationbased entertainment centers have a somewhat narrow
 demographic: teenage boys. DisneyQuest’s goal was to support
 the same demographic as the Disney theme parks: pretty much
 everybody, particularly families. Further, DisneyQuest wanted
 the whole family to play games together. With such a broad
 range of skill levels and interests within any given family, this
 was quite a challenge. But by carefully considering the interests
 of each potential player, we found a way to make it work.
 Roughly, we broke it down this way:
 Boys: We had little worry that boys would enjoy playing this
 game. It is an exciting “adventure and battle fantasy” where
 players can pilot a pirate ship and man powerful cannons. Early
 tests showed that boys enjoyed it a great deal and tended to
 play offensively—trying to seek out and destroy every pirate
 ship they could find. They engaged in some communication but
 always stayed very focused on the task of destroying the enemy
 as skillfully as possible.
 Girls: We were not so confident that girls would like this game,
 since they don’t always have the same zeal for “blowing up bad
 guys.” We were pleased to find that girls seemed to like the
 game a great deal; however, they played it in a different way.
 Girls generally tended to play more defensively—they were
 more concerned about protecting their ship from invaders than
 chasing down other ships. When we became aware of this, we
 made sure to create a balance of invading ships and enemies
 that could be chased to support offensive as well as defensive
 play. The girls seemed very excited about the treasures you
 could gather, so we made sure to pile them up conspicuously on
 the deck and make them visually interesting. Further, we
 designed the final battle so that flying skeletons would charge
 the ship and snatch the treasures off of the deck. This seemed to
 make the skeleton shooting task much more important and
 rewarding to the girls. The girls also seemed to enjoy the social
 aspects of the game more than the boys did—they would
 constantly shout warnings and suggestions to each other,
 occasionally having face-to-face “huddles” where they would
 divide up responsibilities.
 Men: We sometimes joked that men were just “tall boys with
 credit cards.” They seemed to like the game in the same ways
 the boys did, although they tended to play the game in a slightly
 more reserved way—often carefully puzzling out the optimal
 way to play the game.
 Women: We had very little confidence that adult women,
 mothers in particular, would find much to enjoy with this game.
 Mothers tend to have a different theme park experience than
 the rest of the family, because their main concern is often not
 how much fun they personally have but how much fun the rest
 of the family has. In early tests of pirates, we noticed that
 women, and mothers in particular, tended to gravitate toward
 the back of the ship, while the rest of the family moved toward
 the front. This usually meant that the family members manned
 the cannons and that mom steered the ship, since the ship’s
 wheel was in the back. At first, this seemed a recipe for disaster
 —mom might not be a confident gamer, and a poorly steered
 ship has the potential to ruin the experience for everyone.
 But this isn’t what happened at all. Since mom wants to see
 everyone have a good time, she suddenly has a vested interest
 in steering the ship as well as possible. Being at the helm, which
 has the best view, she has a chance to keep an eye on everyone,
 to steer the ship to interesting places, and to slow things down if
 her family is overwhelmed. Further, she is in a good position to
 manage her crew, warning them of oncoming dangers and
 giving orders (“Zoe! Give your brother a turn on that side!”)
 designed to make sure everyone has fun. This was a great way
 to make mom really care about how the game turned out.
 Accepting the fact that mothers would be steering the ship more
 often than boys, girls, or fathers meant that we had to be sure
 that steering the ship was intuitive for someone who was not a
 frequent action game player, but this was a small price to pay to
 include a key part of our audience. Frequently, we would hear
 kids comment when coming off the ride: “Wow, Mom, you were
 really good at that!”
 By paying close attention to the desires and behaviors of our
 various target demographics, we were able to balance the game
 to suit all of them. In the beginning, we just had ideas about
 where there might be problems making the game appeal to all
 four of these groups—it was only through attentive prototyping
 and playtesting that we started to realize the possible solutions
 to these problems. We watched closely to see how each
 demographic group tried to play our game, and then we
 changed it to support each group’s style of play.
 Psychographics
 Of course, age and gender aren’t the only ways to group
 potential players. There are many other factors you can use.
 Demographics generally refer to external factors (age, gender,
 income, ethnicity, etc.), and those can sometimes be a useful
 way to group your audience. But really, when we group people
 by these external factors, we are trying to get at something
 internal: what each group finds pleasurable. A more direct
 approach is to focus less on how players appear on the outside
 and more on how they think on the inside. This is called
 psychographics.
 Some psychographic breakdowns have to do with “lifestyle”
 choices, such as “dog lover,” “baseball fan,” or “hardcore FPS
 player.” These are easy to understand, since they are tied to
 concrete activities. If you are creating a game about dogs,
 baseball, or shooting people in arenas, you will naturally want
 to pay close attention to the preferences of each of these
 lifestyle groups.
 But other kinds of psychographics aren’t so tied to concrete
 activities. They have more to do with what a person enjoys the
 most—the kind of pleasures they look for when participating in
 a game activity or, really, any activity. This is important, for
 ultimately, the motivation for many human actions can be
 traced back to some kind of pleasure seeking. It is a tricky
 business, though, for there are many kinds of pleasures in the
 world and no one seeks only one kind. But it is certainly true
 that people have their pleasure preferences. Game designer
 Marc LeBlanc has proposed a list of eight pleasures that he
 considers the primary “game pleasures.”
 LeBlanc’s Taxonomy of Game Pleasures
 1. Sensation: Pleasures of sensation involve using your senses.
 Seeing something beautiful, hearing music, touching silk, and
 smelling or tasting delicious food are all pleasures of
 sensation. It is primarily the aesthetics of your game that will
 deliver these pleasures. Greg Costikyan tells a story about
 sensation:
 As an example of the difference that mere sensation can
 make, consider the board game Axis & Allies. I first
 bought it when it was published by Nova Games, an
 obscure publisher of hobby games. It had an extremely
 garish board, and ugly cardboard counters to represent
 the military units. I played it once, thought it was pretty
 dumb, and put it away. Some years later, it was bought
 and republished by Milton Bradley, with an elegant new
 board, and with hundreds of plastic pieces in the shapes
 of aircraft, ships, tanks, and infantrymen—I’ve played it
 many times since. It’s the sheer tactile joy of pushing
 around little military figures on the board that makes the
 game fun to play.
 Sensory pleasure is often the pleasure of the toy (see Lens
 #17). This pleasure cannot make a bad game into a good one,
 but it can often make a good game into a better one.
 2. Fantasy: This is the pleasure of the imaginary world and the
 pleasure of imagining yourself as something that you are not.
 We will discuss this pleasure further in Chapters 19 and 20.
 3. Narrative: By the pleasure of narrative, LeBlanc does not
 necessarily mean the telling of a prescribed, linear story. He
 means instead a dramatic unfolding of a sequence of events,
 however it happens. We’ll be talking more about this in
 Chapters 16 and 17.
 4. Challenge: In some sense, challenge can be considered one
 of the core pleasures of gameplay, since every game, at its
 heart, has a problem to be solved. For some players, this
 pleasure is enough—but others need more.
 5. Fellowship: Here, LeBlanc is referring to everything
 enjoyable about friendship, cooperation, and community.
 Without a doubt, for some players, this is the main attraction
 of playing games. We will discuss this further in Chapters 24
 and 25.
 6. Discovery: The pleasure of discovery is a broad one: any
 time you seek and find something new, that is a discovery.
 Sometimes this is the exploration of your game world, and
 sometimes it is the discovery of a secret feature or clever
 strategy. Without a doubt, discovering new things is a key
 game pleasure.
 7. Expression: This is the pleasure of expressing yourself and
 the pleasure of creating things. In the past, this is a pleasure
 that was generally neglected in game design. Today, games
 allow players to design their own characters and build and
 share their own levels. Often, the “expression” that takes
 place in a game does little to achieve the goals of the game.
 Designing new outfits for your character doesn’t help you
 advance in most games—but for some players, it may be the
 very reason they play.
 8. Submission: This strange term refers to the pleasure of
 entering the magic circle—of leaving the real world behind
 and entering into a new, more enjoyable, set of rules and
 meaning. In a sense, all games involve the pleasure of
 submission, but some game worlds are simply more pleasing
 and interesting to enter than others. In some games, you are
 forced to suspend your disbelief—in others, the game itself
 seems to suspend your disbelief effortlessly, and your mind
 easily enters and stays in the game world. It is these games
 that make submission truly a pleasure.
 It is useful to examine these different pleasures, because
 different individuals place different values on each one. Game
 designer Richard Bartle, who has spent many years designing
 MUDs and other online games, observes that players fall into
 four main groups in terms of their game pleasure preferences.
 Bartle’s four types are easy to remember, because they have the
 suits of playing cards as a convenient mnemonic. It is left as an
 exercise to the reader to understand why each card suit was
 chosen to represent each category.
 Bartle’s Taxonomy of Player Types
 1. ♦ Achievers want to achieve the goals of the game. Their
 primary pleasure is challenge.
 2. ♠ Explorers want to get to know the breadth of the game.
 Their primary pleasure is discovery.
 3. ♥ Socializers are interested in relationships with other
 people. They primarily seek the pleasures of fellowship.
 4. ♣ Killers are interested in competing with and defeating
 others. This category does not map well to LeBlanc’s
 taxonomy. For the most part, it seems killers enjoy a mix of
 the pleasures of competition and destruction. Interestingly,
 Bartle characterizes them as primarily interested in
 “imposing themselves on others” and includes in this
 category people who are primarily interested in helping
 others.
 Bartle also proposes a fascinating graph (Figure 9.4) that shows
 how the four types neatly cover a sort of space: that is,
 achievers are interested in acting on the world, explorers are
 interested in interacting with the world, socializers are
 interested in interacting with players, and killers are interested
 in acting on players.
 More Pleasure: MORE!
 We must use caution when trying to make such simple
 taxonomies to describe something as complex as human desire.
 Under close scrutiny, both LeBlanc’s and Bartle’s taxonomies
 (and other similar lists) have gaps and when misused can gloss
 over subtle pleasures that might easily be missed, such as
 “destruction” and “nurturing,” which we encountered in our
 discussion of gender stereotypes. The following is a list of a few
 more pleasures to be considered:
 FIGURE
 9.4
 Anticipation: When you know a pleasure is coming, just
 waiting for it is a kind of pleasure.
 Completion: It feels good to finish something. Many games
 take advantage of the pleasure of completion—any game
 where you have to “collect all the treasures,” “destroy all the
 bad guys,” or otherwise “clear the level” is taking advantage
 of this pleasure.
 Delight in another’s misfortune: Typically, we feel this
 when some unjust person suddenly gets their comeuppance.
 It is an important aspect of competitive games. The Germans
 call it schadenfreude (pronounced “shoddenfroyduh”).
 Gift giving: There is a unique pleasure when you make
 someone else happy through the surprise of a gift. We wrap
 our presents to heighten and intensify this surprise. The
 pleasure is not just that the person is happy but that you
 made them happy.
 Humor: Two unconnected things are suddenly united by a
 paradigm shift. It is hard to describe, but we all know it when
 it happens. Weirdly, it causes us to make a barking noise.
 Possibility: This is the pleasure of having many choices and
 knowing you could pick any one of them. This is often
 experienced when shopping or at a buffet table.
 Pride in an accomplishment: This is a pleasure all its own
 that can persist long after the accomplishment was made.
 The Yiddish word naches (pronounced “nock-hess”) is about
 this kind of pleased satisfaction, usually referring to pride in
 children or grandchildren.
 Surprise: As Lens #4, Surprise, shows us, the brain likes
 surprises.
 Thrill: There is a saying among roller coaster designers that
 “fear minus death equals fun.” Thrill is that kind of fun—you
 experience terror but feel secure in your safety.
 Triumph over adversity: This is that pleasure that you have
 accomplished something that you knew was a long shot.
 Typically, this pleasure is accompanied by shouts of personal
 triumph. The Italians have a word for this pleasure: fiero
 (pronounced fee-air-o).
 Wonder: An overwhelming feeling of awe and amazement. It
 almost always leads to a feeling of curiosity, which is how
 “wonder” gets its name.
 And there are many, many more. I list these pleasures that fall
 outside of easy classification to illustrate the richness of the
 pleasure space. Lists of pleasures can serve as convenient rules
 of thumb, but don’t forget to keep an open mind for ones that
 might not be on your list. Also keep in mind that pleasure is
 very context-sensitive. What might be very pleasurable in one
 context (dancing at a party) might be torturously embarrassing
 in another context (dancing at a job interview). The crucial
 perspective of pleasure gives us Lens #20.
 #20 THE LENS OF PLEASURE
 To use this lens, think about the kinds of pleasure your game
 does and does not provide.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 What pleasures does your game give to players? Can these be
 improved?
 What pleasures are missing from your experience? Why?
 Can they be added?
 Illustration by Jim Rugg
 Ultimately, the job of a game is to give pleasure. By going
 through lists of known pleasures and considering how well
 your game delivers each one, you may be inspired to make
 changes to your game that will increase your players’
 enjoyment. Always be on the lookout, though, for unique,
 unclassified pleasures not found in most games—for one of
 these might be what gives your game the unique quality it
 needs.
 Knowing your players intimately, more intimately than they
 know themselves, is the key to giving them a game they will
 enjoy. In Chapter 10, we will get to know them even better.
 Other Reading to Consider
 Designing Virtual Worlds by Richard R. Bartle. An
 excellent book for looking at the history of virtual world
 development by a deep thinker who made it happen.
 Pleasures of the Brain by Morten L. Kringelbach and Kent
 C. Berridge, editors. A collection of research findings about
 the mechanisms of pleasure by a variety of psychologists and
 neuroscientists. If you are not used to scientific papers, it can
 be a bit daunting, but it is a treasure trove of insights for the
 persistent reader.
 Understanding Kids, Play, and Interactive Design: How
 to Create Games Children Love by Mark Schlichting. It can
 be easy for adults to forget what it was like to be a child.
 Mark has not forgotten, and gives us a guided tour of the
 wonderland that is childhood.
 Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat: Intersectional
 Perspectives and Inclusive Goals in Gaming by Yasmin B.
 Kafai, Gabriela T. Richard, and Brendesha M. Tynes,
 editors. Progress on gender and sexuality issues in games
 has been significant and meaningful, and there are still many
 miles to go. This book explores inclusivity issues from
 multiple thoughtful perspectives.
 CHAPTER TEN
 The Experience Is in the Player’s Mind
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-10
 FIGURE
 10.1
 We have already discussed that ultimately, experiences are
 what a game designer creates. These experiences can only
 happen in one place—the human brain. Entertaining the
 human brain is hard because it is so complex—it is the most
 complex object in the known universe.
 Even worse, most of its workings are hidden from us.
 Until you got to this sentence, were you at all conscious of the
 position of your feet, the rate of your breathing, or how your
 eyes were moving across the page? Do you even know how
 your eyes move across the page? Do they move smoothly and
 linearly, or do they take little hops? How could you have read
 books for so many years without being sure of the answer to
 that question? When you speak, do you really know what you
 are going to say before you say it? Incredibly, when you drive a
 car, somehow you observe the curvature of the roadway and
 translate that into a rotational angle by which you move the
 steering wheel. Who does that calculation? Can you even
 remember paying attention to the curvature of the roadway?
 And how does it happen that just because this sentence
 contains the words “imagine eating a hamburger with pickles,”
 your mouth is watering right now?
 Consider this pattern:
 FIGURE
 10.2
 Somehow, you know what comes next. How did you reach that
 conclusion? Was it through a process of deductive logic, or did
 you just “see” the answer? If you just saw it, what did you see?
 And who drew the picture that you saw?
 Here’s one more. Try this experiment: find a friend, and ask
 them to do these three things:
 1. Say the word “boast” five times. “Boast, boast, boast, boast,
 boast.”
 2. Spell the word “boast” out loud. “B-O-A-S-T.”
 3. Answer this question: “What do you put in a toaster?”
 Your friend will likely give the answer “toast.” Generally, toast is
 what you take out of a toaster, not what you put in. If you omit
 the first two steps, most people will give a more correct answer,
 like “bread.” Priming the brain’s networks with “boast” is
 enough to make the word “toast” seem like a better candidate
 than the correct answer, “bread.” We normally think of
 answering a question like “What do you put in a toaster?” as a
 very conscious event, but the truth is that the subconscious
 exerts terrific control over almost everything we say and do.
 Mostly it does that wisely and well, and we feel like “we” are
 doing it—but from time to time, it makes a laughable mistake
 and reveals how much control it truly has.
 The majority of what is going on in our brains is hidden from
 the conscious mind. Psychologists are gradually making
 progress toward understanding these subconscious processes,
 but generally, we are in the dark as to how they really work.
 The workings of our mind are mostly outside our
 understanding and mostly outside our control. But the mind is
 the place that game experiences happen, so we must do what
 we can to get a working knowledge of what seems to be going
 on in there. In Chapter 7: Idea, we talked about using the power
 of the creative subconscious to be a better designer. Now we
 must consider the interaction of the conscious and
 subconscious in the mind of the player. Everything that is
 known about the human mind would fill many encyclopedias—
 we will contain our examination of the mind to some of the key
 factors that relate to game design.
 There are four principal mental abilities that make gameplay
 possible. These are modeling, focus, imagination, and empathy.
 We will consider each in turn and then examine the secret
 priorities of every player’s subconscious mind.
 Modeling
 Reality is amazingly complex. The only way our minds are able
 to get by at all is by simplifying reality so that we can make
 some sense of it. Correspondingly, our minds do not deal with
 reality itself, but instead with models of reality. Mostly we do
 not notice this—the modeling takes place below our awareness.
 Consciousness is an illusion that our internal experiences are
 reality, when in truth they are imperfect simulations of
 something we may never truly understand. The illusion is a
 very good one, but at times we run into places where our
 internal simulations fail. Some of these are visual, like this
 picture:
 FIGURE
 10.3
 In reality, those dots are not changing color as our eyes move
 around, but our brain sure does make it look like they are.
 Some examples don’t become clear until you think about them
 a little bit, such as the visible light spectrum. From a physics
 point of view, visible light, infrared, ultraviolet, and
 microwaves are all the same kind of electromagnetic radiation,
 just at different wavelengths. Our eyes can only see a tiny
 fraction of this smooth spectrum, and we call this fraction
 “visible light.” It would be very useful if we could see other
 kinds of light. Seeing infrared light, for example, would let us
 easily spot predators in the dark, since all living things emit
 infrared light. Unfortunately, the insides of our eyeballs emit
 infrared as well, so if we could see it, we would be quickly
 blinded by our own glow. As a result, a huge amount of useful
 data, that is, everything outside the visible light range of the
 electromagnetic spectrum, is not part of our perceived reality.
 Even the visible light we can see is strangely filtered by our eyes
 and brains. Because of the construction of our eye, this spread
 of visible light wavelengths looks like it falls into distinct
 groupings, which we call colors. When we look at a rainbow
 that comes out of a prism, we can draw lines to separate one
 color from another. In truth, though, this is just an artifact of
 the mechanics of the retina. In reality, there is no sharp
 separation of colors, just a smooth gradient of wavelengths,
 even though our eyes tell us that blue and light blue are much
 more similar than, say, light blue and green. We evolved this
 eye structure because breaking up the wavelengths into groups
 like this is a useful way to better understand the world. “Colors”
 are only an illusion, not part of reality at all, but a very useful
 model of reality.
 Reality is full of aspects that aren’t at all part of our day-to-day
 modeling. For example, our bodies, our homes, and our food
 are teeming with microscopic bacteria and mites. Many are
 single celled, but others, such as the demodex folliculorum that
 lives in our eyelashes, pores, and hair follicles, are almost large
 enough (up to 0.4 mm) to be seen with the naked eye. These tiny
 creatures are everywhere around us, but are generally not part
 of our mental models at all, because mostly, we don’t need or
 want to know about them.
 FIGURE
 10.4
 © United Features Syndicate. Used with permission.
 One good way to get a grasp on some of our mental models is to
 look for things that feel natural to us until we think about them.
 Consider this picture of Charlie Brown. At first glance, nothing
 seems too unusual about him—he’s just a boy. But upon
 reflection, he looks nothing like a real person. His head is
 nearly as big as his body! His fingers are little bumps! Most
 distressing of all, he is made of lines. Look around you—
 nothing is made of lines—everything is made of lumps. His
 unreality doesn’t become apparent until we stop and
 consciously think about it, and this is a clue to how the brain
 models things.
 Charlie Brown seems like a person even though he doesn’t look
 like anyone we know because he matches some of our internal
 models. We accept his giant head because our minds store
 much more information about heads and faces than the rest of
 the body, since so much information about a person’s feelings
 comes from their face. If instead he had a small head and giant
 feet, he would immediately look ridiculous, because he
 wouldn’t match our internal models at all.
 And what about his lines? It is a challenging problem for the
 brain to look at a scene and pick out which objects are separate
 from each other. When it does, below our conscious level, our
 internal visual processing system draws lines around each
 separate object. Our conscious mind never sees these lines, but
 it does get a feeling about which things in a scene are separate
 objects. When we are presented with a picture already drawn
 with lines, it has been “predigested” in a sense, matching our
 internal modeling mechanisms perfectly and saving them a lot
 of work. This is part of why people find cartoons and comics so
 soothing to look at—our brain needs to do less work to
 understand them.
 Stage magicians amaze us by taking advantage of our mental
 models and then breaking them. In our mind, our models are
 reality, so we feel like we are seeing someone do the impossible.
 The audible gasp that comes from an audience at the
 culmination of a magic trick is the sound of their mental models
 being torn asunder. It is only through our faith that “it must be
 a trick” that we are able to reason that magicians don’t have
 supernatural powers.
 Our brains do a tremendous amount of work to boil down the
 complexity of reality into simpler mental models that can be
 easily stored, considered, and manipulated. And this is not just
 the case for visual objects. It is also the case for human
 relationships, risk and reward evaluation, and decision making.
 Our minds look at a complex situation and try to boil it down to
 a simple set of rules and relationships that we can manipulate
 internally.
 As game designers, we care a lot about these mental models
 because games, with their simple rules, are like Charlie Brown
 —they are predigested models that we can easily absorb and
 manipulate. This is why they are relaxing to play—they are less
 work for our brain than the real world, because so much of the
 complexity has been stripped away. Abstract strategy games,
 like tic-tac-toe and backgammon, are almost completely bare
 models. Other games, like computer-based RPGs, take a simple
 model and coat it with some sugary aesthetics, so that the very
 act of working to digest the model is pleasurable. This is so
 different from the real world, where you have to work so hard
 to figure out what the rules of the game even are and then work
 even harder to properly play by them, never sure if you are
 doing the right thing. And this is why games can sometimes be
 great practice for the real world—it is why they still teach chess
 at West Point—games give us practice digesting and
 experimenting with simpler models, so we can work our way
 up to ones as complex as the real world and be competent at
 dealing with them when we are ready.
 The important thing to understand is that everything we
 experience and think about is a model—not reality. Reality is
 beyond our understanding and comprehension. All we can
 understand is our little model of reality. Sometimes this model
 breaks, and we have to fix it. The reality we experience is just
 an illusion, but this illusion is the only reality we will ever
 know. As a designer, if you can understand and control how
 that illusion is formed in your player’s mind, you will create
 experiences that feel as real, or more real, than reality itself.
 Focus
 Time sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a
 snail; but a man is happiest when he does not even notice
 whether it passes swiftly or slowly.
 —Ivan Turgenev
 One crucial technique our brains use to make sense of the
 world is the ability to focus its attention selectively, ignoring
 some things and devoting more mental power to others. The
 brain’s ability to do this can be startling. One example is the
 “cocktail party effect,” which is our remarkable ability to pay
 attention to a single conversation when a roomful of people are
 all talking at once. Even though the sound waves from many
 conversations are hitting our ears simultaneously, we somehow
 have the ability to “tune in” one and “tune out” the others. To
 study this, psychologists have performed what are sometimes
 called “dichotic ear-studies.” In these experiments, subjects
 wear headphones that deliver different audio experiences to
 each ear. For example, a voice in a subject’s left ear might be
 reading Shakespeare, and the voice in a subject’s right ear
 might be reading a stream of numbers. Provided the voices are
 not too similar, subjects who are asked to focus on one of the
 voices and repeat back what they are hearing as they hear it
 are generally able to do so. Afterward, when asked questions
 about what the other voice was saying, subjects generally have
 no idea. Their brains focused only on selected information and
 tuned out the rest.
 What we focus on at any given moment is determined through
 a blend of our unconscious desires and our conscious will.
 When we create games, our goal is to create an experience
 interesting enough that it holds the player’s focus as long and as
 intensely as possible. When something captures our complete
 attention and imagination for a long period, we enter an
 interesting mental state. The rest of the world seems to fall
 away, and we have no intrusive thoughts. All we are thinking
 about is what we are doing, and we completely lose track of
 time. This state of sustained focus, pleasure, and enjoyment is
 referred to as “flow” and has been the subject of extensive
 study by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and many
 others. Flow is sometimes defined as “a feeling of complete and
 energized focus in an activity, with a high level of enjoyment
 and fulfillment.” It pays for game designers to make a careful
 study of flow, because this is exactly the feeling we want the
 players of our games to enjoy. The following are some of the key
 components necessary to create an activity that puts a player
 into a flow state:
 Clear goals: When our goals are clear, we are able to more
 easily stay focused on our task. When goals are unclear, we
 are not “into” our task, for we aren’t at all certain whether
 our current actions are useful.
 No distractions: Distractions steal focus from our task. No
 focus, no flow. This means engaging both mind and hands.
 Menial labor with no thought makes the mind wander; just
 sitting and thinking can make the hands fidget. These “itchy”
 feelings are each a kind of distraction.
 Direct feedback: If every time we take an action, we have to
 wait before we know what effect the action caused, we will
 quickly become distracted and lose focus on our task. When
 feedback is immediate, we can easily stay focused. We’ll talk
 much more about feedback in Chapter 15: Interface.
 Continuously challenging: Human beings love a challenge.
 But it must be a challenge we think we can achieve. If we
 start to think we can’t achieve it, we feel frustrated, and our
 minds start seeking an activity more likely to be rewarding.
 On the other hand, if the challenge is too easy, we feel bored,
 and again, our minds start seeking more rewarding activities.
 Chapter 13: Balance, will have more to say about challenge.
 Flow activities must manage to stay in the narrow margin of
 challenge that lies between boredom and frustration, for both
 of these unpleasant extremes cause our mind to change its
 focus to a new activity. Csikszentmihalyi calls this margin the
 “flow channel.” He gives an example of the flow channel, using,
 not surprisingly, a game:
 Let us assume that the figure below represents a specific
 activity—for example, the game of tennis. The two
 theoretically most important dimensions of the experience,
 challenges and skills, are represented on the two axes of the
 diagram. The letter A represents Alex, a boy who is learning
 to play tennis. The diagram shows Alex at four different
 points in time. When he first starts playing (A ), Alex has
 practically no skills, and the only challenge he faces is
 hitting the ball over the net. This is not a very dicult feat,
 but Alex is likely to enjoy it because the diculty is just right
 for his rudimentary skills. So at this point he will probably
 be in flow. But he cannot stay there long. After a while, if he
 keeps practicing, his skills are bound to improve, and then
 he will grow bored just batting the ball over the net (A ). Or
 it might happen that he meets a more practiced opponent, in
 which case he will realize that there are much harder
 challenges for him than just lobbing the ball—at that point,
 he will feel some anxiety (A ) concerning his poor
 performance.
 1
 2
 3
 FIGURE
 10.5
 Neither boredom nor anxiety are positive experiences, so
 Alex will be motivated to return to the flow state. How is he
 to do it? Glancing again at the diagram, we see that if he is
 bored (A ) and wishes to be in flow again, Alex has
 essentially only one choice: to increase the challenges he is
 facing. (He also has a second choice, which is to give up
 tennis altogether—in which case A would simply disappear
 from the diagram.) By setting himself a new and more
 dicult goal that matches his skills—for instance, to beat an
 opponent just a little more advanced that he is—Alex would
 be back in flow (A ).
 If Alex is anxious (A ), the way back to flow requires that he
 increase his skills. Theoretically he could also reduce the
 challenges he is facing, and thus return to the flow where he
 started (in A ), but in practice it is dicult to ignore
 challenges once one is aware that they exist.
 The diagram shows that both A and A represent situations
 in which Alex is in flow. Although both are equally
 enjoyable, the two states are quite different in that A is a
 2
 4
 3
 1
 1 4
 4
 more complex experience than A . It is more complex
 because it involves greater challenges, and demands greater
 skill from the player.
 But A , although complex and enjoyable, does not represent
 a stable situation either. As Alex keeps playing, either he will
 become bored by the stale opportunities he finds at that
 level, or he will become anxious and frustrated by his
 relatively low ability. So the motivation to enjoy himself
 again will push him to get back into the flow channel, but
 now at a level of complexity even higher than A .
 It is this dynamic feature that explains why flow activities
 lead to growth and discovery. One cannot enjoy doing the
 same thing at the same level for long. We grow either bored
 or frustrated, and then the desire to enjoy ourselves again
 pushes us to stretch our skills, or to discover new
 opportunities for using them.
 You can see how keeping someone in the flow channel is a
 delicate balance, for a player’s skill level seldom stays in one
 place. As their skill increases, you must present them with
 commensurate challenges. For traditional games, this challenge
 primarily comes from seeking out more challenging opponents.
 In videogames, there is often a sequence of levels that gradually
 1
 4
 4
 get more challenging. This pattern of levels of increasing
 difficulty is nicely self-balancing—players with a lot of skill can
 usually move through the lower levels quickly, until they come
 to the levels that challenge them. This connection between skill
 and the speed of finishing a level helps keep skilled players
 from getting bored. However, it is the rare player who is
 persistent enough to win the game, mastering all levels. Most
 players eventually reach a level where they spend so much time
 in the frustration zone that they give up on the game. There is
 much debate about whether that is a bad thing (many players
 are frustrated) or a good thing (since only skilled, persistent
 players can reach the end, the accomplishment is special).
 Many designers are quick to point out that while staying in the
 flow channel is important, some ways of moving up the channel
 are better than others. Moving straight up the channel like
 this…
 FIGURE
 10.6
 …is definitely better than the game ending in anxiety or
 boredom. But consider the play experience that follows a track
 more like this:
 FIGURE
 10.7
 This will probably feel much more interesting to a player. It is a
 repeating cycle of increasing challenge, followed by a reward,
 often of more power, which gives an easier period of less
 challenge. Soon enough, the challenge ramps up again. For
 example, a videogame might feature a gun that lets me destroy
 enemies if I shoot them three times. As I proceed through the
 game, the enemies grow more numerous, increasing the
 challenge. If I rise to the challenge, though, and defeat enough
 enemies, I might be rewarded with a gun that lets me destroy
 the enemies with only two shots. Suddenly the game is easier,
 which is very rewarding. This easy period doesn’t last though,
 because soon new enemies that take three and even four shots
 to destroy, even with my new gun, will start to appear, taking
 the challenge to new heights.
 This cycle of “tense and release, tense and release” comes up
 again and again in design. It seems to be inherent to human
 enjoyment. Too much tension, and we wear out. Too much
 relaxation, and we grow bored. When we fluctuate between the
 two, we enjoy both excitement and relaxation, and this
 oscillation also provides both the pleasure of variety and the
 pleasure of anticipation.
 You can see how useful the idea of flow and the flow channel
 can be for discussing and analyzing a gameplay experience—so
 useful that it is Lens #21.
 #21 THE LENS OF FLOW
 To use this lens, consider what is holding your player’s focus.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 Does my game have clear goals? If not, how can I fix that?
 Are the goals of the player the same goals I intended?
 Are there parts of the game that distract players to the point
 they forget their goal? If so, can these distractions be reduced
 or tied into the game goals?
 Does my game provide a steady stream of not-too-easy, nottoo-hard challenges, taking into account the fact that the
 player’s skills may be gradually improving?
 Are the player’s skills improving at the rate I had hoped? If
 not, how can I change that?
 Illustration by Diana Patton
 Flow is a very hard thing to test for. You won’t see it in ten
 minutes of gameplay. You must observe players for longer
 periods. Even trickier, a game that keeps someone in flow the
 first few times they play it may later become boring or
 frustrating.
 When observing a player, flow can be easy to miss—you must
 learn to recognize it. It is not always accompanied by external
 expressions of emotion—it often involves quiet withdrawal.
 Players in flow playing solo games will often be quiet, possibly
 muttering to themselves. They are so focused that they are
 sometimes slow to respond or irritated if you ask them
 questions. Players in flow during multiplayer games will
 sometimes communicate with one another enthusiastically,
 constantly focused on the game. Once you notice a player going
 into flow during your game, you need to watch them closely—
 they won’t stay there forever. You must watch for that crucial
 moment—the event that moves them out of the flow channel, so
 you can figure out how to make sure that event doesn’t happen
 in your next prototype of the game.
 One final note: don’t forget to turn the Lens of Flow on yourself!
 You will surely find that times of flow are when you get the
 most done as a designer—make sure to organize your design
 time so you can get to that special state of mind as frequently as
 possible.
 Empathy
 As human beings, we have an amazing ability to project
 ourselves into the place of others. When we do this, we think
 the other person’s thoughts and feel their feelings, to the best of
 our ability. It is one of the hallmarks of our ability to
 understand one another that we can do this, and it is an
 integral part of gameplay.
 There is an interesting theater exercise where a group of actors
 is divided into two groups. In the first group, each actor chooses
 an emotion (happiness, sadness, anger, etc.), and then they all
 mill about the stage, each trying to project their chosen emotion
 through attitude, walk, and facial expression. The second group
 does not choose an emotion. They just walk about at random
 among the first group, trying to establish eye contact with
 others. The first time they try this, the actors in the second
 group discover themselves doing something shocking—
 whenever they make eye contact with someone projecting an
 emotion, they take on the emotion themselves and make the
 corresponding facial expression, without consciously willing to
 do so.
 This is how strong our power of empathy can be. Without even
 trying, we become other people. When we see someone who is
 happy, we can feel their joy as if it is our own. When we see
 someone who is sad, we can feel their pain. Entertainers use
 our power of empathy to make us feel we are part of the story
 world they are creating. Amazingly, our empathy can be cast
 from one person to another in the blink of an eye. We can even
 empathize with animals.
 Have you noticed that dogs have much richer facial expression
 than other animals? They express emotion with their eyes and
 eyebrows much like we do (Figure 10.8). Wolves (dog ancestors)
 don’t have nearly the range of facial expression of domesticated
 dogs. Dogs appear to have evolved this ability as a survival skill.
 Dogs that could make the right faces could capture our
 empathy, and we, suddenly feeling their feelings, became more
 likely to take care of them.
 Of course, the brain does all this using mental models—in truth,
 we are empathizing not with real people or animals, but with
 our mental models of them—which means we are easily
 tricked. We can feel emotion when there is none. A photo, a
 drawing, or a videogame character can just as easily capture
 our empathy. Cinematographers understand this, and they fling
 our empathy all over the place, from one character to another,
 thus manipulating our feelings and emotions. Next time you
 watch television, pay attention, moment to moment, about
 where your empathy is going and why it is going there.
 FIGURE
 10.8
 As game designers, we will make use of empathy in the same
 ways that novelists, graphic artists, and filmmakers do, but we
 also have our own set of new empathic interactions. Games are
 about problem solving, and empathic projection is a useful
 method of problem solving. If I can imagine myself in the place
 of another, I can make better decisions about what that person
 can do to solve a particular problem. Also, in games, you don’t
 just project your feelings into a character, you project your
 entire decision-making capacity into that character and can
 become them in a way that isn’t possible in non-interactive
 media. We will discuss the implications of this in detail in
 Chapter 20: Characters.
 Imagination
 The most beautiful world is always entered through
 imagination.
 —Hellen Keller
 Imagination puts the player into the game by putting the game
 into the player.
 FIGURE
 10.9
 You might think, when I talk about the power of the player’s
 imagination, that I might mean their creative imagination and
 the power to make up dreamlike fantasy worlds—but I am
 talking about something much more mundane. The imagination
 I’m talking about is the miraculous power that everyone takes
 for granted—the everyday imagination that every person uses
 for communication and problem solving. For example, if I tell
 you a short story, “The mailman stole my car yesterday,” I have
 actually told you very little but already you have a picture of
 what happened. Weirdly, your picture is full of details that I
 didn’t include in my story. Take a look at the mental image that
 formed, and answer these questions:
 What did the mailman look like?
 What kind of neighborhood was my car in when he stole it?
 What color was the car?
 What time of day did he steal it?
 How did he steal it?
 Why did he steal it?
 Now, I didn’t tell you any of those things, but your amazing
 imagination just made up a bunch of these details so that you
 could more easily think about what I was telling you. Now, if I
 suddenly give you more information, like “It wasn’t a real car,
 but an expensive model toy car,” you quickly reformulate your
 imaginary image to fit what you have heard, and your answers
 to the preceding questions might change correspondingly. This
 ability to automatically fill in gaps is very relevant for game
 design, for it means that our games don’t need to give every
 detail and players will be able to fill in the rest. The art comes in
 knowing what you should show the player and what you should
 leave to their imagination.
 This power, when you think about it, is quite incredible. The
 fact that our brains only deal in simplified models of reality
 means that we can manipulate these models effortlessly,
 sometimes into situations that wouldn’t be possible in reality. I
 can see an armchair and imagine what it would look like if it
 were a different color or a different size, if it was made of
 oatmeal, or if it was walking around. We do a lot of problem
 solving this way. If I ask you to find a way to change a light bulb
 without a stepladder, you immediately start imagining possible
 solutions.
 Imagination has two crucial functions: the first is
 communication (often for storytelling) and the second is
 problem solving. Since games prominently feature both of
 these, game designers must understand how to engage the
 player’s imagination as a storytelling partner, as well as having
 a sense of the problems it will and will not be able to solve.
 The human mind is truly the most fascinating, amazing,
 complex thing that we know. We may never unravel all of its
 mysteries. The more we know about it, the better a chance we’ll
 have of creating a great experience in it, for it is the site where
 all our game experiences take place. And never forget! You are
 equipped with one yourself. You can use your own powers of
 modeling, focus, empathy, and imagination to get to know how
 these powers are being used in the mind of your player. In this
 way, self-listening can be the key to listening to your audience.
 In the next chapter, we’ll do some of that self-listening to
 understand why the brain is motivated to use any of these
 powers at all.
 Other Reading to Consider
 Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly
 Csikszentmihalyi. A highly readable exploration of the
 nature of flow written by its most prominent researcher.
 CHAPTER ELEVEN
 The Player’s Mind Is Driven by the Player’s
 Motivation
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-11
 FIGURE
 11.1
 Let us begin this chapter by facing a painful truth.
 Games are not important.
 Sure, we like playing them. We get all excited about them and
 have wonderful, memorable experiences when playing them.
 But in the larger scheme of our lives, there is always something
 more important we could be doing. And, in fact, this is true for
 all entertainment. It is no exaggeration to say that the goal of all
 entertainment experiences is to take something unimportant
 (such as a ball going through a hoop, a story about imaginary
 animals, or whether this card is a king or an ace) and make it
 seem very important indeed. Is this deception? It is not. In the
 end, we are always aware that it is “just a game.” But during
 play, something happens in us that makes it feel like it is so
 much more. Something drives us and compels us to care about
 these trivial experiences as if they were matters of life and
 death. This is the magic of motivation. The question of why we
 do what we do is as old as philosophy itself, but there can be no
 doubt that game designers seem to have special insights into
 human motivation.
 The reality of what game designers actually understand is
 somewhat murkier, and it is this murkiness that makes game
 design so challenging. In truth, most designers create systems of
 motivation less through masterful understanding of the
 intricacies of psychology and more through gut instinct and
 experimentation, occasionally stumbling into success. However,
 any insights about motivation are potentially useful, and this is
 one of the rare areas where psychological research is well
 aligned with our design goals, so let’s start there.
 Needs…
 In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a paper titled “A
 Theory of Human Motivation,” which proposed a hierarchy of
 human needs. This is often presented as a pyramid:
 FIGURE
 11.2
 The idea here is that people are not motivated to pursue the
 higher-level needs on this list until the lower needs are
 satisfied. For example, if someone is starving to death, this is a
 priority over a feeling of safety. If someone doesn’t feel safe,
 they aren’t going to seriously pursue human relationships. If
 someone doesn’t feel love and social belonging, they aren’t
 going to pursue things that will boost their self-esteem. And if
 they don’t have good self-esteem, they will not be able to pursue
 their talents (remember the major gift?) to do what they were
 “born to do.”
 If you think hard, you can come up with some possible
 exceptions to this model, but overall, it works well enough to be
 a very useful tool for discussing players’ motivations in games.
 It is interesting to think about different game activities and
 where they fall on this hierarchy. Many game activities are
 about achievement and mastery, which places them at level
 four, self-esteem. But some are lower. Looking at the hierarchy,
 the reasons for the appeal and staying power of multiplayer
 games suddenly become clear—they fulfill more basic needs
 than single player gameplay, so it shouldn’t be surprising that
 many players will feel more motivated to do them.
 Can you think of gameplay activities that go even farther down
 on the hierarchy, to the second or first level? How about
 activities on the fifth level? It can be argued that the success of
 Minecraft comes from its complete coverage of the pyramid. It
 covers the bottom two levels with its fantasy context (you are
 trying to gather resources to build safe shelter), and it covers
 the top three levels by being a multiplayer game about mastery
 and creativity.
 Any game that connects you with other people lets you feel a
 sense of accomplishment, and lets you build and create things
 that let you express yourself fulfills the needs on the third,
 fourth, and fifth levels. Viewed from this perspective, the
 popularity and staying power of games with both online
 communities and content creation tools makes a lot of sense. It
 is also interesting to consider how the different levels can feed
 into one another. But there are other ways to think about needs.
 …And More Needs
 As interesting as Maslow’s point of view is, more modern
 psychologists have taken up new points of view on the question
 of needs. Particularly relevant to games is the work of Edward
 Deci and Richard Ryan, who have done a great deal to develop
 what is called self-determination theory. Don’t let that ugly
 name scare you. All they are saying is that just as humans have
 physical needs, we also have mental needs—not just wants or
 desires, but actual needs. When these needs are unmet, we
 become mentally unhealthy. Surprisingly, Ryan and Deci
 suggest that we have precisely three mental needs:
 1. Competence: I need to feel good at something.
 2. Autonomy: I need freedom to do things my own way.
 3. Relatedness: I need to connect with other people.
 These are somewhat startling in their simplicity, but a great
 body of evidence backs up their validity. And it is hard not to
 notice how well games tend to fulfill all three of these needs.
 Games are designed to make you feel mastery. Games give you
 freedom to play the way you want to play. In fact, they give
 more freedom than that: since they are only games, you can
 stop playing whenever you like. And, of course, most games are
 designed to be played with other people, to help form social
 connections and bonds. In future chapters, we will encounter
 lenses that individually address competence, autonomy, and
 relatedness. But to remember the importance of needs in
 general, take this lens.
 #22 THE LENS OF NEEDS
 To use this lens, stop thinking about your game, and start
 thinking about what basic human needs it fulfills.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 On which levels of Maslow’s hierarchy is my game operating?
 Does it fill the needs of competence, autonomy, and
 relatedness?
 How can I make my game fill more basic needs than it
 already does?
 For the needs my game is already filling, how can it fill those
 needs even better?
 It sounds strange to talk about a game fulfilling basic human
 needs, but everything that people do is an attempt to fulfill
 these needs in some way. And keep in mind, some games fulfill
 needs better than others—your game can’t just promise the
 need, it must deliver fulfillment of the need. If a player
 imagines that playing your game is going to make them feel
 better about themselves, or get to know their friends better, and
 your game doesn’t deliver on these needs, your player will
 move on to a game that does.
 Illustration by Chuck Hoover
 Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation
 Yet another way to think about motivation is by looking at
 where it comes from. This is particularly relevant for game
 designers, since games use so many different kinds of
 motivation to keep players interested. On the surface, it sounds
 simple: when I feel like doing something, we say I am
 intrinsically motivated, but when someone pays me to do
 something, we say I am extrinsically motivated. It may sound
 simple, but in the reality of games, things quickly become
 tangled. Do I play Pac-Man because I enjoy the visceral thrill of
 racing and chasing through the maze (intrinsic) or because the
 game gives me points (extrinsic)? What if I am truly motivated
 by the excitement of getting a high score? Is that intrinsic, or
 extrinsic, or both? Let’s say that PepsiCo creates a game where
 you get points and prizes for drinking Mountain Dew. That’s
 clearly a system of extrinsic motivation. But what if the game
 becomes a joke between my friends and I and we have an
 intrinsically fun social experience one-upping each other by
 winning more points and prizes? Some are quick to vilify
 extrinsic motivation as being “cheap” game design, but savvy
 designers know that one motivation can grow on another, like a
 vine growing on a trellis.
 Some psychologists have tried to illustrate the complexity of
 intrinsic and extrinsic motivations by showing them as a
 continuum:
 FIGURE
 11.3
 The key idea is that “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” are not binary,
 but a gradient where the more the motivation comes from
 “your true self,” the more internal it is. As a game designer, it is
 important to have a sense of how internal or external the
 different motivations in your game really are, for all
 motivations are not created equal, and sometimes they can
 interact in unexpected ways. In one famous study, two groups
 of children were asked to draw pictures. The first group was
 paid for each picture they created; the second group was not. If
 you believe the idea that more motivation is better, then you
 might expect that the paid group would draw more pictures
 and better pictures. And you would be half right—they did
 draw more pictures, but the quality was lower—the pictures
 were not as interesting and thoughtful. But here’s the surprising
 part: when drawing time was up, each group was asked to wait,
 while the researchers left the room. The unpaid children, with
 crayons and paper in front of them, naturally kept drawing. The
 paid children, however, did not. They put their crayons down
 and just waited. It would seem motivation is not purely
 additive; rather, the act of adding extrinsic motivation to
 something that is already intrinsically motivating slides it along
 the continuum toward the external, draining away the intrinsic
 motivation! This has serious repercussions for those who
 believe that any activity can be easily “gamified” by adding
 simple points, badges, and rewards.
 Wanna vs. Hafta
 In Chapter 4: Game, we talked about how a change in attitude
 can turn work into play, and vice versa. This, without a doubt, is
 meaningfully connected to motivation. Think back to the
 example of the factory worker who made a game of trying to
 beat his manufacturing record each day and how it vastly
 increased his motivation and his engagement. What happened
 there, exactly? Certainly, one could argue that his motivation
 became more internal. He was less focused on the external
 reward for doing his job (getting paid) and became more
 focused on something more internal—beating his personal
 record, because he wanted to, and thus his motivation became
 more his own.
 But there is something else at work here, too. It was something
 that I did not fully comprehend until I was reading a book
 about neuroscience that pointed out that pleasure seeking and
 pain avoiding are two different systems in the brain. They are
 not a simple continuum of pain to pleasure, but two different
 sets of motivational circuits. So often, though, we just group
 pleasure seeking and pain avoiding into one lump we call
 “motivation” and think no more about it. But when we think to
 separate them, interesting things come to light.
 The relevance of this to games becomes clear when considering
 the following example. Let’s say I start a new software
 company: Big Red Button Software. Our first product is a new
 kind of tax preparation software. We send you a big red button
 in the mail, you push it, and bam! Your taxes are instantly
 prepared, guaranteeing you the maximum refund allowable by
 law. I suspect you would agree that is a pretty amazing software
 product, and I’m glad you like it, because we are getting ready
 to release our second product: it’s a game called Angry Birds.
 Again, we send you a big red button in the mail, and this time
 when you push it, bam! You instantly win!
 But that’s not such an amazing software product, is it? In fact, it
 might be the worst game ever. What is it that makes these two
 applications so radically different? Simply this: I “hafta” do my
 taxes, but I “wanna” play a game. Taxes are all about pain
 avoidance. I don’t do them because I enjoy them, or because
 someone is paying me to do them, but because I’ll suffer heavy
 fines and maybe go to jail if I don’t do them. But playing a game
 is all about pleasure seeking. There is no penalty for not playing
 —I do it simply because I enjoy doing it. This has nothing to do
 with the activity and everything to do with our attitude toward
 it. A friend of mine loves preparing tax forms, and likewise,
 videogames bore him. For him, taxes are a “wanna” activity,
 and videogames are a “hafta.”
 So why do we care about this? Because while many
 gameplaying motivations are about pleasure seeking, not all of
 them are—many are centered on pain avoidance. When you are
 avoiding enemies and “trying not to die,” you are in pain
 avoidance mode. When you are scooping up gold stars and
 scoring clever combos, you are in pleasure-seeking mode. They
 are both valid kinds of motivation and can actually work well
 in combination. However, sometimes the combination gets out
 of balance. “Free to play” games often begin entirely focused on
 pleasure seeking: big rewards, unexpected bonuses, and
 exciting animations. But over time, they build up obligations—
 come back by a certain time or lose points, invite more friends
 or miss out on prizes. Gradually, these games slide from
 pleasure-seeking motivations to pain avoidance motivations.
 They keep you coming back, but you don’t always feel as good
 about it. For this reason, as designer Sheri Graner Ray puts it,
 “People don’t just stop playing these games, they divorce them.”
 Many World of Warcraft players have had similar experiences.
 They begin playing because there are so many fun things to do,
 one of which is to join a guild and enjoy the friendship and
 camaraderie of team play. But sometimes guild leaders, in a
 desire to succeed, pressure their members to play more than
 they want to. Players want to avoid the pain of shame from
 their guild, so they keep showing up, and gradually, playing
 starts to feel like something you “hafta” do.
 For an interesting perspective on the motivations in your game,
 try putting each one on a matrix, where one axis is
 internal/external and the other is hafta/wanna. It is one more
 illustration of how richly complex and interesting human
 motivation can be.
 FIGURE
 11.4
 Be wary of those who tell you that human motivation is a
 simple thing, for you ignore its complexity at your peril. Take
 this lens to help you remember.
 #23 THE LENS OF MOTIVATION
 Every game is a complex ecosystem of motivations. To examine
 them more closely, ask yourself these questions:
 What motivations do players have to play my game?
 Which motivations are most internal? Which are most
 external?
 Which are pleasure-seeking? Which are pain-avoiding?
 Which motivations support each other?
 Which motivations are in conflict?
 Illustration by Dan Lin
 Novelty
 Unquestionably, the popular thing in this world is novelty.
 —Mark Twain
 It is impossible to overestimate the importance of novelty as
 motivation in the realm of game design. Human beings are
 natural explorers, and we are always interested in that which is
 new. If quality was our primary concern, our bookstores would
 be full of classics whose quality is time tested and true. Instead,
 classics get a dusty shelf in the back, while the majority of
 books for sale are brand new. And this is even truer for games.
 Conversation about games is dominated by what is new and
 what is coming next. Thirst for novelty is a tremendous part of
 what motivates players to purchase games. Games and systems
 that cost hundreds of dollars today will be sold for pennies on
 eBay tomorrow. Thirst for novelty is also big part of what keeps
 players playing—believing there is something new on the next
 level is a powerful incentive to finish this one.
 One of the most powerful kinds of novelty in games is novelty
 that makes you think in a whole new way. Portal is a great
 example of this, with its bizarre mechanic of shooting
 connected “holes” into ceilings, walls, and floors. Its advertising
 slogan, “Now you’re thinking with portals,” is very appropriate,
 because the mechanics of the game make you think about the
 world in a whole new way. Even though it’s the same old world,
 you have a new way of interacting with it—one that probably
 never occurred to you because it didn’t seem possible. But
 suddenly it is not only possible but urgent that you do so. Novel
 ways of thinking stretch our brains in a way that can feel
 incredibly rewarding.
 Keep in mind, however, that there is such a thing as being too
 novel. Every successful game is a mix of the novel and the
 familiar. Many fascinating games have failed by being ahead of
 their time. An even greater danger is that your game may have
 novelty, but no other qualities to give it staying power. Be
 cautious not to fool yourself that novelty is enough. Novelty will
 get the word out and drive early sales, but if there is not a solid
 game underneath, your players will vanish as suddenly as they
 arrived.
 It is easy to shake one’s head at the sad state of a society that
 demands novelty over quality, but seeking and seizing novelty
 is the way the human race explores what is possible, ever
 questing for a better world. So do not despair at man’s
 insatiable appetite for novelty—instead, embrace it, and give
 the people what they want: something they have never
 experienced before. Just be sure that when the novelty wears
 off, there is still something there to care about. Take this lens to
 be sure you remember.
 #24 THE LENS OF NOVELTY
 Different isn’t always better, but better is always different.
 —Scotty Meltzer
 To ensure you harness the powerful motivation of novelty, ask
 yourself these questions:
 What is novel about my game?
 Does my game have novelties throughout or just at the
 beginning?
 Do I have the right mix of the novel and the familiar?
 When the novelty wears off, will players still enjoy my game?
 Illustration by Zachary D. Coe
 Judgment
 The fourth level of Maslow’s hierarchy, self-esteem, is the one
 most intimately connected to games. But why? One deep need
 common to everyone is the need to be judged. This might sound
 wrong—don’t people hate being judged? They don’t—they only
 hate being judged unfairly. We have a deep inner need to know
 how we stack up. And when we aren’t happy with how we are
 judged, we work hard until we are judged favorably. The fact
 that games are excellent systems for objective judgment is one
 of their most appealing qualities.
 This chapter has only scratched the surface of the nature of
 human motivation with regard to games. But don’t worry—it
 isn’t a topic we can abandon. Every aspect of creating great
 games ultimately relates back to human motivation. Consider
 this a starting point, a foundation on which you will build
 greater and greater understanding of why we do what we do.
 Let’s take the next step by examining the mechanisms that
 make games work.
 #25 THE LENS OF JUDGMENT
 To decide if your game is a good judge of the players, ask
 yourself these questions:
 What does your game judge about the players?
 How does it communicate this judgment?
 Do players feel the judgment is fair?
 Do they care about the judgment?
 Does the judgment make them want to improve?
 Illustration by Joseph Grubb
 Other Reading to Consider
 Glued to Games by Scott Rigby and Richard M. Ryan. An
 insightful guide to the relationship between selfdetermination theory and what makes games work.
 Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn. This book is an
 excellent overview of the vast body of research about the
 downsides of extrinsic rewards.
 Understanding Motivation and Emotion by Johnmarshall
 Reeve. If you are ready to get beyond primitive notions of
 how motivation and emotion work, this college-level text is a
 solid introduction to the world of psychological research on
 the subject.
 CHAPTER TWELVE
 Some Elements Are Game Mechanics
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-12
 FIGURE
 12.1
 We have talked a lot about designers, players, and the experience
 of gameplaying. It is time to talk nuts and bolts about what games
 are really made of. Game designers must learn to use their x-ray
 vision to be able to see past the skin of a game and quickly discern
 the skeleton, which is defined by the game mechanics.
 But what are these mysterious mechanics?
 Game mechanics are the core of what a game truly is. They are the
 interactions and relationships that remain when all of the
 aesthetics, technology, and story are stripped away.
 As with many things in game design, we do not have a universally
 agreed-upon taxonomy of game mechanics. One reason for this is
 that the mechanics of gameplay, even for simple games, tend to be
 quite complex and very difficult to disentangle. Attempts at
 simplifying these complex mechanics to the point of perfect
 mathematical understanding result in systems of description that
 are obviously incomplete. Economic “game theory” is an example
 of this. You would think with a name like “game theory,” it would
 be of great use to game designers, but in truth, it can only handle
 such simple systems that it is seldom useful for designing real
 games.
 But there is another reason that taxonomies of game mechanics
 are incomplete. On one level, game mechanics are very objective,
 clearly stated sets of rules. On another level, though, they involve
 something more mysterious. Earlier, we discussed how the mind
 breaks down all games into mental models that it can easily
 manipulate. Part of game mechanics necessarily involves
 describing the structure of these mental models. Since these exist
 largely in the darkness of the subconscious mind, it is hard for us
 come up with a well-defined analytical taxonomy of how they
 work.
 But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Some authors have
 approached this problem from a very academic perspective, more
 concerned with an analysis that is philosophically watertight than
 with one that might be useful to designers. We can’t afford this
 kind of pedantry. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is a fine
 thing, but our interest is in knowledge for the sake of great games,
 even if it means a taxonomy that has some gray areas. With that
 said, I present the taxonomy that I use to classify game mechanics.
 These mechanics fall largely into seven main categories, and each
 one can provide useful insights on your game design.
 Mechanic 1: Space
 Every game takes place in some kind of space. This space is the
 “magic circle” of gameplay. It defines the various places that can
 exist in a game and how those places are related to one another.
 As a game mechanic, space is a mathematical construct. We need
 to strip away all visuals, all aesthetics, and simply look at the
 abstract construction of a game’s space.
 There are no hard and fast rules for describing these abstract,
 stripped-down game spaces. Generally, though, game spaces
 1. Are either discrete or continuous
 2. Have some number of dimensions
 3. Have bounded areas that may or may not be connected
 The game of tic-tac-toe, for example, features a board that is
 discrete and 2D. What do we mean by “discrete”? Well, even
 though we commonly draw a tic-tac-toe board like this:
 FIGURE
 12.2
 It is not really a continuous space, because we only care about
 boundaries, not the space within each cell. Whether you put your
 X…
 FIGURE
 12.3
 FIGURE
 12.4
 FIGURE
 12.5
 It doesn’t really matter—all those are equivalent in terms of the
 game. But if you put your X here:
 FIGURE
 12.6
 That is another matter entirely. So, even though the players can
 make their marks in an infinite number of places in a continuous
 2D space, there are really only nine discrete places that have any
 actual meaning in the game. In a sense, we really have nine zerodimensional cells, connected to each other in a 2D grid, like this:
 FIGURE
 12.7
 Each circle represents a zero-dimensional place, and each line
 shows which places are connected to each other. In tic-tac-toe,
 there is no movement from place to place, but adjacency is very
 important. Without adjacency, it would just be nine disconnected
 points. With the adjacency, it becomes a discrete 2D space, with
 clear boundaries—the space is three cells wide and three cells
 high. The space for a chessboard is similar, except that it is an 8 × 8
 space.
 A game with fancy aesthetics can fool you into thinking that its
 functional space is more complex than it really is. Consider a
 Monopoly board.
 At first glance, you might say it is a discrete 2D space, like a
 chessboard, with most of the middle cells missing. But it can be
 more simply represented as a 1D space—a single line of forty
 discrete points, which connects to itself in a loop. Sure, on the
 game board, the corner spaces look special because they are
 bigger, but functionally that doesn’t matter, since each game
 square is a zero-dimensional space. Multiple game pieces can be in
 a single game square, but their relative positions within that
 square are meaningless.
 But not all game spaces are discrete. A pool table is an example of
 a continuous 2D space. It has a fixed length and width, and the
 balls can freely move about on the table, ricocheting off of the
 walls or falling into the holes, which are in fixed positions.
 Everyone would agree that the space is continuous, but is it 2D?
 Since clever players can sometimes cause the balls to leave the
 table and hop over each other, you could certainly argue that this
 is really a 3D game space, and for some purposes, it is useful to
 think of it that way. There are no hard and fast rules for these
 abstract functional spaces. When designing a new game, there are
 times it will be useful for you to think of your space as 2D and
 there are times when thinking of it as 3D is more useful. The same
 goes for continuous vs. discrete. The purpose of stripping down a
 game into a functional space is so that you can more easily think
 about it, without the distractions of aesthetics or the real world. If
 you are thinking about modifying the game of soccer to a playing
 field with new boundaries, you will probably think about it in
 terms of a 2D continuous space.
 FIGURE
 12.8
 But if you are thinking about modifying the height of the goal, or
 changing the rules about how high the players can kick the ball, or
 adding hills and valleys to the field, it is useful to think of it as a
 continuous 3D space instead.
 FIGURE
 12.9
 There might even be times you think about a soccer field as a
 discrete space—breaking it up into, say, nine major areas of play,
 with two extra areas on the left and right representing the goals.
 This mode of thinking might prove useful if you are analyzing the
 different kinds of play that take place in different parts of the field,
 for example. The important thing is that you come up with
 abstract models of your game space that help you better
 understand the interrelationships of your game.
 Nested Spaces
 FIGURE
 12.10
 Many game spaces are more complex than the examples we have
 looked at here. Often, they feature “spaces within spaces.”
 Computer-based fantasy role-playing games are a good example of
 this. Most of them feature an “outdoor space” that is continuous
 and 2D. A player traveling this space sometimes encounters little
 icons representing towns, or caves, or castles. Players can enter
 these as completely separate spaces, not really connected in any
 way to the “outdoor space” but through the gateway icon. This is
 not geographically realistic, of course—but it matches our mental
 models of how we think about spaces—when we are indoors we
 think about the space inside the building we are in, with little
 thought to how it exactly relates to the space outside. For this
 reason, these “spaces within spaces” are often a great way to
 create a simple representation of a complex world.
 Zero Dimensions
 Does every game take place in a space? Consider a game like
 “Twenty Questions,” where one player thinks of an object, and the
 other player asks “yes or no” questions trying to guess what it is.
 There is no game board and nothing moves—the game is just two
 people talking. You might argue that this game has no space. On
 the other hand, you might find it useful to think of the game
 happening in a space that looks like Figure 12.11.
 FIGURE
 12.11
 The mind of the answerer contains the secret object. The mind of
 the questioner is where all the weighing of the previous answers is
 going on, and the conversation space between them is how they
 exchange information. Every game has some kind of information
 or “state” (as we’ll see later in Mechanic 2), and this has to exist
 somewhere. So, even if a game takes place in a single point of zero
 dimensions, it can be useful to think of it as a space. You may find
 that figuring out an abstract model for a game whose space seems
 to be trivial may lead you to insights about it that surprise you.
 Being able to think about the space of your game in functional
 abstract terms is an essential perspective for a designer, and it is
 Lens #26.
 #26 THE LENS OF FUNCTIONAL SPACE
 To use this lens, think about the space in which your game really
 takes place when all surface elements are stripped away.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 Is the space of this game discrete or continuous?
 How many dimensions does it have?
 What are the boundaries of the space?
 Are there subspaces? How are they connected?
 Is there more than one useful way to abstractly model the space
 of this game?
 Illustration by Cheryl Ceol
 When thinking about game spaces, it is easy to be swayed by
 aesthetics. There are many ways to represent your game space,
 and they are all good, as long as they work for you. When you can
 think of your space in these pure abstract terms, it helps you let go
 of assumptions about the real world, and it lets you focus on the
 kinds of gameplay interactions you would like to see. Of course,
 once you have manipulated the abstract space so that you are
 happy with its layout, you will want to apply aesthetics to it. The
 Lens of Functional Space works quite well with Lens #10:
 Holographic Design. If you can simultaneously see your abstract
 functional space and the aesthetic space the player will
 experience, as well as how they interrelate, you can make
 confident decisions about the shape of your game’s world.
 Mechanic 2: Time
 In the real world, time is the most mysterious of dimensions.
 Against our will, we travel through it, ever forward, with no way
 to stop, turn around, slow down, or speed up. In the world of
 games, we often try to remedy this lack of control by creating toy
 worlds that let us play with time like gods.
 Discrete and Continuous Time
 Just as space in games can be discrete or continuous, so can time.
 We have a word for the unit of discrete time in a game: the “turn.”
 Generally, in turn-based games, time matters little. Each turn
 counts as a discrete unit of time, and the time between turns, as
 far as the game is concerned, doesn’t exist. Scrabble games, for
 example, are generally recorded as a series of moves, with no
 record of the amount of time that each move took, because real
 clock time is irrelevant to the game mechanics.
 Of course, there are many games that are not turn based, but
 instead operate in continuous time. Most action videogames are
 this way, as are most sports. And some games use a mix of time
 systems. Tournament chess is turn-based but has a continuous
 clock to place time limits on each player.
 Clocks and Races
 Clocks of varying types are used in many games, to set absolute
 time limits for all kinds of things. The “sand timer” used in Boggle,
 the game clock in American football, and even the duration of
 Mario’s jump in Donkey Kong are different kinds of “clock”
 mechanisms, designed to limit gameplay through absolute
 measure of time. Just as there can be nested spaces, sometimes
 time is nested, as well. Basketball, for instance, is often played with
 a game clock to limit the length of total play but also with a much
 shorter “shot clock” to help ensure players take more risks,
 keeping the gameplay interesting.
 Other measures of time are more relative—we usually refer to
 these as “races.” In the case of a race, there is not a fixed time limit,
 but rather pressure to be faster than another player. Sometimes
 this is very obvious, like in an auto race, but other races are more
 subtle, such as my race in Space Invaders to destroy all the
 invading aliens before they manage to touch the ground.
 There are many games, of course, where time is not a limiting
 factor, but it is still a meaningful factor. In baseball, for example,
 innings are not timed, but if the game goes on too long, it can
 exhaust the pitcher, making time an important part of the game. In
 Chapter 13: Balance, we will talk about different game factors that
 can control how long a game takes to play.
 Controlling Time
 Games give us the chance to do something we can never do in the
 real world: control time. This happens in a number of fascinating
 ways. Sometimes we stop time completely, as when a “time-out” is
 called in sporting match or when the “pause” button is pushed on
 a videogame. Occasionally, we speed up time, as happens in games
 like Civilization, so that we can see years pass in just seconds. But
 most often, we rewind time, which is what happens every time
 you die in a videogame and return to a previous checkpoint. Some
 games, such as Braid, go so far as to make manipulation of game
 time a central mechanic.
 Since time is invisible and unstoppable, it is easy to forget. Take
 this lens to help you remember.
 #27 THE LENS OF TIME
 It is said that “timing is everything.” Our goal as designers is to
 create experiences, and experiences are easily spoiled when they
 are too short or too long, too fast or too slow. Ask these questions
 to make yours just the right length:
 What is it that determines the length of my gameplay activities?
 Are my players frustrated because the game ends too early?
 How can I change that?
 Are my players bored because the game goes on too long? How
 can I change that?
 Illustration by Sam Yip
 Would clocks or races make my gameplay more exciting?
 Time limits can irritate players. Would I better off without time
 limits?
 Would a hierarchy of time structures help my game? That is,
 several short rounds that together comprise a larger round?
 Timing can be very difficult to get right, but it can make or break a
 game. Often, it makes sense to follow the old vaudevillian adage
 “Leave ‘em wanting more.”
 Mechanic 3: Objects
 A space without anything in it is, well, just a space. Your game
 space will surely have objects in it. Characters, props, tokens,
 scoreboards, or anything that can be seen or manipulated in your
 game falls into this category. Objects are the “nouns” of game
 mechanics. Technically, there are times you might consider the
 space itself an object, but usually the space of your game is
 different enough from other objects that it stands apart. Objects
 generally have one or more attributes, one of which is often the
 current position in the game space.
 Attributes are categories of information about an object. For
 example, in a racing game, a car might have maximum speed and
 current speed as attributes. Each attribute has a current state. The
 state of the “maximum speed” attribute might be 150 mph, while
 the state of the “current speed” attribute might be 75 mph if that is
 how fast the car is going. Maximum speed is not a state that will
 change much, unless perhaps you upgrade the engine in your car.
 Current speed, on the other hand, changes constantly as you play.
 If objects are the nouns of game mechanics, attributes and their
 states are the adjectives.
 Attributes can be static (such as the color of a checker), never
 changing throughout the game, or dynamic (the checker has a
 “movement mode” attribute with three possible states: “normal,”
 “king,” and “captured”). Primarily, we are interested in dynamic
 attributes.
 Here are two more examples:
 1. In chess, the king has a “movement mode” attribute with three
 important states (“free to move,” “in check,” and “checkmated.”)
 2. In Monopoly, each property on the board can be considered an
 object with a dynamic “number of houses” attribute with six
 states (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, hotel) and a “mortgaged” attribute with two
 states (yes, no).
 Is it important to communicate every state change to the player?
 Not necessarily. Some state changes are better hidden. But for
 others, it is crucial to be sure they are communicated to the player.
 A good rule of thumb is that if two objects behave the same way,
 they should look the same. If they behave differently, they should
 look different.
 Videogame objects, especially ones that simulate intelligent
 characters, have so many attributes and states that it is easy for a
 designer to get confused. It is often useful to construct a state
 diagram for each attribute to make sure you understand which
 states are connected to which and what triggers state changes. In
 terms of game programming, implementing the state of an
 attribute as a “state machine” can be a very useful way to keep all
 this complexity tidy and easy to debug. Figure 12.12 is a sample
 state diagram for the “movement” attribute of the ghosts in PacMan.
 FIGURE
 12.12
 The circle that reads “In Cage” is the initial state for the ghosts
 (double circle is often used to indicate the start state). Each of the
 arrows indicates a possible state transition, with an event that
 triggers that transition. Diagrams like these are very useful when
 trying to design complex behaviors in a game. They force you to
 really think through everything that can happen to an object and
 what makes it happen. By implementing these state transitions in
 computer code, you automatically forbid illegal transitions (such
 as “In Cage” → “Blue”), which helps cut down on puzzling bugs.
 These diagrams can get quite complicated and are sometimes
 nested. For example, it is quite likely that the real Pac-Man
 algorithm actually has several substates in “Chasing Pac-Man,”
 such as “Scanning for Pac-Man,” “On Pac-Man’s Tail,” and “Moving
 through a Tunnel.”
 Deciding which objects have what attributes and what states is up
 to you. There are often multiple ways to represent the same thing.
 In a game of poker, for example, you could define a player’s hand
 as an area of the game space that has five card objects in it, or you
 could decide you don’t want to think of cards as objects and just
 call the player’s hand an object that has five different card
 attributes. As with everything in game design, the “right” way to
 think about something is whichever way is most useful at the
 moment.
 Games that force the players to be aware of too many states (too
 many game pieces, too many statistics about each character) to
 play can confuse and overwhelm. In Chapter 13: Balance, we’ll
 discuss techniques for optimizing the amount of state the players
 have to deal with. Thinking of your game strictly as a set of objects
 and attributes with changing states can give a very useful
 perspective, and it serves as Lens #28.
 #28 THE LENS OF THE STATE MACHINE
 To use this lens, think about what information changes during
 your game.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 What are the objects in my game?
 What are the attributes of the objects?
 What are the possible states for each attribute?
 What triggers the state changes for each attribute?
 Illustration by Chuck Hoover
 Gameplaying is decision making. Decisions are made based on
 information. Deciding the different attributes, their states, and
 what changes them is core to the mechanics of your game.
 Secrets
 A very important decision about game attributes and their states is
 who is aware of which ones. In many board games, all information
 is public; that is, everyone knows it. In a game of chess, both
 players can see every piece on the board and every piece that has
 been captured—there are no secrets, except what the other player
 is thinking. In card games, hidden or private state is a big part of
 the game. You know what cards you hold, but which ones your
 opponents hold is a mystery for you to puzzle out. The game of
 poker, for example, is largely about trying to guess what cards
 your opponents have while attempting to conceal information
 about what cards you might have. Games become dramatically
 different when you change what information is public or private.
 In standard “draw poker,” all states are private—players can only
 guess your hand based on how much you bet. In “stud poker,”
 some of your cards are private and some are public. This gives
 opponents much more information about each other’s situations,
 and the game feels very different. Board games such as Battleship
 and Stratego are all about guessing the states of your opponent’s
 private attributes.
 In videogames, we face something new: a state that only the game
 itself knows about. This raises a question about whether virtual
 opponents, from a game mechanics standpoint, should be thought
 of as players or just part of the game. This is well illustrated by a
 story: In 1980, my grandfather bought an Intellivision game
 console, which came with a “Las Vegas Poker and Blackjack” game
 cartridge. He had great fun with it, but my grandmother refused to
 play. “It cheats,” she insisted. I told her that was silly—it was just a
 computer—how could it cheat? She explained her reasoning: “It
 knows what all my cards are, and all the cards in the deck! How
 can it not cheat?” And I had to admit that my explanation that the
 computer “doesn’t look at those” when it is making decisions about
 playing the game sounded kind of weak. But it brings out the point
 that there were really three entities in that game who knew the
 states of different attributes: my grandfather, who was aware of
 the state of his hand; the virtual opponent algorithm, which was
 “aware” of the state of its hand; and lastly the main algorithm for
 the game, which was aware of both players’ hands, every card in
 the deck, and everything else about the game.
 So, it seems that from a public/private attribute point of view, it
 makes sense to consider virtual opponents as individual entities
 on par with players. The game itself, though, is yet another entity,
 with a special status, since it isn’t really playing the game,
 although it may be making decisions that enable the game to
 happen. Celia Pearce points out another kind of information,
 which is private from all of the entities we have mentioned so far:
 randomly generated information, such as a die roll. Depending on
 your views about predestination, you might argue that this
 information doesn’t even exist until it is generated and revealed,
 so that referring to it as private is a little silly. But it does fit well
 into a Venn diagram I call the “hierarchy of knowers,” which helps
 to visualize the relationship between the public and private states:
 FIGURE
 12.13
 Each circle in Figure 12.13 represents a “knower.” The “knowers”
 are god, the game, and players 1, 2, and 3. Each point represents
 some information in the game—the state of an attribute:
 A is information that is completely public, such as the position
 playing piece on a game board, or a face-up card. All the players
 are aware of it.
 B is the state that is shared between players 2 and 3 but kept
 secret from player 1. Perhaps 2 and 3 each had the opportunity
 to look at a face-down card, but player 1 didn’t. Or maybe
 players 2 and 3 are virtual opponents of player 1, and their
 algorithm has them sharing information so they can team up
 against player 1.
 C is information private to a single player, in this case player 2.
 It could be cards he was dealt, for example.
 D is information that the game knows about, but not the players
 themselves. There are some mechanical board games where this
 kind of state exists in the physical structure of the board game,
 but is unknown to the players. Stay Alive was a classic example,
 with plastic sliders that when moved revealed holes in the
 board. Touché is another interesting example, where magnets of
 unknown polarity are placed under each square of the board.
 The states are “known” by the game, but not by the players.
 Another example is tabletop role-playing games, which feature
 a “dungeon master,” or “game master,” who is not one of the
 players and who privately knows a great deal of the game state,
 since she is the operational mechanism of the game, so to speak.
 Most computer games have a great deal of internal state that is
 not known to the players.
 E is randomly generated information, known only by the fates,
 god, etc.
 Secrets are power. Lens #29 will help you channel that power to
 make your game as interesting as it can be. Take it, but don’t tell
 anyone.
 #29 THE LENS OF SECRETS
 Change who has what information, and you change your game
 completely. To use this lens, think about who knows what and why.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 What is known by the game only?
 What is known by all players?
 What is known by some or only one player?
 Would changing who knows what information improve my
 game in some way?
 Illustration by Lilian Qian
 Gameplaying is decision making. Decisions are made based on
 information. Deciding the different attributes, their states, and
 who knows about them is core to the mechanics of your game.
 Small changes to who knows what information can radically
 change a game, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
 Who knows about what attributes can even change over the
 course of a game—a great way to create drama in your game is to
 make an important piece of private information suddenly become
 public.
 Mechanic 4: Actions
 The next important game mechanic is the action. Actions are the
 “verbs” of game mechanics. There are two perspectives on actions
 or, put another way, two ways to answer the question “What can
 the players do?”
 The first kind of action is the basic action. These are simply the
 base actions a player can take. For example, in checkers, a player
 can perform only three basic operations:
 Move a checker forward.
 Jump an opponent’s checker.
 Move a checker backwards (kings only).
 The second kind of action is strategic action. These are actions
 that are only meaningful in the larger picture of the game—they
 have to do with how the player is using basic actions to achieve a
 goal. The list of strategic actions is generally longer than the list of
 basic actions. Consider some possible strategic actions in checkers:
 Protect a checker from being captured by moving another
 checker behind it.
 Force an opponent into making an unwanted jump.
 Sacrifice a checker to trick your opponent.
 Build a “bridge” to protect your back row.
 Move a checker into the “king row” to make it a king.
 Emergent Gameplay
 The strategic actions often involve subtle interactions within the
 game and are often very strategic moves. These actions are mostly
 not part of the rules, per se, but rather actions and strategies that
 emerge naturally as the game is played. Most game designers
 agree that interesting emergent actions are the hallmark of a good
 game. Consequently, the ratio of meaningful strategic actions to
 basic actions is a good measure of how much emergent behavior
 your game features. It is an elegant game indeed that allows a
 player a small number of basic actions but a large number of
 strategic actions. It should be noted that this is a somewhat
 subjective measure, since the number of “meaningful” strategic
 actions is a matter of opinion.
 Trying to create “emergent gameplay,” that is, interesting strategic
 actions, has been likened to tending a garden, since what emerges
 has a life of its own, but at the same time, it is fragile and easily
 destroyed. When you notice some interesting strategic actions
 showing up in your game, you must be able to recognize them and
 then do what you can to nurture them and give them a chance to
 flourish. But what makes these things spring up in the first place?
 It is not just luck—there are things you can do to increase the
 chances of interesting strategic actions appearing. Here are five
 tips for preparing the soil of your game and planting seeds of
 emergence.
 1. Add more verbs: That is, add more basic actions. The strategic
 actions appear when basic actions interact with each other, with
 objects, and with the game space. When you add more basic
 actions, there are more opportunities for interaction and thus
 emergence. A game where you can run, jump, shoot, buy, sell,
 drive, and build is going to have a lot more potential for
 emergence than a game where you can just run and jump. Be
 careful, though—adding too many basic actions, especially ones
 that don’t interact with each other well, can lead to a game that
 is bloated, confusing, and inelegant. Keep in mind that the ratio
 of strategic actions to basic actions is more important than the
 sheer number of basic actions. It is usually better to add one
 good basic action than a slew of mediocre ones.
 2. Verbs that can act on many objects: This is possibly the single
 most powerful thing you can do to make an elegant, interesting
 game. If you give a player a gun that can only shoot bad guys,
 you have a very simple game. But if that same gun can also be
 used to shoot a lock off a door, break a window, hunt for food,
 pop a car tire, or write messages on the wall, you now start to
 enter a world of many possibilities. You still only have one basic
 action: “shoot,” but by increasing the number of things you can
 usefully shoot at, the number of meaningful strategic actions
 increases as well.
 3. Goals that can be achieved more than one way: It’s great to let
 players do all kinds of different things in your game, giving
 them lots of verbs, and verbs with lots of objects. But if the goals
 can only be achieved one way, players have no reason to look
 for unusual interactions and interesting strategies. To follow up
 with the “shoot” example, if you let players shoot all kinds of
 things, but the goal of your game is just “shoot the boss
 monster,” the players will only do that. On the other hand, if you
 can shoot the monster, or shoot out a support chain so a
 chandelier could crash down on her, or maybe even not shoot
 her at all, but stop her through some nonviolent means, you will
 have rich, dynamic gameplay, where lots of things are possible.
 The challenge with this approach is that the game becomes hard
 to balance, for if one of the options is always significantly easier
 than the others (a dominant strategy), players will always
 pursue that option. We will discuss that further in Chapter 13:
 Balance.
 4. Many subjects: If checkers involved just one red checker and
 one black one but had the same rules, the game would not be
 interesting at all. It is because the players have many different
 pieces they can move, pieces that can interact with one another,
 coordinating and sacrificing, that the game becomes interesting.
 This method obviously doesn’t work for all games, but it can
 work in some surprising places. The number of strategic actions
 seems to have roughly a magnitude of subjects times verbs
 times objects, so adding more subjects is very likely to increase
 the number of strategic actions.
 5. Side effects that change constraints: If every time you take an
 action, it has side effects that change the constraints on you or
 your opponent, very interesting gameplay is likely to result. Let
 us again look to checkers. Every time you move a piece, you not
 only change the squares that you threaten with capture, but you
 simultaneously change which squares your opponent (and you)
 can move into. In a sense, every move changes the very nature
 of the game space, whether or not you intended it to. Think how
 different checkers would be if multiple pieces could peacefully
 cohabitate on a single square. By forcing multiple aspects of the
 game to change with every basic action, you are very likely to
 cause interesting strategic actions to suddenly appear.
 #30 THE LENS OF EMERGENCE
 To make sure your game has interesting qualities of emergence,
 ask yourself these questions:
 How many verbs do my players have?
 How many objects can each verb act on?
 How many ways can players achieve their goals?
 How many subjects do the players control?
 How do side effects change constraints?
 Illustration by Reagan Heller
 When comparing games with books and films, one of the most
 striking differences is the number of verbs. Games usually limit
 players to a very narrow range of potential actions, while in
 stories the number of possible actions that characters can engage
 in seems nearly limitless. This is a natural side effect of the fact
 that in games, the actions and all their effects must be simulated
 on the fly, while in stories it is all worked out ahead of time. In
 Chapter 18: Indirect Control, we will discuss how this “action gap”
 can be bridged in the mind of the player, so that you can give the
 feeling of limitless possibilities while keeping the number of basic
 actions at a manageable limit.
 The reason so many games seem similar to one another is because
 they use the same set of actions. Look at the games that are
 considered “derivative,” and you will see that they have the same
 set of actions as older games. Look at games that people call
 “innovative,” and you will find that they give the players new
 kinds of actions, either basic or strategic. When Donkey Kong first
 appeared, it seemed very different because it was about running
 and jumping, which was new at the time. Harvest Moon was a
 game about farming. Katamari Damacy was about rolling a sticky
 ball. The actions a player can take are so crucial to defining a
 game’s mechanics that changing a single action can give you a
 completely different game.
 Some designers dream of games where any verb the player can
 think of is a possible action, and this is a beautiful dream. Some
 massively multiplayer games are starting to move in that
 direction, offering a wide range of verbs for combat, crafting, and
 social interaction. In a way, this is a return to the past—in the
 1970s and 1980s, text adventures were very popular typically
 featuring dozens or hundreds of possible verbs. Only with the rise
 of more visual games did the number of verbs suddenly decrease,
 because it was not feasible to support all those actions in a visualbased game. The demise (or hibernation?) of the text adventure
 genre is usually attributed to the public’s hunger for fancy visuals
 —but perhaps, from an action perspective, there is another
 explanation. Modern 3D videogames give you a very limited range
 of basic actions. The player generally knows every action they can
 possibly attempt. In text adventures, the complete set of basic
 actions was unclear, and discovering them was part of the game.
 Very often, the solution to a tricky puzzle was thinking to type an
 unusual verb, like “spin the fish” or “tickle the monkey.” While this
 was all very creative, it was also often frustrating—for every one
 of the hundreds of verbs a game supported, there were thousands
 it did not. As a result, players did not really have the “complete
 freedom” that text adventure interfaces pretended to give them. It
 is possible that this frustration, more than anything else, caused
 text adventures to fall from favor.
 Your choice of actions significantly defines your game structure, so
 let’s make that Lens #31.
 #31 THE LENS OF ACTION
 To use this lens, think about what your players can do and what
 they can’t and why.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 What are the basic actions in my game?
 What are the strategic actions?
 What strategic actions would I like to see? How can I change my
 game in order to make those possible?
 Am I happy with the ratio of strategic to basic actions?
 What actions do players wish they could do in my game that
 they cannot? Can I somehow enable these, either as basic or
 strategic actions?
 A game without actions is like a sentence without verbs—nothing
 happens. Deciding the actions in your game will be the most
 fundamental decision you can make as a game designer. Tiny
 changes to these actions will have tremendous ripple effects with
 the possibility of either creating marvelous emergent gameplay or
 making a game that is predictable and tedious. Choose your
 actions carefully, and learn to listen to your game and your players
 to learn what is made possible by your choices.
 Illustration by Nick Daniel
 Mechanic 5: Rules
 The rules are really the most fundamental mechanic. They define
 the space, the timing, the objects, the actions, the consequences of
 the actions, the constraints on the actions, and the goals. In other
 words, they make possible all the mechanics we have seen so far
 and add the crucial thing that makes a game a game—goals.
 Parlett’s Rule Analysis
 David Parlett, game historian, did a very good job of analyzing the
 different kinds of rules that are involved with gameplay, as shown
 in this diagram.
 FIGURE
 12.14
 This shows the relationships between all the kinds of rules we are
 likely to encounter, so let’s consider each.
 1. Operational rules: These are the easiest to understand. These
 are basically “What the players do to play the game.” When
 players understand the operational rules, they can play a game.
 2. Foundational rules: The foundational rules are the underlying
 formal structure of the game. The operational rules might say
 “The player should roll a six-sided die, and collect that many
 power chips.” The foundational rules would be more abstract:
 “The player’s power value is increased by a random number
 from 1 to 6.” Foundational rules are a mathematical
 representation of game state and how and when it changes.
 Boards, dice, chips, health meters, etc., are all just operational
 ways of keeping track of the foundational game state. As
 Parlett’s diagram shows, foundational rules inform operational
 rules. There is not yet any standard notation for representing
 these rules, and there is some question about whether a
 complete notation is even possible. In real life, game designers
 learn to see the foundational rules on an as-needed basis, but
 seldom do they have any need to formally document the entire
 set of foundational rules in a completely abstract way.
 3. Behavioral rules: These are rules that are implicit to gameplay,
 which most people naturally understand as part of “good
 sportsmanship.” For example, during a game of chess, one
 should not tickle the other player while they are trying to think
 or take five hours to make a move. These are seldom stated
 explicitly—mostly, everyone knows them. The fact that they
 exist underlines the point that a game is a kind of social contract
 between players. These, too, inform the operational rules.
 Steven Sniderman has written an excellent essay about
 behavioral rules called “Unwritten Rules.”
 4. Written rules: These are the “rules that come with the game,”
 the document that players have to read to gain an
 understanding of the operational rules. Of course, in reality,
 only a small number of people read this document—most
 people learn a game by having someone else explain how to
 play. Why? It is very hard to encode the nonlinear intricacies of
 how to play a game into a document and similarly hard to
 decode such a document. Modern videogames have gradually
 been doing away with written rules in favor of having the game
 itself teach players how to play through interactive tutorials.
 This hands-on approach is far more effective, though it can be
 challenging and time consuming to design and implement as it
 involves many iterations that cannot be completed until the
 game is in its final state. Every game designer must have a ready
 answer to the question: “How will players learn to play my
 game?” Because if someone can’t figure out your game, they will
 not play it.
 5. Laws: These are only formed when games are played in serious,
 competitive settings, where the stakes are high enough that a
 need is felt to explicitly record the rules of good sportsmanship
 or where there is need to clarify or modify the official written
 rules. These are often called “tournament rules,” since during a
 serious tournament is when there is the most need for this kind
 of official clarification. Consider these tournament rules for
 playing Tekken 5 (a fighting game) at the 2005 Penny Arcade
 Expo:
 1. Single elimination.
 2. You may bring your own controller.
 3. Standard VS mode.
 4. 100% health.
 5. Random stage select.
 6. 60 second timer.
 7. Best 3 of 5 rounds.
 8. Best 2 of 3 games.
 9. Mokujin is banned.
 Most of these are just clarifying exactly which game settings will
 be used in the tournament. “You may bring your own
 controller” is a formalized decision about what is “fair play.”
 The most interesting rule here is “Mokujin is banned.” Mokujin
 is one of the characters you can choose to play in Tekken 5. The
 general feeling among players is that Mokujin’s “stun” move is
 so powerful that any player who chooses to play Mokujin is
 likely to win the game, making a tournament pointless. So this
 “law” is an attempt to improve the game, ensuring the
 tournament is balanced, fair, and fun.
 6. Official rules: These are created when a game is played
 seriously enough that a group of players feels a need to merge
 the written rules with the laws. Over time, these official rules
 later become the written rules. In chess, when a player makes a
 move that puts the opponent’s king in danger of checkmate, that
 player is obligated to warn the opponent by saying “check.” At
 one time, this was a “law,” not a written rule, but now it is part
 of the “official rules.”
 7. Advisory rules: Often called “rules of strategy,” these are just
 tips to help you play better, and not really “rules” at all from a
 game mechanics standpoint.
 8. House rules: These rules are not explicitly described by Parlett,
 but he does point out that as players play a game, they may find
 they want to tune the operational rules to make the game more
 fun. This is the “feedback” on his diagram, since house rules are
 usually created by players in response to a deficiency perceived
 after a few rounds of play.
 Modes
 Many games have very different rules during different parts of
 play. The rules often change completely from mode to mode,
 almost like completely separate games. One memorable instance
 was the racing game Pitstop. Most of the time, it was a typical
 racing game but with a twist—if you didn’t pull over to change
 your tires periodically, they would burst. When you did pull over,
 the game changed completely—now you were not racing your car,
 but rather racing to change your tires, with a completely different
 game interface. When your game changes modes in a dramatic
 way like this, it is very important that you let your players know
 which mode you are in. Too many modes and the players can get
 confused. Very often, there is one main mode, with several
 submodes, which is a good hierarchical way to organize the
 different modes. Game designer Sid Meier proposes an excellent
 rule of thumb: players should never spend so much time in a
 subgame that they forget what they were doing in the main game.
 We will talk more about modes in Chapter 15: Interface.
 Enforcer
 One of the most significant differences between videogames and
 more traditional games is who enforces the rules. In traditional
 games, rules are primarily enforced by the players themselves or
 by an impartial referee in high-stakes games, such as sporting
 events. With computer games, it becomes possible (and sometimes
 necessary) for the computer to enforce the rules. This is more than
 a convenience—it allows for the creation of games much more
 complex than was traditionally possible, because now the players
 don’t have to memorize all the rules about what is and is not
 possible—they just try things in the game, and see what works and
 what doesn’t work—they don’t have to memorize it all, or look it
 up. In a sense, what used to be a “rule” now becomes a physical
 constraint of the game world. If a piece isn’t allowed to move a
 certain way, it simply doesn’t move that way. Many of the game
 rules are enforced by the design of the space, the objects, and the
 actions. A game like Warcraft could conceivably be a board game,
 but there would be so many rules to remember and state to keep
 track of that it would quickly become a dreary experience. By
 offloading the dull work of rules enforcement onto the computer,
 games can reach depths of complexity, subtlety, and richness that
 are not possible any other way. But proceed with caution—if the
 rules of your videogame are so complex that a player can’t even
 form a rough idea of how the game works, they will be
 overwhelmed and confused. You must make the rules of a complex
 videogame something that players can discover and understand
 naturally—not something they have to memorize.
 Cheatability
 The reason games need an enforcer is to prevent cheating.
 Violating the rules is bad gamesmanship, certainly, but as we’ve
 seen throughout history, some players will stop at nothing to be
 perceived as the winner. Obviously, when you play a game, you
 want to make sure others don’t cheat. But cheating has a more
 insidious effect than that—if players start believing your game is
 cheatable, even if it isn’t, all the precious endogenous value you
 have worked to develop just slips away. Players imagine
 themselves working hard to win and imagine another player
 cheating, and it makes them feel like chumps. That is the danger of
 cheatability—if players feel like your game can be cheated, some
 will try to cheat, but most will just no longer want to play.
 The Most Important Rule
 Games have a lot of rules—how to move and what you can and
 cannot do—but there is one rule at the foundation of all the others:
 the object of the game. Games are about achieving goals—you
 must be able to state your game’s goal and state it clearly. Often,
 there is not just one goal in a game, but a sequence of them—you
 will need to state each and how they relate to one another. A
 clumsy statement of your game’s goal can be off-putting to players
 right from the beginning—if they don’t completely understand the
 purpose of their actions, they cannot proceed with any certainty.
 Newcomers to chess are often stymied when someone awkwardly
 tries to explain the object of the game: “Your goal is to put the
 other king in checkmate… that means you move your pieces so he
 can’t move without being in check… which, uh, means that one of
 your pieces could potentially capture him, except that, um, it’s
 against the rules to capture the king.” As a boy, I often wondered
 why a game considered to be so elegant could have such an
 inelegant goal. I played the game for years before I realized that
 the goal of chess is actually quite simple: “Capture your opponent’s
 king.” All the folderol about check and checkmate is simply there
 to politely warn your opponent that they are in imminent danger.
 It is remarkable how more interested a potential chess player
 becomes when you tell them that simple four-word goal. The same
 is true for any game you create—the more easily players
 understand the goal, the more easily they can visualize achieving
 it, and the more likely they are going to want to play your game.
 When a goal is set in a player’s mind, it gives them tremendous
 motivation to see it through. Having a clear set of well-constructed
 goals or quests is crucial to keeping your players engaged and
 motivated. Good game goals are as follows:
 1. Concrete: Players understand and can clearly state what they
 are supposed to achieve.
 2. Achievable: Players need to think that they have a chance of
 achieving the goal. If it seems impossible to them, they will
 quickly give up.
 3. Rewarding: A lot goes into making an achieved goal rewarding.
 If the goal has the right level of challenge, just achieving it at all
 is a reward in itself. But why not go further? You can make your
 goal even more rewarding by giving the player something
 valuable upon reaching the goal—use Lens #20: Pleasure, to find
 different ways to reward the player and really make them
 proud of their achievement. And while it is important to reward
 players that achieve a goal, it is equally (or more) important that
 players appreciate that the goal is rewarding before they have
 achieved it, so that they are inspired to attempt to achieve it.
 Don’t overinflate their expectations, though, for if they are
 disappointed with the reward for achieving a goal, they will not
 play again! We will talk much more about rewards in the next
 chapter.
 And while it is important that each of the goals in your game has
 these qualities, it is also important that you have a good balance of
 goals in your game, with some short-term and some much longer
 term. This balance of goals will make your players feel they know
 what to do immediately and that ultimately they will achieve
 something important and magnificent.
 It is easy to focus so much on the action of a game that you forget
 about the goals. To help us remember the importance of goals, let’s
 add this lens to our toolbox.
 #32 THE LENS OF GOALS
 To ensure the goals of your game are appropriate and well
 balanced, ask yourself these questions:
 What is the ultimate goal of my game?
 Is that goal clear to players?
 If there is a series of goals, do the players understand that?
 Are the different goals related to each other in a meaningful
 way?
 Are my goals concrete, achievable, and rewarding?
 Do I have a good balance of short- and long-term goals?
 Do players have a chance to decide on their own goals?
 Illustration by Zachary D. Coe
 It can be fascinating to pick up the Lens of the Toy, the Lens of
 Curiosity, and the Lens of Goals at the same time to see how these
 aspects of your game influence each other.
 Wrapping Up Rules
 Rules are the most fundamental of all game mechanics. A game is
 not just defined by its rules; a game is its rules. It is important to
 view your game from a rules perspective, and that is Lens #33.
 #33 THE LENS OF RULES
 To use this lens, look deep into your game, until you can make out
 its most basic structure. Ask yourself these questions:
 What are the foundational rules of my game? How do these
 differ from the operational rules?
 Are there “laws” or “house rules” that are forming as the game
 develops? Should these be incorporated into my game directly?
 Are there different modes in my game? Do these modes make
 things simpler, or more complex? Would the game be better
 with fewer modes? More modes?
 Who enforces the rules?
 Are the rules easy to understand, or is there confusion about
 them? If there is confusion, should I fix it by changing the rules
 or by explaining them more clearly?
 Illustration by Joshua Seaver
 There is a common misconception that designers make games by
 sitting down and writing a set of rules. This usually isn’t how it
 happens at all. A game’s rules are arrived at gradually and
 experimentally. The designer’s mind generally works in the
 domain of “operational rules,” occasionally switching to the
 perspective of “foundational rules” when thinking about how to
 change or improve the game. The “written rules” usually come
 toward the end, once the game is playable. Part of the designer’s
 job is to make sure there are rules that cover every circumstance.
 Be sure to take careful notes as you playtest, because it is during
 these tests that holes in your rules will appear—if you just patch
 them quickly and don’t make a note, the same hole will just show
 up again later. A game is its rules—give them the time and
 consideration that they deserve.
 Mechanic 6: Skill
 In virtute sunt multi ascensus.
 (There are many degrees in excellence.)
 —Cicero
 The mechanic of skill shifts the focus away from the game and
 onto the player. Every game requires players to exercise certain
 skills. If the player’s skill level is a good match to the game’s
 difficulty, the player will feel challenged and stay in the flow
 channel (as discussed in Chapter 10: Player’s Mind).
 Most games do not just require one skill from a player—they
 require a blend of different skills. When you design a game, it is a
 worthwhile exercise to make a list of the skills that your game
 requires from the player. Even though there are thousands of
 possible skills that can go into a game, skills can generally be
 divided into three main categories:
 1. Physical skills: These include skills involving strength,
 dexterity, coordination, and physical endurance. Physical skills
 are an important part of most sports. Effectively manipulating a
 game controller is a kind of physical skill, but many videogames
 (such as camera-based dance games) require a broader range of
 physical skills from players.
 2. Mental skills: These include the skills of memory, observation,
 and puzzle solving. Although some people shy away from games
 that require too much in the way of mental skills, it is the rare
 game that doesn’t involve some mental skills, because games
 are interesting when there are interesting decisions to make,
 and decision making is a mental skill.
 3. Social skills: These include, among other things, reading an
 opponent (guessing what they are thinking), fooling an
 opponent, and coordinating with teammates. Typically, we think
 of social skills in terms of your ability to make friends and
 influence people, but the range of social and communication
 skills in games is much wider. Poker is largely a social game,
 because so much of it rests on concealing your thoughts and
 guessing the thoughts of others. Sports are very social, as well,
 with their focus on teamwork and on “psyching out” your
 opponents.
 Real vs. Virtual Skills
 It is important to draw a distinction here: When we talk about skill
 as a game mechanic, we are talking about a real skill the player
 must have. In videogames, it is common to talk about your
 character’s skill level. You might hear a player announce “My
 warrior just gained two points on his sword fighting skill!” But
 “sword fighting” is not a real skill required of the player—the
 player is really just pushing the right buttons on the control pad at
 the right time. Sword fighting, in this context, is a virtual skill—
 one that the player is pretending to have. The interesting thing
 about virtual skills is that they can improve even though the
 player’s actual skill does not. The player might be just as sloppy at
 mashing the controller buttons as they ever were, but by mashing
 them enough times, they might be rewarded with a higher level of
 virtual skill, which allows their character to become a faster, more
 powerful swordfighter. Many “free-to-play” games have a whole
 monetization strategy based on the purchase of virtual skills.
 Virtual skills are a great way to give a player a feeling of power.
 Taken too far, it can feel hollow—some critics of massively
 multiplayer games complain that there is too much emphasis on
 virtual skills, and not enough on real skills. Often, the key to a fun
 game is finding the right mix of real and virtual skills. Many
 novice designers confuse the two—it is important that you draw a
 clear distinction between them in your mind.
 Enumerating Skills
 Making a list of all the skills required in your game can be a very
 useful exercise. You might make a general list: “my game requires
 memory, problem solving, and pattern matching skills.” Or you
 might make it very specific: “my game requires players to quickly
 identify and mentally rotate specific two-dimensional shapes in
 their heads, while solving a grid-based packing problem.” Listing
 skills can be very tricky—one interesting example comes from the
 game RC Pro Am, a racing game for the Nintendo Entertainment
 System (NES). In it, players steer the car with the joypad (left
 thumb), accelerate with the A button (right thumb), and fire
 weapons at opponents with the B button (also right thumb). To
 master this game, two surprising skills were required—the first
 was problem solving. Generally on NES games, you only push one
 button at a time—you take your thumb off the A button when you
 want to push the B button. But in RC Pro Am, this is disastrous—it
 means that if you want to fire a rocket (the B button), you have to
 release the car’s accelerator (the A button), and your opponent
 quickly speeds away! How to solve this problem? Some players try
 using a thumb for one button and finger for the other, but this is
 awkward and makes the game too hard to play. The best solution
 seems to involve a new grip on the controller: you hold your
 thumb sideways on the A button, so that when you want to
 occasionally push the B button, you can roll it down onto the B
 button smoothly, without releasing the accelerator. Once the
 player has solved this problem, they then need to practice this very
 specific physical skill. And of course, there are many other skills
 involved in the game—managing resources (missiles and mines, so
 you don’t run out), memorizing race courses, reacting to sharp
 turns and unexpected road hazards, and many more. The point is
 that even a game that seems somewhat simple might require many
 different skills from a player. As a designer, you need to know
 what these are.
 It is easy to fool yourself into thinking your game is about one skill,
 when other skills are actually more important. Many action-based
 videogames seem, on the surface, to be mainly about quickly
 reacting to opponents, when in truth there is a lot of puzzle solving
 required to figure out the right way to react to them and a lot of
 memorization required to avoid being surprised next time you
 play a given level. Designers are often disappointed to realize that
 a game they thought was about quick decisions and thinking on
 your feet is really about memorizing which enemies pop out at
 what time—a very different (and much more tedious) experience
 for the player. The skills that a player exercises go a long way
 toward determining the nature of that player’s experience, so you
 must know what these are. Viewing your game from this
 perspective is Lens #34.
 #34 THE LENS OF SKILL
 To use this lens, stop looking at your game, and start looking at the
 skills you are asking of your players.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 What skills does my game require from the player?
 Are there categories of skill that this game is missing?
 Which skills are dominant?
 Are these skills creating the experience I want?
 Are some players much better at these skills than others? Does
 this make the game feel unfair?
 Can players improve their skills with practice, leading to a
 feeling of mastery?
 Does this game demand the right level of skill?
 Illustration by Emma Backer
 Exercising skills can be a joyful thing—it is one of the reasons that
 people love games. Of course, it is only joyful if the skills are
 interesting and rewarding and if the challenge level strikes that
 ideal balance between “too easy” and “too hard.” Even dull skills
 (such as pushing buttons) can be made more interesting by
 dressing them up as virtual skills and providing the right level of
 challenge. Use this lens as a window into the experience the player
 is having. Because skills do so much to define experience, the Lens
 of Skill works quite well in conjunction with Lens #2: Essential
 Experience.
 Mechanic 7: Chance
 Our seventh and final game mechanic is chance. We deal with it
 last because it concerns interactions between all of the other six
 mechanics: space, time, objects, actions, rules, and skills.
 Chance is an essential part of a fun game because chance means
 uncertainty, and uncertainty means surprises. And as we have
 discussed earlier (Lens #4), surprises are an important source of
 human pleasure and the secret ingredient of fun.
 We must now proceed with caution. You can never take chance for
 granted, for it is very tricky—the math can be difficult, and our
 intuitions about it are often wrong. But a good game designer must
 become the master of chance and probability, sculpting it to her
 will, to create an experience that is always full of challenging
 decisions and interesting surprises. The challenges of
 understanding chance are well illustrated by a story about the
 invention of the mathematics of probability—invented, not
 surprisingly, for the express purpose of game design.
 Invention of Probability
 Il est tres bon ésprit, mais quel dommage, il n’est pas geometre.
 (He’s a nice guy, but unfortunately, no mathematician.)
 —Pascal to Fermat regarding the Chevalier de Méré
 It was the year 1654, and French nobleman Antoine Gombaud, the
 Chevalier de Méré (pronounced “Shevulyay duh Mayray”), had a
 problem. He was an avid gambler and had been playing a game
 where he would bet that if he rolled a single die four times, at least
 one time it would come up as a six. He had made some good
 money from this game, but his friends got tired of losing and
 refused to play it with him any further. Trying to find a new way to
 fleece his friends, he invented a new game that he believed had
 the same odds as the last one. In his new game, he would bet that
 if he rolled a pair of dice twenty-four times, a twelve would come
 up at least once. His friends were wary at first but soon grew to
 like his new game, because the Chevalier started losing money
 fast! He was confused, because by his math, both games had the
 same odds. Chevalier’s reasoning was as follows:
 First Game: In four rolls of a single die, the Chevalier wins if at
 least one six comes up.
 The Chevalier reasoned that the chance of a single die coming up 6
 was 1/6, and therefore rolling a die four times should mean the
 chance of winning was
 4 × (1/6) = 4/6 = 66%, which explained why he tended to win.
 Second Game: In twenty-four rolls of a pair of dice, the Chevalier
 wins if at least one 12 comes up.
 The Chevalier determined that the chance of getting a 12 (double
 sixes) on a pair of dice was 1/36. He reasoned, then, that rolling the
 dice twenty-four times meant the odds should be
 24 × (1/36) = 24/36 = 2/3 = 66%. The same odds as the last game!
 Confused and losing money, he wrote a letter to mathematician
 Blaise Pascal, asking for advice. Pascal found the problem
 intriguing—there was no established mathematics to answer these
 questions. Pascal then wrote to his father’s friend, Pierre de
 Fermat, for help. Pascal and Fermat began a lengthy
 correspondence about this and similar problems and, in
 discovering methods of solving them, established probability
 theory as a new branch of mathematics.
 What are the real odds of Chevalier’s games? To understand that,
 we have to get into some math—don’t fret, it’s easy math that
 anyone can do. Fully covering the mathematics of probability is
 not necessary for game design (and beyond the scope of this book),
 but knowing some of the basics can be quite handy. If you are a
 math genius, you can skip this section, or at least read it smugly.
 For the rest of us, I present the following:
 Ten Rules of Probability Every Game Designer Should
 Know
 Rule #1: Fractions Are Decimals Are Percents
 If you are one of those people who has always had a hard time
 with fractions and percents, it’s time to face up and deal with
 them, because they are the language of probability. Don’t stress—
 you can always use a calculator—no one is looking. The thing you
 have to come to grips with is that fractions, decimals, and percents
 are all the same thing and can be used interchangeably. In other
 words, ½ = 0.5 = 50%. Those aren’t three different numbers; they
 are just three ways of writing exactly the same number.
 Converting from fractions to decimals is easy. Need to know the
 decimal equivalent of 33/50? Just type 33 ÷ 50 into your calculator,
 and you’ll get 0.66. What about percents? They’re easy too. If you
 look up the word “percent” in the dictionary, you’ll see that it
 really means “per 100.” So, 66% really means 66 per 100, or 66/100,
 or 0.66. If you look at Chevalier’s previous math, you’ll see why we
 need to convert back and forth so often—as humans, we like to
 talk in percents, but we also like to talk about “one chance in
 six”—so we need a way to convert between these forms. If you are
 the kind of person who suffers from math anxiety, just relax and
 practice a few of these on the calculator—you’ll have the hang of it
 in no time.
 Rule #2: Zero to One—and That’s It!
 This one’s easy. Probabilities can only range from 0% to 100%, that
 is, from 0 to 1 (see Rule #1), no less and no more. While you can
 say there is a 10% chance of something happening, there is no
 such thing as a −10% chance and certainly no such thing as a 110%
 chance. A 0% chance of something happening means it won’t
 happen, and a 100% chance means it definitely will. This all might
 sound obvious, but it points out a major problem with Chevalier’s
 math. Consider his first game with the four dice. He believed that
 with four dice, he had a 4 × (1/6), or 4/6, or 0.66, or 66% chance of
 having a six come up. But what if he had seven dice? Then he
 would have had 7 × (1/6) or 7/6 or 1.17 or 117% chance of winning!
 And that is certainly wrong—if you roll a die seven times, it might
 be likely that a six will come up one of those times, but it is not
 guaranteed (in fact, it is about a 72% chance). Anytime you
 calculate a probability that comes up greater than 100% (or less
 than 0%), you know for certain that you’ve done something wrong.
 Rule #3: “Looked For” Divided By “Possible Outcomes” Equals
 Probability
 The first two rules lay some basic groundwork, but now we are
 going to talk about what probability really is—and it is quite
 simple. You just take the number of times your “looked for”
 outcome can come up and divide by the number of possible
 outcomes (assuming your outcomes are equally likely), and you’ve
 got it. What is the chance of a six coming up when you roll a die?
 Well, there are six possible outcomes, and only one of them is the
 one we are looking for, so the chance of a six coming up is 1 ÷ 6, or
 1/6, or about 17%. What is the chance of an even number coming
 up when you roll a die? There are 3 even numbers, so the answer
 is 3/6, or 50%. What is the chance of drawing a face card from a
 deck of cards? There are twelve face cards in a deck, and fifty-two
 cards total, so your chances of getting a face card are 12/52, or
 about 23%. If you understand this, you’ve got the fundamental
 idea of probability.
 Rule #4: Enumerate!
 If Rule #3 is as simple as it sounds (and it is), you might wonder
 why probability is so tricky. The reason is that the two numbers we
 need (the number of “looked for” outcomes and the number of
 possible outcomes) are not always so obvious. For example, if I
 asked you what the odds of flipping a coin three times and getting
 “heads” at least twice, what is the number of “looked for”
 outcomes? I’d be surprised if you could answer that without
 writing anything down. An easy way to find out the answer is to
 enumerate all the possible outcomes:
 1. HHH
 2. HHT
 3. HTH
 4. HTT
 5. THH
 6. THT
 7. TTH
 8. TTT
 There are exactly eight possible outcomes. Which ones have heads
 at least twice? #1, #2, #3, and #5. That’s 4 outcomes out of 8
 possibilities, so the answer is 4/8, or a 50% chance. Now, why
 didn’t the Chevalier do this with his games? With his first game,
 there were four die rolls, which means 6 × 6 × 6 × 6, or 1296
 possibilities. It would have been dull work, but he could have
 enumerated all the possibilities in an hour or so (the list would
 have looked like 1111, 1112, 1113, 1114, 1115, 1116, 1121, 1122,
 1123, etc.), then counted up the number of combinations that had a
 six in them (671), and divided that by 1296 for his answer.
 Enumeration will let you solve almost any probability problem, if
 you have the time. Consider the Chevalier’s second game, though:
 24 rolls of 2 dice! There are 36 possible outcomes for 2 dice, and so
 enumerating all 24 rolls would have meant writing down 36 (a
 number 37 digits long) combinations. Even if he could somehow
 write down one combination a second, it would have taken longer
 than the age of the universe to list them all. Enumeration is handy,
 but when it takes too long, you need to take shortcuts—and that’s
 what the other rules are for.
 24
 Rule #5: In Certain Cases, OR Means Add
 Very often, we want to determine the chances of “this OR that”
 happening, such as what are the chances of drawing a face card
 OR an ace from a deck of cards? When the two things we are
 talking about are mutually exclusive, that is, when it is impossible
 for both of them to happen simultaneously, you can add their
 individual probabilities to get an overall probability. For example,
 the chances of drawing a face card are 12/52, and the chances of
 drawing an ace are 4/52. Since these are mutually exclusive events
 (it is impossible for them both to happen at once), we can add
 them up: 12/52 + 4/52 = 16/52, or about a 31% chance.
 But what if we asked a different question: What are the chances of
 drawing an ace from a deck of cards or a diamond? If we add these
 probabilities, we get 4/52 + 13/52 (13 diamonds in a deck) = 17/52.
 But, if we enumerate, we see this is wrong—the right answer is
 16/52. Why? Because the two cases are not mutually exclusive—I
 could draw the ace of diamonds! Since this case is not mutually
 exclusive, “or” does not mean add.
 Let’s look at Chevalier’s first game. He seems to be trying to use
 this rule for his die rolls—adding up four probabilities: 1/6 + 1/6 +
 1/6 + 1/6. But he gets the wrong answer, because the four events
 are not mutually exclusive. The addition rule is handy, but you
 must be certain the events you are adding up are mutually
 exclusive from one another.
 Rule #6: In Certain Cases, AND Means Multiply
 This rule is almost the opposite of the previous one! If we want to
 find the probability of two things happening simultaneously, we
 can multiply their probabilities to get the answer—but ONLY if the
 two events are NOT mutually exclusive! Consider two die rolls. If
 we want to find the probability of rolling a six on both rolls, we
 can multiply together the probabilities of the two events: The
 chance of getting a six on one die roll is 1/6, and also 1/6 for a
 second die roll. So the chance of getting two sixes is 1/6 × 1/6 = 1/36.
 You could also have determined that by enumeration, of course,
 but this is a much speedier way to do it.
 In Rule #5, we asked for the probability of drawing an ace OR a
 diamond from a deck of cards—the rule failed, because the two
 events were not mutually exclusive. So what if we asked about the
 probability of drawing an ace AND a diamond? In other words,
 what is the probability of drawing the ace of diamonds? It should
 be fairly intuitive that the answer is 1/52, but we can check that
 with Rule #6, since we know the two events are not mutually
 exclusive. The chance of getting an ace is 4/52, and the chance of a
 diamond is 13/52. Multiplying them, 4/52 × 13/52 = 52/2704 = 1/52.
 So, the rule works and matches our intuition.
 Do we have enough rules yet to solve Chevalier’s problems? Let’s
 consider his first game:
 First Game: In four rolls of a single die, the Chevalier wins if at
 least one six comes up.
 We’ve already established that we could enumerate this and get
 the answer 671/1296, but that would take an hour. Is there a
 quicker way, using the rules we have?
 (I’ll warn you now—this gets a little hairy. If you don’t really care
 that much, save yourself the headache, and just skip to Rule #7. If
 you do care, then press on—you will find it worth the effort.)
 If the question was about the chances of rolling a die four times
 and getting four sixes, that would be an AND question for four
 events that are not mutually exclusive, and we could just use Rule
 #6: 1/6 × 1/6 × 1/6 × 1/6 = 1/1296. But that isn’t what is asked. This is
 an OR question for four events that are not mutually exclusive (it
 is possible for the Chevalier to get multiple sixes on the four rolls).
 So what can we do? Well, one way is to break it down into events
 that are mutually exclusive and then add them up. Another way to
 phrase this game is
 What are the chances of rolling four dice, and getting either
 1. Four sixes, OR
 2. Three sixes and one non-six, OR
 3. Two sixes and two non-sixes, OR
 4. One six and three non-sixes
 That might sound a little complicated, but it is four different
 mutually exclusive events, and if we can figure the probability of
 each, we can just add them up and get our answer. We’ve already
 figured out the probability of (a), using Rule #6: 1/1296. So, how
 about (b)? Really, (b) is four different mutually exclusive
 possibilities:
 1. 6, 6, 6, non-six
 2. 6, 6, non-six, 6
 3. 6, non-six, 6, 6,
 4. Non-six, 6, 6, 6
 The probability of rolling a six is 1/6, the probability of rolling a
 non-six is 5/6. So, the probability of each of those is 1/6 × 1/6 × 1/6 ×
 5/6 = 5/1296. Now, if we add up all four, that comes to 20/1296. So,
 the probability of (b) is 20/1296.
 How about (c)? This one is the same as the last, but there are more
 combinations. It is tricky to figure out how many ways there are
 for exactly two sixes and two non-sixes to come up, but there are
 six ways:
 1. 6, 6, non-six, non-six
 2. 6, non-six, 6, non-six
 3. 6, non-six, non-six, 6
 4. non-six, 6, 6, non-six
 5. non-six, 6, non-six, 6
 6. non-six, non-six, 6, 6
 And the probability of each of these is 1/6 × 1/6 × 5/6 × 5/6 =
 25/1296. Adding up all six of them comes to 150/1296.
 This leaves only (d), which is the inverse of (b):
 1. Non-six, non-six, non-six, 6
 2. Non-six, non-six, 6, non-six
 3. Non-six, 6, non-six, non-six
 4. 6, non-six, non-six, non-six
 The probability of each is 5/6 × 5/6 × 5/6 × 1/6 = 125/1296. Adding up
 all four gives 500/1296.
 So, we have now calculated the probability of the four mutually
 exclusive events:
 1. Four sixes—(1/1296)
 2. Three sixes and one non-six—(20/1296)
 3. Two sixes and two non-sixes—(150/1296)
 4. One six and three non-sixes—(500/1296)
 Adding up those four probabilities (as Rule #5 allows) gives us a
 total of 671/1296, or about 51.77%. So, we can see that this was a
 good game for the Chevalier—by winning more than 50% of the
 time, he eventually was likely to make a profit, but the game was
 close enough to even that his friends believed they had a chance—
 at least for a while. It certainly is a very different result than the
 66% chance of winning the Chevalier believed he had!
 This is the same answer we could have gotten from enumeration,
 but much faster. Really, though, we did a kind of enumeration—it
 is just that the rules of addition and multiplication let us count
 everything up much faster. Could we do the same thing to get the
 answer to Chevalier’s second game? We could, but with 24 rolls of
 two dice, it would probably take an hour or more! This is faster
 than enumeration, but we can do even better by being tricky—
 that’s where Rule #7 comes in.
 Rule #7: One Minus “Does” = “Doesn’t”
 This is a more intuitive rule. If the chance of something happening
 is 10%, the chance of it not happening is 90%. Why is this useful?
 Because often it is quite hard to figure out the chance of something
 happening but easy to figure out the chance of it NOT happening.
 Consider Chevalier’s second game. To figure out the chance of
 double sixes coming up at least once on twenty-four die rolls
 would be nightmarish to figure out, because you have so many
 different possible events to add together (1 double sixes, 23 non–
 double sixes; 2 double sixes, 22 non–double sixes; etc.). On the
 other hand, what if we ask a different question: What are the
 chances of rolling two dice twenty-four times and NOT getting
 double sixes? That is now an AND question, for events that are not
 mutually exclusive, so we can use Rule #6 to get the answer! But
 first we’ll use Rule #7 twice—watch.
 The chance of double sixes coming up on a single roll of the dice is
 1/36. So, by Rule #7, the chance of not getting double sixes is 1 −
 1/36, or 35/36.
 So, using Rule #6 (multiplication), the chances of not getting double
 sixes twenty-four times in a row is 35/36 × 35/36 twenty-four times,
 or as we say (35/36) . You would not want to do this calculation by
 hand, but using a calculator, you find the answer is around 0.5086,
 or 50.86%. But that is the chance of the Chevalier losing. To find
 the chance of the Chevalier winning, we apply Rule #7 again: 1 −
 0.5086 = 0.4914, or about 49.14%. Now it is clear why he lost this
 game! His chances of winning were close enough to even that it
 was hard for him to tell if this was a winning or losing game, but
 after playing many times, he was very likely to lose.
 Even though all probability problems can be solved through
 enumeration, Rule #7 can be a really handy shortcut. In fact, we
 24
 could have used the same rule to solve the Chevalier’s first game!
 Rule #8: The Sum of Multiple Linear Random Selections Is NOT
 a Linear Random Selection!
 Don’t panic. This one sounds hard, but it is really easy. A “linear
 random selection” is simply a random event where all the
 outcomes have an equal chance of happening. A die roll is a great
 example of a linear random selection. If you add up multiple die
 rolls, though, the possible outcomes do NOT have an equal chance
 of happening. If you roll two dice, for example, your chance of
 getting a seven is very good, while your chance of getting a twelve
 is small. Enumerating all the possibilities shows you why:
 Look at how many 7’s there are and only one little twelve! We can
 show this in a graph (see Figure 12.15), called a probability
 distribution curve, to visually see the chances of each total coming
 up.
 Rule #8 might seem like a very obvious rule, but I frequently find
 novice game designers make the mistake of adding together two
 randomly selected numbers without realizing its effect.
 Sometimes, it is exactly the effect you want—in the game
 Dungeons and Dragons, players generate (virtual) skill attributes
 with values ranging from 3 to 18 by rolling three six-sided dice. As
 a result, you see a lot of attribute values around 10 or 11, but very
 few at 3 or 18, and this is exactly what the designers wanted. How
 would the game be different if players simply rolled a single
 twenty-sided die to get their attributes?
 Game designers who want to use mechanic of chance as a tool in
 their games must know what kind of probability distribution
 curve they want and know how to get it. With practice, probability
 distribution curves will be a very valuable tool in your toolbox.
 FIGURE
 12.15
 Rule #9: Roll the Dice
 All the probability we’ve been talking about so far is theoretical
 probability, that is, mathematically, what ought to happen. There
 is also practical probability, which is a measure of what has
 happened. For example, the theoretical probability of getting a 6
 when I roll a die is a perfect 1/6, or about 16.67%. I could find the
 practical probability by rolling a six-sided die hundred times and
 recording how many times I get a six. I might record 20 sixes out of
 100. In that case, my practical probability is 20%, which is not too
 far from the theoretical probability. Of course, the more trials I do,
 the closer I would expect the practical probability to get to the
 theoretical probability. This is sometimes known as the “Monte
 Carlo” method, after the famous casino.
 The great thing about the Monte Carlo method of determining
 probability is that it doesn’t involve any complex math—you just
 repeat the test over and over again and record how it comes out. It
 can sometimes give more useful results than theoretical
 probability too, because it is a measure of the real thing. If there is
 some factor that your mathematics didn’t capture (e.g., perhaps
 your die is slightly weighted toward sixes), or if the math is just so
 complicated that you can’t come up with a theoretical
 representation of your case, the Monte Carlo method can be just
 the thing. The Chevalier could easily have found good answers to
 his questions by just rolling the dice again and again, counting up
 wins, and dividing by the number of trials.
 And here in the computer age, if you know how to do a little bit of
 programming (or know someone who can—see Rule #10), you can
 easily simulate millions of trials in just a few minutes. It isn’t too
 hard to program simulations of games and get some very useful
 probability answers. For example, in Monopoly, which squares are
 landed on most frequently? It would be nearly impossible to figure
 this out theoretically—but a simple Monte Carlo simulation allows
 you to answer the question quickly by using a computer to roll the
 dice and move the pieces around the board a few million times.
 Alternatively, you could make use of the Machinations system
 created by Joris Dormans, which is specifically designed to model
 gameplay systems and show patterns of results through repeated
 simulations.
 Rule #10: Geeks Love Showing Off (Gombaud’s Law)
 This is the most important of all the probability rules. If you forget
 all the others but remember this one, you’ll get by just fine. There
 are many more difficult aspects of probability that we won’t get
 into here—when you run into them, the easiest thing to do is to
 find someone who considers themselves a “math whiz.” Generally,
 these people are thrilled to have someone actually needing their
 expertise, and they will bend over backwards to help you. I have
 used Rule #10 to solve hard game design probability questions
 again and again. If there aren’t any experts around you, post your
 question on a forum or mailing list. If you really want a fast
 response, preface it with “This problem is probably too difficult for
 anyone to solve, but I thought I would ask anyway,” for there are
 many math experts who love the ego boost of solving a problem
 that others think is impossible. In a sense, your hard problem is a
 game for them—why not use game design techniques to make it as
 attractive as possible?
 You might even be doing your geek a favor! I like to call Rule #10
 “Gombaud’s Law,” in honor of Antoine Gombaud, the Chevalier de
 Méré, who, through his awareness of this principle, not only
 solved his gambling problem (his mathematical one, anyway), but
 inadvertently initiated all of probability theory.
 You might be afraid of exercising Rule #10, because you are afraid
 of asking stupid questions. If you feel that way, don’t forget that
 Pascal and Fermat owed the Chevalier a great debt—without his
 stupid questions, they never would have made some of their
 greatest discoveries. Your stupid question might lead to a great
 truth of its own—but you’ll never know unless you ask.
 Expected Value
 You will use probability in many ways in your designs, but one of
 the most useful will be to calculate expected value. Very often,
 when you take an action in a game, the action will have a value,
 either positive or negative. This might be points, tokens, or money
 gained or lost. The expected value of a transaction in a game is the
 average of all the possible values that could result.
 For example, there might be a rule in a board game that when a
 player lands on a green space, he can roll a six-sided die and get
 that many power points. The expected value of this event is the
 average of all the possible outcomes. To get the average in this
 case, since all the probabilities are equal, we can add up all the
 possible die rolls, 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 = 21, and divide by 6, which
 gives us 3.5. As a game designer, it is very useful for you to know
 that each time someone lands on a green space, they will, on
 average, get 3.5 power points.
 But not all examples are so simple—some involve negative
 outcomes, and outcomes that aren’t evenly weighted. Consider a
 game where a player rolls two dice. If they get a 7, or an 11, they
 win $5, but if they get anything else, they lose $1. How do we
 figure out the expected value of this game?
 The chance of rolling a 7 is 6/36.
 The chance of rolling an 11 is 2/36.
 Using Rule #8, the chance of rolling anything else is 1 − 8/36, or
 28/36.
 So, to calculate the expected value, we multiply the probabilities
 by the values for each and add them all up, like this:
 Outcome Chance × Outcome Value
 7 6/36 × $5 $0.83
 11 2/36 × $5 $0.28
 Everything else 28/36 × −$1 −$0.78
 Outcome Chance × Outcome Value
 Expected value $0.33
 So, we see that this is a good game to play, because in the long run,
 you will, on average, win thirty-three cents each time you play.
 But, what if we changed the game, so that only 7’s are winning
 numbers and 11’s make you lose a dollar, just like all the other
 numbers? This changes the expected value, like this:
 Outcome Chance × Outcome Value
 7 6/36 × $5 $0.83
 Everything else 30/36 × −$1 −$0.83
 Expected value $0.00
 An expected value of zero means that this game is just as good as
 flipping a coin in the long run. Wins and losses are completely
 balanced. What if we change it again, so that this time only eleven
 wins?
 Outcome Chance × Outcome Value
 11 2/36 × $5 $0.28
 Everything else 34/36 × −$1 −$0.94
 Expected value −$0.86
 Ouch! As you might expect, this is a losing game. You’ll lose, on
 average, about eighty-six cents each time you play it. Of course,
 you could make it into a fair game, or even a winning game, by
 increasing the payoff for getting an eleven.
 Consider Values Carefully
 Expected value is an excellent tool for game balancing, which we
 will discuss more in the next chapter—but if you aren’t careful
 about what the true value of an outcome is, it can be very
 misleading.
 Consider these three attacks that might be part of a fantasy roleplaying game:
 Attack Name Chance of Hitting (%) Damage
 Wind 100 4
 Fireball 80 5
 Lightning bolt 20 40
 What is the expected value of each of these? Wind is easy—it
 always does exactly 4 damage, so the expected value of that attack
 is 4. Fireball hits 80% of the time and misses 20% of the time, so it’s
 expected value is (5 × 0.8) + (0 × 0.2) = 4 points, the same as the
 wind attack. The lightning bolt attack doesn’t hit very often, but
 when it does, it packs a wallop. Its expected value is (40 × 0.2) + (0
 × 0.8) = 8 points.
 Now, based on those values, one might conclude that players
 would always use the lightning bolt attack, since on average it does
 double the damage of the other two attacks. And if you are fighting
 an enemy that has 500 hit points, that might be correct. But what
 about an enemy with 15 hit points? Most players would not use
 lightning bolt in that case—they would opt for something weaker
 but surer. Why is this? Because even though the lightning bolt can
 do 40 damage points, only 15 of them are of any use in that
 situation—the real expected value of the lightning bolt against an
 enemy with 15 HP is (0.2 × 15) + (0.8 × 0) = 3 points, which is lower
 than both the wind and the fireball attack.
 You must always take care to measure the real values of actions in
 your game. If something gives a benefit that a player can’t use, or
 contains a hidden penalty, you must capture that in your
 calculations.
 The Human Element
 You must also keep in mind that expected value calculations do not
 perfectly predict human behavior. You would expect players to
 always choose the option with the highest expected value, but that
 is not always the case. In some cases, this is due to ignorance—
 because players did not realize the actual expected value. For
 example, if you didn’t tell players the respective chances of wind,
 fireball, and lightning bolt, but left it to them to discover them
 through trial and error, you might find that players who tried
 lightning bolt several times and never got a hit reached the
 conclusion that “lightning bolt never hits” and therefore has an
 expected value of zero. The estimates that players make about how
 often an event happens are often incorrect. You must be aware of
 the “perceived probabilities” that players have arrived at, because
 it will determine how they play.
 But sometimes, even with perfect information, players still will not
 choose an option with the highest expected value. Two
 psychologists, Kahneman and Tversky, tried an interesting
 experiment, where they asked a number of subjects which of the
 two games they would like to play:
 Game A:
 66% chance of winning $2400
 33% chance of winning $2500
 1% chance of winning $0
 Game B:
 100% chance of winning $2400
 These are both pretty great games to play! But is one better than
 the other? If you do the expected value calculations
 Expected Value of Game A: 0.66 × $2400 + 0.33 × $2500 + 0.01 × $0 =
 $2409
 Expected Value of Game B: 1.00 × 2400 = $2400
 You can see that Game A has a higher expected value. But only
 18% of the subjects they surveyed picked A, while 82% preferred
 playing Game B.
 Why? The reason is that the expected value calculation does not
 capture an important human element: regret. People not only seek
 out options that create the most pleasure, they also avoid the ones
 that cause the most pain. If you played Game A (and we’re
 assuming you only get to play it once), and were unlucky enough
 to get that 1% and $0, it would feel pretty bad. People are often
 willing to pay a price to eliminate the potential of regret—“buying
 peace of mind,” as the insurance salesmen say. Not only are they
 willing to pay a price to avoid regret, they are willing to take risks.
 This is why a gambler who has lost a little money is often willing to
 take more risks to try to get the money back. Tversky puts it this
 way: “When it comes to taking risks for gains, people are
 conservative. They will make a sure gain over a problem gain. But
 we are also finding that when people are faced with a choice
 between a small, certain loss and a large, probable loss, they will
 gamble.” This appears to be a large part of the success of the “freeto-play” game Puzzle & Dragons. Players perform a series of
 puzzles and rack up treasures while making their way through a
 dungeon. Sometimes, though, they perish in the dungeon, and the
 game effectively says, “Oh, that’s too bad, you’re dying. Look at all
 the treasure you are going to lose. Are you sure you don’t want to
 pay just a little bit of real money, so you have a shot at keeping
 what you have earned?” And many people respond by paying cash
 money to avoid that small, certain loss.
 In some cases, the human mind inflates some risks completely out
 of proportion. In one study, Tversky asked people to estimate the
 likelihood of various causes of death and obtained the following
 results:
 What is particularly interesting here is that the subjects making
 estimates underestimated the top three categories (natural causes
 of death) and significantly overestimated the bottom three
 (unnatural causes of death). This distortion of reality seems to be a
 reflection of the fears of the respondents. What bearing does this
 have on game design? As a designer, you must have not only a
 grasp of the actual probabilities of events in your game but also
 the perceived probabilities, which may be quite different for a
 number of reasons.
 You will need to consider both actual and perceived probabilities
 when calculating expected values, which provide such useful
 information that they make Lens #35.
 #35 THE LENS OF EXPECTED VALUE
 To use this lens, think about the chance of different events
 occurring in your game and what those mean to your player.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 What is the actual chance of a certain event occurring?
 What is the perceived chance?
 What value does the outcome of that event have? Can the value
 be quantified? Are there intangible aspects of value that I am
 not considering?
 Each action a player can take has a different expected value
 when I add up all the possible outcomes. Am I happy with these
 values? Do they give the player interesting choices? Are they too
 rewarding, or too punishing?
 Illustration by Nick Daniel
 Expected value is one of your most valuable tools for analyzing
 game balance. The challenge of using it is finding a way to
 numerically represent everything that can happen to a player.
 Gaining and losing money is easy to represent. But what is the
 numerical value of “boots of speed” that let you run faster or a
 “warp gate” that lets you skip two levels? These are difficult to
 quantify perfectly—but that doesn’t mean you can’t take a guess.
 As we’ll see in the next chapter, as you go through multiple
 iterations of game testing and tweaking parameters and values in
 your game, you will also be tweaking your own estimations of the
 values of different outcomes. Quantifying these less tangible
 elements can be quite enlightening, because it makes you think
 concretely about what is valuable to the player and why—and this
 concrete knowledge will put you in control of the balance of your
 game.
 Skill and Chance Get Tangled
 As tricky as probability and the difference between actual and
 perceived values might be, the game mechanic of chance has more
 tricks up its sleeve. As much as we like to think that chance and
 skill are completely separate mechanics, there are important
 interactions between them that we cannot ignore. Here are five of
 the most important skill/chance interactions for a game designer
 to consider.
 1. Estimating chance is a skill: In many games, what separates
 the skilled players from the unskilled is their ability to predict
 what is going to happen next, often through calculating
 probabilities. The game of blackjack, for example, is almost
 entirely about knowing the odds. Some players even practice
 “card counting,” which is the practice of keeping track of what
 cards have already been played, since each card played changes
 the odds of what subsequent cards can appear. The perceived
 probabilities in your game can vary a great deal between
 players who are skilled estimators and those who are not.
 2. Skills have a probability of success: Naively, one might think
 that completely skill-based games, such as chess or baseball,
 have no aspects of randomness or risk in them. But from a
 player’s point of view, this simply isn’t true. Every action has
 some level of risk, and players are constantly making expected
 value decisions, deciding when to play it safe and when to take a
 big risk. These risks can be difficult to quantify (what are the
 odds that I can successfully steal a base or that I can trap my
 opponent’s queen without them noticing?), but they are still
 risks. When designing a game, you need to make sure they are
 balanced just as you would balance “pure chance” game
 elements, like drawn cards or die rolls.
 3. Estimating an opponent’s skill is a skill: A big part of a
 player’s ability to determine the chances of success for a
 particular action rests on their ability to estimate their
 opponent’s skill. A fascinating part of many games is trying to
 fool your opponent into thinking your skills are greater than
 they are, to prevent her from trying anything too bold and to
 make her uncertain of herself. Likewise, sometimes the opposite
 is true—in some games, it is a good strategy to make a player
 think your skills are less than they really are, so that your
 opponent will not notice your subtle strategies and will perhaps
 try actions that would be risky against a skilled player.
 4. Predicting pure chance is an imagined skill: Humans look for
 patterns, consciously and subconsciously, to help predict what is
 going to happen next. Our mania for patterns often leads us to
 look for and find patterns where none exist. Two of the most
 common false patterns are the “lucky streak fallacy” (I’ve had
 several wins in a row, and therefore another is likely) and, its
 opposite, the “gambler’s fallacy” (I’ve had several losses, so I
 must be due for a win). It is easy to scoff at these as ignorant,
 but in the all-important mind of the player, detecting these
 bogus patterns feels like the exercise of a real skill, and as a
 designer, you should find ways to use that to your advantage.
 5. Controlling pure chance is an imagined skill: Not only do our
 brains actively seek patterns, but they also actively and
 desperately seek cause-and-effect relationships. With pure
 chance, there is no way to control the outcome—but that doesn’t
 stop people from rolling the dice a certain way, carrying lucky
 charms, or engaging in other superstitious rituals. This feeling
 that it might be possible to control fate is part of what makes
 gambling games so exciting. Intellectually, we know it isn’t
 possible, but when you are up there rolling the dice, saying
 “come on, come on…,” it certainly feels like it might be possible,
 especially when you get lucky! If you try playing games of pure
 chance, but completely disengage yourself from the idea that
 anything you think or do can influence the outcome, much of
 the fun suddenly drains away. Our natural tendency to try to
 control fate can make games of chance feel like games of skill.
 Chance is tricky stuff, because it intertwines hard math, human
 psychology, and all of the basic game mechanics. But this trickiness
 is what gives games their richness, complexity, and depth. The last
 of our seven basic game mechanics gives us Lens #36.
 #36 THE LENS OF CHANCE
 To use this lens, focus on the parts of your game that involve
 randomness and risk, keeping in mind that those two things are
 not the same.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 What in my game is truly random? What parts just feel random?
 Does the randomness give the players positive feelings of
 excitement and challenge, or does it give them negative feelings
 of hopelessness and lack of control?
 Would changing my probability distribution curves improve my
 game?
 Do players have the opportunity to take interesting risks in the
 game?
 What is the relationship between chance and skill in my game?
 Are there ways I can make random elements feel more like the
 exercise of a skill? Are there ways I can make exercising skills
 feel more like risk taking?
 Illustration by Joshua Seaver
 Risk and randomness are like spices. A game without any hint of
 them can be completely bland, but put in too much and they
 overwhelm everything else. Get them just right, and they enhance
 every flavor in your game. Unfortunately, using them in your game
 is not as simple as sprinkling them on top. You must look into your
 game to see where elements of risk and randomness naturally
 arise, and then decide how you can best tame them to do your
 bidding. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that elements of chance
 only occur around die rolls or randomly generated numbers. On
 the contrary, you can find them wherever a player encounters the
 unknown.
 At long last, we have made it through all seven of the basic game
 mechanics. Soon, we will move onto more advanced mechanics
 that are built from these, such as puzzles and interactive story
 structures. But first, we need to explore methods of bringing these
 basic elements into balance.
 Other Reading to Consider
 Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design by Ernest Adams
 and Joris Dormans. This book gets into a lot of wonderfully
 nitty-gritty details about the interactions of various game
 mechanics and gives an introduction to the fascinating
 Machinations system for simulating your game design.
 The Oxford Book of Board Games by David Parlett. Contains
 more details on Parlett’s Rule Analysis, as well as descriptions of
 some amazing but little-known board games from previous
 centuries.
 Uncertainty in Games by Greg Costikyan. An incredibly
 insightful book about the nature of chance and uncertainty in
 games. I get something new from it every time I read it.
 The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Unfinished
 Letter that Made the World Modern by Keith Devlin. If you
 want even more details of the story of how probability came to
 be, this is the definitive book.
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
 Game Mechanics Must Be in Balance
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-13
 FIGURE
 13.1
 A false balance is an abomination to the Lord.
 —Proverbs 11:1
 Have you ever looked forward to playing a game that you were
 certain was going to be incredibly fun, only to be terribly
 disappointed? This game had a story that sounded interesting, the
 kind of gameplay action that is your favorite, cutting-edge
 technology, and beautiful artwork—but somehow the play was
 monotonous, confusing, and frustrating. This is a game that is out
 of balance.
 To novice designers, the business of balancing a game seems quite
 mysterious—but really, balancing a game is nothing more than
 adjusting the elements of the game until they deliver the
 experience you want. Balancing a game is far from a science; in
 fact, despite the simple mathematics that is often involved, it is
 generally considered the most artful part of game design, for it is
 all about understanding subtle nuances in the relationships
 between the elements of your game and knowing which ones to
 alter, how much to alter them, and which ones to leave alone.
 Part of what makes game balancing so difficult is that no two
 games are alike and every game has many different factors that
 need to be in balance. As a designer, you must discern what
 elements in your game need to be balanced and then experiment
 with changing them until you have them generating exactly the
 experience you want your players to have.
 Think of it like creating a new recipe—it is one thing to determine
 the ingredients you need, but another is to decide how much of
 each to use and how they should be combined. Some of the
 decisions you make will be based on hard mathematics (1.5
 teaspoons of baking powder leavens 1 cup of flour), but others, like
 how much sugar to use, are often a matter of personal taste. A
 skilled chef can make the simplest of recipes a delight to eat for the
 same reason a skilled game designer can make the simplest of
 games a delight to play—they both know how to balance the
 ingredients.
 Game balancing can come in a variety of forms, because every
 different game has different things that must be brought into
 balance. Still, there are some patterns of balance that occur over
 and over again. Balancing a game is all about examining it
 carefully, so this chapter will be rich with many lenses.
 The Twelve Most Common Types of Game
 Balance
 Balance Type #1: Fairness
 There is no joy in an unequal battle.
 —Mrs. Cavour
 Symmetrical Games
 One quality that players universally seek in games is fairness.
 Players want to feel that the forces working against them do not
 have an advantage that will make them impossible to defeat. One
 of the simplest ways to ensure this is to make your game
 symmetrical, that is, to give equal resources and powers to all
 players. Most traditional board games (such as checkers, chess,
 and Monopoly) and almost all sports use this method to be sure
 that no player has an unfair advantage over another. If you want
 to put players in direct competition with each other and you
 expect them to have roughly equal levels of skill, symmetrical
 games are a great choice. They are particularly good systems for
 determining which players are the best, since all things in the
 game are equal but for the skill and strategy that the individual
 players bring to the game. In these games, perfect symmetry is not
 always possible as there is often some minor issue such as “who
 goes first?” or “who starts with the ball?” that gives one side a
 small advantage over the other. Generally, random selection, such
 as a coin toss or die roll, is the solution. Though it gives one player
 a small advantage, over many games, the advantage is distributed
 evenly. In some cases, the way this asymmetry is remedied is by
 giving the advantage to the player with the least skill—such as
 “youngest player goes first.” This is an elegant way to use the
 natural imbalance of the game to help balance the skill levels of
 the players.
 Asymmetrical Games
 It is also possible, and often desirable, to give opponents different
 resources and abilities. If you do, be aware that you have a
 significant balancing task ahead of you! Here are some of the
 reasons you might create an asymmetrical game:
 1. To simulate a real-world situation: If the point of your game is
 to simulate the battle between Axis and Allied forces during
 World War II, a symmetrical game does not make sense, since
 the real-world conflict was not symmetrical.
 2. To give players another way to explore the game space:
 Exploration is one of the great pleasures of gameplay. Players
 often enjoy exploring the possibilities of playing the same game
 with different powers and resources. In a fighting game, for
 example, if two players have ten different fighters to choose
 from, each with different powers, there are ten times ten
 different pairings, each of which requires different strategies,
 and effectively you have turned one game into one hundred
 games.
 3. Personalization: Different players bring different skills to a
 game—if you give the players a choice of powers and resources
 that best match their own skills, it makes them feel powerful—
 they have been able to shape the game to emphasize the way
 they like to play.
 4. To level the playing field: Sometimes, your opponents have
 radically different skill levels. This is especially true if you have
 opponents that are computer controlled. Consider the game of
 Pac-Man. It would be more symmetrical if there were just one
 ghost chasing Pac-Man, not four. But if that was the case, the
 player would win easily for a human can easily outwit a
 computer when it comes to navigating a maze. But to outwit
 four computer-controlled opponents at once brings the game
 into balance and gives the computer a fair chance of defeating
 the player. Some games are customizable in this regard—a golf
 handicap, for instance, lets players of different levels compete at
 the challenge levels they will both enjoy. Whether to introduce
 this kind of balancing depends on whether your game is meant
 to be a standard measure of player’s skill or whether the goal is
 to provide challenge to all players.
 5. To create interesting situations: In the infinite space of all the
 games that can be created, many more of them are
 asymmetrical than are symmetrical. Pitting asymmetrical forces
 against each other can often be interesting and thought
 provoking for the players, since it is not always obvious what
 the right strategies will be to win the game. Players become
 naturally curious about whether one side or another has an
 advantage, and they will often spend a great deal of time and
 thought to try to decide whether the game is truly fair. The
 game of Bhag-Chal (the official board game of Nepal) is an
 excellent example of this. In this game, not only do the players
 have unequal forces, they also have different goals! One player
 controls five tigers, while the other controls twenty goats. The
 tiger player wins by eating five goats, and the goat player wins
 by positioning the goats so that no tiger can move. Though it is
 generally acknowledged by experienced players that the game is
 balanced, novices to the game spend a great deal of time
 discussing whether one side or the other has particular
 advantage and playing the game over and over trying to
 determine the best strategies and counter strategies.
 It can be quite difficult to properly adjust the resources and
 powers in an asymmetrical game to make them feel evenly
 matched. The most common method of doing so is to assign a
 value to each resource or power and make sure that the sum of the
 values is equal for both sides. See the following section for an
 example.
 Biplane Battle
 Imagine a game of biplane dogfight combat. Each player gets to
 choose one of the following planes:
 Plane Speed Maneuverability Firepower
 Piranha Medium Medium Medium
 Revenger High High Low
 Sopwith Camel Low Low Medium
 Are these planes equally balanced? It is hard to say. At first glance,
 though, we might evaluate all three categories as low = 1,
 medium = 2, and high = 3. This gives us new information:
 Plane Speed Maneuverability Firepower Tot
 Piranha Medium
 (2)
 Medium (2) Medium
 (2)
 6
 Revenger High (3) High (3) Low (1) 7
 Looked at from this point of view, the player with the Revenger
 seems to have an unfair advantage over the others. And that may
 be the case. But after playing the game a little, maybe we notice
 that the Piranha and the Revenger seem evenly matched but
 players who fly the Sopwith Camel generally lose. This might lead
 us to speculate that Firepower is more valuable than the other
 categories—maybe twice as valuable. In other words, for the
 Firepower column, low = 2, medium = 4, and high = 6. This gives us
 a new table:
 Plane Speed Maneuverability Firepower Tot
 Sopwith
 Camel
 Low (1) Low (1) Medium
 (2)
 4
 Plane Speed Maneuverability Firepower Tot
 Piranha Medium
 (2)
 Medium (2) Medium
 (4)
 8
 Revenger High (3) High (3) Low (2) 8
 This gives us totals that match our observation of the game in
 action. We may now have a model that shows us how to balance
 the game to make it fair. To test our theory, we might change the
 Firepower for the Sopwith Camel to be high (6), giving us a new
 table:
 Plane Speed Maneuverability Firepower Tot
 Sopwith
 Camel
 Low (1) Low (1) Medium
 (4)
 6
 Plane Speed Maneuverability Firepower Tot
 Piranha Medium
 (2)
 Medium (2) Medium
 (4)
 8
 Revenger High (3) High (3) Low (2) 8
 Sopwith
 Camel
 Low (1) Low (1) High (6) 8
 It would appear that if our model is correct, these three planes are
 equally balanced. But that’s only a theory. The way we find out is
 by playtesting the game. If we play and determine that gameplay
 feels roughly fair no matter which plane you use, then our model
 is correct. But what if we play and realize that the Sopwith Camel
 is still losing battles? In that case, we will have to make a new
 speculation, change our model, rebalance, and try playing again.
 It is important to note that the act of balancing and developing a
 model of how to balance go hand in hand. As you balance, you
 learn more about relationships in the game, and you can make a
 better mathematical model that represents these relationships.
 And as you change the model, you learn more about the right way
 to balance your game. The model informs the balance, and the
 balancing informs the model.
 Also note that balancing a game can only really begin once the
 game is playable. Many a game has suffered in the marketplace
 because all the time in the schedule got used up just getting the
 game to work, and not enough time was allotted to balance the
 game before it needed to go to market. There is an old rule of
 thumb that it takes six months to balance your game after you
 have a completely working version, but this varies a great deal
 depending on the type and scope of your game. The rule I
 personally use is that half the development time should be spent
 balancing the game. Certainly, the more new gameplay elements
 you have, the longer it will take you to balance it properly.
 Rock, Paper, Scissors
 One simple way to balance elements for fairness is to make sure
 that whenever something in your game has an advantage over
 something else, yet another thing has an advantage over that!
 Often referred to as “circular balance,” the iconic example of this
 is the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors where
 Rock breaks scissors
 Scissors cut paper
 Paper covers rock
 None of the elements can be supreme, because there is always
 another that can defeat it. It is a simple way to ensure that every
 game element has both strengths and weaknesses. Fighting games
 particularly like to use this technique to help ensure none of the
 warriors a player might choose are undefeatable.
 Balancing your game to make it feel fair is one of the most
 fundamental types of game balancing. You will surely want to use
 the Lens of Fairness on any game you create.
 #37 THE LENS OF FAIRNESS
 To use the Lens of Fairness, think carefully about the game from
 each player’s point of view. Taking into account each player’s skill
 level, find a way to give each player a chance of winning that each
 will consider to be fair.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 Should my game be symmetrical? Why?
 Should my game be asymmetrical? Why?
 Which is more important: that my game is a reliable measure of
 who has the most skill or that it provide an interesting challenge
 to all players?
 If I want players of different skill levels to play together, what
 means will I use to make the game interesting and challenging
 for everyone?
 Fairness can be a slippery subject. There are some cases where one
 side has an advantage over the other and the game still seems fair.
 Sometimes this is so that players of unequal skill can play together,
 but there can be other reasons. In the game Alien vs. Predator, for
 example, it is generally recognized that in multiplayer mode,
 Predators have a significant advantage over the Aliens. Players do
 not consider it to be unfair, however, because it is in keeping with
 the Alien vs. Predator story world, and they accept that if they play
 as an Alien, they will be at a disadvantage and will need to
 compensate for that with extra skill. It is a badge of pride among
 players to be able to win the game when playing as an Alien.
 Illustration by Nick Daniel
 Balance Type #2: Challenge vs. Success
 Let us revisit this diagram from Chapter 10: Player’s Mind.
 FIGURE
 13.2
 We know that keeping the player in the flow channel is desirable.
 If play is too challenging, the player becomes frustrated. But if the
 player succeeds too easily, they can become bored. Keeping the
 player on the middle path means keeping the experiences of
 challenge and success in proper balance. This can be particularly
 difficult since players may have all different levels of skill. What
 one player finds boring, another may find challenging, and yet
 another may find frustrating. Some common techniques for
 striking a proper balance include the following:
 Increase difficulty with each success: This is a very common
 pattern in videogames—each level is harder than the last.
 Players build their skill until they can complete a level, only to
 be presented with one that challenges them yet again. Don’t
 forget, of course, to use the tense and release pattern shown
 earlier.
 Let players get through easy parts fast: Assuming your game
 has some method of gradually increasing the difficulty, you do
 yourself a service by allowing skilled players to finish a level
 quickly if they can easily master it. This way, skilled players will
 blow through easy levels, quickly getting to a challenge that is
 more interesting to them, while less skilled players will be
 challenged by the early levels. This lets every player quickly get
 to the part of the game that is a challenge. If you arrange it
 differently, such that each level takes one hour to play,
 regardless of skill level, skilled players may quickly grow bored
 from lack of challenge.
 Create “layers of challenge”: A popular pattern in games is to
 give a grade, or some number of stars, at the end of each level or
 mission. If you get a “D” or “F,” you must repeat the level, but if
 you get a “C” or better, you can continue. This creates a situation
 with a lot of flexibility in how you can play it. Novice players are
 thrilled to get a “C” and unlock the next level. As they gain
 experience and have unlocked all the levels, they may set
 themselves a new challenge—to earn an “A” (or even “A+”!) on
 earlier levels.
 Let players choose the difficulty level: A tried and true
 method is to let players choose to play on “easy, medium, or
 hard” modes. Some games (e.g., many Atari 2600 games) even let
 you change the difficulty-level midgame. The upside of this is
 that players can quickly find the appropriate challenge level for
 their skill level. The downside is that you have to create and
 balance multiple versions of your game. Also, it can detract
 from the “reality” of your game—players will argue over which
 version is the “real” one or be left feeling unsure whether any of
 them are “real.”
 Playtest with a variety of players: Many designers fall into a
 trap of only testing with people who are constantly exposed to
 the game and end up designing a game that is too frustrating for
 novices. Others fall into the opposite trap and only test their
 game with people who have never played before. They end up
 designing a game that experienced players quickly grow bored
 with. Wise designers playtest with a mix of skilled and novice
 players, to be sure that their game is fun at first, fun after a
 while, and fun much, much later.
 Give the losers a break: Mario Kart is famous for its unusual
 system of giving out power-ups. Players who are ahead in the
 race get meager power-ups, while players who are far behind
 get the good stuff, allowing them to race ahead. This is a great
 system for that game because it feels more fair and keeps
 everyone engaged: players who are behind need to pay
 attention because a game-changing power-up could come at any
 second, and players who are ahead cannot afford to rest on
 their laurels because that “blue shell” could hit them at any
 time. This tricky system does a great job at nudging all players
 to the center of the flow channel.
 One of the toughest challenges in game balancing is deciding how
 difficult the game should get over time. Many designers are so
 afraid of players beating their game too easily that they make later
 levels so fiendishly difficult to win that 90% of players eventually
 give up on the game in frustration. These designers hope that the
 increased challenge will extend the play time—and there is
 something to that—if you have expended forty hours to get
 through level nine, you will probably be willing to work pretty
 hard to defeat level ten. But in truth, there are so many competing
 games to play that many players just give up in frustration. On the
 other hand, with a free to play game, this late-game frustration
 might be just what you want, to spur players to pay money and
 move toward completion. As a designer, it makes sense to ask
 yourself, “What percentage of players do I want to be able to
 complete this game?” and then design for that.
 And don’t forget: just learning to play a game at all is a challenge!
 For this reason, the first level or two of a game is often incredibly
 simplistic—the player is so challenged just trying to understand
 the “controls and goals” that any additional challenge might push
 them right into frustration. Not to mention the fact that a few early
 successes can do a lot to build a player’s confidence—a confident
 player will give up less easily on a game.
 Challenge is a core element of gameplay and can be so difficult to
 balance that it merits its own lens.
 #38 THE LENS OF CHALLENGE
 Challenge is at the core of almost all gameplay. You could even say
 that a game is defined by its goals and its challenges. When
 examining the challenges in your game, ask yourself these
 questions:
 What are the challenges in my game?
 Are they too easy, too hard, or just right?
 Can my challenges accommodate a wide variety of skill levels?
 How does the level of challenge increase as the player succeeds?
 Is there enough variety in the challenges?
 What is the maximum level of challenge in my game?
 Illustration by Reagan Heller
 Balance Type #3: Meaningful Choices
 There are many different ways to give a player choices in a game.
 Meaningful choices for a player lead them to ask themselves
 questions, such as the following:
 Where should I go?
 How should I spend my resources?
 What should I practice and try to perfect?
 How should I dress my character?
 Should I try to get through the game quickly or carefully?
 Should I focus on offense or defense?
 What strategy should I use in this situation?
 Which power should I choose?
 Should I play it safe or take a big risk?
 A good game gives the player meaningful choices. Not just any
 choices but choices that will have a real impact on what happens
 next and how the game turns out. Many designers fall into the trap
 of offering the player meaningless choices; for example, in a racing
 game, you might have 50 vehicles to choose from, but if they all
 drive the same way, it is like having no choice at all. Other
 designers fall into a different trap—offering choices that no one
 would want. You might offer a soldier ten guns, all different, but if
 one of them is clearly better than the rest, again it is like having no
 choice at all.
 When choices are offered to a player, but one of them is clearly
 better than the rest, this is called a dominant strategy. Once a
 dominant strategy is discovered, the game is no longer fun,
 because the puzzle of the game has been solved—there are no
 more choices to make. When you discover that a game you are
 working on has a dominant strategy, you must change the rules
 (balance things) so that this strategy no longer dominates and
 meaningful choice can be restored to the game. The previous
 Biplane Battle example is an example of just that—a designer
 trying to balance a game to remove a dominant strategy and
 restore meaningful choice to the players. Hidden dominant
 strategies that are discovered by players are often referred to as
 “exploits,” since they can be exploited by players to take a shortcut
 to success that the designer never intended.
 In early development of a game, dominant strategies abound. As
 the game continues development, these strategies start to get
 properly balanced. Paradoxically, this often throws novice
 designers into a panic: “Yesterday, I understood the right way to
 play this game—but with these new changes, I’m not sure about
 the right way to play it!” They feel like they have lost their handle
 on their own game. But in reality, the game has just taken a big
 step forward! It no longer has a dominant strategy, and now there
 are meaningful choices to be made. Instead of fearing this
 moment, you should cherish it and take the opportunity to see if
 you can understand why the current configuration of rules and
 values is putting your game into balance.
 But this leads to another question: how many meaningful choices
 should we give to a player? Michael Mateas points out that the
 number of choices a player seeks is dependent on the number of
 things they desire:
 If choices > desires, then the player is overwhelmed.
 If choices < desires, the player is frustrated.
 If choices = desires, the player has a feeling of freedom and
 fulfillment.
 So, to properly determine the number of choices, you need to
 figure out the types and number of things the player would like to
 do. In some situations, the player wants only a small number of
 meaningful choices (choosing to take the left or right fork in the
 road is interesting—choosing to take one of thirty side roads is
 overwhelming). Other times, a huge number of choices are desired
 (e.g., a clothes shopping interface in the Sims).
 Meaningful choices are the heart of interactivity, and having a lens
 to examine them is quite useful.
 #39 THE LENS OF MEANINGFUL CHOICES
 When we make meaningful choices, it lets us feel like the things
 we do matter. To use this lens, ask yourself these questions:
 What choices am I asking the player to make?
 Are they meaningful? How?
 Am I giving the player the right number of choices? Would more
 make them feel more powerful? Would less make the game
 clearer?
 Are there any dominant strategies in my game?
 Illustration by Chuck Hoover
 Triangularity
 One of the most exciting and interesting choices for a player to
 make is whether to play it safe and go for a small reward or take a
 big risk to try for a big reward. This is a hard decision to make, if
 the game is balanced properly. I find that about eight out of ten
 times someone comes to me asking for help on a game prototype
 that “just isn’t fun”; the game is missing this kind of meaningful
 choice. You could call this “balanced asymmetric risk,” since you
 are balancing a low risk with low reward against a high risk for
 high reward, but that is kind of a mouthful. This relationship
 comes up so often, and is so important, that I like to give it a
 shorter name: triangularity. The player is one point of the
 triangle, the low-risk choice is the second point, and the high-risk
 choice is the third.
 An example of a game that has good triangularity is Space
 Invaders. Most of the time in the game you are shooting at low
 point aliens near your ship worth 10, 20, and 30 points. They are
 slow moving and easy to shoot, and shooting them makes you
 safer because it stops them from dropping bombs on you. Every
 once in a while, however, a little red flying saucer flies across the
 top of the screen. It poses no threat, and it is quite difficult and
 dangerous to shoot. It is difficult because it is moving and far away,
 and it is dangerous because to properly aim at it, you have to take
 your eyes off your ship to look at it, and you risk getting hit by a
 bomb. However, it is worth between 100 and 300 points! Without
 the flying saucer, Space Invaders gets quite tedious, because your
 choices are few—you just shoot and shoot and shoot. With the
 flying saucer, you occasionally have a very difficult, meaningful
 choice to make—should you play it safe or take a risk and go for
 the big points? Triangularity is so important that it gets its own
 lens.
 FIGURE
 13.3
 #40 THE LENS OF TRIANGULARITY
 Giving a player the choice to play it safe for a low reward or to
 take a risk for a big reward is a great way to make your game
 interesting and exciting. To use the Lens of Triangularity, ask
 yourself these questions:
 Do I have triangularity now? If not, how can I get it?
 Is my attempt at triangularity balanced? That is, are the rewards
 commensurate with the risks?
 Illustration by Nick Daniel
 Once you start looking for triangularity in games, you will see it
 everywhere. A dull, monotonous game can quickly become
 exciting and rewarding when you add a dash of triangularity.
 A classic example of triangularity appears in the book Hackers by
 Steven Levy. An MIT engineer hacked a vending machine giving
 each user a choice: get your snack from the vending machine for
 normal price as usual or take a chance. A digital coin could be
 flipped, resulting in your snack either costing double or being
 completely free.
 A good way to make sure your triangularity is balanced is to use
 Lens #35: Expected Value. The arcade game Qix provides an
 interesting example of balancing with expected values. In it, you
 try to draw rectangular shapes to surround territory on a blank
 game board. While you do this, a blob of lines, called the Qix, floats
 around the board at random. If the Qix touches one of your
 rectangles before you finish drawing it, you die. But if you finish
 drawing the rectangle, then you claim that area of the board.
 When you have covered 75% of the board, you win the level.
 The designers of the game give the player a very explicit choice—
 each time you draw a rectangle, you can either move quickly
 (drawing a blue rectangle) or at half speed (drawing an orange
 rectangle). Since moving at half speed is twice as dangerous,
 rectangles drawn at half speed are given double the points. This
 works because if we assume that the chance of successfully
 drawing a fast, blue rectangle is 20% and it is worth 100 points,
 then the expected value of attempting to draw one is 100 points ×
 20% = 20 points. We also know that drawing a rectangle at half
 speed has half the chance of succeeding, so we get a table that
 looks like this:
 Speed
 Chance of Success
 (%)
 Points
 Expected
 Value
 Fast (blue) 20 100 20
 Slow
 (orange)
 10 ? 20
 We want the game to be balanced, so we keep the expected value
 constant. It is pretty easy to see that if we want the game to be
 balanced, the point value should be 200 points for the same size
 slow rectangle. The difficult part with this kind of thing is figuring
 out the chance of success—we often have to estimate—but this is
 another case where the model informs the prototype and testing
 the prototype informs the model, creating a virtuous circle where
 eventually the model is correct and the game is balanced.
 Mario Kart is a symphony of triangularity. Again and again, it
 brings you high-risk/low-risk choices with appropriate payoffs.
 Examples include the following:
 Manual or automatic? Manual requires more skill to use, but
 when used well, it gives you more speed boosts.
 Kart or bike? Karts have a faster base speed—but if you do a
 wheelie on a bike (which is risky because you can’t turn during
 a wheelie), you go faster than the karts do.
 Grab power-ups? (risking a crash) or ignore them?
 Use power-ups? (risk breaking your concentration) or ignore
 them?
 Keep the power-up you’ve got? or dump it in favor of a new
 one?
 Use speed boost pads? They speed you up but tend to be in
 dangerous locations.
 Hit the gas early? If you hit the gas early at the starting line,
 you get a speed boost if you time it right, and a frustrating delay
 if you time it wrong.
 Left or right? Many tracks include forking tracks that have a
 low-risk and high-risk path—and of course the high-risk path
 has more speed boosts.
 Balancing Type #4: Skill vs. Chance
 In Chapter 12, we talked in detail about the mechanics of skill and
 chance. In a real sense, these are two opposing forces in any game
 design. Too much chance negates the effects of player skill and vice
 versa. There is no easy answer for this one—some players prefer
 games with as few elements of chance as possible, and other
 players prefer the opposite. Games of skill tend to be more like
 athletic contests—systems of judgment that determine which
 player is the best. Games of chance often have a more relaxed,
 casual nature—after all, much of the outcome is up to fate. To
 strike the balance, you must use Lens #19: The Player, to
 understand how much skill and how much chance will be the right
 amount for the audience of your game. Differences in preference
 are sometimes determined by age or gender, and sometimes even
 by culture; for example, German board game players seem to
 prefer games that minimize the effects of chance more so than,
 say, American players.
 One very common method of balancing these is to alternate the
 use of chance and skill in a game. For example, dealing out a hand
 of cards is pure chance—but choosing how to play them is pure
 skill. Rolling a die to see how far you move is pure chance—
 deciding where to move your piece is pure skill. This can create an
 alternating pattern of tension and relaxation that can be very
 pleasing to players.
 Designer David Perry advises that the key to addictive game design
 is designing your game such that players are doing three things at
 all times: exercising a skill, taking risks, and working a strategy.
 And it is certainly true that any time players are taking risks, they
 are up against chance, in some way.
 Choosing how to balance skill and chance will determine the
 character of your game. Examine it closely with this lens.
 #41 THE LENS OF SKILL VS. CHANCE
 To help determine how to balance skill and chance in your game,
 ask yourself these questions:
 Are my players here to be judged (skill) or to take risks
 (chance)?
 Skill tends to be more serious than chance: is my game serious
 or casual?
 Are parts of my game tedious? If so, will adding elements of
 chance enliven them?
 Do parts of my game feel too random? If so, will replacing
 elements of chance with elements of skill or strategy make the
 players feel more in control?
 Illustration by Nathan Mazur
 Balancing Type #5: Head vs. Hands
 This type of balancing is quite straightforward: how much of the
 game should involve doing a challenging physical activity (be it
 steering, throwing, or pushing buttons dexterously), and how
 much of it should involve thinking? These two things are not as
 separate as they might seem on the surface—many games involve
 constant strategizing and puzzle solving while simultaneously
 pulling off feats of speed and dexterity. Other games alternate the
 two types of gameplay for variety. Consider the “action platform”
 game genre—you work your way through a level, dexterously
 guiding your avatar to jump over obstacles, and maybe shooting at
 enemies, occasionally pausing to solve some small puzzle that
 prevents you from clearing the level. Often, the intensity is
 increased at the end of a level by a “boss monster,” who can only
 be defeated through a mix of puzzle solving (“Oh! I have to jump
 on its tail, and that makes it drop its shield for a second!”) and
 dexterity (“I only have a second to shoot an arrow into that
 narrow gap!”).
 It is important, though, to understand what your target market
 prefers in a game—more thinking or more dexterity? And it is
 equally important that your game clearly communicate what
 balance you have chosen to put into it. Consider the very unusual
 game Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures for the Sega Genesis. The
 name suggested that it would be a game of action and a little
 strategy, like the original Pac-Man. But a quick glance at the box
 told another story—this appeared to be a 2D platform game, like
 Super Mario Brothers or Sonic the Hedgehog, which meant action
 plus a little puzzle solving. But actually, playing the game revealed
 something completely different! Though it visually looked like an
 action platform game, it was really a game of strange
 psychological puzzles, where you subtly guided Pac-Man into
 different emotional states to get him to get past various obstacles.
 Players expecting mostly action and little thinking were
 disappointed—players looking for a game about puzzle solving
 generally didn’t play the game, rejecting it based on its “actionbased” appearance.
 When Games Magazine reviews a videogame, they give it a
 ranking on a sliding scale where one end is “fingers” and the other
 end is “brain.” It can be easy to forget that a game with a lot of
 button pushing can still involve a lot of thought and strategy. Use
 Lens #34: Skill, to understand the different skills in your game, and
 then use this lens to balance those skills.
 #42 THE LENS OF HEAD AND HANDS
 Yogi Berra once said, “Baseball is 90% mental. The other half is
 physical.” To make sure your game has a more realistic balance of
 mental and physical elements, use the Lens of Head and Hands.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 Are my players looking for mindless action or an intellectual
 challenge?
 Would adding more places that involve puzzle solving in my
 game make it more interesting?
 Are there places where the player can relax their brain and just
 play the game without thinking?
 Can I give the player a choice—succeed either by exercising a
 high level of dexterity or by finding a clever strategy that works
 with a minimum of physical skill?
 If “1” means all physical and “10” means all mental, what
 number would my game get?
 Illustration by Lisa Brown
 This lens works particularly well when used in conjunction with
 Lens #19: The Player.
 Balance Type #6: Competition vs. Cooperation
 Competition and cooperation are basic, animal urges. All higher
 animals are driven to compete against others partly for survival
 and partly to establish their status in the community. Opposite of
 that, there is also a basic instinct to cooperate with others, since a
 team, with its many eyes and hands and its diverse abilities, is
 always more powerful than an individual. Competition and
 cooperation are so important to our survival that we need to
 experiment with them—partly to get better at them and partly to
 learn about our friends and family—so we get a better sense of
 who is good at what and how we can work together. Games
 provide a very socially safe way to explore how the people around
 us behave in stressful situations—this is a secret reason we like to
 play games together.
 When it comes to games, competitive games are more common
 than cooperative ones, though some very interesting cooperative
 games have been created. Overcooked needs players to work
 together to cook dishes in order to save the world. And the board
 game Pandemic is a fascinating example of a game where the
 players do not compete at all, but instead coordinate their efforts
 in an attempt to win the game as a group.
 Some games find interesting ways to blend competition and
 cooperation. The arcade game Joust can be played solo, where a
 player competes against many computer-controlled enemies, or it
 can be played in a two-player mode, where both players compete
 against enemies together in the same arena. There is a tension
 between competition and cooperation in Joust that is very
 interesting: On the competitive side, the players get points based
 on how many enemies they defeat, and they can battle each other
 if they choose. But on the cooperative side, players can get higher
 scores overall if they coordinate their attacks and protect each
 other. It is up to the players to decide whether they are trying to
 beat each other (getting the highest relative score) or trying to beat
 the game (trying to get the highest absolute score). The game plays
 up this tension: some levels are designated “Team Wave”—if both
 players can survive the level, they each get 3000 bonus points.
 Other levels are designated “Gladiator Wave”—the first player who
 defeats the other gets 3000 bonus points. This interesting
 alternation between cooperation and competition gives the game a
 lot of variety and lets players explore whether their partner is
 more interested in cooperation or competition.
 And while competition and cooperation are polar opposites, they
 can be quite conveniently combined into a situation where you get
 the best of both. How? Through team competition! Common in
 athletic sports, the rise of networked gaming has allowed team
 competition to grow and thrive in the world of videogames.
 Competition and cooperation are so important that we need three
 lenses to examine them properly.
 #43 THE LENS OF COMPETITION
 Determining who is most skilled at something is a basic human
 urge. Games of competition can satisfy that urge. Use this lens to
 be sure your competitive game makes people want to win it. Ask
 yourself these questions:
 Does my game give a fair measurement of player skill?
 Do people want to win my game? Why?
 Is winning this game something people can be proud of? Why?
 Can novices meaningfully compete at my game?
 Can experts meaningfully compete at my game?
 Can experts generally be sure they will defeat novices?
 Illustration by Elizabeth Barndollar
 #44 THE LENS OF COOPERATION
 Collaborating and succeeding as a team is a special pleasure that
 can create lasting social bonds. Use this lens to study the
 cooperative aspects of your game. Ask these questions:
 Cooperation requires communication. Do my players have
 enough opportunity to communicate? How could
 communication be enhanced?
 Are my players friends already, or are they strangers? If they
 are strangers, can I help them break the ice?
 Is there synergy (2 + 2 = 5) or antergy (2 + 2 = 3) when the players
 work together? Why?
 Do all the players have the same role, or do they have special
 jobs?
 Cooperation is greatly enhanced when there is no way an
 individual can do a task alone. Does my game have tasks like
 that?
 Tasks that force communication inspire cooperation. Do any of
 my tasks force communication?
 Illustration by Sam Yip
 #45 THE LENS OF COMPETITION VS. COOPERATION
 Balancing competition and cooperation can be done in many
 interesting ways. Use this lens to decide whether they are balanced
 properly in your game. Ask these questions:
 If “1” is competition and “10” is cooperation, what number
 should my game get?
 Can I give players a choice whether to play cooperatively or
 competitively?
 Does my audience prefer competition, cooperation, or a mix?
 Is team competition something that makes sense for my game?
 Is my game more fun with team competition or with solo
 competition?
 Illustration by Diana Patton
 As more and more games go online, more opportunities for
 different types of competition and collaboration become available,
 from casual multiplayer games of chess between two people to
 competing guilds of thousands of players in Massively Multiplayer
 Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). But the psychological
 forces that drive us to enjoy competition and cooperation have not
 changed—the better you can understand and balance these forces,
 the stronger your game will become.
 Balance Type #7: Short vs. Long
 One important thing to balance in every game is the length of the
 gameplay. If the game is too short, players may not get a chance to
 develop and execute meaningful strategies. But if the game goes on
 too long, players may grow bored, or they may avoid the game
 because playing it requires too much of a time commitment.
 The things that determine the length of a game are often subtle.
 The game of Monopoly, for example, when played by the official
 rules, often ends in about ninety minutes. But many players find
 these rules too harsh and modify them to give out cash jackpots
 and ease the restrictions on when you must purchase properties,
 which as a side effect makes the game last much longer, typically
 three hours, or even more.
 The main factors that determine when a game ends are the win or
 lose conditions. By altering these conditions, you can dramatically
 change the length of the game. The designers of the arcade game
 Spy Hunter came up with a very interesting system to balance the
 length of their game. In Spy Hunter, you drive a car that fires
 machine guns at enemies on a highway. In early prototypes, when
 your car was destroyed three times, the game was over. The game
 is very challenging, particularly for novice players, and the
 designers found that these players were having very short games
 and feeling frustrated—so they introduced a new rule: For the first
 ninety seconds of gameplay, the player has an unlimited supply of
 cars—they cannot lose the game during this time. After that time is
 up, they only have a few cars, and when they are destroyed, the
 game is over.
 The designers of Minotaur (who later went on to make Halo) had
 another interesting method of balancing the length of their game.
 Minotaur was a networked game where up to four players would
 run around a maze, gathering weapons and spells, and try to
 destroy the other players in the maze. The game ends when only
 one player is left alive. The designers saw a problem where a
 stalemate could result if players don’t confront each other and the
 game would run the risk of becoming boring. One way to solve the
 problem would be to set a time limit and declare a winner based
 on a point system, but instead they did something much more
 elegant. They created a new rule: after twenty minutes, a bell
 sounds, and “Armageddon” begins; all surviving players are
 suddenly transported to a small room filled with monsters and
 other hazards, where no one can survive for long. This way, the
 game is guaranteed to end in less than twenty-five minutes, in a
 rather dramatic fashion, and one player can still be declared the
 winner. Modern “battle royale” games have followed this same
 model, gradually shrinking the area over a fixed time period,
 eventually forcing all surviving players to encounter one another.
 Balance Type #8: Rewards
 A prince should be quick to reward and slow to punish.
 —Ovid
 Why is it that people will spend so much time playing a
 videogame, just to get a good score? We have talked earlier about
 how games become structures of judgment and that people want
 to be judged. But people don’t just want any judgment—they want
 to be judged favorably. Rewards are the way the game tells the
 player “you have done well.”
 There are several common types of rewards that games tend to
 give. Each is different, but they all have one thing in common—
 they fulfill the player’s desires.
 Praise: The simplest of rewards, the game just tells you that you
 did good work, through either an explicit statement, a special
 sound effect, or even an in-game character speaking to you. It all
 amounts to the same thing: the game has judged you, and it
 approves. Nintendo games are famous for giving players lots of
 secondary praise via sounds and animations for every reward
 they get.
 Points: In many games, points serve no purpose than a measure
 of the player’s success, be it through skill or luck. Sometimes
 these points are a gateway to another reward, but often, this
 measurement of your success is enough—particularly if others
 can see it on a high score list.
 Prolonged play: In many games (pinball, for example), the goal
 of the game is to risk resources (in pinball, your ball) to rack up
 as many points as possible without losing what you have put at
 risk (your ball down the drain). In games with this structure of
 “lives,” the most valuable reward a player can get is an extra
 life. Other games that have time limits reward players by adding
 time to their play session, which really amounts to the same
 thing. Prolonged play is desirable because it allows for a higher
 score and a measure of success, but it also taps into our natural
 human drive for survival. Modern free to play games have a
 slight twist on this with the “energy” model. Run out of energy,
 and play is paused until you pay for more or until a certain
 number of hours pass.
 A gateway: While we have a desire to be judged favorably, we
 also have a desire to explore. Game structures that reward
 success by moving you to new parts of the game satisfy this
 basic urge. Anytime you earn access to a new level or win a key
 to a locked door, you have received a gateway reward.
 Spectacle: We like to enjoy beautiful and interesting things.
 Often, games will play music or show animations as a simple
 reward. The “intermission” at the end of level 2 in Pac-Man was
 probably the first example of this in a videogame. This kind of
 reward seldom satisfies players on its own, so it tends to be
 paired with other types of rewards.
 Expression: Many players like to express themselves within a
 game with special clothes or decorations. Even though these
 often have nothing to do with a goal in the game, they can be
 great fun for a player and satisfy a basic urge to make a mark on
 the world.
 Powers: Becoming more powerful is something that everyone
 desires in real life, and in a game, becoming more powerful is
 likely to improve the game’s judgment of a player’s success.
 These powers can come in many forms: getting “kinged” in
 checkers, becoming tall in Super Mario World, speeding up in
 Sonic the Hedgehog, and getting special weaponry in Call of
 Duty. The thing all powers have in common is that they give you
 a way to reach your goal more quickly than you could before.
 Resources: While casino games and lotteries reward the player
 with real money, videogames more frequently reward the
 player with resources they can only use in the game (e.g., food,
 energy, ammunition, hit points). Some games, instead of giving
 resources directly, give virtual money that the player can choose
 how to spend. Usually the things that one can buy with this
 money are resources, powers, prolonged play, or expression.
 Free to play games, of course, blur this distinction by letting you
 spend real money to get virtual money (but almost never the
 other way around).
 Status: High leaderboard rankings, special achievements, or
 anything else that gives a player higher status in the community
 of players can be very desirable award, especially to competitive
 players.
 Completion: Completing all the goals in a game gives a special
 feeling of closure to players that they seldom get from solving
 problems in real life. In many games, this is the ultimate reward
 —when you have reached this point, there is often no point in
 playing the game any further.
 Most of the rewards you will encounter in games fall into one or
 more of the aforementioned categories, though these categories
 are often combined in interesting ways. Many games reward the
 player with points, but when the points reach a certain score, the
 player gets a bonus reward of an extra life (resource, prolonged
 play). Often, players will get a special item (resource) that lets
 them do something new (powers). Other games let a player enter
 their name or draw a picture (expression) if they get a high score
 (points). Some games show a special animation (spectacle) at the
 end (completion) if the player unlocks every area in the game
 (gateway).
 But how to balance these rewards? That is, how many should be
 given out, and which ones? This is a difficult question, and the
 answer is different for almost every game. Generally, the more
 types of rewards you can work into your game, the better. Two
 other reward rules of thumb from the world of psychology include
 the following:
 People have a tendency to get acclimated to rewards the more
 they receive them, and what was rewarding an hour ago is no
 big deal now. One simple method many games use to overcome
 this is to gradually increase the value of the rewards as the
 player progresses in the game. In a way, this is a cheesy trick,
 but it works—even when you know the designer is doing it and
 why, it still feels very rewarding to suddenly get bigger rewards
 in conjunction with getting to a new part of a game.
 The power of variable rewards over fixed ones has been proven
 in thousands of psychological experiments. For example, if
 every monster you defeat gives you ten points, that gets
 predictable and boring pretty quickly—but if every monster you
 defeat has a 2/3 chance of giving you zero points, but a 1/3
 chance of giving you thirty points, this stays rewarding for a
 much longer time, even though you are receiving the same
 number of points on average. It’s like bringing donuts to work—
 if you bring them every Friday, people will come to expect them
 and take them for granted. But if you bring them every now and
 then on random days, they are a delightful surprise each time.
 Part of what makes triangularity so interesting to players is its
 connection to variable reward.
 #46 THE LENS OF REWARD
 Everyone likes to be told they are doing a good job. Ask these
 questions to determine if your game is giving out the right rewards
 in the right amounts at the right times:
 What rewards is my game giving out now? Can it give out others
 as well?
 Are players excited when they get rewards in my game, or are
 they bored by them? Why?
 Getting a reward you don’t understand is like getting no reward
 at all. Do my players understand the rewards they are getting?
 Are the rewards my game gives out too regular? Can they be
 given out in a more variable way?
 How are my rewards related to one another? Is there a way that
 they could be better connected?
 How are my rewards building? Too fast, too slow, or just right?
 Illustration by Sam Yip
 Balancing rewards is different for every game. Not only do you
 have to worry about giving out the right ones, but you have to
 worry about giving them at the right times in the right amounts.
 This can only be determined through trial and error—even then, it
 probably won’t be right for everyone. When trying to balance
 rewards, it is hard to be perfect—you often have to settle for “good
 enough.”
 Balance Type #9: Punishment
 The idea of a game that punishes the player can seem a little
 strange—aren’t games supposed to be fun? Paradoxically, though,
 punishment used properly can increase the enjoyment that
 players get from games. Here are some reasons that a game might
 punish players:
 Punishment creates endogenous value: We’ve talked about
 the importance of creating value within a game (Lens #7:
 Endogenous Value). Resources in a game are worth more if there
 is a chance they can be taken away.
 Taking risks is exciting: Particularly if the potential rewards
 are balanced against the risks! But you can only take risks if
 there are negative consequences or punishments. Giving players
 a chance to risk terrible consequences makes success much,
 much sweeter.
 Possible punishment increases challenge: We’ve discussed the
 importance of challenging players—when failure means a
 punishing setback in the game, the challenge of play increases.
 Increasing the punishment that comes with failure can be one
 way to increase the challenge.
 Here are some common types of punishment used in games. Many
 of them are simply rewards in reverse.
 Shaming: The opposite of praise, this is simply the game telling
 you that you are doing a bad job. This can happen with explicit
 messages (e.g., “Missed” or “Defeated!”) or with discouraging
 animations, sound effects, and music.
 Loss of points: Players find this type of punishment so painful
 that it is relatively rare in videogames or even in traditional
 games and sports. Maybe it is less an issue of it being painful
 and more of the fact that when players can lose points, it
 cheapens the value of the earned points. Points that can’t be
 taken away are very valuable—points that could be subtracted
 on the next bad move have less endogenous value.
 Shortened play: “Losing a life” in a game is an example of this
 kind of punishment. Some games that work on a timer will
 shorten play by taking time off the clock.
 Terminated play: Game over, man.
 Setback: When, after dying, a game returns you to the start of a
 level, or to the last checkpoint, this is a setback punishment. In
 games that are all about proceeding to the end, a setback is a
 very logical punishment. The balancing challenge is to figure
 out exactly where the checkpoints belong to make the
 punishments seem meaningful, but not unreasonable.
 Removal of powers: The designer must tread carefully here—
 players greatly treasure the powers they have earned, and to
 have them taken away may feel unfair to them. In Ultima
 Online, players who were killed in battle turned into ghosts. To
 come back to life, they had to find their way to a shrine. If they
 took too long getting there, they would lose valuable skill points
 that had taken weeks to earn. Many players felt this was too
 harsh a punishment. One way to remove powers fairly is to take
 them away temporarily. Some amusement parks feature
 bumper car battle tanks that shoot tennis balls at each other.
 The tanks have targets on each side, and if an opponent hits one
 of your targets with a tennis ball, your tank goes into an
 uncontrolled spin for five seconds and your gun becomes
 inoperable during that time.
 Resource depletion: Loss of money, goods, ammunition,
 shields, or hit points fall into this category. This is one of the
 most common types of game punishment.
 One thing that psychological study has shown is that reward is
 always a better tool for reinforcement than punishment.
 Whenever possible, if you need to encourage a player to do
 something, it is better to use a reward than a punishment, if you
 can. One great example from Blizzard’s game Diablo is the
 business of gathering food in games. Many game designers at one
 time or another get the idea that they would like to make a game
 with a “realistic” system of food gathering. That is, if you do not
 gather food, your character suffers from diminished powers
 because of hunger. Blizzard implemented this and found that
 players considered it a nuisance—they must perform a fairly
 boring activity or suffer a penalty. So, Blizzard turned it around
 and implemented a system where your player never gets hungry,
 but if they do eat food, they get a temporary boost in abilities.
 Players liked this much better. By changing a punishment into a
 reward, they were able to turn the same activity from a negative to
 a positive.
 When punishment is necessary, however, how much to use is a
 delicate question. When developing Toontown Online, we had to
 face the question of what was to be the harshest punishment in a
 light, fun MMORPG for kids. We ultimately decided on a
 combination of light punishments for “dying,” which in Toontown
 is called “becoming sad,” for the game is so lighthearted that
 players do not have a life meter, but rather a laff meter, and the
 enemy’s goal is not to kill the player outright, but just to make
 them sad enough to stop acting like a cartoon character. When
 your laff meter goes to zero in Toontown, these things happen:
 You are teleported from the battle area back to a playground
 zone (setback). This setback is very minor—the distance is
 usually only a minute’s walk.
 All the items you are carrying disappear (resource depletion).
 This is also minor—the items are inexpensive and can be earned
 again in about ten minutes of play.
 Your character hangs his or her head sadly (shame).
 For about thirty seconds, your character walks at a painfully
 slow pace and is unable to leave the playground zone or engage
 in any meaningful gameplay (temporary removal of powers).
 Your laff meter (hit points) goes to zero (resource depletion),
 and the player will probably want to wait for it to increase (it
 increases over time in a playground zone) before exploring
 again.
 This combination of light punishments is just enough to make
 players use caution in battles. We tried lighter versions, and it
 made battles boring—there was no risk in them. We tried tougher
 versions, and it made players too cautious in battles. Eventually
 we settled on a combination that struck an appropriate balance
 between encouraging caution and risk in the players.
 It is crucial that all punishment in a game is for things that the
 player is able to understand and prevent. When punishment feels
 random and unstoppable, it makes the player feel a complete lack
 of control, which is a very bad feeling, and the player will quickly
 label the game “unfair.” Once this happens, a player is seldom
 willing to engage in a game further.
 Players dislike punishment, of course, and you must be thoughtful
 about whether there are tricky ways that players can avoid your
 punishment. Richard Garriott’s game Ultima III, though greatly
 beloved, contained very strict punishment. It was a game that took
 close to hundred hours to complete, and if your four characters
 perished while you were playing, your game state was completely
 erased, and you had to begin the game again! Players generally felt
 this was unfair, and as a result, it was common practice if your
 characters were near death to shut off the computer before the
 game had a chance to erase the saved game, effectively dodging
 the punishment.
 It is worth mentioning that there is a certain class of player that
 lives for games that are insanely challenging and loves games that
 have strong punishments (cough, Dark Souls, cough), because they
 can feel so proud about having beaten such a difficult game. These
 players are a fringe group, though, and even they have their limits.
 They will quickly call a game “unfair” if they cannot see how to
 prevent punishment.
 #47 THE LENS OF PUNISHMENT
 Punishment must be used delicately, since after all, players are in a
 game of their own free will. Balanced appropriately, it will give
 everything in your game more meaning, and players will have a
 real sense of pride when they succeed at your game. To examine
 the punishment in your game, ask yourself these questions:
 What are the punishments in my game?
 Why am I punishing the players? What do I hope to achieve by
 it?
 Do my punishments seem fair to the players? Why or why not?
 Is there a way to turn these punishments into rewards and get
 the same or a better effect?
 Are my strong punishments balanced against commensurately
 strong rewards?
 Illustration by Chris Daniel
 Balance Type #10: Freedom vs. Controlled Experience
 Games are interactive, and the point of interactivity is to give the
 player control, or freedom, over the experience. But how much
 control? Giving the player control over everything is not only more
 work for the game developer; it can also be boring for the player!
 After all, a game isn’t meant to be a simulation of real life, but
 rather more interesting than real life—this sometimes means
 cutting out boring, complex, or unnecessary decisions and actions.
 One simple kind of game balance that every designer must
 consider is where to give the player freedom and how much
 freedom to give.
 In Aladdin’s Magic Carpet VR Adventure, we were faced with a very
 difficult problem in the final scene within the Cave of Wonders. To
 make the conflict with Jafar, the villain, be as exciting as possible,
 we needed to take control of the camera. But we didn’t want to
 compromise the freedom that players felt in the scene. Observing
 players during playtests, though, they all wanted to do the same
 thing—fly to the top of the hill where Jafar was standing. After
 several experiments, we made a bold decision—we would take
 away freedom from the players in this scene so they could have a
 perfect flight up the hill to confront Jafar. This was in sharp
 contrast to the rest of the experience, where players could fly
 wherever they wanted with no restrictions. In our tests, not a
 single one of our playtesters noticed we had taken away their
 freedom, because the game had trained them that they could go
 wherever they wanted and this scene happened to be arranged
 such that everyone who viewed it wanted the same thing. We
 decided that this was a case where the balance should fall on the
 side of controlled experience instead of freedom, because it made
 for a better experience for the player.
 Balance Type #11: Simple vs. Complex
 It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing
 left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
 —Antoine de Saint-Exupery
 Simplicity and complexity of game mechanics can seem very
 paradoxical. Calling a game “simple” can be a criticism, such as “so
 simple it is boring.” It can also be a compliment: “so simple and
 elegant!” Complexity can also be a double-edged sword. Games are
 criticized as “overly complex and confusing” or complimented as
 “richly and intricately complex.” To make sure your game has the
 “good simplicity” and the “good complexity,” but not the bad, we
 need to look at the nature of simplicity and complexity in games
 and how to strike the right balance between them.
 So much praise is heaped on classic games for being ingeniously
 simple that it might make you think that making a complex game
 is a bad thing. Let’s look at the different kinds of complexity that
 show up in games:
 Innate complexity: When the very rules of the game get very
 complex, I call this innate complexity. This is the kind of
 complexity that often gets a bad name. It generally arises either
 because the designer is trying to simulate a complex real-world
 situation or because extra rules need to be added to a game in
 order to balance it. When you see a ruleset with lots of
 “exception cases,” this is generally a ruleset that is innately
 complex. Games like this can be hard to learn, but some people
 really enjoy mastering the complex rulesets.
 Emergent complexity: This is the kind of complexity that
 everyone praises. Just as the simple structure of H O lets myriad
 complex snowflakes appear, games like Go have a very simple
 rulesets that give rise to billions of intricate, complex game
 situations. We call this emergent complexity: when games are
 praised for being simple and complex at the same time, it is the
 emergent complexity that is being praised.
 Emergent complexity can be difficult to achieve, but is worth the
 effort. Ideally, one can create a simple ruleset out of which
 emerges the thing every game designer strives for: balanced
 surprises. If you can design a simple game that becomes a factory
 for a never-ending stream of balanced surprises, people will play
 your game for centuries to come. The only way to find out whether
 you have achieved this is to keep playing and changing your game
 over and over until the surprises start to come. Of course, using
 Lens #30: Emergence, can help, too.
 So, if emergent complexity is so great, why would anyone make a
 game that is innately complex? Well, sometimes you need the
 innate complexity to simulate a real-world situation, such as recreating a historical battle. Other times, you add more innate
 2
 complexity to balance your game a little better. The pawns in chess
 have movement rules that are innately complex: when they move,
 they can only move forward one square, into an unoccupied space,
 unless it is their first move, in which case they can move one or
 two spaces. One exception to this is when they are capturing
 another piece; in that case, they can only move diagonally
 forward, but only one square, even if it is their first move.
 This rule has some innate complexity (some keywords of innate
 complexity: “unless,” “except,” “exception,” “but,” and “even if”),
 but it is one that evolved gradually in an attempt to make sure
 pawns had a behavior that was well balanced and interesting.
 And, in fact, it is well worth it, for this small amount of innate
 complexity blossoms into a great deal more emergent complexity
 —particularly because the pawns can only move forward but
 capture diagonally—that leads to fascinatingly complex pawn
 structures that can form on the board that would never be
 possible with a simpler ruleset.
 #48 THE LENS OF SIMPLICITY/COMPLEXITY
 Striking the right balance between simplicity and complexity is
 difficult and must be done for the right reasons. Use this lens to
 help your game become one in which meaningful complexity
 arises out of a simple system. Ask yourself these questions:
 What elements of innate complexity do I have in my game?
 Is there a way this innate complexity could be turned into
 emergent complexity?
 Do elements of emergent complexity arise from my game? If
 not, why not?
 Are there elements of my game that are too simple?
 Illustration by Tom Smith
 Natural vs. Artificial Balancing
 Designers must be careful when adding innate complexity in an
 attempt to balance a game, however. Adding too many rules to get
 the behavior you want is sometimes called “artificial balancing” as
 opposed to the “natural balancing” that can come when a desired
 effect arises naturally from the interactions in a game. Consider
 Space Invaders: it has a wonderful balance of increasing difficulty
 that forms very naturally. The invaders adhere to a very simple
 rule—the fewer there are, the faster they go. From this, some very
 desirable properties emerge:
 1. The game starts slow and speeds up the more the player
 succeeds.
 2. It is easy to hit targets in the beginning, but the more the player
 succeeds, the harder it is to hit targets.
 3. Those two properties are not the result of innate rules, but
 rather nicely balanced properties that emerge from a single
 simple rule.
 Elegance
 We call simple systems that perform robustly in complex
 situations elegant. Elegance is one of the most desirable qualities
 in any game, because it means you have a game that is simple to
 learn and understand but is full of interesting emergent
 complexity. And while elegance can seem somewhat ineffable and
 hard to capture, you can easily rate the elegance of a given game
 element by counting the number of purposes it has. For example,
 the dots in Pac-Man serve the following purposes:
 1. They give the player a short-term goal: “Eat the dots close to
 me.”
 2. They give the player a long-term goal: “Clear all the dots from
 the board.”
 3. They slow the player down slightly when eating them, creating
 good triangularity (safer to go down a corridor with no dots,
 riskier to go down one with dots).
 4. They give the player points, which are a measure of success.
 5. They give the player points, which can earn an extra life.
 Five different purposes, just for those simple dots! This makes
 them very elegant. You can imagine a version of Pac-Man where
 the dots did not do all those things; for example, if the dots didn’t
 slow the player down and didn’t award points or extra lives, they
 would have less purpose and be less elegant. There is an old
 Hollywood rule of thumb: if a line in a script doesn’t serve at least
 two purposes, it should be cut. Many designers, when they find
 their game doesn’t feel right, first think, “Hmm… what do I need to
 add?” Often, a better question is, “What do I need to remove?” One
 thing I like to do is look for all the things in my game that are only
 serving one purpose and think about which of them can be
 combined.
 In working on Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Buccaneer
 Gold, we originally planned to have two main characters: a
 friendly host at the start of the game, whose only job was to
 explain how to play, and a villain at the end of the game, whose
 only purpose was to engage in a dramatic final battle. This was a
 short (five minutes) game for Disneyworld, and it felt strange to
 have to use up time to introduce both of these two characters, and
 it was a strain on the budget as well to make them both look good.
 We started talking about just cutting either the tutorial at the
 beginning or the battle at the end, but they were both very
 important for a fulfilling game. Then we hit on an idea: what if the
 host at the beginning also was the villain at the end? This not only
 saved us development time but saved game time since we only
 needed to introduce one character. Further, it made the character
 seem more interesting and a more credible pirate (since he tricks
 the player), and it also created a surprising plot twist! By giving
 this one character several purposes, it made for a game structure
 we felt was very elegant indeed.
 #49 THE LENS OF ELEGANCE
 Most “classic games” are considered to be masterpieces of
 elegance. Use this lens to make your game as elegant as possible.
 Ask yourself these questions:
 What are the elements of my game?
 What are the purposes of each element? Count these up to give
 the element an “elegance rating.”
 For elements with only one or two purposes, can some of these
 be combined into each other or removed altogether?
 For elements with several purposes, is it possible for them to
 take on even more?
 Illustration by Joshua Seaver
 Character
 As important as elegance is, though, there is such a thing as honing
 a thing down too far. Consider the leaning tower of Pisa. Its
 significant tilt serves no purpose—it is an accidental flaw. The Lens
 of Elegance would have us remove its tilt and turn it into the
 perfectly straight tower of Pisa. But who would want to visit that?
 It might be elegant, but it would be boring—it would have no
 character. Think of the tokens in Monopoly: a hat, a shoe, a dog, a
 statue, and a battleship. They have nothing to do with a game
 about real estate. Arguably, they should be themed as little
 landlords. But no one would do that, because it would strip
 Monopoly of its character. Why is Mario a plumber? It has almost
 nothing to do with what he does or the world he lives in. But this
 weird inconsistency gives him character.
 #50 THE LENS OF CHARACTER
 Elegance and character are opposites. They are like miniature
 versions of simplicity and complexity and must be kept in balance.
 To make sure your game has lovable, defining quirks, ask yourself
 these questions:
 Is there anything strange in my game that players talk about
 excitedly?
 Does my game have funny qualities that make it unique?
 Does my game have flaws that players like?
 Illustration by Kyle Gabler
 Balance Type #12: Detail vs. Imagination
 As we discussed in Chapter 10, the game is not the experience—
 games are simply structures that engender mental models in the
 mind of the player. In doing so, the games provide some level of
 detail but leave it to the player to fill in the rest. Deciding exactly
 what details should be provided and which should be left to the
 player’s imagination is a different but important kind of balance to
 strike. Here are some tips for how to do it well.
 Only detail what you can do well: Players have rich, detailed
 imaginations. If there is something you need to present that is of
 lower quality than your players will be able to imagine, don’t do
 it—let the imagination do the heavy lifting! Let’s say you would
 like to play recorded dialog for your whole game, but you don’t
 have the budget for quality voice actors or you don’t have the
 storage space for all that dialog. An engineer might suggest
 trying speech synthesis, that is, letting the computer speak for
 the characters. After all, it is cheap, requires no storage space,
 and can be tuned somewhat to sound like different characters,
 right? All that is true—but also, it will make everyone sound like
 a robot, and unless you are making a game about robots, your
 players will not be able to take it seriously. An even cheaper
 alternative is to use subtitles. Some people might claim that this
 means there is no voice at all! But that isn’t true. The player’s
 imagination will fill in a voice—a voice far better than the one
 you will be able to synthesize. This same idea goes for just about
 everything in the game: scenery, sound effects, characters,
 animations, and special effects. If you can’t do it well, try to find
 a way to leave it to the player’s imagination.
 Give details the imagination can use: Players have a lot to
 learn when they come to a new game—any clear details you can
 give them that make the game easier to understand will be
 welcome. Consider the game of chess. It is mostly a somewhat
 abstract game, but some interesting details have been filled in.
 The game is set in a medieval era, and the pieces, which easily
 could have been numbered or just made as abstract shapes, are
 given the roles of people in a medieval court. It isn’t a lot of
 detail—the kings, for example, don’t have names, and we know
 nothing about their kingdoms or their policies—but none of that
 matters. In fact, if this were to be a real simulation of an army
 between two kingdoms, the rules of movement and capture
 would make no sense at all! What matters about the “kings” in
 chess is that the tallest of the chess pieces has movements that
 are slightly evocative of a real king. He is important and must
 move slowly and must be carefully guarded. Any other details
 can be left to the imaginations of the players to fill in as they see
 fit. Similarly, picturing the “knights” as horses helps us
 remember that they can jump around the board in ways the
 others cannot. By giving details that help our imaginations
 better grasp their functionality, the game becomes much more
 accessible to us.
 Familiar worlds do not need much detail: If you are creating a
 simulation of something that the player is likely to know very
 well, such as a city street or a house interior, you have little
 need to simulate every little detail—since the player already
 knows what these places are like, they will quickly fill them in
 with imagination, if you give them a few relevant details. If the
 point of your game, though, is to educate someone about a place
 they have never been before, imagination will be of little help,
 and you will find it necessary to fill in a great deal of detail.
 Use the binocular effect: When spectators bring binoculars to
 an opera or a sporting event, they use them mostly at the
 beginning of the event, to get a close-up view of the different
 players or performers. Once this close-up view has been put into
 memory, the glasses can be set aside, for now the imagination
 goes to work, filling in the close-ups on the tiny distant figures.
 Video games replicate this effect all the time, often by showing a
 close-up of a character at the beginning of the game who is
 going to be an inch-high sprite for the rest of the experience. It
 is an easy way to use a little detail to get a lot of imagination.
 Give details that inspire imagination: Again, chess is a great
 example. To be able to control all the members of a royal army
 is a fantasy that the mind quickly takes to—and of course, it is a
 fantasy—it only has to be tied to reality by a thin thread. Giving
 players situations they can easily fantasize about lets their
 imagination take wing, and all kinds of imaginary details will
 quickly crystallize around one little detail that the designer
 provided.
 We will talk more about the balance between detail and
 imagination in Chapter 20: Characters, since deciding what to
 leave to the imagination is a key question when it comes to
 characters in games. Because the imagination of the player is
 where the gameplaying experience takes place, the Lens of
 Imagination is an important tool.
 #51 THE LENS OF IMAGINATION
 All games have some element of imagination and some element of
 connection to reality. Use this lens to help find the balance
 between detail and imagination. Ask yourself these questions:
 What must the player understand to play my game?
 Can some element of imagination help them understand that
 better?
 What high-quality, realistic details can we provide in this game?
 What details would be low quality if we provided them? Can
 imagination fill the gap instead?
 Can I give details that the imagination will be able to reuse
 again and again?
 What details I provide inspire imagination?
 What details I provide stifle imagination?
 Illustration by Elizabeth Barndollar
 Game Balancing Methodologies
 We have discussed a great number of things that can be balanced
 within games. Let us now turn our attention to general methods of
 balancing that can be broadly applied to many types of balancing.
 You may find you can use some of these together, but others are
 contradictory—this is because different designers prefer different
 methods. You must experiment to find the method that is right for
 you.
 Use the Lens of the Problem Statement: Earlier, we discussed
 the importance of clearly stating your design problems before
 jumping to solutions. An out-of-balance game is a problem that
 will benefit greatly from a clear problem statement. Many
 designers end up making a mess of their games by jumping in
 with balancing solutions before they have thought clearly about
 what the problem really is.
 Doubling and halving:
 You never know what is enough unless you know what is more
 than enough.
 —William Blake, Proverbs of Hell
 The rule of doubling and halving suggests that when changing
 values to balance your game, you will waste time by changing
 them by small amounts. Instead, start by doubling or halving
 your values in the direction they need to go. For example, if a
 rocket does 100 points of damage and you think that perhaps
 that is too much, don’t decrease it by 10 or 20, but rather set the
 damage value to 50 and see how that works. If that is too low,
 then try a number halfway between 50 and 100. By pushing the
 values farther than your intuition tells you, the limits of good
 balance start to become clear more quickly.
 This rule is often attributed to designer Brian Reynolds. I
 contacted him to ask about it, and he had this to say:
 That’s indeed a principle I regularly use (and espouse), but the
 original credit for it goes to none other than the illustrious Sid
 Meier. I often tell the story of how he took me aside as a young
 designer (when he caught me repeatedly changing something by
 10%, I’m sure) back in the early 90s when we were working on
 Colonization, and it’s probably through the retelling of the story
 that it got associated with me. The point of the rule is to change
 something so that you can actually feel the difference right away.
 That gives you a much clearer idea of the workings of the variable
 you are changing, and saves you getting lost in the weeds
 wondering if you have even had an effect (or worse, seeing a
 change where none has really been accomplished, perhaps
 because of an unusual series of random numbers).
 Train your intuition by guessing exactly: The more game
 design you do, the better your intuition will become. You can
 train your intuition for better game balancing by getting in the
 practice of guessing exactly. For example, if a projectile in your
 game is moving at 10 feet per second and you get the feeling
 that is too slow, concentrate on what the exact number might
 be. Maybe your intuition tells you that 13 is too low, but 14 is a
 little too high. “13.7? No… Maybe 13.8. Yes—13.8 just feels right.”
 Once you have arrived at this intuitive guess, plug it in and see.
 You might find it is too low, or too high, or maybe even exactly
 right. Regardless, you will have just given your intuition some
 excellent data for when you guess next time. You can experience
 the same thing with your microwave oven. It is hard to know
 exactly what time to put in when reheating leftovers. And if you
 just make rough guesses, rounded to thirty seconds, you’ll never
 get much better at guessing. But if you guess exactly every time
 you put food in the microwave (1:40? Too hot… 1:20? Too cold…
 1:30? Hmm… No, 1:32 seems right), in a couple months, you will
 be able to make surprisingly accurate guesses because you will
 have trained your intuition. Some people believe that the body’s
 uncanny ability to wake at specific times with startling precision
 is related to the subconscious mind’s ability to perform secret
 arithmetic.
 Document your model: You should write down what you think
 the relationships are between the things you are balancing. This
 will help clarify your thoughts and give you a framework to
 record the results of your game balancing experiments.
 Tune your model as you tune your game: As was mentioned
 in the “asymmetrical game” section near the start of this
 chapter, as you experiment with balancing your game, you will
 develop a better model about how things are related within the
 game. With each balancing experiment that you try, you should
 note not only whether it improved your game but whether the
 experiment matches your model for how game mechanics are
 related. Then you should alter your model if it doesn’t match
 what you expected. Writing down your observations and your
 model helps a great deal!
 Plan to balance: You know you are going to have to balance
 your game. As you are designing it, you might have a pretty
 good idea of what aspects of it you will need to balance. Take
 advantage of that, and put in systems that make it easy to
 change the values you expect to have to balance. If you can
 change these values while the game is running, that is even
 better. Better still is to have a content management system that
 lets you continue to balance the game even after it ships. The
 Rule of the Loop is in full force while you are game balancing,
 and in the modern world of online game distribution, you can
 (and must!) keep looping well after the game has shipped.
 Let the players do it: Every once in a while, you will run into a
 designer who has this bright idea: “Let’s let the players balance
 the game! That way they can pick the values that are right for
 them!” This sounds good in theory (who wouldn’t want a game
 that was custom tailored for a personalized level of challenge?)
 but tends to fail in practice because players have a conflict of
 interest. Yes, they want the game to give them a challenge, but at
 the same time, they want to win the game as easily as they can!
 And when all the values are set that way (Look at me! I have a
 million lives!), it is a quick rush of fun that quickly gets boring
 since there is no challenge left. Worst of all, returning from an
 overpowered game to a reasonable game balance is a little like
 trying to kick heroin—the lack of power makes the ordinary
 game feel limiting and dull. The Monopoly example serves us
 well again: people who play with the player-created rule that
 you get a jackpot when you land on free parking complain that
 the game goes on too long, but if you convince them to play by
 the official rules (that have no such jackpots), they often
 complain that it seems less exciting than the old way. There are
 times when letting the players balance the game is a good idea
 (usually through difficulty levels), but mostly, balancing the
 game is better left to the designers.
 Balancing Game Economies
 One of the more challenging structures to balance in any game is a
 “game economy.” The definition of a game economy is simple. We
 talked earlier about how to balance meaningful decisions, and that
 is just what any economy is defined by—two meaningful decisions,
 namely,
 How will I earn money?
 How will I spend the money I have earned?
 Now, “money” in this context can be anything that can be traded
 for something else. If your game lets players earn skill points and
 then spend them on different skills, those skill points are money.
 What is important is that players have the two choices described
 earlier—that is what makes an economy. What makes for a
 meaningful economy is the depth and meaning in those two
 choices. And these two choices are usually in a loop, because
 usually players spend their money in ways that will help them
 earn more money, which will give them more opportunities to
 spend money, and so on. This alternating pattern of earning and
 spending is very appealing to players and shows up in many
 guises, a sort of alternating ratchet that moves players forward,
 like walking on two legs.
 Balancing economies, particularly in large online multiplayer
 games, where players can buy or sell items to each other, can be
 very difficult, because you are really balancing many of the things
 we have already discussed at once:
 Fairness: Do any players get unfair advantage by buying certain
 things or earning a certain way?
 Challenge: Can players buy something that makes the game too
 easy for them? Is earning money to buy what they want too
 hard?
 Choices: Do players have enough ways to earn money? To
 spend money?
 Chance: Is earning money more skill based or chance based?
 Cooperation: Can players pool their funds in interesting ways?
 Can they collude in a way that exploits “holes” in the economy?
 Time: Does it take too long to earn money, or is it earned too
 quickly?
 Rewards: Is it rewarding to earn money? To spend money?
 Punishment: How do punishments affect a player’s ability to
 earn and spend money?
 Freedom: Can players buy what they want and earn the way
 they want?
 There are many different ways to balance economies in games,
 from controlling how much money is created by the game to
 controlling the different ways to earn and spend it. But the goals of
 balancing a game economy are the same as balancing any other
 game mechanics—to be sure the players can enjoy a fun,
 challenging game.
 #52 THE LENS OF ECONOMY
 Giving a game an economy can give it surprising depth and a life
 all its own. But like all living things, it can be difficult to control.
 Use this lens to keep your economy in balance:
 How can my players earn money? Should there be other ways?
 What can my players buy? Why?
 Is money too easy to get? Too hard? How can I change this?
 Are choices about earning and spending meaningful ones?
 Is a universal currency a good idea in my game, or should there
 be specialized currencies?
 Illustration by Sam Yip
 Dynamic Game Balancing
 Dreamy young game designers frequently speak of their desire to
 create a system that will “adjust to the player’s skill level on the
 fly.” That is, if the game is too easy or too difficult for a player, the
 game will detect this and change the difficulty until it is at the right
 level of challenge for the player. And this is a beautiful dream. But
 it is a dream that is rife with some surprising problems.
 It spoils the reality of the world: Players want to believe, on
 some level, that the game world they are playing in is real. But if
 they know that all of their opponents’ abilities are not absolute,
 but relative to the player’s skill level, it damages the illusion that
 these opponents are fixed challenges to be met and mastered.
 It is exploitable: If players know the game will get easier when
 they play badly, they may choose to play badly just to make an
 upcoming part of the game easy to get through, completely
 defeating the purpose of the self-balancing system.
 Players improve with practice: The Incredible Hulk for the
 PlayStation 2 caused some controversy by making the enemies
 get easier if you were defeated by them more than a certain
 number of times. Many players felt insulted by this, and others
 felt disappointed—they wanted to keep practicing until they
 could master the challenge, and the game took away that
 pleasure.
 This is not to say that dynamic game balancing is a dead end. I
 only mean to point out that implementing such a system is not so
 straightforward. I suspect that advances in this area will involve
 some very clever, counterintuitive ideas.
 The Big Picture
 Game balancing is a big topic both in breadth and depth. I have
 tried to cover as many major points as possible, but each game has
 unique things that need to be balanced, so it would be impossible
 to cover everything. Use the Lens of Balance to look for any
 balancing problems the other lenses might have missed.
 #53 THE LENS OF BALANCE
 There are many types of game balance, and each is important.
 However, it is easy to get lost in the details and forget the big
 picture. Use this simple lens to get out of the mire, and ask yourself
 the only important question:
 Does my game feel right? Why or why not?
 Illustration by Sam Yip
 Other Reading to Consider
 Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design by Ernest Adams
 and Joris Dormans. I mentioned this in the last chapter, but I’ll
 mention it here again, since so much of it is about practical
 techniques for game balancing.
 Design in Detail: Changing the Time between Shots for the
 Sniper Rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 Seconds for Halo 3 by Jaime
 Griesemer. This was a talk that Jaime gave at GDC 2010 that
 deals head on with the fact that balancing tiny values can have a
 tremendous impact on gameplay.
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
 Game Mechanics Support Puzzles
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-14
 FIGURE
 14.1
 Puzzles are wonderful mechanisms that form key parts of many
 games. Sometimes they are very visible, and other times they
 are so enmeshed into the gameplay as to make them hidden,
 but what all puzzles have in common is that they make the
 player stop and think. Examining with Lens #42: Head and
 Hands, puzzles are firmly on the “head” side. It can be argued
 that any time a player stops during gameplay to think, they are
 solving a puzzle. The relationship between puzzles and games is
 tricky. In Chapter 4: Game, we talked about how every game is
 “a problem-solving activity, approached playfully.” Puzzles, too,
 are problem-solving activities—does this make them games? In
 this chapter, we will explore how to make good puzzles, and
 what the best ways are to incorporate puzzles into games. But
 first, we too should stop and think to better understand the
 puzzle–game relationship.
 The Puzzle of Puzzles
 There is much debate about whether puzzles are “really
 games.” Certainly, puzzles are often part of games, but does that
 mean they are games? In a sense, puzzles are just “fun
 problems.” If you go back and review Chapter 4, you will find
 that, surprisingly, “fun problem” meets the many qualifications
 that we listed for the definition of a game. So, maybe each
 puzzle is really a kind of game?
 Something bothers people about calling puzzles games. A jigsaw
 puzzle doesn’t feel like a game nor does a crossword puzzle.
 Would you call Rubik’s Cube a game? Probably not. So what is
 missing from puzzles that we are inclined to exclude them from
 our definition of games? First of all, most puzzles are just single
 player, but that can hardly be an objection—many things we
 immediately classify as games, from solitaire to Final Fantasy,
 are single player. They still have conflict; it is just between the
 player and system, not between player and player.
 A young Chris Crawford once made the bold statement that
 puzzles are not even really interactive, since they don’t actively
 respond to the player. This is questionable, partly because some
 puzzles do indeed respond to the player, particularly puzzles in
 videogames. Some people have suggested that any game that
 both has an ending and is guaranteed to give the same output to
 a player who always gives the same input is really a puzzle, and
 not a game. This would mean many story-based adventure
 games, such as Zork, Zelda, or Uncharted, might not qualify as
 games at all, but only as puzzles. But this doesn’t really ring
 true.
 Perhaps puzzles are kind of like penguins. The first explorers to
 see penguins must have been kind of surprised, and probably at
 a loss as to how to classify them, thinking something like “Well,
 they kind of look like birds, but they can’t be birds, because
 birds can fly. They must be something else.” But further
 examination leads to the conclusion that penguins are indeed
 birds: just birds that can’t fly. So what is it that puzzles can’t do?
 Puzzlemaster Scott Kim once said that “A puzzle is fun, and has
 a right answer.” The irony of that is that once you find that right
 answer, the puzzle ceases to be fun. Or as Emily Dickinson once
 put it:
 The Riddle we can guess
 We speedily despise—
 Not anything is stale so long
 As Yesterday’s surprise.
 The thing that really seems to bother people about calling
 puzzles games is that they are not replayable. Once you figure
 out the best strategy, you can solve the puzzle every time, and it
 is no longer fun. Games are not usually this way. Most games
 have enough dynamic elements that each time you play you are
 confronted again with a new set of problems to solve.
 Sometimes this is because you have an intelligent human
 opponent (checkers, chess, backgammon, etc.), and sometimes it
 is because the game is able to generate lots of different
 challenges for you, either through ever-advancing goals (setting
 a new high score record) or through some kind of rich
 challenge-generation mechanism (solitaire, Rubik’s Cube, Tetris,
 etc.)
 In Chapter 12: Balance, we gave a name to the situation when a
 single strategy will defeat a game every time: a “dominant
 strategy.” When a game has a dominant strategy, it doesn’t cease
 to be a game; it just isn’t a very good game. Children like tic-tactoe until they find the dominant strategy. At that point, the
 puzzle of tic-tac-toe has been solved, and the game ceases to be
 interesting. Usually, we say games that have dominant
 strategies are bad, unless, of course, the whole point of the
 game is to find that dominant strategy. This leads to an
 interesting definition of a puzzle:
 A puzzle is a game with a dominant strategy.
 From this point of view, puzzles are just games that aren’t fun
 to replay, just as penguins are birds that cannot fly. This is why
 both puzzles and games have problem solving at their core—
 puzzles are just miniature games whose goal is to find the
 dominant strategy.
 Aren’t Puzzles Dead?
 When I discuss the importance of puzzles with students, there
 is always someone who asks, “Aren’t puzzles old fashioned? I
 mean, sure they were a part of adventure games twenty years
 ago, but modern videogames are based on action, not puzzles,
 right? Besides, with all the walk-throughs on the web, everyone
 can get the answers to puzzles easily—so what’s the point?”
 And this is an understandable point of view. In the 1980s and
 even early 1990s, adventure games (Zork, Myst, Monkey Island,
 King’s Quest, etc.) were very popular, and these usually
 featured very explicit puzzles. With the rise of console gaming,
 games that slid a bit more toward the “hands” side of the
 spectrum and away from the “head” side became more popular.
 But did the puzzles go away? No. Remember—a puzzle is
 anything that makes you stop and think, and mental challenges
 can add significant variety to an action-based game. As game
 designers grew more experienced and games developed more
 fluid and continuous control schemes, the puzzles became less
 explicit and more woven into the fabric of the gameplay.
 Instead of completely stopping play and demanding that the
 player slides around pieces of a puzzle before they could
 continue, modern games integrate the puzzles into their
 environment.
 For example, The 7th Guest, a popular game released in 1992,
 featured puzzles that, though interesting, were often completely
 incongruous. While walking through a house, you find cans on
 a shelf, and you need to rearrange them so that the letters on
 them form a sentence. Then you would suddenly find a giant
 chessboard and be told that to continue in the game, you must
 find a way to exchange the positions of all the black pieces and
 the white pieces. Then you would look through a telescope and
 do a puzzle about connecting planets with lines.
 Contrast that to The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which
 has many puzzles but smoothly integrates them into
 environments in the game. When confronted with a river of
 lava, you have to figure out how to throw water jugs in the right
 pattern so that you can cross the river. When you are in a
 dungeon where the doors are opened and closed by a complex
 series of switches, you must figure out how to use items found
 in the dungeon (statues, etc.) to flip the switches so you can
 successfully get through all the doors. Some of these are quite
 complex; for example, some enemies in the dungeon are
 paralyzed when light falls on them. To get the doors open, you
 must lure the enemies onto the right switches and then shoot
 flaming arrows near enough to paralyze them to keep the door
 open so you can run out. But in all cases, the puzzle elements
 are natural parts of the environment, and the goals of solving
 the puzzle are direct goals of the player’s avatar.
 This gradual change from explicit, incongruous puzzles to
 implicit, well-integrated ones is less because of a change in the
 tastes of the gaming audience and more because game
 designers have matured in their skills. Look at The 7th Guest
 and Zelda puzzles with Lens #49: Elegance, and notice how
 many more purposes the implicit puzzle serves as opposed to
 the explicit one.
 Our two examples were adventure games. Can other genres
 include puzzles? Absolutely. When you play a fighting game and
 you have to stop and think about which strategies are going to
 work best against a particular opponent, you are solving a
 puzzle. When you play a racing game and are trying to figure
 out where on the track to use your turbo booster to finish the
 race in less than a minute, you are solving a puzzle. When you
 play a first-person shooter and you think about which order
 you should shoot the enemies so that you take the least damage,
 you are solving a puzzle.
 But what about walk-throughs on the web? Haven’t they spoiled
 videogame puzzles forever? They have not. We’ll see why in the
 next section.
 Good Puzzles
 Okay—so, puzzles are everywhere. The thing we really care
 about is how to create good puzzles that will improve our
 games. Here are ten principles of puzzle design that can be
 useful in any game genre.
 Puzzle Principle #1: Make the Goal Easily Understood
 To get people interested in your puzzle, they have to know what
 they are supposed to do. Consider this puzzle:
 FIGURE
 14.2
 Just looking at it, it isn’t at all obvious what the goal is. Is it
 about color matching? Is the goal to take it apart? Or maybe to
 put it back together? It isn’t easy to tell for sure. Contrast that to
 this puzzle:
 FIGURE
 14.3
 Almost anyone can look at this and tell that the goal is to get the
 disk off of the shaft, even though they have never seen this
 before. The goal is clear.
 The same thing applies to puzzles in videogames. If players
 aren’t sure what they are supposed to do, they will quickly lose
 interest, unless figuring out what to do is actually fun. And
 there are a lot of puzzles where figuring out what to do is part
 of the puzzle. But you must use caution with these kinds of
 puzzles—generally, only die-hard puzzle fans like that kind of
 challenge. Consider the fate of Hasbro’s Nemesis Factor. This
 ingenious puzzle is much revered by puzzle fanatics for being
 creative, interesting, and challenging—it challenges the player
 with one hundred puzzles, gradually increasing in difficulty. Its
 design is incredible, and Hasbro surely hoped they might have
 another Rubik’s Cube on their hands. But sadly, it did not sell
 well. Why? It violated our first puzzle principle—the goal was
 not clear. Its curious stair-step design made it difficult to guess
 the goal, or even guess how you might interact with it at all, just
 by looking at it. Even after you have purchased it, the game still
 tells you little about what you are supposed to do. The player
 must figure out the goal of each puzzle and then try to solve it,
 and each of the one hundred puzzles has a different goal. It’s
 the sort of thing that hardcore puzzle freaks love, but a more
 general audience finds frustrating, because it is a very openended kind of problem that gives little feedback about whether
 you are on the right track.
 When designing puzzles, make sure to view them through Lens
 #32: Goals, and make sure that you are clear to the player about
 what you want them to know about the goals of your puzzle.
 Puzzle Principle #2: Make It Easy to Get Started
 Once a player understands the goal of your puzzle, then they
 need to get started solving it. With some puzzles, it is quite clear
 how to begin. Consider Sam Loyd’s famous “15 Puzzle,” whose
 goal is to slide the tiles back into numerical order from 1 to 15.
 FIGURE
 14.4
 Although the series of moves to solve the puzzle is not obvious,
 how you would get started manipulating it is very clear to most
 players. Contrast that to this puzzle, where the goal is to figure
 out which digit each letter represents:
 FIGURE
 14.5
 Like the 15 Puzzle, the goal is very clear. However, most players
 are at a complete loss as to how to begin solving a puzzle like
 this. Hardcore puzzle solvers will likely begin a lengthy trialand-error session to figure out how they might approach it, but
 most players will just abandon it as “too hard.”
 Another piece of wisdom from Scott Kim is, “To design a good
 puzzle, first build a good toy.” And it makes sense to pull out
 Lens #17: The Toy, when designing your puzzle, for good toys
 make it obvious how to manipulate them. More than that, the
 player is drawn toward manipulating them. This is one of the
 things that made Rubik’s Cube so successful: even someone who
 has no intention of trying to solve the puzzle wants to see what
 it feels like to touch it, hold it, and twist it.
 #54 THE LENS OF ACCESSIBILITY
 When you present a puzzle to players (or a game of any kind),
 they should be able to clearly visualize what their first few
 steps would be. Ask yourself these questions:
 How will players know how to begin solving my puzzle or
 playing my game? Do I need to explain it, or is it self-evident?
 Does my puzzle or game act like something they have seen
 before? If it does, how can I draw attention to that similarity.
 If it does not, how can I make them understand how it does
 behave?
 Does my puzzle or game draw people in and make them
 want to touch it and manipulate it? If not, how I can I change
 it so that it does?
 Illustration by Karen Phillips
 Puzzle Principle #3: Give a Sense of Progress
 What is the difference between a riddle and a puzzle? In most
 cases, the big difference is progress. A riddle is just a question
 that demands an answer. A puzzle also demands an answer but
 frequently involves manipulating something so that you can see
 or feel yourself getting closer to the solution, bit by bit. Players
 like this sense of progress—it gives them hope that they may
 actually arrive at an answer. Riddles are not this way—you just
 have to think and think, and maybe start making guesses,
 which are either right or wrong. In early computer adventure
 games, riddles were frequently encountered, since they were so
 easy to put into a game—but the “stone wall” they give to the
 player is so frustrating that they are virtually absent from
 modern adventure games.
 But there is a way to turn a riddle into a puzzle—it’s a game we
 call “Twenty Questions.” This is the game where one player
 thinks of a thing or a person and the other player gets to ask
 twenty yes/no questions in an attempt to learn what the first
 player is thinking of.
 The great thing about the game of Twenty Questions is the
 sense of progress that a player gets. By using their questions to
 gradually narrow down the space of possible answers, they can
 get closer and closer to a solution—after all, 2 is over one
 million, and this means that twenty well-crafted yes/no
 questions could home in on one answer out of a million
 possibilities. When players get frustrated playing Twenty
 Questions, it is because they feel like they aren’t getting any
 closer to an answer.
 One of the things that made players persistently try to solve
 Rubik’s Cube is the sense of progress it gives. Gradually, a
 novice player is able to add more and more colors to one side,
 until voila! An entire side is completed! This is a clear sign of
 progress and something that makes players quite proud! Now
 they just have to do that five more times, right?
 Of course, visible progress is important in more than just
 puzzles. It’s important in all aspects of gameplay, and even in
 life. Research shows that visible progress (or lack thereof) is the
 primary driver of mood in the workplace. And consider
 inflation: why is it that prices and wages tend to rise over time?
 It is not an economic principle; it is a psychological one: people
 want to have yearly pay raises, because it feels like progress.
 20
 That money has to come from somewhere, so eventually prices
 go up.
 Visible progress is so important to puzzle and game design that
 it becomes our next lens.
 #55 THE LENS OF VISIBLE PROGRESS
 Players need to see that they are making progress when solving
 a difficult problem. To make sure they are getting this feedback,
 ask yourself these questions:
 What does it mean to make progress in my game or puzzle?
 Is there enough progress in my game? Is there a way I can
 add more interim steps of progressive success?
 What progress is visible, and what progress is hidden? Can I
 find a way to reveal what is hidden?
 Illustration by Nick Daniel
 Puzzle Principle #4: Give a Sense of Solvability
 Related to a sense of progress is a sense of solvability. If players
 begin to suspect that your puzzle is not solvable, they will
 become afraid that they are hopelessly wasting their time and
 give up in disgust. You need to convince them that it is solvable.
 Visible progress is a good way to do this, but so is outright
 stating that your puzzle has an answer. Returning to Rubik’s
 Cube, it had a very elegant method of making it clear to the
 player that it was a solvable puzzle—when purchased, it is
 already in the solved state—the player then scrambles it up,
 usually by twisting it about a dozen times. At this point, it is
 quite obviously solvable—in as many moves as it took to
 scramble it, just backward! But of course, most players find that
 solving it takes many more twists than that. But as frustrated as
 they may get, they never have any doubt that it can be solved.
 Puzzle Principle #5: Increase Difficulty Gradually
 We’ve already discussed the fact that difficulty in games should
 increase gradually (Lens #38: Challenge), and successful puzzles
 also adhere to this maxim. But how can a puzzle increase in
 difficulty? Isn’t it either solved or not solved? Most puzzles are
 solved by taking a series of actions that are often small steps
 toward a chain of goals that leads to solving the puzzle. It is
 these actions that should gradually increase in difficulty. The
 classic jigsaw puzzle provides a naturally balanced series of
 these steps. A player who tries to solve a jigsaw puzzle doesn’t
 just start sticking pieces together until it is solved; instead they
 usually follow this sequence of steps:
 1. Flip all the pieces so that the picture side is up (mindlessly
 easy).
 2. Find the corner pieces (very easy).
 3. Find the edge pieces (easy).
 4. Connect the edge pieces into a frame (a slight challenge,
 rewarding when completed).
 5. Sort the remaining pieces by color (easy).
 6. Start assembling sections that are obviously near each other
 (a moderate challenge).
 7. Assemble the pieces that could go anywhere (a significant
 challenge).
 This gradual increase in difficulty is part of what gives jigsaw
 puzzles lasting appeal. Now and then, someone releases a
 jigsaw puzzle that is meant to be tougher than normal, and they
 usually do it by changing the properties of the puzzle so that
 some (or all) of steps 1 through 6 are eliminated.
 One Tough Puzzle, shown below, does just that. And while it is
 interesting as a novelty, the only interesting part about it is how
 immediately difficult it is. The pleasing nature of gradually
 increasing difficulty that makes jigsaw puzzles a perennial
 favorite is absent.
 FIGURE
 14.6
 One easy way to ensure that difficulty increases gradually is to
 give the players control over the order of the steps to your
 puzzle. Consider the crossword puzzle—players have dozens of
 questions to answer, with each one answered giving hints
 about the unanswered ones. Players naturally gravitate toward
 answering the questions that are easiest for them and slowly
 work their way up toward harder questions. Giving the player
 this kind of choice is called parallelism, and it has another
 excellent property.
 Puzzle Principle #6: Parallelism Lets the Player Rest
 Puzzles make a player stop and think. A real danger is that the
 player will be unable to think their way past your puzzle and,
 unable to make progress, will abandon the game entirely. A
 good way to safeguard against this is to give them several
 different related puzzles at once. This way, if they get tired of
 banging their head on one of them, they can go off and try
 another for a while. In the process of doing that, they get to take
 a break from the first puzzle, and they may be ready to try it
 again with the renewed vigor that a break can provide. The old
 saying that “A change is as good as a rest” applies perfectly
 here. Games like crossword puzzles and Sudoku do this
 naturally. But videogames can do it as well. It is the rare RPG
 that gives puzzles and challenges to a player one at a time—
 much more common is to give two or more parallel challenges
 at once, since the player is much less likely to grow frustrated
 this way.
 #56 THE LENS OF PARALLELISM
 Parallelism in your puzzle brings parallel benefits to the
 player’s experience. To use this lens, ask yourself these
 questions:
 Are there bottlenecks in my design where players are unable
 to proceed if they cannot solve a particular challenge? If so,
 can I add parallel challenges for a player to work on when
 this challenge stumps them?
 If parallel challenges are too similar, the parallelism offers
 little benefit. Are my parallel challenges different enough
 from each other to give players the benefit of variety?
 Can my parallel challenges be connected somehow? Is there a
 way that making progress on one can make it easier to solve
 the others?
 Illustration by Nick Daniel
 Puzzle Principle #7: Pyramid Structure Extends
 Interest
 One more thing that parallelism lends itself to is pyramid
 puzzle structure. This means a series of small puzzles that each
 give some kind of clue to a larger puzzle. A classic example is
 the Jumble scrambled word game frequently seen in
 newspapers.
 FIGURE
 14.7
 This puzzle could be made simpler by just asking you to
 unscramble the four words. But by having each unscrambled
 word give a few more letters for a more difficult scrambled
 phrase, the game combines short- and long-term goals. It
 gradually increases difficulty, and most important, a pyramid
 has a point: this game has a single clear and meaningful goal—
 to figure out the punch line of the joke presented by the
 cartoon.
 #57 THE LENS OF THE PYRAMID
 Pyramids fascinate us because they have a singular highest
 point. To give your puzzle the allure of the ancient pyramids,
 ask yourself these questions:
 Is there a way all the pieces of my puzzle can feed into a
 singular challenge at the end?
 Big pyramids are often made of little pyramids—can I have a
 hierarchy of ever more challenging puzzle elements,
 gradually leading to a final challenge?
 Is the challenge at the top of my pyramid interesting,
 compelling, and clear? Does it make people want to work in
 order to get to it?
 Illustration by Sam Yip
 Puzzle Principle #8: Hints Extend Interest
 “Hints?! What is the point of even having a puzzle if we are
 going to give hints?” I hear you cry. Well, sometimes when a
 player is about to give up on your puzzle in frustration and
 disgust, a well-timed hint can renew their hope and their
 curiosity. And while it “cheapens” the puzzle-solving experience
 somewhat, solving a puzzle with a hint is much better than not
 solving it at all. One thing Hasbro’s Nemesis Factor did
 brilliantly was to include a hint system. It featured a “hint”
 button, and the player who presses it gets to hear a brief one- or
 two-word hint about the puzzle they are currently working on
 like “staircase” or “music.” Pushing it a second time gives
 another less cryptic hint. To help balance this hint system, there
 is a slight point penalty for asking for hints, but generally
 players are willing to take the hit and get a hint than give up on
 the puzzle altogether. A few mobile “escape the room” puzzle
 games have taken this logic one step further—the games are
 free to play, but hints cost money.
 Today, with walk-throughs of virtually every game available on
 the Internet, you can argue that hints are not really necessary
 for hard videogame puzzles. But still you might consider them,
 since solving a puzzle based on a hint can be more enjoyable
 than just cribbing the answer from someone else.
 Puzzle Principle #9: Give the Answer!
 No, seriously, hear me out on this one. Ask yourself this
 question: what is it that is so pleasurable about solving puzzles?
 Most people answer that it is the “Aha!” experience you get
 when you figure out the answer. But the funny thing is that
 experience is triggered not by solving the puzzle but by seeing
 the answer. Sure, it’s a little sweeter if you solved it yourself,
 but if you have given serious consideration to a problem, your
 problem-solving brain is primed for a rush of pleasure at
 merely seeing or hearing the answer. Think about mystery
 novels—they are just big puzzles in book form. And sometimes
 readers guess the ending ahead of time, but more often, they
 are surprised (Oh! The butler did it! I see now!), which is just as
 pleasurable, or weirdly, more pleasurable than if they had
 figured it out themselves.
 So, how can you put this into practice? In the age of the
 Internet, you probably won’t have to—if your game is known at
 all, answers to your puzzles will quickly be posted online. But
 why not consider saving your players the trouble and give them
 a way to find out the answers to your puzzles from within your
 game, if they are truly stumped?
 Puzzle Principle #10: Perceptual Shifts Are a DoubleEdged Sword
 Consider this puzzle:
 Can you arrange six matchsticks so they form four equilateral
 triangles?
 No, seriously, consider it. And by that, I mean, try to solve it.
 Don’t worry, I’ll be here when you get back.
 If you tried it, I’m guessing one of three things happened. Either
 (A) you’ve seen this one before, and solving it involved no
 pleasurable “Aha,” although maybe there was a little
 pleasurable smugness or (B) you had a “perceptual shift,” that
 is, a big leap in your assumptions and came up with the right
 answer, which was very exciting or (C) someone told you the
 answer, and you had a little bit of “Aha!” combined with a little
 bit of shame for not figuring it out yourself or (D) you gave up
 in frustration, feeling kind of ashamed.
 The point I want to make with this is that puzzles like this,
 which involve a perceptual shift where “either you get it or you
 don’t,” are a problematic double-edged sword. When a player is
 able to make the perceptual shift, they receive a great deal of
 pleasure and solve the puzzle. But if they are not able to make
 the perceptual shift, they get nothing. Puzzles like this involve
 almost no possibility of progress or gradual increase in
 difficulty—just a lot of staring and straining for inspiration to
 come. They are almost like riddles in this way, and generally,
 you will find they should be used sparingly in videogames or in
 any other medium where the player expects to be able to make
 continual progress.
 A Final Piece
 This concludes the ten principles of puzzle design. There are
 certainly others, but these ten can take you a long way if you
 use them in your designs. Puzzles can add a meaningful mental
 dimension to any game. Before we move on to a new topic, I’ll
 leave you with a final lens that is useful to see if your game has
 enough puzzles of the right kind.
 #58 THE LENS OF THE PUZZLE
 Puzzles make the player stop and think. To ensure your puzzles
 are doing everything you want to shape the player experience,
 ask yourself these questions:
 What are the puzzles in my game?
 Should I have more puzzles, or less? Why?
 Which of the ten puzzle principles apply to each of my
 puzzles?
 Do I have any incongruous puzzles? How can I better
 integrate them into the game? (Use Lens #49: Elegance, to
 help do this).
 Illustration by Elizabeth Barndollar
 In the last few chapters, we have focused on game internals—it
 is now time to consider an external element, the interface of the
 game.
 Other Reading to Consider
 What is a Puzzle? by Scott Kim. A thoughtful article by
 puzzle designer Scott Kim.
 http://www.scottkim.com/thinkinggames/whatisapuzzle/.
 Designing and Integrating Puzzles into Action Adventure
 Games by Pascal Luban. A good collection of practical tips.
 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2917/designing_and
 _integrating_puzzles_.php.
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 Players Play Games through an Interface
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-15
 FIGURE
 15.1
 Between Yin and Yang
 FIGURE
 15.2
 Remember in Chapter 10 when we talked about the strange
 relationship between player and game? Specifically, that the
 player puts their mind inside the game world, but that game
 world really only exists in the mind of the player? This magical
 situation, which is at the heart of all we care about, is made
 possible by the game interface, which is where player and game
 come together. Interface is the infinitely thin membrane that
 separates white/yang/player and black/yin/game. When the
 interface fails, the delicate flame of experience that rises from
 the player/game interaction is suddenly snuffed out. For this
 reason, it is crucial for us to understand how our game
 interface works and to make it as robust, as powerful, and as
 invisible as we can.
 Before we proceed, though, we should consider the goal of a
 good interface. It isn’t “to look nice” or “to be fluid,” although
 those are nice qualities. The goal of an interface is to make
 players feel in control of their experience. This idea is
 important enough that we should keep a lens around for
 frequent examination of whether a player feels in control.
 #59 THE LENS OF CONTROL
 This lens has uses beyond just examining your interface, since
 meaningful control is essential for immersive interactivity. To
 use this lens, ask yourself these questions:
 When players use the interface, does it do what is expected?
 If not, why not?
 Intuitive interfaces give a feeling of control. Is your interface
 easy to master or hard to master?
 Do your players feel they have a strong influence over the
 outcome of the game? If not, how can you change that?
 Feeling powerful = feeling in control. Do your players feel
 powerful? Can you make them feel more powerful somehow?
 Illustration by Nathan Mazur
 Breaking It Down
 Like many things we encounter in game design, interface is not
 simple or easily described. “Interface” can mean many things—
 a game controller, a display device, a system of manipulating a
 virtual character, the way the game communicates information
 to the player, and many other things. To avoid confusion and to
 understand it properly, we need to separate it out into
 component parts.
 Let’s work from the outside in. Initially, we know that we have a
 player and a game world.
 FIGURE
 15.3
 On the simplest level, the interface is everything that is in
 between them. So, what is in there? There is some way that the
 player touches something to make changes in the world. This
 could be by manipulating pieces on a game board or by using a
 game controller or keyboard and mouse. Let’s call this physical
 input. And similarly, there is some way the player can see what
 is going on in the game world. It could be by looking at a game
 board, or it could be some kind of display screen with audio or
 other sensory output. Let’s call this physical output. So we
 have the following:
 FIGURE
 15.4
 This looks pretty simple and is the way most people naively
 think about game interface. But some important things are
 missing from this picture. While there are times when the
 physical input and output are directly connected to elements in
 the game world, there are other times that there is some
 amount of intermediate interface. When you play Pac-Man and
 there is a score display at the top of the screen, this is not really
 part of the game world—it is really part of the interface. The
 same goes for menus and buttons on mouse-based interfaces or
 when you hit an enemy for ten points of damage and a stylized
 “10” floats out of their body. When you play most 3D games, you
 do not see the entire world, but instead you see a view into the
 world from a virtual camera with a position in the virtual space
 of the game world. All these things are part of a conceptual
 layer that exists between the physical input/output and the
 game world. This layer is usually called virtual interface and
 has both input elements (such as a virtual menu where the
 player makes a selection) and output elements (such as a score
 display) (see Figure 15.5).
 Sometimes, the virtual layer is so thin that it is almost
 nonexistent, but other times, it is very dense, full of virtual
 buttons, sliders, displays, and menus that help the player play
 the game, but aren’t part of the game world. This virtual layer
 must be handled delicately, for, as designer Daniel Burwen
 notes, the less abstraction there is in an interface, the more
 emotional connection we feel to our content.
 And that makes a pretty complete picture of the major interface
 elements involved in a game. But we’ve left out something
 crucial to the design of any game interface: mapping. On every
 arrow on the right side of the diagram, some special things are
 happening—it is not as if data are simply passed through—
 rather, these data go through a special transformation based on
 how the software is designed. Every one of the arrows on the
 game side represents a separate piece of computer code. How
 all this behaves together in composite defines the interface for
 your game.
 FIGURE
 15.5
 Some quick examples of the kinds of logic that can be contained
 in each of those six arrows are as follows:
 1. Physical Input → World: If pushing a thumbstick makes my
 avatar run, the mapping tells how fast it will run and how
 quickly it will slow down if I let go. If I push the thumbstick
 harder, does my character run faster? Will my character
 accelerate over time? Will “double tapping” the thumbstick
 make my character dash?
 2. World → Physical Output: If you cannot see the entire world
 at once, what parts of it can you see? How will it be shown?
 3. Physical Input → Virtual Interface: In a mouse-based menu
 interface, what does clicking do? What does double-clicking
 do? Can I drag parts of the interface around?
 4. Virtual Interface → World: When the player manipulates
 the virtual interface, what effect does this have on the world?
 If they select an item in the world and use a pop-up menu to
 take an action on it, does that action take effect immediately
 or after some delay?
 5. World → Virtual Interface: How are changes in the world
 manifested in the virtual interface? When do scores and
 energy bars change? Do events in the world lead to special
 pop-up windows or menus or mode changes in the interface?
 When players enter a battle, will special battle menus
 appear?
 6. Virtual Interface → Physical Output: What data are shown
 to the player, and where does it go on the screen? What
 colors will it be? What fonts? Will hit points pulse or make a
 sound when they are very low?
 For close examination of these six types of connections, we
 introduce two new lenses.
 #60 THE LENS OF PHYSICAL INTERFACE
 Somehow, the player has a physical interaction with your game.
 Copying existing physical interfaces is an easy trap to fall into.
 Use this lens to be sure that your physical interface is well
 suited to your game by asking these questions:
 What does the player pick up and touch? Can this be made
 more pleasing?
 How does this map to the actions in the game world? Can the
 mapping be more direct?
 If you can’t create a custom physical interface, what
 metaphor are you using when you map the inputs to the
 game world?
 How does the physical interface look under the Lens of the
 Toy?
 How does the player see, hear, and touch the world of the
 game? Is there a way to include a physical output device that
 will make the world become more real in the player’s
 imagination?
 Illustration by Zachary D. Coe
 The world of videogames occasionally goes through dry spells
 where designers feel it is not feasible to create custom physical
 interfaces. But the marketplace thrives on experimentation and
 novelty, and specially crafted physical interfaces can bring new
 life to old gameplay.
 #61 THE LENS OF VIRTUAL INTERFACE
 Designing virtual interfaces can be very tricky. Done poorly,
 they become a wall between the player and the game world.
 Done well, they amplify the power and control a player has in
 the game world. Ask these questions to make sure that your
 virtual interface is enhancing player experience as much as
 possible:
 What information does a player need to receive that isn’t
 obvious just by looking at the game world?
 When does the player need this information? All the time?
 Only occasionally? Only at the end of a level?
 How can this information be delivered to the player in a way
 that won’t interfere with the player’s interactions with the
 game world?
 Are there elements of the game world that are easier to
 interact with using a virtual interface (like a pop-up menu,
 for instance) than they are to interact with directly?
 What kind of virtual interface is best suited to my physical
 interface? Pop-up menus, for example, are a poor match for a
 gamepad controller.
 Illustration by Chris Daniel
 Of course, these six kinds of mapping cannot be designed
 independently—they must all work in unison to create a great
 interface. But before we move on, we must consider two other
 important kinds of mapping, represented by the arrows that
 come and go from the player or, more specifically, from the
 player’s imagination. This is when a player becomes so
 immersed in a game, he or she is no longer pushing buttons and
 watching a television (TV) screen, instead, he or she is running,
 jumping, and swinging a sword. And you can hear this in a
 player’s language. A player generally won’t say, “I controlled my
 avatar, so she ran to the castle, and then I pressed the red
 button to make her throw a grappling hook, then I started
 tapping the blue button to make my avatar climb up.” No, a
 player describes the gameplay this way: “I ran up the hill, threw
 my grappling hook, and started climbing the castle wall.”
 Players project themselves into games and on some level
 disregard that the interface is there at all, unless it suddenly
 becomes confusing. A person’s ability to project consciousness
 into whatever they are controlling is almost alarming. But it is
 only possible if the interface becomes second nature to the
 player, and this gives us our next lens.
 #62 THE LENS OF TRANSPARENCY
 No matter how beautiful your interface is, it would be better
 if there were less of it.
 —Edward Tufte
 The ideal interface becomes invisible to the player letting the
 player’s imagination be completely immersed in the game
 world. To ensure invisibility, ask yourself these questions:
 What are the player’s desires? Does the interface let the
 players do what they want?
 Is the interface simple enough that with practice, players will
 be able to use it without thinking?
 Do new players find the interface intuitive? If not, can it be
 made more intuitive, somehow? Would allowing players to
 customize the controls help or hurt?
 Illustration by Jesse Schell
 Does the interface work well in all situations, or are there
 cases (near a corner, going very fast, etc.) when it behaves in
 ways that will confuse the player?
 Can players continue to use the interface well in stressful
 situations, or do they start fumbling with the controls or
 missing crucial information? If so, how can this be
 improved?
 Does anything confuse players about the interface? On which
 of the six interface arrows is it happening?
 Do players feel a sense of immersion when using the
 interface?
 This interface, a parody from the web comic Penny Arcade, is
 probably not transparent.
 FIGURE
 15.6
 (From www.penny-arcade.com. Used with permission.)
 The Loop of Interaction
 Information flows in a loop from player to game to player to
 game, round and round. It is almost like this flow pushes a
 waterwheel that generates experience when it spins. But it can’t
 be just any information that flows around this loop. The
 information that is returned to the player by the game
 dramatically affects what the player will do next. This
 information is generally called feedback, and the quality of this
 feedback can exert a powerful influence on how much the
 player understands and enjoys what is happening in your
 game.
 FIGURE
 15.7
 The importance of good feedback is easily overlooked. One
 example is the net on a basketball hoop. The net does not affect
 the gameplay at all—but it slows the ball as it descends from the
 hoop, so that all players can clearly see, and even hear, that it
 went in.
 A less obvious example is the Swiffer (Figure 15.7), a simple
 device designed to be a better solution for cleaning floors than
 the traditional broom/dustpan combination. Some people who
 have attempted to redesign the broom and dustpan have
 merely modified the existing solution, making a pan that clips
 to the broom handle, making sturdier broom bristles, adding a
 lid to the dustpan, etc. It would appear that the designers of the
 Swiffer used Lens #14: Problem Statement, to invent a brandnew solution. If we look at some of the problems with the
 broom/dustpan solution,
 Problem #1: It’s impossible to sweep all the dust into the
 dustpan.
 Problem #2: When standing, the dustpan is hard to use.
 When crouching, the broom is hard to use.
 Problem #3: The broom doesn’t really get all the dust.
 Problem #4: Your hands get kind of dirty when you try to
 sweep dust into the dustpan.
 Problem #5: Transferring the dirt from the dustpan to the
 trash is perilous—it often spills or blows around.
 We see that the Swiffer, with its disposable cloth, solves these
 problems fairly well:
 Solution #1: No dustpan is needed.
 Solution #2: There is no need to crouch when using the
 Swiffer.
 Solution #3: The Swiffer cloth captures far more dust than a
 broom can.
 Solution #4: Your hands stay clean.
 Solution #5: The cloth is easily disposed of.
 So, the Swiffer solves a lot of problems, which makes it very
 appealing. But it has an appeal beyond these practical things. It
 has a strong psychological appeal—frankly, it is fun to use.
 Why? Because the design addresses problems that most people
 wouldn’t state as problems. Here is an example:
 Problem #6: The user gets little feedback about how well
 they have cleaned the floor.
 Unless a floor is really dirty, it is hard to see whether your
 sweeping is making any difference just by looking at the floor.
 You might say, “Who cares? All that matters is how well it
 cleans, right?” But this lack of feedback can make the entire
 task feel somewhat futile, which means that the user enjoys it
 less and will clean their floor less often. In other words, less
 feedback = dirtier floor. But the Swiffer solves this problem very
 well:
 Solution #6: The dirt you have removed from the floor is
 clearly visible on the cleaning cloth when you are done.
 This feedback shows the user quite clearly that what they have
 done makes a real difference in how clean the floor is. This
 triggers all kinds of pleasures—satisfaction of having done
 something useful, the pleasure of purification, and even the
 pleasure of having secret knowledge that others cannot see.
 And though this feedback doesn’t come until the end of the task,
 the user comes to anticipate it and looks forward to seeing this
 concrete evidence of a job well done.
 #63 THE LENS OF FEEDBACK
 The feedback a player gets from the game is many things:
 judgment, reward, instruction, encouragement, and challenge.
 Use this lens to be sure your feedback loop is creating the
 experience you want by asking these questions at every
 moment in your game:
 What do players need to know at this moment?
 What do players want to know at this moment?
 What do you want players to feel at this moment? How can
 you give feedback that creates that feeling?
 What do the players want to feel at this moment? Is there an
 opportunity for them to create a situation where they will
 feel that?
 What is the player’s goal at this moment? What feedback will
 help them toward that goal?
 Illustration by Nick Daniel
 Using this lens takes some effort, since feedback in a game is
 continuous but needs to be different in different situations. It
 takes a lot of mental effort to use this lens in every moment of
 your game, but it is time well spent, because it will help
 guarantee that the game is clear, challenging, and rewarding.
 FIGURE
 15.8
 Experiences without feedback are frustrating and confusing. At
 many crosswalks in the United States, pedestrians can push a
 button that will make the DON’T WALK sign change to a WALK
 sign so they can cross the street safely. But it can’t change right
 away, since that would cause traffic accidents. So the poor
 pedestrian often has to wait up to a minute to see whether
 pressing the button had any effect. As a result, you see all kinds
 of strange button-pressing behavior: some people push the
 button and hold it for several seconds; others push it several
 times in a row, just to be safe. And the whole experience is
 accompanied by a sense of uncertainty—pedestrians can often
 be seen nervously studying the lights and DON’T WALK sign to
 see if it is going to change, because they might not have pushed
 the button correctly.
 What a delight it was to visit the United Kingdom and find that
 in some areas the crosswalk buttons give immediate feedback
 in the form of an illuminated WAIT sign that comes on when
 the button has been pushed and turns off when the WALK
 period has ended (Figure 15.9)! The addition of some simple
 feedback turned an experience where a pedestrian feels
 frustrated into one where they can feel confident and in
 control.
 Generally, it is a good rule of thumb that if your interface does
 not respond to player input within a tenth of a second, the
 player is going to feel like something is wrong with the
 interface. A typically problematic example of this often appears
 when you make a game with a “jump” button. If the animator
 working on the jump animation is new to videogames, they are
 very likely to put a “wind up” or “anticipation” on the jump
 animation, where the character crouches down, getting ready
 to jump, for probably one-quarter to one-half a second. This is
 sound animation practice, but because this breaks the tenth of a
 second rule (I push the jump button, but my character doesn’t
 actually end up in the air until a half second later), it drives
 players crazy with frustration.
 FIGURE
 15.9
 Helpful feedback.
 Juiciness
 But let’s return to our sweeping example: a dirty cloth is not the
 only feedback that the Swiffer gives the user. Let’s consider
 another problem with the broom and dustpan that most people
 would be unlikely to state.
 Problem #7: Sweeping is boring.
 Well, of course it is! It’s sweeping! But what do we mean by
 boring? We need to break this down further. Specifically:
 Sweeping is repetitive (same motion over and over).
 It requires you to focus your attention on something with no
 surprises (if you don’t monitor that little pile of dust, it goes
 everywhere).
 How does the Swiffer meet this challenge?
 Solution #7: Using the Swiffer is fun!
 This may well be the single biggest selling point of the Swiffer.
 In TV advertisements for the Swiffer, they show people joyously
 dancing through houses cleaning floors, and some ads featured
 people picking up the Swiffer out of sheer curiosity and then
 cleaning the floors while playing with the Swiffer like a child
 plays with a toy. And the Swiffer does very well under Lens #17:
 The Toy—it is fun to play with… but why? It’s just a cloth on a
 stick, right? Yes, in one sense, but the base of the Swiffer, where
 the cloth goes, is attached to the stick with a special sort of
 hinge, so that when you rotate your wrist, even slightly, the
 base that holds the cloth rotates dramatically. A little motion
 from my wrist makes the cleaning mechanism move easily,
 fluidly, and powerfully—getting into exactly the position you
 want it to be in with a minimum of effort. Using it feels kind of
 like running a magic race car around the floor of your house.
 The motion that the cleaning base shows is second-order
 motion, that is, motion that is derived from the action of the
 player. When a system shows a lot of second-order motion that
 a player can easily control and that gives the player a lot of
 power and rewards, we say that it is a juicy system—like a ripe
 peach, just a little bit of interaction with it gives you a
 continuous flow of delicious reward. Juiciness is often
 overlooked as an important quality in a game. To avoid
 overlooking it, use this lens.
 #64 THE LENS OF JUICINESS
 To call an interface “juicy” might seem kind of silly—although it
 is very common to hear an interface with very little feedback
 described as “dry.” Juicy interfaces are fun the moment you
 pick them up. To maximize juiciness, ask yourself these
 questions:
 Is my interface giving the player continuous feedback for
 their actions? If not, why not?
 Is second-order motion created by the actions of the player?
 Is this motion powerful and interesting?
 Juicy systems reward the player many ways at once. When I
 give the player a reward, how many ways am I
 simultaneously rewarding them? Can I find more ways?
 Illustration by Patrick Mittereder
 We discussed in Chapter 4 how the difference between work
 and play is one of attitude. I chose this nongame example of the
 Swiffer as an illustration because the feedback it gives is so
 powerful that it changes work into play. And it is important for
 your interface to be fun, if possible—since your game is meant
 to be fun and you run the risk of creating inner contradictions
 and a self-defeating experience if you put a dry, painful
 interface as the player’s gateway to your supposedly fun
 experience. Remember, fun is pleasure with surprises, so if
 your interface is going to be fun, it should give both.
 Primality
 One kind of interface that tends to be associated with juicy fun
 is the touch interface found on phones and tablets. Touch
 interfaces have done a lot to change the world of gaming in a
 very short time. Young children, in particular, seem to take to
 touch interfaces with surprising ease. But why? The obvious
 answer is “because they are intuitive.” But that’s really a pretty
 vaporous answer, since the definition of “intuitive” is “easy to
 understand.” So the question becomes “why is it that touch
 interfaces are so easy to understand?” And the answer is this:
 they are primal.
 Until the advent of touch computing, every computer interface
 took the form of tool use. I would interact with some physical
 object (keyboard, mouse, button panel, punch card, etc.), and
 some remote (not near my finger) response would take place.
 Gradually, like with all tools, we learn how they work and
 become accustomed to them. But tool use is not primal, by
 which I mean, prehuman. Humans started using tools about
 three million years ago, which is a pretty good run. But still
 animals have been touching things, intuitively, for much longer:
 probably something like 300 or 400 million years. And our
 brains, of course, are evolved from those brains. When you
 think about the three-layer structure of the human brain, it
 becomes clearer—the lowest-level “reptilian” section of the
 brain is able to process touch, but tool use probably requires
 help from the neocortex, the highest level of the brain.
 When you think of it that way, it becomes obvious why touch is
 more intuitive than using a mouse or game controller. But then,
 of course, it raises a broader question—what parts of my game
 are primal, and what parts require higher brain function? It
 seems certain that the more you can engage and involve the
 primal parts of the brain, the more intuitive and powerful your
 gameplay will feel, which helps to explain why so many games
 contain elements such as the following:
 Gather fruit-like items.
 Fight a threatening enemy.
 Find your way through an unfamiliar environment.
 Overcome obstacles to get to a mate (how scientists say
 “rescue the princess”).
 To really know what parts of the brain are involved in a given
 activity, you need to be a brain scientist doing MRI research. But
 to make an educated guess about whether your interface and
 game activity has low-level primality, just think about whether
 it is something that animals can do. If they can, there’s a good
 chance you are tapping into the power of primality.
 #65 THE LENS OF PRIMALITY
 Some actions and interfaces are so intuitive that animals were
 doing them hundreds of millions of years ago. To capture the
 power of primality, ask yourself these questions:
 What parts of my game are so primal an animal could play?
 Why?
 What parts of my game could be more primal?
 Illustration by Astro Leon-Jhong
 Channels of Information
 One important goal of any interface is to communicate
 information. Determining the best way for your game to
 communicate necessary information to the player requires
 some thoughtful design, since games can often contain a great
 deal of information and often much of it is needed at the same
 time. To figure out the best way to present the information in
 your game, try following these steps. Referring back to our
 interface data flow diagram from the beginning of this chapter,
 we are mostly talking about arrows 5 (World → Virtual
 Interface) and 6 (Virtual Interface → Physical Output).
 Step 1: List and Prioritize Information
 A game has to present a lot of information, but it is not all
 equally important. Let’s say we were designing the interface for
 a game similar to the classic NES game, Legend of Zelda. We
 might begin by listing all of the information the player needs to
 see. A simple unprioritized list might look like
 1. Number of rubies
 2. Number of keys
 3. Health
 4. Immediate surroundings
 5. Distant surroundings
 6. Other inventory
 7. Current weapon
 8. Current treasure
 9. Number of bombs
 Now, we might sort these by importance:
 Need to know every moment:
 4. Immediate surroundings
 Need to glance at from time to time while playing:
 1. 1. Number of rubies
 2. 2. Number of keys
 3. 3. Health
 4. 5. Distant surroundings
 5. 7. Current weapon
 6. 8. Current treasure
 7. 9. Number of bombs
 Need to know only occasionally:
 6. Other inventory
 Step 2: List Channels
 A channel of information is just a way of communicating a
 stream of data. Exactly what the channels are varies from game
 to game—and there is a lot of flexibility in how you choose
 them. Some possible channels of information might be
 The top center of the screen
 The bottom right of the screen
 My avatar
 Game sound effects
 Game music
 The border of the game screen
 The chest of the approaching enemy
 The word balloon over a character’s head
 It can be a good idea to list out the possible channels that you
 think you might use. In Legend of Zelda, the main channels of
 information the designers settled on were
 Main display area
 Dashboard of information at the top of the screen
 Also, they decided there would be a “mode change” the player
 could activate by hitting the “select” button (we’ll discuss mode
 changes later in this chapter), which has different channels of
 information:
 Auxiliary display area
 Dashboard of information at the bottom of the screen
 Step 3: Map Information to Channels
 Now, the difficult task comes of mapping the types of
 information to the different channels. This is usually done
 partly by instinct, partly by experience, and mostly by trial and
 error—drawing lots of little sketches, thinking about them, and
 then redrawing them, until you think you have something
 worth trying out. In Zelda, the mapping is as follows:
 Main display area:
 4. Immediate surroundings
 Dashboard of information at the top of the screen:
 1. 1. Number of rubies
 2. 2. Number of keys
 3. 3. Health
 4. 5. Distant surroundings
 5. 7. Current weapon
 6. 8. Current treasure
 7. 9. Number of bombs
 Auxiliary display area:
 6. Other inventory
 Taking a look at the main screen (Figure 15.11) and subscreen
 (Figure 15.10), you can see other interesting choices that were
 made:
 Note that the dashboard information is so important to
 gameplay that it needs to be shown all the time on both the
 main screen and subscreen. And the contents of that dashboard
 really involve seven different channels of information. Notice
 how they split them up—“life” was deemed so important that it
 got nearly one-third of the interface. Rubies, keys, and bombs,
 though their functions are different, each have to communicate
 a two-digit number, so they are all grouped together. The
 weapon and treasure you are holding are so important that
 they have little boxes around them. The “A” and “B” are
 reminders to the player about which buttons to hit in order to
 use these items.
 FIGURE
 15.10
 NES Zelda subscreen.
 FIGURE
 15.11
 NES Zelda main screen.
 Also note on the inventory screen how extra space was used to
 give the player some instruction on how to use it.
 You can see that even though this is a relatively simple interface
 compared to more modern games, there were many decisions
 the designer made about how to lay it out, and these decisions
 made a significant impact on the game experience.
 Step 4: Review Use of Dimensions
 A channel of information in a game can have several
 dimensions. For example, if you have decided to map “damage
 to an enemy” to “numbers that fly out of that enemy,” you have
 several dimensions you can work with on that channel. Some of
 these might be
 The number you display
 The color of the number
 The size of the numerals
 The font of the numerals
 Now you have to decide which of these dimensions, if any, you
 want to use. Surely you will use the first one, the number. But
 will the color mean anything? Perhaps you will use the other
 dimensions as reinforcers of the information—numbers under
 50 will be white and small, numbers from 50 to 99 will be
 yellow and medium sized, but numbers 100 and over will be
 red and very large and in a special font to emphasize the
 amount of damage.
 And while using multiple dimensions on a channel to reinforce
 a piece of information is a way to make the information very
 clear (and also kind of juicy), you could also take a different
 approach and decide to put different pieces of information on
 the different dimensions. For example, you might decide to
 color the numbers to indicate friend (white) or foe (red). Then
 you might make the size of the numbers indicate how close the
 character is to defeat—small numerals might mean the
 character has a lot of hit points left, while large numerals might
 mean they are about to die. This kind of technique can be very
 efficient and elegant. By using a single number, you have
 communicated three different pieces of information. The risk is
 that you have to educate the player on what these different
 dimensions on one channel of information represent, which
 might be difficult for some players to understand or remember.
 Good use of channels and dimensions is what makes for an
 elegant, well laid out interface, so we keep a special lens around
 for this kind of examination.
 #66 THE LENS OF CHANNELS AND DIMENSIONS
 Choosing how to map game information to channels and
 dimensions is the heart of designing your game interface. Use
 this lens to make sure you do it thoughtfully and well. Ask
 yourself these questions:
 What data need to travel to and from the player?
 Which data are most important?
 What channels do I have available to transmit these data?
 Which channels are most appropriate for which data? Why?
 Which dimensions are available on the different channels?
 How should I use those dimensions?
 Illustration by Elizabeth Barndollar
 Modes
 What is an interface mode? Simply put, it is a change in one of
 the mapping arrows (1–6) in our interface diagram. For
 example, if pressing the B button changes the functionality of
 the gamepad so that instead of making your avatar run around,
 it makes your avatar aim a water hose, which is a mode change,
 the mapping on arrow #1 (Physical Interface → World) has just
 changed. Mode changes can happen as a result of mapping
 changes on any of the six arrows.
 Modes are a great way to add variety to your game, but you
 must be very careful, since you run a risk of confusing the
 player if they don’t realize that a mode change has occurred.
 Here are a few tips to avoid getting in trouble with interface
 modes.
 Mode Tip #1: Use as Few Modes as Possible
 The fewer the modes, the less chance a player is going to get
 confused. Having multiple interface modes isn’t a bad thing, but
 you should add modes cautiously, for each one is something the
 new the player is going to have to learn and understand.
 Mode Tip #2: Avoid Overlapping Modes
 Just as we have channels of information from the game to the
 player, there are similar channels of information from the
 player to the game. Each button or thumbstick is a channel of
 information; for example, let’s say you have a game that lets
 you change between walking mode (the thumbstick navigates)
 and throwing mode (the thumbstick aims). Later, you decide to
 add a driving mode as well (the thumbstick steers a car). What
 happens if the player changes into throwing mode while they
 are driving? You could try to allow this, potentially putting you
 into two modes at once (driving and throwing). And while this
 might work, it also might be a disaster if the thumbstick is
 simultaneously steering a car and controlling an aiming
 interface. It might be wiser to move the aiming, in all cases, to a
 second thumbstick, if your physical interface has one. By
 making your modes distinct and nonoverlapping, you keep
 yourself out of trouble. If you find you need to have
 overlapping modes, make sure they use different channels of
 information on the interface. For example, the thumbstick
 could have two navigating modes (flying or walking), and the
 button has two shooting modes (shoot fireball or lightning bolt).
 These modes are on completely different dimensions, so they
 can overlap safely—I can switch between shooting fireballs and
 shooting lightning bolts while either walking or flying with no
 confusing effects.
 Mode Tip #3: Make Different Modes Look as Different as
 Possible
 In other words, look at your modes with Lens #63: Feedback,
 and Lens #62: Transparency. If a player doesn’t know what
 mode they are in, they are going to be confused and frustrated.
 The old Unix text editing system, vi (pronounced as “V. I.”), was
 a symphony of confusing modes. Most people would expect that
 a text editor, when it started up, would be in a mode that would
 allow you to enter text. But not so for vi. It was actually in a
 mode where each letter of the keyboard either would issue a
 command, like “delete line,” or would put the editor into a new
 mode. But hitting these keys would give no feedback about
 what mode you were in. If you actually wanted to enter text,
 you had to type a letter “i,” and then you would be in text insert
 mode, which looked exactly like command entry mode. It was
 impossible to figure out on your own, and even seasoned vi
 users would occasionally get confused about what mode they
 were in.
 Here are some great ways to make your modes distinct:
 Change something large and visible on the screen: In Halo
 and most first-person shooters, when you change weapons, it
 is very visible. As a side note, the amount of ammo you have
 left is given through an interesting channel—it is right on the
 back of your gun.
 Change the action your avatar is taking: In the classic
 arcade game Jungle King, you go from a vine swinging mode
 to a swimming mode. Because your avatar is doing
 something so obviously different, it is clear that the mode has
 changed (also his hair changes color—that might be overkill).
 Change the on screen data: In Final Fantasy games and
 most RPGs, when you enter combat mode, many combat
 statistics and menus suddenly come up, and it is obvious
 there has been a mode change.
 Change the camera perspective: This is often overlooked as
 an indicator of a mode change, but it can be very effective.
 #67 THE LENS OF MODES
 An interface of any complexity is going to require modes. To
 make sure your modes make the player feel powerful and in
 control and do not confuse or overwhelm, ask yourself these
 questions:
 Illustration by Patrick Collins
 What modes do I need in my game? Why?
 Can any modes be collapsed or combined?
 Are any of the modes overlapping? If so, can I put them on
 different input channels?
 When the game changes modes, how does the player know
 that? Can the game communicate the mode change in more
 than one way?
 Other Interface Tips
 Okay—we’ve covered interface data flow, feedback, channels,
 dimensions, and modes. That’s a good start. But whole books
 have been written about the topic of interface design, and we
 have so many other interesting things to discuss; we must move
 on! But before we do, here are some general tips for making
 good game interfaces.
 Interface Tip #1: Steal
 More politely, we would call this the “top-down approach” to
 interface design. If you are designing an interface for a known
 game genre, say an action/platform game, you can begin with
 the interface of a known success in this area and then change it
 around to suit the things that are unique about your game. This
 can save you a lot of design time and has the benefit of being a
 familiar interface to your users. Of course, if your game has
 nothing new to offer, this will make it feel like a clone—but it is
 often surprising how one little change leads to another, which
 leads to another, and before you know it, your clone interface
 has morphed into something quite different.
 Interface Tip #2: Customize
 Also called the bottom-up approach, it is the opposite of
 stealing. With this approach, you design your interface from
 scratch, by listing out information, channels, and dimensions
 like we explained earlier. This is a great way to get an interface
 that looks unique and is custom to your particular game. If your
 gameplay is novel, you may find this is the only path available
 to you. But even if your gameplay is nothing new, you may be
 surprised when you try to build it from the bottom up—you
 may find yourself inventing a whole new way to play your
 game, because everyone else has just been copying what is
 successful and you took the time to actually examine the
 problem and tried to do a better job.
 Interface Tip #3: Design around Your Physical Interface
 The world of videogame development features platforms with
 radically different interfaces: touch interfaces, motion
 interfaces, mouse and keyboard, gamepads, and even mixed
 reality headsets. It is tempting to make games that can work
 equally well on all these platforms, so that you can sell them to
 as many people as possible. But the truth is that trying to design
 a game independent of any particular interface is usually a
 path to a dull game. Think about Angry Birds—its megasuccess
 was partly due to the fact that it used the touch interface so
 well. Remember the Lens of the Toy? If the core interaction of
 your game is a unique type of play that takes advantage of what
 is unique to that physical interface, it can get enough attention
 to make giving up those other platforms more than worthwhile.
 Interface Tip #4: Theme Your Interface
 Often it is a different artist who designs the interface artwork
 than the one who designs the game world. In Chapter 6: Theme,
 we talked about the importance of theming everything, and
 interface is no exception. Go over every inch of your interface
 with Lens #11: Unification, and see if you can find a way to tie it
 all together with the rest of the experience.
 Interface Tip #5: Sound Maps to Touch
 Usually, when we think of using sound in a game, we think of
 creating a soundscape to give a sense of place (tweeting birds in
 a meadow), or to make actions seem more realistic (hearing
 glass break when you see it break), or to give the player
 feedback about their progress in the game (a musical glissando
 when you pick up a treasure). But there is an often overlooked
 aspect to sound that has a direct bearing on interface: the
 human mind easily maps sound to touch. This is important,
 since when we manipulate things in the real world, touch is a
 central component of feedback we get about manipulation. In a
 virtual interface, we get little, if any, information through our
 touch sense. But you can simulate touch by playing appropriate
 sounds, in a way that touch screen keyboards that click when
 you type do. First, you have to think about what you would like
 your interface to feel like if it were real, and then you have to
 decide what sounds best create that feeling. If you do this
 successfully, people will marvel at what a pleasure your
 interface is to use, but they will have difficulty expressing
 exactly why. I have high hopes that future interfaces will find
 ways to more successfully involve tactile feedback, but until
 they do, sound is your best bet.
 Interface Tip #6: Balance Options and Simplicity with Layers
 When designing an interface, you will be confronted by two
 conflicting desires: the desire to give the player as many options
 as possible and the desire to make your interface as simple as
 possible. As with so many things in game design, the key to
 success is striking a balance. And one good way to achieve this
 balance is by creating layers of interface through modes and
 submodes. If you have done a good job of prioritizing your
 interface, you will have a good head start toward figuring out
 how to do this. A typical videogame example of this is hiding
 inventory and configuration menus under an infrequently used
 button, such as “start.”
 FIGURE
 15.12
 The ToyTopia control panel. A “down” message has just been sent to Winnie the Pooh.
 (Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. Used with permission.)
 Interface Tip #7: Use Metaphors
 A great shortcut to giving a player understanding of how your
 interface works is by making it resemble something the player
 has seen before. For example, in designing the game ToyTopia,
 my team had a very unusual constraint. In this game, the player
 issues keyboard commands (go up, go right, etc.) to a small team
 of windup toys. Since it was a synchronous multiplayer game,
 the plan was to keep things in sync by introducing a delay
 between when a player issued a command and when a toy
 would receive it. This way, we could keep games in sync on
 different players’ machines because the local artificial delay
 would be the same length as the unavoidable network delay of
 a signal traveling from one computer to another. Unfortunately
 (and not surprisingly), players found this to be confusing—they
 are used to a button push taking action immediately—not
 taking a half second before something happens. The team was
 frustrated to the point of considering abandoning the whole
 scheme, but then someone had the idea that if we showed a
 visible radio signal traveling from the virtual button to the toy
 and accompanied it by a “radio transmission” sound effect, it
 might help players understand the mechanism better. And it
 worked! With the new system, the radio transmission metaphor
 clearly explained the delay in action and also gave the players
 some immediate feedback about what was happening. And
 under Lens #11: Unification, this change helped reinforce the
 theme, which was about radio-controlled toys.
 #67½ THE LENS OF METAPHOR
 Game interfaces often mimic interfaces to things that are
 already familiar to players. To make sure your metaphors are
 aiding players’ understanding, and not confusing them, ask
 yourself these questions:
 Is my interface already a metaphor for something else?
 If it is a metaphor, am I making the most of that metaphor?
 Or is the metaphor getting in the way?
 If it isn’t a metaphor, would it be more intuitive if it were?
 Illustration by Derek Hetrick
 Interface Tip #8: If It Looks Different, It Should Act
 Different
 Game developers frequently fall into the trap of going against
 this tip in the name of visual variety. For example, they might
 be making a game where you fight flying saucers. To add some
 visual spice, someone gets the idea to have the saucers be
 different colors: some are red, some purple, and some green.
 Players who see these are surely going to think that they are
 functionally different—that they perhaps go different speeds or
 have different point values. If they are not and they just have
 different paint jobs, players are sure to be disappointed and
 confused.
 Similarly, designers often make the opposite mistake, creating
 two things that look the same but behave differently. For
 example, you might create an “X” button that when pressed,
 closes part of the interface. Later, in need of a button that
 allows players to delete items from the game, “X” might seem
 like a logical choice to represent delete. But if the same “X”
 sometimes means “delete” and sometimes means “close
 window,” it has a good chance of confusing and frustrating
 players.
 Interface Tip #9: Test, Test, Test!
 No one gets an interface right the first time. New games require
 new interfaces, and you cannot take it for granted that your
 new interface is going to be clear, power giving, and fun unless
 you have people try it out. Test it as early as possible and as
 often as possible. Build prototypes of your interface well before
 you have a complete playable game. Make paper and cardboard
 prototypes of any button or menu systems that you have, and
 get people to act out playing the game and using the interface so
 that you can see where they are having trouble. Most
 important, by working with players this way, like an
 anthropologist, you will start to get better ideas about their
 intentions from moment to moment, which will inform all of
 your interface decisions.
 Interface Tip #10: Break the Rules to Help Your Player
 Since many games are variations on existing themes, there is a
 lot of copying of interface designs from game to game. So much
 so that certain rules of thumb tend to show up for each genre of
 game. These can be useful, but it is easy to follow them slavishly
 without thinking about whether they are really a good idea for
 the players of your game. One example involves PC games using
 a mouse. The left mouse button is considered the main button,
 and some games choose to use the right mouse button for other
 functionality. So, a rule of thumb is that the right mouse button
 should generally not do anything, unless you are in a special
 mode where it has a purpose. However, this rule is often taken
 too far—and in simple games, such as children’s games, where
 the right mouse button isn’t used at all, most designers tend to
 leave it completely disabled, so that all gameplay happens
 through the left mouse button. But when children use a mouse,
 they frequently click the wrong mouse button because their
 hands are small. Smart designers break this rule of thumb and
 make the left and right mouse buttons both map to the same
 action, so that either button can be pressed successfully. Really,
 why wouldn’t you do this for every game that only needs one
 mouse button?
 The game interface is indeed the gateway to the experience. Let
 us pass now through that gateway and look more closely at the
 experience itself.
 Other Reading to Consider
 The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. This
 straightforward, down-to-earth book is full of thoughtful
 examples of good and bad design of real-world objects and
 systems. Its wisdom translates surprisingly well to the realm
 of game design.
 Game Feel by Steve Swink. This unique book focuses on
 game interface design at the millisecond level, carefully
 dissecting what it is that makes games feel great. This is
 required reading.
 The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by
 Edward Tufte. Considered the bible (or at least the Old
 Testament) of graphical interface design, this and Tufte’s
 other three books can provide deep insights even when you
 just leaf through them.
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN
 Experiences Can Be Judged by Their Interest
 Curves
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-16
 FIGURE
 16.1
 My First Lens
 When I was sixteen, I landed my first job working as a
 professional entertainer. It was in a show troupe at a local
 amusement park. I had hopes of being a part of shows where I
 could make good use of my much-practiced juggling skills, but
 my job ended up being a mix of a lot of things—puppeteering,
 wearing a raccoon costume, working the mixing board
 backstage, and hosting audience participation comedy shows.
 But one day the head of the troupe, a magician named Mark
 Tripp, came to me, explaining, “Listen—that new stage on the
 east side of the park is almost finished. We’re going to move the
 music revue over there, and I’m going to be putting on a magic
 show. On my days off, we need some other show to fill the gap.
 Do you think you and Tom could put together a juggling show?”
 Naturally, I was very excited—Tom and I had been practicing
 together every chance we could get, hoping that we might get
 an opportunity to do our own show. We talked it over and put
 together a rough script, with brief descriptions of the various
 tricks we could do and the patter and jokes that would link
 them together. We practiced it until we felt it was ready for a
 trial run. In a couple of days, our big moment came, and we got
 to try the show in front of an audience. We opened with a
 balancing routine, followed by some ring juggling, then club
 juggling, then club passing, and ending with five ball juggling,
 which we felt was our hardest trick. It was exhilarating to be
 performing our very own show. At the end, we took our bows
 and went backstage triumphantly.
 Mark was backstage waiting for us. “Well, what did you think?”
 we asked proudly.
 “Not bad,” he said, “but it could be a lot better.”
 “Better?” I said, surprised, “but we didn’t drop anything!”
 “True,” he replied, “but were you listening to that audience?”
 I thought back. “Well, they were a little slow to warm up, I
 guess, but they really liked the club passing routine!”
 “Yes, but how about the five-ball juggling—your last routine?”
 We had to admit that didn’t go over as big as we thought it
 would.
 “Let me see your script,” he said. He read it over carefully,
 sometimes nodding, sometimes squinting at it. He thought for a
 moment and said, “You have some good stuff in this act, but the
 progression isn’t quite right.” Tom and I looked at each other.
 “Progression?” I asked.
 “Yeah,” he responded, picking up a pencil, “See, your show right
 now is kind of shaped like this,” and he sketched this shape on
 the back of the script:
 FIGURE
 16.2a
 He went on. “Audiences generally prefer to see a show shaped
 more like this.”
 FIGURE
 16.2b
 “See?”
 I didn’t see. But I had the feeling I was looking at something
 very important.
 “It’s simple. You need to start with more of a bang—to get their
 attention. Then you back off and do something a little smaller,
 to give them a chance to relax and get to know you. Then you
 gradually build up with bigger and bigger routines, until you
 give them a grand finale that exceeds their expectations. If you
 put your ring routine first and your club passing routine last, I
 think you’ll have a much better show.”
 The next day, we tried the show again, changing almost nothing
 but the order of the routines—and Mark was absolutely right.
 The audience was excited from the very beginning, and then
 their interest and excitement slowly built up over the course of
 the show to a grand climax with our club passing routine. Even
 though we dropped things a couple times in the second show,
 the audience response was twice what we had at the first show,
 with a few people jumping to their feet and shouting at the
 climax of the final routine.
 Mark was waiting for us backstage, smiling this time. “It seems
 like it went better today,” he said. Tom replied, “After you
 suggested that we change the show, it seemed so obvious. It’s
 weird that we couldn’t see it on our own.”
 “It’s not weird at all,” said Mark. “When you are working on a
 show, you are thinking about all the details and how one thing
 links to another. It requires a real change in perspective to rise
 above the show and look at it as a whole from the audience’s
 point of view. But it makes a real difference, huh?”
 “It sure does!” I said, “I guess we have a lot to think about.”
 “Well, don’t think about it now—you two have a puppet show in
 five minutes.”
 Interest Curves
 Since my time at the amusement park, I have found myself
 using this technique again and again when designing games
 and have always found it useful. But what are these graphs,
 really? Let’s take a moment and examine them in detail.
 The first thing to realize is that any entertainment experience is
 a series of moments. Some are more powerful than others, and
 when we make these graphs, we are generally charting the
 most powerful moments. Back in my Imagineering days, when
 we would present a new idea for a theme park ride to the CEO
 of Disney, we could expect one certain question: “What are the
 top ten moments in your experience?” This question takes a lot
 of thought and preparation to answer properly, but if we didn’t
 have a clear answer, the pitch meeting was over. When you
 chart an interest curve, you are figuring out how to best
 arrange the best moments of your experience, and you can’t do
 that if you don’t know what they are. That’s what makes the
 Lens of Moments so important.
 #68 THE LENS OF MOMENTS
 Memorable moments are stars that make up the constellation of
 your interest curve. To chart what is most important, ask
 yourself these questions:
 What are the key moments in my game?
 How can I make each moment as powerful as possible?
 Illustration by Kim Kiser
 Once you know your moments, how should you chart them out?
 The quality of an entertainment experience can be measured
 by the extent to which its unfolding sequence of events is able
 to hold a guest’s interest. I use the term “guest” instead of
 “player” because it is a term that works with games as well as
 more general experiences. The level of interest over the course
 of the experience can be plotted out in an interest curve. Figure
 16.3 shows an example of an interest curve for a successful
 entertainment experience.
 At point (A), the guest comes into the experience with some
 level of interest; otherwise, they probably wouldn’t be there.
 This initial interest comes from preconceived expectations
 about how entertaining the experience will be. Depending on
 the type of experience, these expectations are influenced by the
 packaging, advertisements, advice from friends, etc. While we
 want this initial interest to be as high as possible to get guests in
 the door, overinflating it can actually make the overall
 experience less interesting.
 FIGURE
 16.3
 Then the experience starts. Quickly we come to point (B),
 sometimes called “the hook.” This is something that really grabs
 you and gets you excited about the experience. In a musical, it
 is the opening number. In the Beatles song Revolution, it is the
 screaming guitar riff. In Hamlet, it is the appearance of the
 ghost. In a videogame, it often takes the form of a little movie
 before the game starts. Having a good hook is very important. It
 gives the guest a hint of what is to come and provides a nice
 interest spike, which will help sustain focus over the less
 interesting part where the experience is beginning to unfold
 and not much has happened yet.
 Once the hook is over, we settle down to business. If the
 experience is well crafted, the guest’s interest will continually
 rise, temporarily peaking at points like (C) and (E) and
 occasionally dropping down a bit to points like (D) and (F), only
 in anticipation of rising again.
 Finally, at point (G), there is a climax of some kind, and by point
 (H), the story is resolved, the guest is satisfied, and the
 experience is over. Hopefully, the guest goes out with some
 interest left over, perhaps even more than when they came in.
 When show business veterans say “leave them wanting more,”
 this is what they are talking about.
 Of course, not every good entertainment experience follows
 this exact curve. But most successful entertainment experiences
 will contain some of the elements that our picture of a good
 interest curve displays.
 This diagram, on the other hand, shows an interest curve for a
 less successful entertainment experience. There are lots of
 possibilities for bad interest curves, but this one is particularly
 bad, although not as uncommon as one might hope.
 FIGURE
 16.4
 As in our good curve, the guest comes in with some interest at
 point (a) but is immediately disappointed, and due to the lack of
 a decent hook, the guest’s interest begins to wane.
 Eventually, something somewhat interesting happens, which is
 good, but it doesn’t last, peaking at point (b), and the guest’s
 interest continues its downhill slide until it crosses, at point (c),
 the interest threshold. This is the point where the guest has
 become so disinterested in the experience that he changes the
 channel, leaves the theater, closes the book, or shuts off the
 game.
 This dismal dullness doesn’t continue forever, and something
 interesting does happen later at point (d), but it doesn’t last, and
 instead of coming to a climax, the experience just peters out at
 point (e)—not that it matters, since the guest probably gave up
 on it some time ago.
 Interest curves can be a very useful tool when creating an
 entertainment experience. By charting out the level of expected
 interest over the course of an experience, trouble spots often
 become clear and can be corrected. Further, when observing
 guests having the experience, it is useful to compare their level
 of observed interest to the level of interest that you, as an
 entertainer, anticipated they would have. Often, plotting
 different curves for different demographics is a useful exercise.
 Depending on your experience, it might be great for some
 groups but boring for others (e.g., “guy movies” vs. “chick
 flicks”), or it might be an experience with “something for
 everyone,” meaning well-structured curves for several different
 demographic groups.
 Patterns inside Patterns
 Once you start thinking about games and entertainment
 experiences in terms of interest curves, you start seeing the
 pattern of the good interest curve everywhere. You can see it in
 the three-act structure of a Hollywood movie. You can see it in
 the structure of popular songs (musical intro, verse, chorus,
 verse, chorus, bridge, big finish). When Aristotle says that every
 tragedy has a complication and a denouement, you can see it
 there. When comedians talk about the “rule of three,” you can
 see the interest curve. Anytime someone tells a story that is
 interesting, engaging, or funny, the structure is there, like in
 this “High Dive Horror” story, which was sent in by a girl to the
 “Embarrassing Moments” column of a teen magazine:
 I was at an indoor pool, and my friends had dared me to
 jump off the highest diving board. I’m really afraid of
 heights, but I climbed all the way up anyway. I was looking
 down, trying to convince myself to jump, when my stomach
 just turned over and I barfed—right into the pool! Even
 worse, it fell on a group of cute guys! I climbed down as fast
 as I could and hid in the bathroom, but everyone knew what
 I’d done!
 High Dive Horror, from Discovery Girls Magazine
 You can even see the pattern quite concretely in the layout of a
 roller coaster track. And naturally, this pattern shows up in
 games. The first time I found myself using it was when I was
 working on the Mark 2 version of Aladdin’s Magic Carpet virtual
 reality experience for Disneyland. Some of us on the team had
 been discussing how, although the experience was a lot of fun,
 it seemed to drag a little bit at one point, and we were talking
 about how to improve that. It occurred to me that drawing an
 interest curve of the game would probably be a good idea. It
 had a shape roughly like this:
 FIGURE
 16.5
 And suddenly it was very clear to me that the flat part was a
 real problem. How to fix it wasn’t obvious. Simply putting more
 interesting moments in it might not be enough—since if the
 interest level was too high, it would diminish the interest of
 what was to come later. I finally realized that it might make the
 most sense to cut the flat part from the game entirely. Talking to
 the show director, he was opposed to cutting it—he felt we’d put
 too much work into it to cut it now, which was understandable
 because we were pretty late in development at this point.
 Instead, he suggested putting a shortcut at the beginning of the
 flat part so that some players could bypass that area if they
 wanted. We put the shortcut in (a merchant’s tent you could fly
 into that magically transported you to the heart of the city), and
 it was clear that players who knew about it preferred to take it.
 Observing the game in use after installation, it was common to
 see the game operators watching the players progress on
 monitors suddenly lean down to a player and whisper in their
 ear “go in that tent!” When I first witnessed this, I asked the
 operator why she told them that, and she replied, “Well, I don’t
 know … they just seem to have more fun when they go that
 way.”
 But the Magic Carpet experience was a brief one—only about
 five minutes long. It makes sense to ask whether this pattern is
 meaningful at all for longer experiences. Will what works for a
 five-minute experience still work for one that goes on for
 hours? As some evidence that it does, consider the game of HalfLife 2, one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time.
 Look at this graph of the number of player deaths that happen
 through a game of Half-Life 2, Episode 1, which has an average
 completion time of five hours and thirty-nine minutes.
 FIGURE
 16.6
 (Courtesy 2008, Valve Corporation. Used with permission.)
 The three lines indicate the three difficulty settings for the
 game. Do these shapes look familiar? It can certainly be argued
 that the number of times a player dies is a good indicator of
 challenge, which is connected to how interesting the experience
 is.
 But what about even longer experiences like multiplayer
 games, where a player might play for hundreds of hours? How
 can the same pattern hold up for a five-hundred-hour
 experience? The answer is a little surprising: interest curve
 patterns can be fractal.
 In other words, each long peak, upon closer examination, can
 have an internal structure that looks like the overall pattern,
 something like.
 FIGURE
 16.7
 A fractal interest curve.
 And of course, this can go as many layers deep as you like.
 Typical video games have this pattern in roughly three levels:
 1. Overall game: Intro movie, followed by a series of levels of
 rising interest, ending with a major climax where the player
 defeats the game.
 2. Each level: New aesthetics or challenges engage the player at
 the start, and then the player is confronted with a series of
 challenges (battles, puzzles, etc.) that provide rising interest
 until the end of the level, which often ends with some kind of
 “boss battle.”
 3. Each challenge: Every challenge the player encounters
 hopefully has a good interest curve in itself, with an
 interesting introduction, and stepped rising challenges as you
 work your way through it.
 Multiplayer games have to give the player an even larger
 structure, which we’ll discuss further in Chapter 25:
 Communities.
 Interest curves will prove to be one of the most useful and
 versatile tools you can use as a game designer, so let’s add them
 to our toolbox.
 #69 THE LENS OF THE INTEREST CURVE
 Exactly what captivates the human mind often seems different
 for every person, but the most pleasurable patterns of that
 captivation are remarkably similar for everyone. To see how a
 player’s interest in your experience changes over time, ask
 yourself these questions:
 If I draw an interest curve of my experience, how is it
 generally shaped?
 Does it have a hook?
 Does it have gradually rising interest, punctuated by periods
 of rest?
 Is there a grand finale, more interesting than everything
 else?
 What changes would give me a better interest curve?
 Is there a fractal structure to my interest curve? Should there
 be?
 Do my intuitions about the interest curve match the observed
 interest of the players? If I ask playtesters to draw an interest
 curve, what does it look like?
 Illustration by Chris Daniel
 Since all players are different, you may find it quite useful to
 use the Lens of the Interest Curve and Lens #19: The Player, at
 the same time, creating a unique interest curve for each of the
 types of players your game is trying to reach.
 What Comprises Interest?
 At this point, you might find your analytical left brain crying
 out, “I like these charts and graphs, but how can I objectively
 evaluate how interesting something is to another person? This
 all seems very touchy-feely!” And it is very touchy-feely. Many
 people ask what the “units of interest” are. And there is no good
 answer for that—we do not yet have a fun-o-meter that can give
 a reading in “millifuns.” But that’s okay, because all we care
 about are relative changes in interest—absolute interest is less
 important.
 To determine the interest level, you have to experience it with
 your whole self, using your empathy and imagination and using
 skills of the right brain as well as the left. Still, your left brain
 may be happy to know that overall interest can be broken down
 further into other factors. There are many ways to do that, but I
 like to use these three:
 Factor 1: Inherent Interest
 Some events are simply more interesting than others. Generally,
 risk is more interesting than safety, fancy is more interesting
 than plain, and the unusual is more interesting than the
 ordinary. Dramatic change and the potential for dramatic
 change are always interesting. Accordingly, a story about a man
 wrestling an alligator is probably going to be more interesting
 than a story about a man eating a cheese sandwich. We simply
 have internal drives that push us to be more interested in some
 things than others. Lens #6: Curiosity, comes in handy when
 evaluating inherent interest, but it is a useful enough concept
 that it gets its own lens.
 #70 THE LENS OF INHERENT INTEREST
 Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.
 —William Archer
 Some things are just interesting. Use this lens to be sure your
 game has inherently interesting qualities by asking these
 questions:
 What aspects of my game will capture the interest of a player
 immediately?
 Does my game let the player see or do something they have
 never seen or done before?
 What base instincts does my game appeal to? Can it appeal to
 more of them?
 What higher instincts does my game appeal to? Can it appeal
 to more of those?
 Does dramatic change and anticipation of dramatic change
 happen in my game? How can it be more dramatic?
 Illustration by Patrick Mittereder
 The events don’t stand alone, however. They build on one
 another, creating what is often called the story arc. Part of the
 inherent interest of events depends on how they relate to one
 another. For example, in the story of Goldilocks and the Three
 Bears, most of the events in the story aren’t very interesting:
 Goldilocks eats porridge, sits in chairs, and takes a nap. But
 these boring events make possible the more interesting part of
 the story where the bears discover their home has been
 disturbed.
 Factor 2: Poetry of Presentation
 This refers to the aesthetics of the entertainment experience.
 The more beautiful the artistry used in presenting the
 experience, whether that artistry be writing, music, dance,
 acting, comedy, cinematography, graphic design, or whatever,
 the more interesting and compelling the guests will find it. Of
 course, if you can give a beautiful presentation to something
 that is inherently interesting in the first place, all the better. We
 will discuss this further in Chapter 23: Aesthetics, but let’s add
 this useful idea to our toolbox right now.
 #71 THE LENS OF BEAUTY
 Beauty is mysterious. Why, for example, do the most beautiful
 things have a touch of sadness about them? Use this lens to
 contemplate the mysteries of beauty in your game by asking
 yourself these questions:
 What elements make up my game? How can each one be
 more beautiful?
 Some things are not beautiful in themselves, but are
 beautiful in combination. How can the elements of my game
 be composed in a way that is poetic and beautiful?
 What does beauty mean within the context of my game?
 Illustration by Kyle Gabler
 Factor 3: Projection
 This is the extent to which you compel a guest to use their
 powers of empathy and imagination to put themselves into the
 experience. This factor is crucial to understanding the
 commonality between story and gameplay and requires some
 explanation.
 Consider the example of winning the lottery (an inherently
 interesting event). If a stranger wins the lottery, you might be
 mildly interested in hearing about it. If one of your friends wins
 the lottery, that is somewhat more interesting. If you win the
 lottery, you will surely be interested enough to focus your
 attention on that fact. Events that happen to us are just more
 interesting than events that happen to other people.
 You would think that this would put storytellers at a
 disadvantage, since the stories they tell are usually about
 someone else, often someone you have never heard of, or even
 someone who doesn’t actually exist. However, storytellers know
 that guests have the power of empathy, the ability to put
 themselves in the place of another person. An important part of
 the art of storytelling is to create characters that the guests can
 empathize with easily, for the more the guests can empathize
 with the characters, the more interesting the events become
 that happen to those characters. When you start almost any
 entertainment experience, the characters in it are strangers. As
 you get to know them, they become like your friends and you
 begin to care about what happens to them, and your interest in
 events involving them grows. At some point, you might even
 mentally put yourself in their place, bringing you to the height
 of projection.
 FIGURE
 16.8
 In terms of trying to build projection, imagination is as
 important as empathy. Humans exist in two worlds: the
 outward-facing world of perception and the inward-facing
 world of imagination. Every entertainment experience creates
 its own little world in the imagination. This world does not have
 to be realistic (although it might be), but it does need to be
 internally consistent. When the world is consistent and
 compelling, it fills the guest’s imagination, and mentally, the
 guest enters the world. We often say that the guest is
 “immersed” in the world. This kind of immersion increases
 projection, boosting the overall interest of the guest
 significantly. The suspension of disbelief that keeps the guest
 immersed in the story world is fragile indeed. One small
 contradiction is all it takes to bring the guest back to reality and
 “take them out” of the experience.
 Episodic forms of entertainment, such as soap operas, sitcoms,
 and serialized fiction, take advantage of the power of projection
 by creating characters and a world that persist from one
 entertainment experience to the next. Returning guests are
 already familiar with these persistent characters and settings,
 and each time they experience an episode, their projection
 grows, and the fantasy world becomes “more real.” This
 episodic strategy can quickly backfire, however, if the creator
 fails to carefully maintain the integrity of the characters and
 the world. If new aspects of the world contradict previously
 established aspects or if the regular characters start to do or say
 things that are “out of character” to serve the storyline of some
 new episode, then not only is the episode compromised, but the
 integrity of the entire fantasy world, which spans all episodes,
 past, present, and future. From the guest’s point of view, one
 bad episode can spoil the entire series, because the
 compromised characters and setting will seem phony from the
 point of contradiction onward and it will be difficult for the
 guest to sustain projection.
 Another way to build up the player’s projection into the world
 you have created is to provide multiple ways to enter that
 world. Many people think of toys and games based on popular
 movies or television shows as nothing but a gimmicky way to
 make a few extra dollars by riding the coattails of a successful
 entertainment experience. But these toys and games provide
 new ways for children to access an established fantasy world.
 The toys let them spend more time in that world, and the longer
 they spend imagining they are in the fantasy world, the greater
 their projection into that world and the characters in it
 becomes. We will talk more about this idea in Chapter 19:
 Worlds.
 Interactive entertainment has an even more remarkable
 advantage, in terms of projection. The guest can be the main
 character. The events actually happen to the guest and are all
 the more interesting for that reason. Also, unlike story-based
 entertainment, where the story world exists only in the guest’s
 imagination, interactive entertainment creates significant
 overlap between perception and imagination, allowing the
 guest to directly manipulate and change the story world. This is
 why videogames can present events with little inherent interest
 or poetry but still be compelling to guests. What they lack in
 inherent interest and poetry of presentation, they can often
 make up for in projection.
 We will discuss projection further in Chapter 20: Characters
 when we talk about avatars, but let’s introduce a lens to
 examine it now.
 #72 THE LENS OF PROJECTION
 One key indicator that someone is enjoying an experience is
 that they have projected their imaginations into it. When they
 do this, their enjoyment of the experience increases
 significantly, in a sort of virtuous circle. To examine whether
 your game is well suited to induce projection from your players,
 ask yourself these questions:
 What is there in my game that players can relate to? What
 else can I add?
 What is there in my game that will capture a player’s
 imagination? What else can I add?
 Are there places in the game that players have always
 wanted to visit?
 Does the player get to be a character they could imagine
 themselves to be?
 Are there other characters in the game that the players
 would be interested to meet (or to spy on)?
 Do the players get to do things that they would like to do in
 real life, but can’t?
 Is there an activity in the game that once a player starts
 doing, it is hard to stop?
 Illustration by Kyle Gabler
 Interest Factor Examples
 To ensure the relationship between the interest factors is clear,
 let’s compare some different entertainment experiences.
 Some brave street performers attract attention by juggling
 running chainsaws. This is an inherently interesting event. It is
 hard not to at least look up when it is going on around you. The
 poetry with which it is presented, however, is usually
 somewhat limited. There is some projection, though, as it is
 easy to imagine what it would be like to catch the wrong end of
 a chainsaw. When you witness the act in person, the projection
 is even greater (see Figure 16.9).
 FIGURE
 16.9
 How about a violin concerto? The events (two sticks rubbed
 together) are not that inherently interesting, and the projection
 is usually not very notable. In this case, the poetry has to carry
 the experience. If the music isn’t beautifully played, the
 performance will not be very interesting (see Figure 16.10).
 Now, there are exceptions. The inherent interest can build up
 when the music is well structured or when the evening’s
 program is well structured. If the music makes you feel as if you
 are in another place or if you feel a particular empathy for the
 musician, there may be significant projection. But these are
 exceptions. In most cases, poetry alone is enough to sustain
 interest in beautiful music.
 FIGURE
 16.10
 Consider the popular videogame Tetris. The game mainly
 consists of an endless sequence of falling blocks. This leaves
 little room for inherent interest or poetry of presentation;
 however, the projection can be intense. The guest makes all the
 decisions, and success or failure is completely contingent on the
 guest’s performance. This is a shortcut that traditional
 storytelling is unable to take. In terms of an interesting
 entertainment experience, the large amount of projection
 makes up for what is lacking in poetry or inherent interest (see
 Figure 16.11).
 FIGURE
 16.11
 Putting It All Together
 Some people find it useful to qualify the types of interest that
 happen at different points in their experience, letting you see
 which types of interest are holding the audience’s interest at
 different times, creating graphs that look something like:
 FIGURE
 16.12
 However you do it, examining the interest that a player has in a
 game is the best way to measure the quality of the experience
 you are creating. Opinions sometimes differ about what shapes
 are best for an interest curve, but if you don’t take a step back
 and draw an interest curve of your experience, you risk not
 being able to see the forest for the trees. If you get in the habit
 of creating interest curves, though, you will have insights into
 design that others are likely to miss.
 But a problem looms up before us. Games do not always follow
 the same pattern of experience. They are not linear. If that is
 true, then how can interest curves be of any use to us? To
 address that question properly, we must first spend some time
 discussing the most traditional type of linear entertainment
 experience.
 Other Reading to Consider
 Magic and Showmanship by Henning Nelms. Remember
 the juggling show interest curve story at the start of this
 chapter? The day after that, Mark Tripp gave me a copy of
 this book that introduces the topic of interest curves. Anyone
 who ever has to stand on a stage should read this book.
 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
 One Kind of Experience Is the Story
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-17
 FIGURE
 17.1
 God never wrote a good play in his life.
 —Kurt Vonnegut
 Story/Game Duality
 At the dawn of the twentieth century, physicists started noticing
 something very strange. They noticed that electromagnetic
 waves and subatomic particles, which had long been thought to
 be fairly well-understood phenomena, were interacting in
 unexpected ways. Years of theorizing, experimenting, and
 theorizing again led to a bizarre conclusion: waves and
 particles were the same thing, both manifestations of a singular
 phenomenon. This “wave-particle duality” challenged the
 underpinnings of all that was known about matter and energy
 and made it clear that we didn’t understand the universe quite
 as well as we had thought.
 Now we are well into the next century, and storytellers are
 faced with a similar conundrum. With the advent of computer
 games, story, and gameplay, two age-old enterprises with very
 different sets of rules show a similar duality. Storytellers are
 now faced with a medium where they cannot be certain what
 path their story will take, just as the physicists found that they
 could no longer be certain what path their electrons would
 take. Both groups can now only speak in terms of probabilities.
 Historically, stories have been single-threaded experiences that
 can be enjoyed by an individual, and games have been
 experiences with many possible outcomes that are enjoyed by a
 group. The introduction of the single-player computer game
 challenged these paradigms. Early computer games were
 simply traditional games, such as tic-tac-toe or chess but with
 the computer acting as the opponent. In the mid-1970s,
 adventure games with storylines began to appear that let the
 player become the main character in the story. Thousands of
 experiments combining story and gameplay began to take
 place. Some used computers and electronics, and others used
 pencil and paper. Some were brilliant successes; others were
 dismal failures. The one thing these experiments proved was
 that experiences could be created that had elements of both
 story and gameplay. This fact seriously called into question the
 assumption that stories and games are governed by different
 sets of rules.
 There is still much debate about the relationship between story
 and gameplay. Some people are so story-oriented that they
 believe that adding gameplay is guaranteed to ruin a good story.
 Others feel the opposite—that a game with strong story
 elements has been cheapened somehow. Still others prefer a
 middle-of-the-road approach. As game designer Bob Bates once
 told me: “Story and gameplay are like oil and vinegar.
 Theoretically they don’t mix, but if you put them in a bottle and
 shake them up real good, they’re pretty good on a salad.”
 Setting theory aside, and taking a good look at the game titles
 that people really enjoy, there can be no doubt that stories must
 do something to enhance gameplay, since most games have
 some kind of strong story element, and it is the rare game that
 has no story element at all. Some stories are thick, epic tales,
 like the elaborate multihour storytelling of the Final Fantasy
 series. Others are incredibly subtle. Consider the game of chess.
 It could be a completely abstract game, but it isn’t—it has a
 gossamer thin layer of story about two warring medieval
 kingdoms. And even games with no story built in them at all
 tend to inspire players to make up a story to give the game
 context meaning. I played Liar’s Dice with some school-age kids
 recently, which is a completely abstract dice game. They liked
 the game, but after a few rounds, one of them said, “Let’s
 pretend we are pirates—playing for our souls!” which was
 greeted with enthusiasm all around the table.
 Ultimately, of course, we don’t care about creating either stories
 or games—we care about creating experiences. Stories and
 games can each be thought of as machines that help create
 experiences. In this chapter, we will discuss how stories and
 games can be combined and what techniques work best for
 creating experiences that neither a gameless story nor a
 storyless game could create on its own.
 The Myth of Passive Entertainment
 Before we go any further, I want to deal with the persistent
 myth that interactive storytelling is completely different from
 traditional storytelling. I would have hoped that by this day and
 age, with story-based games taking in billions of dollars each
 year, this antiquated misconception would be obsolete and long
 forgotten. Sadly, it seems to spring up, weed-like, in the minds
 of each new generation of novice game designers. The
 argument generally goes like this:
 Interactive stories are fundamentally different from
 noninteractive stories, because in noninteractive stories, you
 are completely passive, just sitting there, as the story plods
 on, with or without you.
 At this point, the speaker usually rolls back his eyes, lolls his
 tongue, and drools to underline the point.
 In interactive stories, on the other hand, you are active and
 involved, continually making decisions. You are doing
 things, not just passively observing them. Really, interactive
 storytelling is a fundamentally new art form, and as a
 result, interactive designers have little to learn from
 traditional storytellers.
 The idea that the mechanics of traditional storytelling, which
 are innate to the human ability to communicate, are somehow
 nullified by interactivity is absurd. It is a poorly told story that
 doesn’t compel the listener to think and make decisions during
 the telling. When one is engaged in any kind of storyline,
 interactive or not, one is continually making decisions: “What
 will happen next?” “What should the hero do?” “Where did that
 rabbit go?” “Don’t open that door!” The difference only comes
 in the participant’s ability to take action. The desire to act and
 all the thoughts and emotions that go with that are present in
 both. A masterful storyteller knows how to create this desire
 within a listener’s mind and then knows exactly how and when
 (and when not) to fulfill it. This skill translates well into
 interactive media, although it is made more difficult because
 the storyteller must predict, account for, respond to, and
 smoothly integrate the actions of the participant into the
 experience.
 In other words, while interactive storytelling is more
 challenging than traditional storytelling, by no means is it
 fundamentally different. And since story is an important part of
 so many game designs, game designers are well served to learn
 all they can about traditional storytelling techniques.
 The Dream
 “But wait!” I hear you cry out. “I have a dream of beautiful
 interactive storytelling—a dream that rises above mere
 gameplay, a dream where a wonderfully told story is
 completely interactive, and makes the participant feel like they
 are in the greatest movie ever made, while still having complete
 freedom of action, thought, and expression! Surely this dream
 can’t be achieved if we continue to imitate past forms of story
 and gameplay.”
 And I admit that it is a beautiful dream—one that has spurred
 the creation of many fascinating experiments in interactive
 storytelling. But so far, no one has come anywhere close to
 realizing this dream. But this hasn’t stopped people from
 creating interactive storytelling experiences that are truly
 wonderful, enjoyable, and memorable, despite the fact that they
 are somewhat limited in the structure and in the freedom they
 give the participant.
 Shortly, we’ll discuss the reasons this dream hasn’t become a
 reality, and may never become a reality. But first, let’s talk
 about what actually works.
 The Reality
 Real-World Method 1: The String of Pearls
 For all the grand dreams of interactive storytelling, there are
 two methods that dominate the world of game design. The first
 and most dominant in videogames is commonly called the
 “string of pearls” or sometimes the “rivers and lakes” method. It
 is called this because it can be visually represented like this:
 FIGURE
 17.2
 The idea is that a completely noninteractive story (the string) is
 presented in the form of a text, a slideshow, or an animated
 sequence and then the player is given a period of free
 movement and control (the pearl) with a fixed goal in mind.
 When the goal is achieved, the player travels down the string
 via another noninteractive sequence to the next pearl, in other
 words, cut scene, game level, cut scene, game level.
 Many people criticize this method as “not really being
 interactive,” but players sure do enjoy it. And really there
 should be little wonder at that. The string of pearls method
 gives the player an experience where they get to enjoy a finely
 crafted story, punctuated with periods of interactivity and
 challenge. The reward for succeeding at the challenge? More
 story and new challenges. Though some snobs will scoff, it is a
 neat little system that works very well, and it strikes a nice
 balance between gameplay and storytelling. While older games
 were sometimes ham-fisted with their approach, some newer
 games, such as Ico, The Walking Dead, and The Last of Us have
 shown how artfully the string and the pearls can be joined
 together.
 Real-World Method 2: The Story Machine
 To understand this method, we have to take a good look at what
 a story is. It is nothing more than a sequence of events that
 someone relates to someone else. “I was out of gum, so I went to
 the drugstore” is a story, just not a very interesting one. A good
 game, however, tends to generate series of events that are
 interesting, often so interesting that people want to tell
 someone else what happened. From this point of view, a good
 game is like a story machine—generating sequences of events
 that are very interesting indeed. Think of the thousands of
 stories created by the game of baseball or the game of golf. The
 designers of these games never had these stories in mind when
 they designed the games, but the games produced them,
 nonetheless. Curiously, the more prescripting the designer puts
 into their game (like with the string of pearls), the fewer stories
 their game is likely to produce. Some videogames, such as The
 Sims or Minecraft, are specifically designed to be story
 generators and are very effective in this regard. Some critics
 say that these games don’t really count as “interactive stories,”
 because the stories have no author. But we don’t care about
 that, because all we care about is creating great experiences—if
 someone experiences something they consider a great story,
 and it has no author, does that diminish the impact of the
 experience? Certainly not. In fact, it’s an interesting question to
 consider which is more challenging—to create a great story or
 to create a system that generates great stories when people
 interact with it. Either way, this is a powerful method of
 interactive storytelling, and one that should not be ignored or
 taken for granted. The vast number of “Let’s Play” videos on
 YouTube and Twitch are testament that people like to share
 these stories. Use this lens to determine how to make your game
 a better story generator.
 #73 THE LENS OF THE STORY MACHINE
 A good game is a machine that generates stories when people
 play it. To make sure your story machine is as productive as
 possible, ask yourself these questions:
 When players have different choices about how to achieve
 goals, new and different stories can arise. How can I add
 more of these choices?
 Different conflicts lead to different stories. How can I allow
 more types of conflict to arise from my game?
 When players can personalize the characters and setting,
 they will care more about story outcomes, and similar stories
 can start to feel very different. How can I let players
 personalize the story?
 Good stories have good interest curves. Do my rules lead to
 stories with good interest curves?
 A story is only good if you can tell it. Who can your players
 tell the story to that will actually care?
 Illustration by Jim Rugg
 In terms of methods of interactive storytelling, these two
 methods surely cover 99% of all games ever created. What is
 interesting is how opposite they are from each other. The string
 of pearls requires a linear story to be created ahead of time,
 and the story machine thrives when as little story as possible
 has been created ahead of time. “But surely there is something
 in between!” I hear the dreamer cry. “Neither of these methods
 are the real, true dream of interactive storytelling! The first
 method is basically a linear path, and the second one isn’t really
 storytelling at all—it’s just game design! What about my vision
 of a wonderfully branching story tree, full of AI characters, and
 dozens of satisfying endings, so that a participant will want to
 enjoy it over and over?”
 And this is a good question. Why isn’t this vision a reality? Why
 isn’t it the dominant form of interactive storytelling? The usual
 suspects (conservative publishers, a weak-minded mass
 audience, lazy designers) are not to blame. The reason that this
 vision isn’t a reality is because it is riddled with many
 challenging problems that haven’t been successfully solved yet
 —and may never be solved. These problems are real and
 serious and deserve careful consideration.
 The Problems
 Problem #1: Good Stories Have Unity
 Really, it is a simple thing to make an interactive story tree. Just
 keep making choices that lead to more choices that lead to more
 choices. Do that and you’ll get all kinds of stories. But how
 many of them will be enjoyable? What kind of interest curve
 will they have? One thing that we know about good stories is
 that they have intense unity—the problem that is presented in
 the first five minutes of the story is a driving force that has
 meaning all the way until the end. Imagine an interactive
 Cinderella story. “You are Cinderella. Your stepmother has told
 you to clean out the fireplace. Do you (1) do it or (2) pack your
 bags and leave?” If Cinderella leaves and, say, gets a job as an
 administrative assistant, it isn’t the Cinderella story anymore.
 The reason for Cinderella’s wretched situation is so that she can
 rise out of it dramatically, suddenly, and unexpectedly. No
 ending you could write for the Cinderella story can compare
 with the ending that it already has, because the whole thing is
 crafted as a unit—the beginning and ending are of a piece. To
 craft a story with twenty endings and one beginning that is the
 perfect beginning for each of the twenty is challenging, to say
 the least. As a result, most interactive stories with many
 branching paths end up feeling kind of watery, weak, and
 disconnected.
 Problem #2: The Combinatorial Explosion
 I fear there are too many realities.
 —John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
 It seems so simple to propose: I’ll give the player three choices
 in this scene, three in the next, and so on. But let’s say your
 story is ten choices deep—if each choice leads to a unique event
 and three new choices, you will need to write 88,573 different
 outcomes to the choices the player will make. And if ten choices
 sound kind of short, and you want to have twenty opportunities
 for three choices from the beginning to the end of the story, that
 means you’ll need to write 5,230,176,601 outcomes. These large
 numbers make any kind of meaningful branching storytelling
 impossible in our short life spans. And sadly, the main way that
 most interactive storytellers deal with this perplexing plethora
 of plotlines is to start fusing outcomes together—something like
 (Figure 17.3):
 And this certainly makes the storytelling more manageable, but
 look at what has just happened. For all the choices the player
 had (well, not that many here, really), they all end up at the
 same place. How meaningful can these choices have been if
 they all lead to the same conclusion? The combinatorial
 explosion is frustrating because it leads to compromises on top
 of Band-Aids on top of compromises and ultimately a weak
 story. And you still have to write a lot more scenes than the
 player will ever see.
 FIGURE
 17.3
 Problem #3: Multiple Endings Disappoint
 One thing that interactive storytellers like to fantasize about is
 how wonderful it is that a story can have multiple endings.
 After all, this means the player will be able to play again and
 again with a different experience every time! And like many
 fantasies, the reality tends to disappoint. Many games have
 experimented with having multiple endings to their game story.
 Almost universally, the player ends up thinking two things
 when they encounter their first ending in one of these:
 1. “Is this the real ending?” In other words, the happiest
 ending, or the ending that is most unified with the story
 beginning. We all like to dream that we can find a way to
 write equally valid endings, but because good stories have
 unity, this generally doesn’t happen. And when players start
 to suspect they may be on the wrong track, they stop
 experiencing the story and start thinking about what they
 should have done instead, which defeats any attempt at
 storytelling. The string of pearls has a tremendous advantage
 here—the player is always on the correct story path, and they
 know it—any problem-solving action is surely a path toward
 a rewarding ending.
 2. “Do I have to play this whole thing again to see another
 ending?” In other words, the multiple endings go against the
 idea of unity, and as much as we would like to dream that the
 gameplay would be significantly different if the player made
 different choices, it almost never is, and so the player now
 has to go on a long repetitive trudge to explore the story tree,
 which probably will not be worth the effort and tedium,
 since there is likely a lot of repeated content upon a second
 playing (in an attempt to manage a combinatorial explosion),
 which will look pretty bad under Lens #4: Surprise. Some
 games have tried novel approaches to deal with this problem.
 The infamous game Psychic Detective (once summed up in a
 review as “One of the worst games ever made. Also, a
 masterpiece”) was a continuously moving 30-minute
 experience that always culminated in a final psychic battle
 with the villain, in which your powers were determined by
 the path you took through the game. As a result, to master
 the game, you had to play it through over and over again.
 Since most of the game consists of video clips, and the game
 tree has some significant bottlenecks that you must
 experience every time, the designers filmed multiple
 versions of the bottleneck areas, each with different dialog
 but containing the same information. As hard as the
 designers worked to solve the problem of repeated content
 (and many other problems), players generally found the
 process of replaying the interactive story somewhat tedious.
 There are exceptions, of course. Star Wars: Knights of the Old
 Republic featured a novel type of player choice—did they want
 to play the game on the “light side” or “dark side” of the force,
 that is, with good or evil goals? Depending on which of the
 paths you choose, you have different adventures, different
 quests, and ultimately a different ending. It can be argued that
 this isn’t really a case of two different endings on the same
 story, but two completely different stories—so different that
 they are each equally valid. Players who try to take the middle
 path (the, uh, beige side of the force?) generally find the
 experience to be dissatisfactory.
 Problem #4: Not Enough Verbs
 The things that videogame characters spend their time doing
 are very different than the things that characters in movies and
 books spend their time doing:
 Video game verbs: run, shoot, jump, climb, throw, cast,
 punch, fly
 Movie verbs: talk, ask, negotiate, convince, argue, shout,
 plead, complain
 Videogame characters are severely limited in their ability to do
 anything that requires something to happen above the neck.
 Most of what happens in stories is communication, and at the
 present time, videogames just can’t support that. Game designer
 Chris Swain has suggested that when technology advances to
 the point that players can have an intelligent, spoken
 conversation with computer-controlled game characters, it will
 have an effect similar to the introduction of talking pictures.
 Suddenly, a medium that was mostly considered an amusing
 novelty will quickly become the dominant form of cultural
 storytelling. Until then, however, the lack of usable verbs in
 videogames significantly hampers our ability to use games as a
 storytelling medium.
 Problem #5: Time Travel Makes Tragedy Obsolete
 Of all the problems that interactive storytelling faces, this final
 one is quite possibly the most overlooked, the most crippling,
 and the most insoluble. The question is often asked, “Why don’t
 videogames make us cry?” and this may well be the answer.
 Tragic stories are often considered the most serious, most
 important, and most moving type of story. Unfortunately, they
 are generally off limits to the interactive storyteller.
 Freedom and control are one of the most exciting parts of any
 interactive story, but they come at a terrible price: the
 storyteller must give up inevitability. In a powerful tragic story,
 there is a moment where you can see the horrible thing that is
 going to happen, and you feel yourself wishing, begging, and
 hoping that it won’t—but you are powerless to stop this path
 toward inevitable destiny. This rush of being carried along
 toward certain doom is something that videogame stories
 simply cannot support, for it is as if every protagonist has a
 time machine, and anything seriously bad that happens can
 always be undone. How could you make a game out of Romeo
 and Juliet, for example, where Shakespeare’s ending (spoiler
 alert: they both commit suicide) is the “real” ending for the
 game?
 Not all good stories are tragic of course. But any experience that
 met the qualifications of the dream of interactive fiction should
 at least have the potential for tragedy. Instead, we get what the
 narrator in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time intones when
 your character dies: “Wait — that’s not what really happened…”
 Freedom and destiny are polar opposites. As such, any solution
 to this problem has to be very clever indeed.
 The Dream Reborn
 The problems with the dream of interactive storytelling are not
 trivial. Perhaps, one day, artificial personalities so realistic that
 it is impossible to tell them from humans will be intimately
 involved in our story and game experiences, but even that does
 not solve all of the problems presented here—any more than a
 well-run game of Dungeons and Dragons, where human
 intelligence is behind every game character, can solve all these
 problems. No magic solution is likely to solve all five at once.
 This is not a reason to despair; the reason the dream is a failure
 is because it is flawed. Flawed, because it is obsessed with story,
 not with experience, and experience is all we care about.
 Focusing on story structure at the expense of experience is the
 same sin as focusing too much on technology, on aesthetics, or
 on gameplay structure at the expense of experience. Does this
 mean we need to discard our dreams? No—we just need to
 improve them. When you change your dream to one of creating
 innovative, meaningful, and mind-expanding experiences and
 keep in mind these may need to mix and blend traditional story
 and game structures in untraditional ways, the dream can come
 true for you every day. We live in a sea of stories, but most
 people new to storytelling find it harder than they expect. The
 following tips and Chapter 18: Indirect Control, address some
 interesting ways to make the story elements of your game as
 interesting and involving as possible.
 Ten Story Tips for Game Designers
 Story Tip #1: Respect the Story Stack
 When developing a game that you hope has a compelling story,
 it can be very tempting to begin not by designing a game but by
 writing your story. There is something enticingly concrete about
 plotting out a story, with engaging characters and exciting
 events, something that draws in novice game designers, who
 find it easier to sketch out a story idea than to deal with
 complexities of game mechanics and psychology. But this path
 is fraught with terrible peril. It has ruined more games than
 any other mistake that I know of. I learned about the story stack
 from designer Jason Vandenberghe, who needed to explain it to
 me because I had fallen into its terrible trap, wasting time,
 resources, and almost destroying a game I cared about very
 much. It is because of this intense danger that I make this story
 tip #1.
 FIGURE
 17.4
 Figure 17.4 shows the story stack in all its glory. It is not a
 complicated idea, simply a list of five important elements that
 comprise story games. But these elements are sorted in an
 important way: from least flexible (Fantasy, at the bottom) to
 most flexible (Story, at the top). Let us consider each of one
 these elements, and how they relate to each other, in order,
 starting at the wisest place.
 Fantasy: It sounds crazy to say that of these five elements,
 fantasy is the least flexible. After all, isn’t fantasy more flexible
 than anything? I can fantasize about anything I want! And
 while that is true, there is something terrifyingly inflexible
 about fantasies. Either a fantasy appeals to a player or it does
 not. There is no middle ground. A story game about a flying
 superhero makes sense… many people have that fantasy. But, a
 story game about being a professional dishwasher? You’ll have
 a much harder time keeping people interested, because that just
 isn’t a fantasy that most people have. It is important to begin
 your design with a strong fantasy—after all, one of the main
 reasons that people play games is fantasy fulfillment. If your
 fantasy fails to resonate with your players, everything else you
 do will be an uphill battle. A clear statement of the central
 fantasy of your game is a rock upon which you can build
 something powerful.
 Action: Once you have your fantasy clearly articulated, you
 next want to think about what player actions are best suited to
 fulfilling that fantasy. In the development of Pixie Hollow
 Online, which was based in part on the Disney Tinkerbell movie,
 we had an initial design where players engaged in many of the
 actions from the movie. They could help animals, harvest items
 from nature, make gifts for other fairies, help famous fairies
 solve interpersonal problems, and many other things. We
 proudly brought this design to a focus group of young girls to
 gauge their interest. To our embarrassment, they said “these
 things seem interesting… but what I really want to do is fly!” We
 had overlooked flying as an important action, because it was of
 minimal importance in the movie script. It was just a way of
 transitioning from one activity to another. And so, in our
 design, flying only happened in cut scenes. But when we took a
 step back, it became obvious that to fulfill the fantasy of being a
 fairy like Tinkerbell, the primary game action should be flying.
 Thankfully, the girls set us straight while we still had time to
 make the change. In the final version of the game, players
 would fly constantly, during all of their activities, and we gave
 special attention to the feel of the flight, so that it would fulfill
 the fantasy in a delightful way.
 Economy: Now that you have a set of actions that solidly fulfill
 an appealing fantasy, now you need a system of progress that
 will reward those actions, especially those actions that best
 fulfill the fantasy. As we discussed in Chapter 13: Balance, game
 economies are defined by earning and spending. The simplest
 game economies are really just about earning—earning points,
 earning access to the next level, earning a win. It is easy to
 reward the wrong things in your game. For example, maybe
 you create a game centered on the fantasy of being a ninja. You
 choose actions like throwing ninja stars, sneaking up on
 enemies, and striking enemies with a ninja sword, which help
 fulfill that fantasy. However, if you accidentally design levels
 where in order to win, players must tediously memorize the
 locations of hidden traps, you are rewarding actions that work
 against the fantasy of being a ninja. In the Pixie Hollow Online
 example, we wanted players to earn progress from many
 different tasks and be able to use the earnings to get new outfits
 to play dress-up with their fairy. But… should fairies have
 money? “Fairybucks” felt like they went directly against the
 fantasy of being a fairy. Something like a barter system felt like
 it would fit the fairy fantasy much better… and we
 implemented just that: a system of many currencies. A given
 fairy shop might offer a pair of slippers for five pine needles, a
 hair ribbon for two blueberries, and a dress for six lily petals.
 This created an economy that matched the fantasy of being a
 fairy, and encouraged the actions we wanted: players desiring
 these items would fly off on a scavenger hunt to find out where
 in Pixie Hollow they could earn what they needed.
 World: Once you have your fantasy, your actions, and your
 economy in place, now you need a world where they make
 sense. We will talk more about this soon in Chapter 19: Worlds,
 but in short, you need to create a place with rules where the
 economy you have created makes sense. If you’ve made a game
 all about running and jumping and collecting stars that the
 player trades in for magical items, you should have some
 explanation of where these stars came from and why the sellers
 of the magical items want the stars. And… where did the
 magical items come from, anyway? This set of rules about how
 your world works is not yet story… a story is a series of events.
 A world is a place that operates by certain rules. If the rules of
 your world do not match the rules of your economy, everything
 about your game will feel hollow and fake.
 Story: And, at last, here we are at the top of the stack. Now that
 we have a solid fantasy, actions that fulfill it, an economy that
 rewards those actions, and a world that justifies that economy,
 we are at last ready to develop our story. It should be a story
 that makes the world we’ve created make sense, and a story
 where the player actions and progress are important. As we’ll
 see in the next tip, story has an almost infinite flexibility to
 make even the strangest situations seem understandable and
 normal. Despite this flexibility, story still always wants to take
 over the story stack. When story gets its way, it will enslave the
 entire process of game design. Story should not be the master of
 the game but rather a willing servant, using its flexibility to
 create the greatest game experience possible. If ever you find
 yourself, or someone on your team, saying “we can’t do that… it
 goes against the story,” it is a clear signal that story has tricked
 you, trapped you, and taken over your game.
 And this is why it is so important to respect the story stack.
 Wherever you begin with your design, you place a stake in the
 ground. Placing a story stake in the ground is foolish—because
 now, somehow, you will have to drag inflexible fantasy to
 where that stake has been placed. On the other hand, if you find
 a powerful, but inflexible fantasy, and put your stake there,
 then when you have built up the other elements, you can easily
 craft a story that explains why your stake is exactly where it is.
 And that leads us to story tip #2.
 Story Tip #2: Put Your Story to Work!
 As we discussed in Chapter 5: Elements, it is possible to start a
 design in any corner of the tetrad—story, gameplay, technology,
 or aesthetics. And many designs begin with a story. Following
 that story too slavishly, at the expense of the other elements, is
 a common mistake—and an especially silly one, since story is,
 in some ways, the most pliable of all the elements! Story
 elements can often be changed with just a few words, where
 changing elements of gameplay might take weeks of balancing,
 and changing elements of technology might take months of
 reprogramming.
 I once heard some developers of a 3DO game talk about some
 development headaches they were having. Their game involved
 flying over a planet in a spaceship and shooting down enemy
 ships. The game was 3D, and to maintain performance, they
 could not afford to draw distant terrain. To keep the terrain
 from looking strange when it popped in, they had planned to
 use the old trick of making the world foggy. But due to some
 quirk of the 3D hardware, the only fog they could make was a
 weird green color that looked completely unrealistic. Initially,
 the team assumed they would have to scrap this solution, when
 suddenly, story to the rescue! Someone had the idea that maybe
 the evil aliens who had taken over the planet had done so by
 shrouding it with toxic gas. This little change in the story
 suddenly made a technical approach that supported the desired
 gameplay mechanic completely possible. As a side effect, it
 arguably improved the story, making the alien takeover seem
 all the more dramatic.
 I had a similar experience developing my Mordak’s Revenge
 board game. My initial design for the gameplay required
 players to travel about the board, collecting five keys. When
 they had all five, they had to journey to the stronghold of the
 evil wizard Mordak to unlock the stronghold and battle him. In
 playtests, it quickly became clear that it would be a better game
 mechanic if Mordak could somehow come to the player who
 had collected the keys, since it was more immediate, and it
 meant that the battle against Mordak could be fought in a
 variety of terrains. But I was troubled because then the story
 didn’t make any sense. So, once again, story to the rescue! What
 if, instead, Mordak had a secret stronghold that no one could
 find? And instead of collecting keys, the players had to collect
 five summoning stones? When all five were collected, Mordak
 could be summoned immediately out of his stronghold and
 forced to battle the player in whatever terrain the player was
 currently in. This simple change to the story made the desired
 gameplay possible. It also was more novel than my somewhat
 trite “villain in the castle” story.
 Always keep in mind how limber, flexible, and powerful a story
 can be—don’t be afraid to mold your story to support the
 gameplay you think is best.
 Story Tip #3: Goals, Obstacles, and Conflicts
 It is an old maxim of Hollywood screenwriting that the main
 ingredients for a story are (1) a character with a goal and (2)
 obstacles that keep him or her from reaching that goal.
 As the character tries to overcome the obstacles, interesting
 conflicts tend to arise, particularly when another character has
 a conflicting goal. This simple pattern leads to very interesting
 stories because it means the character has to engage in problem
 solving (which we find very interesting); because conflicts lead
 to unpredictable results, in other words surprises (which we
 find very interesting); and because the bigger the obstacle, the
 bigger the potential for dramatic change (which we find very
 interesting).
 Are these ingredients just as useful when creating videogame
 stories? Absolutely—and maybe even more so. We’ve already
 discussed Lens #32: Goals—the goal of the main character will
 be the goal of the player and will be the driving force that keeps
 them moving along the string of pearls, if you choose to create
 one. And the obstacles that character meets will be the
 challenges the player faces. If you want your game to have a
 solidly integrated story, it is very important that these things
 line up—if you give the player a challenge that has nothing to
 do with the obstacles the main character faces, you have just
 weakened the experience considerably. But if you can find a
 way to make the challenges of the game meaningful, as well as
 dramatic obstacles for the main character, your story and game
 structure will fuse into one, which goes a long way toward
 making the player feel like part of the story. We already have a
 Lens of Goals—here is its sister lens.
 #74 THE LENS OF THE OBSTACLE
 A goal with no obstacles is not worth pursuing. Use this lens to
 make sure your obstacles are ones that your players will want
 to overcome.
 What is the relationship between the main character and the
 goal? Why does the character care about it?
 What are the obstacles between the character and the goal?
 Is there an antagonist who is behind the obstacles? What is
 the relationship between the protagonist and the antagonist?
 Do the obstacles gradually increase in difficulty?
 Some say “the bigger the obstacle, the better the story.” Are
 your obstacles big enough? Can they be bigger?
 Great stories often involve the protagonist transforming in
 order to overcome the obstacle. How does your protagonist
 transform?
 Illustration by Sam Yip
 Story Tip #4: Make It Real
 Know your world as God knows this one.
 —Robert McKee
 It is one thing to come up with a plot line, a list of characters,
 and a set of rules for a fantasy world. It is something else again
 to see it in your mind, as if it is a real place. To get there, you
 must think about it constantly, imagining you are one of the
 characters living in the world. One of the secrets of ride design
 at Disney is that each experience, such as the Haunted Mansion
 or Splash Mountain, has an elaborate backstory that is not
 shared with the public, but all the designers know it and they
 use it to keep the world solid. Tolkien did not simply sit down
 and write The Lord of the Rings one day; instead, he spent years
 imagining and documenting the world of Middle Earth, its
 history, people, and languages before the stories really began to
 take shape. That level of detailed planning is seldom necessary,
 but if you can’t answer basic questions about the history of
 your world and the motivations of your characters, it will show
 in your work, and people will see it for what it is:
 unimaginative. Always remember: If it’s not real to you, it’s not
 real to them.
 Story Tip #5: Provide Simplicity and Transcendence
 One thing that game worlds and fantasy worlds tend to have in
 common is that they offer the player a combination of
 simplicity (the game world is simpler than the real world) and
 transcendence (the player is more powerful in the game world
 than they are in the real world). This potent combination
 explains why so many types of story worlds show up again and
 again in games, such as the following:
 Medieval: The stream of swords and sorcery worlds seems to
 be never ending. These worlds are simpler than the world we
 know, because the technologies are primitive. But they are
 seldom accurate simulations of medieval times—there is
 almost always some kind of magic added, and this provides
 the transcendence. The continued success of this genre surely
 stems from the fact that it combines the simple and the
 transcendent in such a primal way.
 Futuristic: Many games and science fiction stories are set in
 the future. But these very seldom are any kind of realistic
 interpretation of the future we are likely to see—one with
 continued suburban sprawl, safer cars, longer work hours,
 and ever more complicated cell phone plans. No—the future
 that we see in these worlds is usually more of a postapocalyptic future; in other words, a bomb went off, or we
 are on some strange frontier planet, and the world is much
 simpler. And of course we have access to sufficiently
 advanced technologies—which, as Arthur C. Clarke noted, are
 indistinguishable from magic—at least in terms of
 transcendence.
 War: In war, things are simpler, since all normal rules and
 laws are set aside. And the transcendence comes from a
 powerful weaponry that lets participants become like gods,
 deciding who lives and who dies. It is a horror in reality, but
 in fantasy it gives a player powerful feelings of simplicity and
 transcendence.
 Modern: Modern settings are unusual for game stories,
 unless the player suddenly has surprisingly more power than
 normal. This can be accomplished in many ways. The Grand
 Theft Auto series uses criminal life to give both simplicity
 (life is simpler when you don’t obey laws) and transcendence
 (you are more powerful when you don’t obey laws). The Sims
 creates a simplified dollhouse version of human life, and it
 gives the player transcendent godlike powers to control the
 characters in the game.
 Abstract: Abstract worlds, such as Minecraft, are not only
 simpler than the real world; they are simpler than the
 average videogame! As Notch discovered, combining that
 simplicity with the godlike power to create and destroy can
 create a pretty successful game.
 Simplicity and transcendence form a powerful combination
 that is easily botched. Use this lens to make sure you combine
 them just right.
 #75 THE LENS OF SIMPLICITY AND TRANSCENDENCE
 To make sure you have the right mix of simplicity and
 transcendence, ask yourself these questions:
 How is my world simpler than the real world? Can it be
 simpler in other ways?
 What kind of transcendent power do I give to the player?
 How can I give even more without removing challenge from
 the game?
 Is my combination of simplicity and transcendence
 contrived, or does it provide my players with a special kind
 of wish fulfillment?
 Illustration by Nick Daniel Insert
 Story Tip #6: Consider the Hero’s Journey
 In 1949, mythologist Joseph Campbell published his first book,
 The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In this text, he describes an
 underlying structure that most mythological stories seem to
 share, which he calls the monomyth, or hero’s journey. He goes
 into great detail about how this structure underlies the stories
 of Moses, Buddha, Christ, Odysseus, Prometheus, Osiris, and
 many others. Many writers and artists found great inspiration
 in Campbell’s work. Most famously, George Lucas based the
 structure of Star Wars around structures Campbell described,
 with great success.
 In 1992, Christopher Vogler, a Hollywood writer and producer,
 published a book called The Writer’s Journey, which was a
 practical guide to writing stories using the archetypes that
 Campbell describes. Vogler’s book is not as scholarly as
 Campbell’s text, but it serves as a far more accessible and
 practical guide for writers who would like to use the hero’s
 journey as a framework. The Wachowskis, who wrote The
 Matrix (which rather clearly follows the hero’s journey model),
 are said to have used Vogler’s book as a guide. As accessible as
 the text is, it is often criticized for being over-formulaic and for
 shoehorning too many stories into a single formula.
 Nonetheless, many people find it gives them useful insights into
 the structure of heroic stories.
 Because so many videogames revolve around a theme of
 heroism, it is only logical that the hero’s journey is a relevant
 structure for a powerful videogame story. Since several books
 and a plethora of websites already exist describing how to
 structure a story around the hero’s journey, I will only give an
 overview of it here.
 Vogler’s Synopsis of the Hero’s Journey
 1. The ordinary world—Establishing scenes that show our
 hero is a regular person leading an ordinary life.
 2. The call to adventure—The hero is presented with a
 challenge that disrupts their ordinary life.
 3. Refusal of the call—The hero makes excuses about why they
 can’t go on the adventure.
 4. Meeting with the mentor—Some wise figure gives advice,
 training, or aid.
 5. Crossing the threshold—The hero leaves the ordinary world
 (often under pressure) and enters the adventure world.
 6. Tests, allies, enemies—The hero faces minor challenges,
 makes allies, confronts enemies, and learns the workings of
 the adventure world.
 7. Approaching the cave—The hero encounters setbacks and
 needs to try something new.
 8. The ordeal—The hero faces a peak life or death crisis.
 9. The reward—The hero survives, overcomes their fear, and
 gets the reward.
 10. The road back—The hero returns to the ordinary world, but
 the problems still aren’t all solved.
 11. Resurrection—The hero faces a still greater crisis and has to
 use everything they have learned.
 12. Returning with the elixir—The journey is now well and
 truly complete, and the hero’s success has improved the lives
 of everyone in the ordinary world.
 By no means do you need to have all twelve of these steps in
 your heroic story—you can tell a good heroic story with fewer
 or more or in a different order.
 As a side note, it is an interesting exercise to look at the hero’s
 journey through Lens #69: Interest Curve—you will see a
 familiar form emerge.
 Some storytellers take great offense at the idea that good
 storytelling can be accomplished by formula. But the hero’s
 journey is not so much a formula, guaranteed to produce an
 entertaining story; rather, it is a form that many entertaining
 stories tend to take. Think of it as a skeleton. Just as humans
 have tremendous variety despite all of us having the same 208
 bones, heroic stories can take millions of forms despite some
 common internal structure.
 Most storytellers seem to agree that using the hero’s journey as
 a starting point for your writing isn’t a very good idea. As Bob
 Bates puts it:
 The Hero’s Journey isn’t a box of tools you can use to fix
 every story problem. But it’s somewhat similar to a circuit
 tester. You can clamp the leads around a problem spot in
 your story and check to see if there’s enough mythical
 current flowing. And if you don’t have enough juice, it can
 help point out the source of the problem.
 Better to write your story first, and if you notice that it might
 have something in common with elements of the monomyth,
 then spend some time considering whether your story might be
 improved by following archetypical structures and elements
 more closely. In other words, use the hero’s journey as a lens.
 #76 THE LENS OF THE HERO’S JOURNEY
 Many heroic stories have similar structure. Use this lens to
 make sure you haven’t missed out on any elements that might
 improve your story. Ask yourself these questions:
 Does my story have elements that qualify it as a heroic story?
 If so, how does it match up with the structure of the hero’s
 journey?
 Would my story be improved by including more archetypical
 elements?
 Does my story match this form so closely that it feels
 hackneyed?
 Illustration by Chris Daniel
 Story Tip #7: Keep Your Story World Consistent
 There is an old French saying that goes:
 If you add a spoonful of wine to a barrelful of sewage,
 you get a barrelful of sewage.
 If you add a spoonful of sewage to a barrelful of wine,
 you get a barrelful of sewage.
 In some ways, story worlds are fragile like the barrelful of wine.
 One small inconsistency in the logic of the world, and the
 reality of the world is broken forever. In Hollywood, the term
 “jumping the shark” is used to describe a television show that
 has deteriorated to a point that it can never be taken seriously
 again. The term is a reference to the popular seventies show
 Happy Days. As a season finale, the writers had Fonzie, the most
 popular character in the show, jump over a line of school buses
 on his motorcycle. The episode was greatly hyped and had
 excellent ratings. In the next season, in an attempt to repeat this
 success, and to play off the popularity of the film Jaws, they had
 a waterskiing Fonzie jump over a shark. This was so ridiculous,
 and so far out of Fonzie’s character, that fans of the show were
 repulsed. The problem was not so much that one particular
 episode had a ridiculous premise, but rather that the character
 and his world were forever tainted and could never be taken
 seriously again. Here is another example: shortly after the
 release of Mass Effect 3, many players complained at their
 disappointment with the ending to the trilogy. The creators
 responded, announcing they were going to release a patch that
 changed the ending. This led to a massive uproar, proving that
 the quality of a story is less important than the illusion that it is
 real. One small error in consistency can make a whole world
 break apart, damaging its past, present, and future.
 If you have a set of rules that define how things work in your
 world, stick with them, and take them seriously. If, for example,
 in your world you can pick up a microwave oven and put it in
 your pocket, that might be a little strange, but maybe in your
 world, pockets are magic and can hold all kinds of things. If
 later, though, a player tries to put an ironing board in their
 pocket and is told “that is too big for you to carry,” the player
 will be frustrated, will stop taking your story world seriously,
 and will stop projecting their imagination into it. Invisibly, in
 the blink of an eye, your world will have changed from a real,
 live place to a sad, broken toy.
 Story Tip #8: Make Your Story World Accessible
 In Jules Verne’s classic tale, From the Earth to the Moon (1865),
 he tells the story of three men who travel to the moon in a
 spaceship fired from a giant cannon. Despite the fact that the
 book goes into great detail about the science of the cannon, the
 premise seems ridiculous to modern eyes because any cannon
 blast powerful enough to launch a spacecraft would surely kill
 everyone inside. We know from experience that rockets are a
 far safer and realistic method of sending people to the moon.
 One might think that Verne did not use rockets in his story
 because they had not yet been invented—but this was not the
 case. Rockets were commonly used as weapons at that time—
 consider the “rockets’ red glare” in “The Star-Spangled Banner”
 (1814), for instance.
 So, surely Verne knew about rockets, and he seems to have had
 enough of a scientific mind to realize that they were a much
 more reasonable method of putting a craft into space than a
 cannon would be. So why did he write his story this way? The
 answer seems to be that it was much more accessible to his
 audience.
 Consider the progressions of military technology over the
 course of the nineteenth century. First, consider rockets:
 1812: William Congreve’s rockets: 6.5″ diameter, 42 pounds,
 two-mile range
 1840: William Hale’s rockets: same as Congreve’s but slightly
 more accurate
 In nearly thirty years, rockets showed no growth and only slight
 improvement.
 But now consider cannons:
 1855: Dahlgren’s gun: 100-pound shell, three mile range
 1860: Rodman’s Columbiad: 1000-pound shell, six mile range
 In a mere five years, the size of a cannon shell had increased by
 ten times! Keeping in mind that the American Civil War was
 making international headlines in 1865, it only took a small
 leap of the imagination to picture even larger and more
 powerful cannons appearing within the next few years—
 possibly large enough to fire shells clear to the moon.
 Verne surely understood that rockets were the most likely
 method of man reaching the moon—but he was a storyteller,
 not a scientist, and he had the good sense to know that when
 you are telling a story, facts aren’t always your friends. What
 the player will believe and enjoy is more important that what is
 physically accurate.
 When I worked on Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the
 Buccaneer Gold, several examples of this principle arose. One
 was the speed of the boat—initially, we took pains to make sure
 our pirate ship traveled at a realistic speed. But we quickly
 found that this speed was so slow (or appeared to be, at our
 height from the water) that players quickly became bored. So,
 we cast reality to the winds, as it were, and just made the boat
 go at a speed that felt realistic and exciting, even though it was
 not realistic at all. Another example can be clearly seen in this
 screenshot from the game:
 FIGURE
 17.5
 (Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. Used with permission.)
 Look at those boats and consider which way the wind is
 blowing. Weirdly, it seems to be behind all of them. And indeed
 it is. To ask players to understand how to sail a ship with the
 wind was simply too much to ask in an action game—and no
 player ever asked us about that; they simply assumed that the
 boats drove like cars or motorboats, because that is what they
 were familiar with. As a minor detail, consider the flags at the
 top of the ship masts—they are being blown in the opposite
 direction as the sails! The modeler of the ships initially had
 them facing the correct way, but it looked strange to our
 playtesters, who were more used to seeing a flag flying on a car
 antenna than on a ship’s mast. Our players would frequently
 ask why the flags pointed the wrong way, and we would
 explain: “No, see, the wind is blowing from behind the ships…”
 and they would say “Oh… hmm…. I guess that’s right.” But after
 a while, we got tired of explaining it, so we just made the flags
 point the other way, and people stopped asking about them,
 because now they looked “normal.”
 There are times, though, that your story requires something
 strange that the player has never seen before, which can’t be
 made readily accessible. In these cases, it is very important that
 you call special attention to that thing and make the players
 understand what it is and how it works. I once had a team of
 students who made a little game about two hamsters in a pet
 store who fall in love but are unable to meet because they are
 in separate cages. Their game had the player use a little
 hamster cannon to try to launch the boy hamster to the girl
 hamster’s cage. It was pointed out to them that there is no such
 thing as a hamster cannon, and as a result the story seemed
 kind of strange and hard to believe. One solution would have
 been to change the cannon to something else that could launch
 the boy hamster, like perhaps a hamster wheel, but the team
 wanted to keep the cannon, so they took a different approach.
 In the establishing shots of the pet shop, they prominently
 featured signs reading “Special! Hamster Cannons on sale!”
 This not only served as an intriguing hook for the experience,
 creating anticipation to see what a hamster cannon would look
 like, but it introduced this very strange item to the player so
 that when it showed up, it didn’t seem so strange after all—just
 a natural part of an unusual world. Surreal elements are not at
 all uncommon in games, and it is important that you
 understand how to smoothly integrate them. One handy way to
 do that is to use this lens.
 #77 THE LENS OF THE WEIRDEST THING
 Having weird things in your story can help give meaning to
 unusual game mechanics—it can capture the interest of the
 player, and it can make your world seem special. Too many
 things that are too weird, though, will render your story
 puzzling and inaccessible. To make sure your story is the good
 kind of weird, ask yourself these questions:
 What’s the weirdest thing in my story?
 How can I make sure that the weirdest thing doesn’t confuse
 or alienate the player?
 If there are multiple weird things, should I maybe get rid of,
 or coalesce, some of them?
 If there is nothing weird in my story, is the story still
 interesting?
 Illustration by Reagan Heller
 Story Tip #9: Use Clichés Judiciously
 One criticism videogame stories seem unable to escape is
 overuse of clichés, or tropes. After all, you can only save the
 world from evil aliens, use your wizardry against an evil
 dragon, or fight a dungeon full of zombies with a shotgun a
 certain number of times before it becomes tedious. This drives
 some designers to avoid any story setting or theme that has
 been done before—sometimes pushing their story and setting
 into something so offbeat that players are unable to understand
 what it is or relate to it at all.
 For all their potential to be abused, clichés have the tremendous
 advantage of being familiar to the player, and what is familiar
 is understandable and comprehensible. It has been said that
 every successful videogame finds a way to combine something
 familiar with something novel. Some designers would never
 make a game about ninjas, because ninjas have been done to
 death. But what if you made a story about a lonely ninja, an
 incompetent ninja, a ninja dog, a robotic ninja, or a third-grade
 girl who leads a secret life as a ninja? All of these storylines
 have the potential to be something new and different while
 having a hook into a world the player already understands.
 It is certainly an error to overuse clichés, but it is an equal error
 to exile them from your toolbox.
 Story Tip #10: Sometimes a Map Brings a Story to Life
 When we think of writing stories, we generally think of words,
 characters, and plotlines. But stories can come from unexpected
 places. Robert Louis Stevenson had no intention of writing what
 is considered his greatest work: Treasure Island. Obligated to
 entertain a schoolboy during a particularly rainy vacation, he
 and the boy took turns drawing pictures. On a whim, Stevenson
 drew a map of a fanciful island, which suddenly took on a life
 of its own:
 …as I paused upon my map of ‘Treasure Island’, the future
 character of the book began to appear there visibly among
 imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright
 weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as
 they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on
 these few square inches of a flat projection. The next thing I
 knew I had some papers before me and was writing out a
 list of chapters.
 Most videogames do not happen in world of words, but in a
 physical place. By making sketches and drawings of this place,
 often a story will naturally take shape, as you are compelled to
 consider who lives there, what they do, and why.
 Story Tip #11: Surprise and Emotion
 Writing stories is hard. Getting them to emerge from games is
 even harder. But, generally, when stories are dull, it is because
 they lack surprise or emotion (or, yikes, both!). If you find that
 your game story is dull, take out your old friends, Lens #1:
 Emotion and Lens #4: Surprise, and point them at your story.
 You yourself might be surprised and emotional at how much
 they help.
 So much more can be said about story that we cannot possibly
 cover it all here. But whatever you create, whether it be an
 abstract game with only the thinnest veneer of theme and
 setting or a vast epic adventure with hundreds of detailed
 characters, you are wise to make the story elements of your
 game as meaningful and powerful as possible. So, we end this
 chapter with a general-purpose lens, which can benefit any
 game as a tool for studying this very important quadrant of the
 elemental tetrad.
 #78 THE LENS OF STORY
 Ask yourself these questions:
 Does my game really need a story? Why?
 Why will players be interested in this story?
 How does the story support the other parts of the tetrad
 (aesthetics, technology, gameplay)? Can it do a better job?
 How do the other parts of the tetrad support the story? Can
 they do a better job?
 How can my story be better?
 Illustration by Diana Patton
 Other Reading to Consider
 Character Development and Storytelling for Games by
 Lee Sheldon. Lee has written for dozens of games and just as
 many television shows. He condenses his lifetime of
 storytelling experience into this very practical book.
 Interactive Storytelling for Video Games by Josiah
 Liebowitz and Chris Klug. More excellent advice on
 interactive storytelling from two experienced professionals.
 Story by Robert McKee. Considered by many the bible of
 Hollywood screenwriting, this book is clear, accessible, and
 full of excellent advice.
 The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by
 Christopher Vogler. This book has a reputation for being too
 formulaic, but it makes many powerful ideas easy to
 understand, and it has given powerful insights to many great
 screenwriters.
 Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive
 Entertainment. This book is chock full of examples and tips,
 not to mention thoughtful interviews with interactive
 storytellers from all over the industry.
 Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet
 Burroway. Now in its tenth edition, this book is for anyone
 serious about becoming a great storyteller and writer. It won
 me over from the first page: Chapter One: Whatever Works.
 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
 Story and Game Structures Can Be Artfully
 Merged with Indirect Control
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-18
 FIGURE
 18.1
 FIGURE
 18.2
 In late 1966, musician John Lennon was invited to attend an art
 exhibition called “Unfinished Paintings and Objects” at the
 Indica Gallery in London. He had no special interest in avantgarde art and had never heard of the artist, a woman named
 Yoko Ono, but when he arrived, one particular piece caught his
 attention: a tall stepladder in the center of the room. Mounted
 above it, on the ceiling, was a white canvas that appeared to be
 blank. Above the ladder, beside the ceiling-mounted canvas,
 hung a magnifying glass on a chain. John eyed this weird
 assemblage uncertainly—was he just supposed to look up at it?
 The painting looked blank—but if it was, why was the magnifier
 up there? He bolstered his courage, climbed the wobbly ladder,
 and, precariously balancing on the top step, picked up the
 magnifier and craned his neck to look up at the white canvas.
 At first, he thought it was blank, some kind of artistic statement
 about nothingness. But then he saw it: one tiny word,
 impossible to read without the glass, which would change his
 life forever.
 The word was “yes.”
 The Feeling of Freedom
 In previous chapters, we touched on the conflict between story
 and gameplay. At its heart, this is a conflict about freedom. The
 wonderful thing about games and interactive experiences is the
 freedom that the player feels—this freedom gives the player the
 wonderful feeling of control and makes it easy for them to
 project their imaginations into the world you have created. The
 feeling of freedom is so important in a game that it merits a
 new lens.
 #79 THE LENS OF FREEDOM
 A feeling of freedom is one of the things that separates games
 from other forms of entertainment. To make sure your players
 feel as free as possible, ask yourself these questions:
 When do my players have freedom of action? Do they feel
 free at these times?
 When are they constrained? Do they feel constrained at these
 times?
 Are there any places I can let them feel freer than they do
 now?
 Are there any places where they are overwhelmed by too
 much freedom?
 Illustration by Nathan Mazur
 And even though it makes it very difficult for us to control the
 interest curve for the player, when we give them those
 wonderful feelings of interactivity and control, we have to give
 them freedom, right?
 Wrong.
 We don’t always have to give the player true freedom—we only
 have to give the player the feeling of freedom. For, as we’ve
 discussed, all that’s real is what you feel—if a clever designer
 can make a player feel free, when really the player has very few
 choices, or even no choice at all, then suddenly we have the
 best of both worlds, the player has the wonderful feeling of
 freedom, and the designer has managed to economically create
 an experience with an ideal interest curve and an ideal set of
 events.
 But how is such a thing possible? How can one create the
 feeling of freedom, when no freedom or very limited freedom
 exists? After all, a designer has no control over what a player
 does when they enter a game, right?
 No, not right. It is true that the designer does not have direct
 control over what a player does, but through various subtle
 means, they can exert indirect control over the actions of a
 player. And this indirect control is possibly the most subtle,
 delicate, artful, and important technique of any we will
 encounter.
 To understand what I’m talking about, let’s look at some of the
 methods of indirect control. There are many of them, varied
 and subtle, but generally these six do most of the work.
 Indirect Control Method #1: Constraints
 Consider the difference between these two requests:
 Request 1: Pick a color: ___________
 Request 2: Pick a color: a. red b. blue c. green
 Both of them give the answerer freedom of choice, and they are
 both asking for about the same thing. But the difference is
 tremendous because for Request 1, the answerer could have
 chosen one of millions of different answers—“fire engine red,”
 “cauliflower blue,” “mauvish taupe,” “sky blue pink,” “no, you
 pick a color,” or just about anything, really.
 But for Request 2, the answerer only has three choices. They
 still have freedom, they still get to choose, but we have
 managed to cut the number of choices from millions to three!
 And the answerers who were going to pick red, blue, or green
 anyway won’t even notice the difference. And still others will
 prefer Request 2 over Request 1, because too much freedom can
 be a daunting thing—it forces your imagination to work hard.
 In my amusement park days, I sometimes worked in the candy
 store, in front of a big display of sixty flavors of old-fashioned
 stick candy. A hundred times a day, people would come in and
 ask “What flavors do you have back there?” At first, I thought I
 would be a smart aleck and recite all sixty flavors—as I did this,
 the customer’s eyes would get wide with fear, and right around
 the thirty-second flavor, they would say, “Stop! Stop! That’s
 enough!” They were completely overwhelmed by so many
 choices. After a while, I thought of a new approach. When they
 asked about the flavors, I would say “We have every flavor you
 can imagine. Go on, name the flavors you would like—I’m sure
 we have them.”
 At first, they would be impressed with this powerful freedom.
 But then they would furrow up their brows, think hard, and
 say, “Uh… cherry? No, wait… I don’t want that… Hmm….
 peppermint? No… Oh, just forget it,” and they would walk away
 in frustration. Finally, I figured out a strategy that sold a lot of
 candy sticks. When someone would ask about the flavors, I
 would say “We have just about every flavor you can imagine,
 but our most popular flavors are cherry, blueberry, lemon, root
 beer, wintergreen, and licorice.” They were delighted at having
 the feeling of freedom but also glad to have a small number of
 attractive choices; in fact, most customers would choose from
 the “popular six,” a list I made up and a list I would change
 frequently to help ensure the other flavors didn’t get too old on
 the shelf. This is an example of indirect control in action—by
 constraining their choices, I made it more likely they would
 make a choice. But not just any choice—the choices I guided
 them toward. And despite my tricky methods of constraining
 their choices, they retained a feeling of freedom and perhaps
 felt an enhanced feeling of freedom, since their choices were
 clearer than when I didn’t guide them at all.
 This method of indirect control by constraint is used in games
 all the time. If a game puts a player in an empty room with two
 doors, the player will almost certainly go through one of them.
 Which one, we don’t necessarily know, but they will surely go
 through one, since a door is a message that says “open me” and
 players are naturally curious. After all, there is nowhere else to
 go. If you ask the player if they had choices, they would say they
 did, for even two options is a choice. Compare this to putting a
 player in an open field, out on a city street, or in a shopping
 mall. In those cases, where they go and what they do is far more
 open ended and difficult to predict—unless you use other
 methods of indirect control.
 Indirect Control Method #2: Goals
 The most common and straightforward use of indirect control
 in game design is through goals. If a player has two doors they
 can go through, I don’t really know which one they are going to
 enter. But if I give them a goal of “go find all the bananas,” and
 one of the doors clearly has bananas behind it, I can make a
 pretty good guess about where they are going to go.
 Earlier, we talked about the importance of establishing good
 goals to give players a reason to care about your game. Once
 clear and achievable goals have been established, though, you
 can take advantage of that fact by sculpting your world around
 the goals, since your players will only go places and do things
 that they think will help fulfill the goals. If your driving game is
 about racing through a city to get to a finish line, you don’t have
 to build a complete street map, because if you clearly mark the
 fastest route, people will mostly stick to that. You might add a
 small number of side streets (especially if some are shortcuts!)
 to give a feeling of freedom, but the goal you have selected will
 indirectly control players to avoid exploring every little side
 street. Creating content that players will never see does not give
 them more freedom—it just wastes development resources that
 could be used to improve the places that the players will see.
 Something important to note is the important interaction
 between player confidence and goals. If players feel very
 confident about their goals, and their ability to pursue them,
 the powerful effects of indirect control will be multiplied, as the
 players will confidently follow their own instincts. However, if
 players are confused about their goals, or doubtful of their
 ability to interact properly in this world, the effects of indirect
 control will be greatly diminished, as the players second guess
 their own instincts about what to do and how to do it.
 One fascinating real-world example of indirect control in action
 can be seen in the men’s restrooms of Amsterdam’s Schiphol
 Airport. Users of the urinals in these restrooms quickly notice
 that they contain a fly. This is not an actual fly; rather, it is just
 an etching in the surface of the porcelain. Why? The designers
 were trying to solve the problem of “sloppy marksmanship,”
 which results in the need for more janitorial service. The etched
 fly creates an implicit goal—hit the fly. By placing the fly in the
 center of the urinal (and slightly to one side to soften the angle
 of incidence), the bathrooms stay cleaner. The “players” have
 not had their freedom diminished in the least, but are indirectly
 controlled toward the behavior that the designers find optimal.
 Indirect Control Method #3: Interface
 We’ve already talked about feedback, transparency, juiciness,
 and important aspects of a good interface. But there is
 something else to consider about your interface: indirect
 control. Because players want interfaces to be transparent, they
 don’t really think about the interface, if they can help it. In
 other words, they set up their expectations about what they can
 and cannot do in a game based on the interface. If your “rock
 star” game has a plastic guitar as the physical interface, your
 players are probably going to expect to play the guitar, and it
 probably will not occur to them that they might want to do
 something else. If you give them a gamepad instead, they might
 wonder if they can play different instruments and do stage
 dives, or any number of other things a rock star might do. But
 that plastic guitar secretly steals away those options—silently
 limiting the players to a single activity. When we built our
 virtual Pirates attraction with a wooden ship’s wheel and thirtypound spun-aluminum cannons, no guest ever asked whether
 they could sword fight as part of the game—that option never
 entered their minds.
 And it isn’t just the physical interface that has this power—the
 virtual interface has it, too. Even the avatar you control, which
 is part of the virtual interface, exerts indirect control over the
 player. If the player controls a human adventurer, they will try
 to do certain things. If they control a dragonfly, an elephant, or
 a Sherman tank, they will try to do very different things. The
 choice of avatar is partly about who a player will relate to, but
 it is also about implicitly limiting the player’s options.
 Indirect Control Method #4: Visual Design
 We are led to believe a lie
 when we see with, not through, the eye.
 —William Blake
 Anyone who works in an area of the visual arts knows that
 layout affects where the guest will look. This becomes very
 important in an interactive experience, since guests tend to go
 to what draws their attention. Therefore, if you can control
 where someone is going to look, you can control where they are
 going to go. Figure 18.3 shows a simple example.
 It is difficult, looking at this picture, for your eyes not to be led
 to the center of the page. A guest looking at this scene in an
 interactive experience would be very likely to examine the
 central triangle before considering what might be at the edges
 of the frame. This is in sharp contrast to Figure 18.4.
 Here, the guest’s eyes are compelled to explore the edges of the
 frame and beyond. If this scene were part of an interactive
 experience, it would be a good bet that the guest would be
 trying to find out more about the objects on the edges, rather
 than the circle in the middle of the scene. Most likely, they
 would try to push past the borders of the screen, if they could.
 These examples are abstract, but there are plenty of real-world
 examples that illustrate the same thing. The designers of quilts,
 for example, think a great deal about how to draw the eye. It is
 often said that a good quilt design makes the eye flit
 continuously around the quilt, never letting it come to rest on a
 single image.
 FIGURE
 18.3
 FIGURE
 18.4
 Set designers, illustrators, architects, and cinematographers use
 these principles to guide the eye of their guests and indirectly
 control their focus. One excellent example is the castle at the
 center of Disneyland. Walt Disney knew that there was some
 risk of guests entering the park and milling about at the
 entrance, unsure of where to go. The castle is placed such that
 the guests’ eyes are immediately drawn to it upon entering the
 park (similar to Figure 18.3), and their feet are quick to follow.
 Soon the guests are at the Disneyland hub, with several visual
 landmarks beckoning them in different directions (similar to
 Figure 18.4). Indirectly, Walt was able to control guests to do
 just what he wanted them to do: Move quickly to the center of
 Disneyland, and then branch out randomly to other parts of the
 park. Of course, the guests are seldom aware of this
 manipulation. After all, no one told them where to go. All the
 guests know is that without much thinking, and with total
 freedom, they ended up somewhere interesting and had a fun
 entertainment experience.
 Walt even had a name for this kind of manipulation. He called it
 a visual “weenie,” a reference to the way dogs are sometimes
 controlled on a movie set: A trainer holds a hot dog or piece of
 meat in the air, and moves it around to control where the dog
 will look, since nothing draws the attention of a dog better than
 food.
 One of the keys to good level design is that the player’s eyes pull
 them through the level, effortlessly. It makes the player feel in
 control and immersed in the world. Understanding what pulls
 the eye of the player can give you tremendous power over the
 choices players want to make. When the Disney VR Studio
 worked on the Mark 2 version of Aladdin’s Magic Carpet Ride:
 VR Adventure, we faced a significant conundrum. One very
 important scene was the palace throne room, shown here:
 FIGURE
 18.5
 (Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. Used with permission.)
 The animation director wanted players to fly into this room,
 then fly up to that little throne at the base of the elephant
 statue, and sit for a moment and listen to a message from the
 Sultan before they continued their gameplay. We had hoped
 that the little Sultan, dressed in white hopping up and down on
 that throne, would be enough to draw people over to listen to
 him—but that didn’t happen. These players were on flying
 carpets! They wanted to fly all around, up to the ceiling, around
 the pillars, anywhere they could. Their implicit goal was to fly
 and have fun—visiting the Sultan didn’t fit in with that plan.
 Seeing no other choice, we were all set to implement a system
 that seized control from the players, dragging them across the
 room to the Sultan and gluing them to the spot while he talked.
 No one liked this idea, since we all knew it meant robbing the
 players of their precious feeling of freedom.
 But then the art director had an idea.
 He painted a single red line on the floor, like this:
 His thinking was that maybe guests would follow the red line.
 We were all somewhat skeptical, but it was an easy thing for us
 to prototype. And to our stunned amazement, guests did exactly
 that! Upon entering the room, instead of flying every which way
 like we had seen before, they followed the red line like it was
 some kind of tractor beam, right up to the Sultan’s throne. And
 when he started talking (by that time guests were right up close
 to him), they waited to hear what he had to say! It didn’t work
 every single time, but it did work over 90% of the time, which
 was perfectly adequate for this experience. The most startling
 part was in the interviews afterwards—upon asking players
 why they followed the red line in the throne room, they would
 say “What red line?” It didn’t register in their conscious
 memory at all.
 FIGURE
 18.6
 (Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. Used with permission.)
 At first this didn’t make sense to me: How could a simple red
 line wipe the idea of flying around the room out of the minds of
 the players? But then I realized—it was seeing the columns and
 the chandeliers that put the idea of flying around into their
 minds. The red line was so visually dominant in the scene that
 it stopped them from noticing these other things, and so the
 idea to do these other things didn’t even occur to them.
 Curiously, we faced a new version of this problem in the Mark 3
 version of the game. In this version, which was for four
 simultaneous players, we didn’t want them all to go to the
 Sultan. We wanted them to split up and go to different places—
 we wanted some players to visit the Sultan and others to fly
 through doors on the left and right sides of the room. But the
 tyrannical red line was making all four players fly up to the
 Sultan. Again we started discussing how we probably had to
 force the players to split up—but then we had a different
 thought—could we change the red line to make that happen?
 We tried this:
 FIGURE
 18.7
 (Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. Used with permission.)
 And it worked beautifully. In most cases, two players would
 visit the throne, one player would branch left following the line
 to the left door, and one player would branch right, following
 the line to the right door.
 Indirect Control Method #5: Characters
 One very straightforward method of indirectly controlling the
 player is through computer-controlled characters in the game.
 If you can use your storytelling ability to make the player
 actually care about the characters—that is, willingly wanting to
 obey them, protect them, help them, or destroy them—you
 suddenly have an excellent tool to control what the player will
 and will not try to do.
 This was used to great effect in an early interactive movie: Mr.
 Sardonicus, directed by William Castle in 1961, featured an
 unusual gimmick. The narrator explains that how the film ends
 is up to the audience—should the villain suffer punishment, or
 be forgiven? Each audience member was given a “thumbsup/thumbs-down” card to hold up, so the projectionist could
 load the appropriate film reel. Castle had significant confidence
 that audiences would choose the “punishment” reel. He was so
 confident, in fact, that he never bothered to film the
 “forgiveness” reel, and no audience ever noticed.
 In the game Animal Crossing, a mysterious council called the
 Happy Room Academy (HRA) periodically evaluates how well
 you have decorated the interior of your house and awards you
 points based on how well you have done. Players work very
 hard to get these points—partly because it is a goal of the game,
 but I think also partly because it feels embarrassing to think
 that someone is looking at the inside of your house and shaking
 their head in disgust, even if they are only imaginary.
 In the game Ico, your goal is to protect a princess who travels
 with you. The designers have a very clever timer mechanism in
 the game—evil spirits appear if you stay still too long, grab the
 princess, and try to drag her into a hole in the ground. Even
 though they can’t hurt her unless they succeed in carrying her
 away, and it takes some time for them to actually pull her into
 the hole, I found myself snapping into action the moment they
 appeared, for the very idea of them touching her made me feel
 like I was letting her down.
 Characters can be a great way to manipulate the choices the
 player is trying to make or how they feel about those choices.
 But first, you have to make the player care about how those
 imaginary characters feel, for once you have done that, it is
 easy to inspire action in the player, for one marvelous aspect of
 human nature is a deep desire to help those we empathize with.
 It is a point of view so useful we should add it to our toolbox.
 #80 THE LENS OF HELP
 Deep down, everyone wants to be helpful. To channel this
 helpful spirit toward engaging gameplay, ask yourself these
 questions:
 Within the context of the game, who is the player helping?
 Can I make the player feel more connected to the characters
 who need help?
 Can I better tell the story of how meeting game goals helps
 someone?
 How can the helped characters show their appreciation?
 Illustration by Astro Leon-Jhong
 Indirect Control Method #6: Music
 When most designers think of adding music to a game, they
 usually think of the mood they want to create and the
 atmosphere of the game. But music can also have a significant
 effect on what players do.
 Restaurants use this method all the time. Fast music makes
 people eat faster, so during a lunch rush, many restaurants play
 high-energy dance music, because faster eating means more
 profits. And of course, during a slow period, like three in the
 afternoon, they do the opposite. An empty restaurant often is a
 sign of a bad restaurant, so to make diners linger, they play
 slow music, which slows down the eating and makes customers
 consider ordering an extra cup of coffee or a dessert. Of course,
 the patrons don’t realize this is happening—they think they
 have total freedom over their actions.
 If it works for restaurant managers, it can work for you. Think
 about what kind of music you should play to make players:
 Look around for something hidden.
 Destroy everything possible without slowing down.
 Realize they are heading the wrong way.
 Move slowly and carefully.
 Worry about accidentally hurting innocent bystanders.
 Go as far and as fast as possible without looking back.
 Music is the language of the soul, and as such, it speaks to
 players on a deep level—a level so deep that it can change their
 moods, desires, and actions—and they don’t even realize it is
 happening.
 These six methods of indirect control can be very powerful
 ways to balance freedom and good storytelling. That it is
 possible your design is exerting control on players in ways you
 never intended is a note of caution, though. I took a friend to
 Walt Disney World’s scary Alien Encounter experience back in
 the 1990s (it has since been made less frightening and more
 family friendly). It consisted of indoor circular amphitheater
 with strange chairs that could create the illusion that a vicious
 alien monster was loose in the dark theater, brushing against
 you and breathing down your neck. It was so unique and
 exciting, I felt sure my friend would enjoy it, but when it was
 over, he seemed nonplussed. I asked what he thought, and he
 said, “It was okay. But when I saw how it was laid out in a circle,
 and they strapped us into the chairs, I was sure the theater
 would spin. But we just sat there. I mean, it was okay, just not
 what I expected.”
 To make sure your experience has the right kind of indirect
 control, use this lens.
 #81 THE LENS OF INDIRECT CONTROL
 Every designer has a vision of what they would like the players
 to do to have an ideal play experience. To help ensure the
 players do these things of their own free will, ask yourself these
 questions:
 Ideally, what would I like the players to do?
 Can constraints get players to do it?
 Can goals get players to do it?
 Can interface get players to do it?
 Can visual design get players to do it?
 Can game characters get players to do it?
 Can music or sound get players to do it?
 Is there some other method I can use to coerce players
 toward ideal behavior without impinging on their feeling of
 freedom?
 Is my design inducing desires I’d rather the player not have?
 Illustration by Cheryl Ceol
 Collusion
 While designing Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the
 Buccaneer Gold, we faced a significant challenge. We had to
 create a very powerful interactive experience that would only
 last five minutes. The interest curve had to be excellent, since a
 family of four could be paying as much as $20 just to play this
 game one time. But at the same time, we knew this couldn’t just
 be a linear experience, because the very essence of being a
 pirate involved a feeling of tremendous freedom. Based on our
 previous experiences, we knew that this was a great
 opportunity for some indirect control.
 Our early prototypes of the game made one thing clear: If we
 just set people out on the ocean to battle enemies, they had
 great fun for about two minutes and twenty seconds. Then their
 zeal would wane, and they would sometimes ask, “So… is this
 all we do?” Clearly, this was an unacceptable interest curve.
 Players wanted more buildup. We thought a way to achieve this
 would be with some more interesting scenarios. We thought
 that by putting these scenarios near islands that the players
 could approach, it would be a great way to guide them to where
 interesting things were happening—kind of like the castle
 guides people in Disneyland. So, we drew up an initial map:
 FIGURE
 18.8
 (Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. Used with permission.)
 Players would start in the center, where we expected they
 would fight some enemies, and then they would hopefully sail
 for one of the islands, each designed to be interesting and
 visible from a distance. Which island they went to was up to
 them—they had freedom to choose, for each island had
 different types of encounters. At one, evil pirates were
 besieging a burning town. At another, a surprising mining
 operation was taking place on the side of a volcano. At a third,
 the royal navy was transporting huge quantities of gold and
 guarding their stronghold with catapults that launched
 fireballs. We were sure that these big islands would draw a lot
 of player interest.
 Boy, were we wrong. Taking a look at Figure 18.9, you can see
 the problem.
 The players have been told that their goal is to sink the pirate
 ships. Here they are surrounded by large, threatening pirate
 ships with bright white sails. Look at that poor volcano in the
 distance. It is hardly noticeable and has nothing to do with the
 player goals!
 We saw right away that this wasn’t working. And we started
 considering the possibility of putting the pirate ship on a fixed
 path that guided them to the islands. But then we had a funny
 idea. What if the enemy pirate ships didn’t act in their own best
 interest? Up until now, we had been spending a lot of time
 writing fancy algorithms to make the enemy ships attack with
 interesting and intelligent strategies. Our new idea was to scrap
 all that and change the logic of the ships. With the new system,
 at the start of the game, when the players encounter ships on
 the open ocean, the ships would attack the players, but then
 they would start to flee. The players, fixed on their goal of
 destroying enemy ships, would pursue them. We then tried to
 time things so that right about when the players destroyed the
 enemy ships, the ships had arrived at one of the islands (chosen
 randomly). With the ships sunk, the players would look up to
 find themselves at an interesting island scenario. They would
 do battle there, only to be attacked by new ships that again fled
 —to where? To whatever island the players had not visited yet.
 FIGURE
 18.9
 (Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. Used with permission.)
 This strategy worked magnificently. With a feeling of total
 freedom, the players would have a very structured experience:
 they would start with an exciting battle, followed by a miniscenario, followed by a new naval battle, followed by another
 new mini-scenario. We knew we had to have a big finish, but
 we couldn’t be sure where the players would be. So a little bit
 after the fourth minute, the big finish came to them, in the form
 of a sudden fog and an attack by ghost pirates who engaged the
 players in an epic final battle.
 The whole thing was only possible because we did something
 very unusual—we made the characters in the game have two
 simultaneous goals. On one hand, their goal is to engage the
 players in a challenging battle. On the other hand, their goal is
 to lead the players to interesting places to keep the flow of the
 experience optimal. I call this principle collusion, since the
 game characters are colluding with the designer to make an
 experience that will be optimal for the players. It is an
 interesting form of indirect control that joins methods of using
 goals, characters, and visual design for a single unified effect.
 There is some evidence that this kind of indirect control via
 collusion may be central to the future of interactive storytelling.
 The fascinating Façade experience, created by Andrew Stern
 and Michael Mateas, takes this idea to a new level. In Façade,
 you play the role of a guest at a dinner party, hosted by Grace
 and Trip, a married couple. Your interface is one that mainly
 consists of speaking through typed text, which offers
 tremendous freedom and flexibility. As you play, you quickly
 notice that you are the only guest at the party, and weirdly, it is
 their anniversary. The situation is very uncomfortable because
 of their constant bickering, each trying to get you to take sides
 in their arguments. It is a very unusual game experience with
 goals that are more like those in a novel or television show than
 in a videogame.
 FIGURE
 18.10
 Something else is unusual, too. The game seems to play quite
 differently on different sessions—each time you play, you hear
 perhaps 10% of the dialog that was recorded. This is not a string
 of pearls structure, or even a branching structure. This is a
 simulation where Grace and Trip are artificially intelligent
 characters who have goals they are trying to achieve. This is
 done through fairly standard AI models of goals related to
 behaviors that are triggered by sensors (Figure 18.11).
 However, like our tricky pirate ships, Grace and Trip are not
 just trying to satisfy their own goals. They also are very aware
 that they are part of a story and, as such, should be trying to
 make it interesting. As they make their choices about what to
 say and do, part of their decision concerns whether what they
 are saying is of the proper tension for this part of the story, and
 the designers encoded a timeline of what they thought was an
 appropriate tension over time for the experience (Figure 18.12).
 Does that graph look familiar? By having Grace and Trip make
 decisions that follow this tension graph, while simultaneously
 trying to fulfill the goals they have as characters in the story,
 their behavior makes sense while keeping the player interested
 in the sequence of events.
 FIGURE
 18.11
 FIGURE
 18.12
 It would seem that we have only scratched the surface of the
 type of experiences that might be possible through the clever
 use of collusion. If you’d like to consider how you might use it in
 your game, use this lens.
 #82 THE LENS OF COLLUSION
 Characters should fulfill their roles in the game world but,
 when possible, also serve as the many minions of the game
 designer, working toward the designer’s ultimate aim, which is
 to ensure an engaging experience for the player. To make sure
 your characters are living up to this responsibility, ask yourself
 these questions:
 What do I want the player to experience?
 How can the characters help fulfill this experience, without
 compromising their goals in the game world?
 Illustration by Nick Daniel
 The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote:
 When the best leader’s work is done the people say ‘We did
 it ourselves!’
 Hopefully, you will find the subtle techniques of indirect control
 useful when trying to lead your players to engaging experiences
 where they will feel control, mastery, and success.
 But where is it that these engaging experiences will take place?
 Other Reading to Consider
 Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang. This
 simple guide, by a noted illustrator of children’s books, is the
 best guide to visual indirect control I have ever found.
 CHAPTER NINETEEN
 Stories and Games Take Place in Worlds
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-19
 FIGURE
 19.1
 Transmedia Worlds
 In May of 1977, the film Star Wars premiered. It was a surprise
 hit with young and old alike, but especially with the young.
 Children were going to see it again and again. It took nearly a
 year for Kenner Toys to produce a line of action figures based
 on the movie characters, but even a year after the film’s release,
 the toys were a tremendous success, selling as fast as they could
 be produced and continuing to sell well for years. Other Star
 Wars merchandise was produced—posters, jigsaw puzzles,
 sleeping bags, paper plates, and just about everything else you
 can imagine—but nothing was as popular as the action figures.
 FIGURE
 19.2
 Some people believe that selling this kind of merchandise is just
 a way to cash in on hype and that, ultimately, it cheapens a film.
 I mean, these toys look kind of cheesy compared to what you
 see in the movie.
 So, why did they sell so many action figures? For some people,
 they were just a cool decoration—something they could look at
 and remember the film. But for most children, they were
 something else—they were a gateway into the Star Wars
 universe.
 For if you observed children playing with them, you would
 notice something very strange. Seldom would they act out
 scenes from the movie, as an adult might expect. Instead, they
 would make up all kinds of stories featuring these characters
 with only a loose relationship to the plotline from the movie,
 which was fairly complex and somewhat difficult for a child to
 fully comprehend. This might lead you to conclude that it was
 the characters that were so popular, not the story from Star
 Wars. But often, you would see children give these characters
 completely different names, and completely different
 relationships than they had in the film, as they enacted dramas
 and comedies starring this cast of characters in bedrooms and
 backyards everywhere in the world.
 So, if it wasn’t the plotline or the characters that the kids were
 so excited by, then what was left? The answer is that it was the
 world of Star Wars that was so compelling—and the toys
 provided another gateway into that world—one that was better
 than the movie, in some ways, since it was interactive,
 participatory, flexible, portable, and social. And weirdly, these
 toys made the Star Wars world more meaningful for children,
 not less, because the toys afforded them the ability to visit the
 world, sculpt it, change it, and make it their own. And as Star
 Wars sequels started to appear, there was great anticipation,
 but how much of that anticipation was a desire to hear a new
 story and how much of it was the excitement of reentering that
 world?
 Henry Jenkins coined the term transmedia worlds to refer to
 fantasy worlds that can be entered through many different
 media—print, video, animation, toys, games, and many others.
 This is a very useful concept, for it really is as if the world exists
 apart from the media that support it. Many people find this a
 bizarre concept—they think of books, films, games, and toys as
 separate things, each standing on their own. But more and
 more often, the real product that is created is not a story, or a
 toy, or a game, but a world. But you can’t sell a world, so these
 various products are sold as gateways into this world, each
 leading to different parts of it. And if the world is well
 constructed, the more gateways you visit, the more real and
 solid the world will become in your imagination. But if these
 gateways contradict each other or provide inconsistent
 information, the world crumbles quickly into dust and ashes,
 and suddenly the products are worth nothing.
 Why is this? Why do worlds become so real for us, more real
 than the media that define them? It is because we want them to
 be real. Some part of us wants to believe that these worlds
 aren’t just stories in books, sets of rules, or actors on a screen,
 but that these worlds actually exist and that maybe, somehow,
 someday, we can find our way to them.
 This is why people so casually throw out magazines but hesitate
 before throwing out a comic book—after all, there’s a world in
 there.
 The Power of Pokémon
 Pokémon is arguably one of the most successful transmedia
 worlds of all time. Since its introduction, the combined sales of
 all Pokémon products combined is over $90 billion, making it
 the second most lucrative videogame franchise of all time,
 second only to Mario. And though many tried to write it off as a
 short-term fad, over fifteen years later, new Pokémon games
 are consistently top sellers. It is worth understanding the
 history of Pokémon to better understand the power of its
 transmedia world.
 Pokémon began as a game for the Nintendo Game Boy system.
 Its designer, Tajiri Satoshi, had collected insects as a boy, and
 seeing the “game link” feature that allowed message passing
 between two Game Boys in 1991, he had a vision of insects
 traveling along the cable. He approached Nintendo about the
 idea, and then he and his team spent five years developing and
 perfecting the title. In 1996, Pocket Monsters (the direct
 translation of the Japanese title) as a pair of games (red and
 green) was launched. It was essentially a traditional RPG (not
 unlike Ultima or Final Fantasy), except that you could capture
 the monsters you fought and make them part of your team.
 The graphics and game action were not elaborate or advanced
 —but the interactions were rich and interesting, since the team
 had spent five years to properly balance the game. It is
 important to realize how primitive the graphics really were.
 The original Game Boy only allowed four shades of olive for the
 graphics, and two battling Pokémon would basically stand next
 to each other and wiggle as the player chose attacks from a
 simple menu.
 The game was a huge success—so much so that a comic book
 and an anime series were soon planned. Unlike many TV shows
 that are only loosely connected to the videogame they were
 based on (e.g., the dreadful Hanna Barbera Pac-Man cartoon),
 the Pokémon show reflected the intricate rules of the gameplay
 very closely, and the adventures of the main character were
 directly based on the quest path through the Game Boy game.
 The result was a show that so mirrored the mechanics of the
 game, that watching it players better understood what
 strategies to use in the game.
 But most importantly, the TV show gave players a new gateway
 into the Pokémon universe—one that showed the Pokémon in
 full color with dramatic animation and sound. When viewers
 would return to the Game Boy, these vivid images were
 retained in their imaginations, making the crudeness of Game
 Boy graphics and sound completely irrelevant. As mentioned in
 Chapter 13: Balance, this is sometimes called the “binocular
 effect,” so named because it is like when people take binoculars
 to a sporting event or opera glasses to the theater. No one
 watches the whole event through the binoculars. Instead, the
 binoculars are used early on to give a close-up view of the
 distant figures. Once someone has seen them close up, they can
 map that image onto the tiny figures they see on the stage in
 their visual imagination.
 These two gateways had tremendous synergy—wanting to
 succeed at the game gave reasons to watch the TV show, and
 watching the TV show made playing the game more vivid and
 exciting.
 And if this wasn’t enough, in 1999, Nintendo worked with
 Wizards of the Coast, the company that produced the
 breakthrough Magic: The Gathering collectible card game, to
 create a new collectible card game, based on the world of
 Pokémon. This game, like the TV show, held as closely as
 possible to the core mechanics of the Game Boy game. This gave
 players a third method of entry into this world—one that was
 both portable and very social. Although the Game Boy game
 featured the game link cable for trading Pokémon, the truth
 was that players only used it occasionally—most of the time, it
 was played as a solo adventure. Not so with the card game—its
 low price and accessibility made it very popular with children
 (especially boys), playing off their interest in competing with
 their peers and fitting in naturally with the Pokémon slogan of
 “Gotta catch’em all!”
 These three complementary gateways into a single solid world
 made the property a near unstoppable force. People who didn’t
 understand the Pokémon universe were completely
 bewildered: Is this thing a game, or a TV show, or what? What is
 it about the storyline that is so great that kids want to spend all
 this money on it? I was fortunate enough to be at a roundtable
 discussion in 1999 with the head of a major entertainment
 company. Someone asked him what he thought of “this
 Pokémon craze,” and he replied, “The movie comes out in a few
 months, and that’ll be the end of it.” He was wrong, of course,
 because he fundamentally did not get the idea of transmedia
 worlds. He was completely mired in the old Hollywood way of
 thinking about story worlds—a big Hollywood movie defines
 the world, then there are toys, games, and TV shows that mimic
 that. The idea of a world that could be based in the ruleset of a
 handheld videogame or a world that could get stronger with
 each new medium you add to it was completely unfamiliar to
 him (he is not in charge of that company any longer).
 The strength of Pokémon is not just in the game concept, but in
 the careful and consistent use of multiple media as gateways
 into a single, well-defined world.
 Properties of Transmedia Worlds
 Transmedia worlds have several properties that make them
 interesting.
 Transmedia Worlds Are Powerful
 Successful transmedia worlds exert a powerful effect over fans.
 It is stronger than just a fan’s love of an interesting story. It is
 almost as if the world becomes a sort of personal utopia that
 they fantasize about visiting. Sometimes, these fantasies are
 short term, but for many, they are long term, lasting on through
 their lives. For some, these long-term fantasies are something
 they turn to, now and then, for a sort of mental break. An adult
 who keeps a Transformer toy around as a decoration might be a
 good example of this. The toy gives them a convenient mental
 gateway to the world of Transformers that they can visit
 occasionally.
 But for others, the passion for this personal utopia becomes
 something they actively engage in every day. Such was certainly
 the case with Scott Edward Nall, who on his 30th birthday
 legally changed his name to Optimus Prime, one of the lead
 robots in the Transformers Universe. In fact, if you look at
 “hardcore fans” of any kind of fiction, you will find that in
 almost all cases, the properties with the most devoted fans are
 the ones that are the strongest transmedia worlds. Star Trek,
 Star Wars, Transformers, Lord of the Rings, Marvel Comics,
 Harry Potter, and many other popular properties have a world
 at their core. More than the enjoyment of a good storyline, or
 the appreciation of interesting characters, the desire to enter a
 fantasy world seems to be what propels these fans to such
 extremes. As we discussed in Chapter 17: Story, fantasy is such
 an important concept in games that often forms the anchor for
 your world. To be sure you remember to capture the epic power
 of fantasy, take this lens.
 #83 THE LENS OF FANTASY
 Everyone has secret wishes and desires. To be sure your world
 fulfills them, ask yourself these questions:
 What fantasy does my world fulfill?
 Who does the player fantasize about being?
 What does my player fantasize about doing there?
 Illustration by Ryan Yee
 Transmedia Worlds Are Long Lived
 Solid transmedia worlds continue for a surprisingly long time.
 Superman appeared over seventy-five years ago. James Bond
 has been around for sixty years. Star Trek and Doctor Who still
 thrive after fifty years. Walt Disney realized the power of
 transmedia as he started developing comic books to help keep
 the worlds of his animation properties alive and created
 Disneyland to this same end. One of his strongest arguments for
 investing in such an unusual venture was that it would help
 keep up the public’s interest in Disney films by giving them
 another gateway into the world of the films. The Copyright
 Term Extension Act of 1998 extended the length of corporate
 copyrights from 75 to 95 years. This was greatly spurred by the
 fact that some still lucrative properties (such as early Mickey
 Mouse cartoons) were in danger of falling into the public
 domain. Right or wrong, some have suggested that one of the
 reasons that this act passed seems to be that it just feels wrong
 to let a carefully managed, well-beloved world fall into the
 wrong hands.
 One very good reason to cultivate a strong transmedia world is
 that if you do it well, it can be profitable for a very long time.
 This seems particularly true for worlds that appeal to children
 —when the children grow into adulthood, they often want to
 share the worlds with their children, creating a cycle that can
 go on a very long time.
 Transmedia Worlds Evolve over Time
 But these worlds do not remain static over time—they evolve.
 Consider a transmedia world over a hundred years old (and still
 popular!): the world of Sherlock Holmes. When we think of
 Sherlock Holmes today, we typically think of him in his
 trademark deerstalker cap and oversized calabash pipe. But if
 you read the text of the Sherlock Holmes stories, these items are
 not mentioned in the text. The cap first appears in illustrations
 by Sidney Paget, who liked wearing a deerstalker cap himself.
 Later, actor William Gillette, who portrayed Holmes in a series
 of plays based on the stories built on that by wearing the
 unusual hat and adding the oversized pipe because it would be
 distinct and visible even from the back row of a theater. The
 plays were immensely popular, so much so that future
 illustrators of the Holmes stories used photos of Gillette as a
 model for their illustrations. Weirdly, the pipe and cap have
 become the icons for Sherlock Holmes—icons that his creator,
 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, never envisioned. But this is the way of
 transmedia worlds—as new media provide new gateways to the
 world, the world itself (or people’s perception of it, which
 amounts to the same thing for an imaginary world) changes to
 accommodate the new gateways.
 Another excellent example of this comes from an even older
 and more beloved transmedia world—the world of Santa Claus.
 If ever there was a fantasy utopia that people truly want to be
 real, it is Santa’s world—a world where once a year a
 benevolent figure carefully considers your heart’s desire, and
 gives it to you if you are worthy. Consider the many paths of
 entry to this world: Not only are there stories, poems, songs,
 and movies, but you can write him letters, and even visit Santa
 himself! Just think of it—a fictional character comes to your
 house and eats your cookies and then leaves behind a treasure
 trove of gifts! We so badly want this world to exist that millions
 of people go to tremendous expense and feats of deception to
 make children believe it to be an unquestionable reality.
 But who is the author of this world? Like all long-lived
 transmedia worlds, it was a great collaborative effort.
 Storytellers and artists continually try to augment Santa’s
 world. Some succeed, like the introduction of Santa’s reindeer
 by Clement Moore in 1823, or the introduction of Rudolph by
 Robert L. May in 1939. Many others fail. No less a storyteller
 than L. Frank Baum, the author of the Wizard of Oz stories,
 failed miserably with his 1902 Life and Adventures of Santa
 Claus, which attempted to establish Santa’s origin as a mortal
 selected for immortality by a council of nymphs, gnomes, and
 demons.
 Who decides which new features enter a transmedia world, and
 which ones are rejected? It somehow happens as part of our
 collective consciousness. Through some unspoken democratic
 process, everyone just decides whether a particular feature
 seems appropriate or inappropriate, and the fictional world
 changes slightly to accommodate. There is no formal decision—
 it just happens. If a story feature is well-liked, it takes root. If
 not, it fades away. In the long run, the world is governed by
 those who visit it.
 What Successful Transmedia Worlds Have
 in Common
 Successful transmedia worlds are powerful and valuable—so
 what do they have in common?
 They tend to be rooted in a single medium: For all of their
 many gateways, the most successful of the transmedia worlds
 started out by making a huge splash in just one medium.
 Sherlock Holmes was serialized fiction. Superman was a
 comic book. Star Wars was a movie. Star Trek was a TV show.
 Pokémon was a handheld game. Transformers were a toy. All
 of these have appeared in many other forms, but each is at its
 very strongest when in its original medium.
 They are intuitive: When doing research for Toontown
 Online, I tried to learn as much as I could about the fictional
 world of Toontown. As I studied the film Who Framed Roger
 Rabbit, I realized that very little about Toontown was really
 described there. The film didn’t need to describe Toontown in
 great detail because everyone already knew it existed.
 Without anyone ever expressly saying it, it was somehow
 common knowledge that all cartoon characters live together
 in a cartoon universe that is very different than ours. The
 creators of Superman and Batman surely never had any
 intention that their characters shared the world with other
 superheroes, but it was intuitive to comic readers that these
 characters lived in the same world—and so now they do.
 They have a creative individual at their core: The majority
 of successful transmedia worlds are rooted in the
 imagination and aesthetic styling of a single individual.
 People like Walt Disney, Shigeru Miyamoto, L. Frank Baum,
 Tajiri Satoshi, Jim Henson, J.K. Rowling, and George Lucas
 are all examples. Occasionally, small, tight teams are able to
 create successful transmedia worlds, but it is very rare
 indeed for successful worlds to be created by large teams.
 There is something about the holistic vision of a world that
 comes to a single individual that gives it the strength, solidity,
 integrity, and beauty necessary to survive the pressure of
 many gateways.
 They facilitate the telling of many stories: Successful
 transmedia worlds are never based around a single plotline.
 They have a solidity and an interconnectedness that goes far
 beyond that. They leave room for future stories and for
 guests to imagine their own stories.
 They make sense through any of their gateways: One kiss
 of death for almost any movie is the phrase “It makes more
 sense if you read the book.” You never know which gateway
 guests might enter first, so you must make all of them equally
 inviting and welcoming. Pokémon certainly succeeded in this
 regard—its TV show, comic, video, and card games were each
 understandable and enjoyable in their own right. Any of
 these could be a first encounter with the world of Pokémon
 that might lead to other ports of entry later on.
 A counterexample would be some of the things that were
 attempted with the world of The Matrix. Enter The Matrix, a
 critically panned videogame based on the second film,
 Matrix: Reloaded, took the novel approach of not telling the
 story of the movie, but rather a parallel story that intersected
 with the movie. This was an interesting idea, but if you didn’t
 see the movie, it was confusing. Similarly, Animatrix, a series
 of animated shorts that happen in the Matrix universe only
 make sense if the viewer is already intimate with the Matrix
 universe. This “it only makes sense if you enter through all
 the gateways” approach was intriguing for a few, but
 alienating for most.
 They are often about discovery: This makes sense because
 a world about discovery encourages visits from many
 gateways.
 They are about wish fulfillment: Imagining a fantasy world
 is a lot of work. Players will not do it unless it is a world that
 they truly would like to visit—a world that fulfills some deep
 and important wish.
 Transmedia worlds are the future of entertainment. It is no
 longer sufficient to focus just on creating a great experience in a
 single medium. Increasingly, designers are asked to create new
 gateways to existing worlds—not an easy task. But those who
 can create gateways that excite players by creatively giving
 them a new perspective on and enjoyment of a known world
 are much sought after. But even more sought after are those
 who can invent a successful transmedia world starting with
 nothing but an understanding of their audience’s secret wishes.
 If you want to create or improve transmedia worlds, use this
 lens.
 #84 THE LENS OF THE WORLD
 The world of your game is a thing that exists apart. Your game
 is a doorway to this magic place that exists only in the
 imagination of your players. To ensure your world has power
 and integrity, ask yourself these questions:
 How is my world better than the real world?
 Can there be multiple gateways to my world? How do they
 differ? How do they support each other?
 Is my world centered on a single story, or could many stories
 happen here?
 Illustration by Nick Daniel
 y
 Strong transmedia worlds are not just empty places. A huge
 part of what makes them interesting is who lives there. It is this
 we turn our attention to now.
 CHAPTER TWENTY
 Worlds Contain Characters
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-20
 FIGURE
 20.1
 The Nature of Game Characters
 If we are to create games that have great stories in them, these
 stories must contain memorable characters. It is an important
 question to ask: How are characters in games different than
 characters in other media? If we examine fictional characters in
 various media side by side, some differences become apparent.
 Here are some samples I chose from lists of the best novels,
 films, and videogames of the twentieth century.
 Novel Characters
 Holden Caulfield: The Catcher in the Rye. Holden is a
 teenager who wrestles with the phoniness and ugliness of the
 adult world.
 Humbert Humbert: Lolita. Humbert is an adult consumed
 by lust for an adolescent girl.
 Tom Joad: The Grapes of Wrath. Tom is an ex-convict who
 tries to help his family after they lose their farm.
 Ralph: Lord of the Flies. Ralph and many other children are
 stranded on an island and try to survive the island and each
 other.
 Sethe: Beloved. Sethe is a woman who tries to rebuild her life
 after she and her daughter escape from slavery.
 Movie Characters
 Rick Blaine: Casablanca. Rick must choose between the love
 of his life and saving the life of her husband.
 Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. An adventurous
 archaeologist must rescue the Ark of the Covenant from the
 Nazis.
 Rose DeWitt Bukater: Titanic. A young woman falls in love
 on the ill-fated Titanic.
 Norman Bates: Psycho. A man with an unusual case of
 schizophrenia commits murders and tries to cover them up.
 Don Lockwood: Singin’ in the Rain. A silent film actor
 struggles to make the transition to talkies.
 Game Characters
 Mario: Super Mario Brothers. A cartoon plumber battles
 enemies to rescue a princess from an evil king.
 Solid Snake: Metal Gear Solid. A retired soldier infiltrates a
 nuclear weapons disposal facility to neutralize a terrorist
 threat.
 Cloud Strife: Final Fantasy VII. A band of rebels tries to
 defeat an evil megacorporation run by an evil wizard.
 Link: Legend of Zelda. A young man must recover a magic
 artifact to rescue a princess from a villain.
 Gordon Freeman: Half-Life 2. A physicist must battle aliens
 when an experiment goes horribly wrong.
 So, examining these lists, what patterns do we see?
 Mental → Physical. The characters in the novels are
 involved in deep psychic struggles. This makes sense, since in
 a novel we spend much of our time listening to the
 characters’ innermost thoughts. The characters in the movies
 are involved in both emotional and physical struggles, which
 are resolved through combinations of communication and
 action. Again, when you consider the medium, this makes
 sense: We cannot hear the thoughts of film characters, but we
 can see what they say and do. Finally, the game characters
 are involved in conflicts that are almost entirely physical.
 Since these characters mostly have no thoughts (the player
 does the thinking for them) and are only occasionally able to
 speak, this again makes perfect sense. In all three cases, the
 characters are defined by their media.
 Reality → Fantasy. The novels tend to be very reality based;
 the films tend to be rooted in reality, but often pushing
 toward fantasy, and the game worlds are almost entirely
 fantasy situations. And the characters reflect this—they are
 products of their environment.
 Complex → Simple. For a variety of reasons, the complexity
 of the plots and depth of the characters gradually diminishes
 as we move from novels to games.
 From this, one might conclude that games are doomed to have
 simple fantasy characters engaging mostly in physical actions.
 And that certainly is the easy path. After all, you can get away
 with mere action in games when you usually can’t in movies or
 novels. But it doesn’t mean it isn’t possible to add more depth,
 more mental conflict, and more interesting character
 relationships into your games—it just means that it is
 challenging. Some of the games on this list, Final Fantasy VII, for
 instance, have very involved sets of character relationships
 structured around a simple gameplay structure—as involved as
 they are, players are crying out for more—they want their
 games to have richer, more meaningful characters and
 storylines. For much of this chapter, we will be looking at
 methods that storytellers in other media use to define their
 characters and consider how we can adapt these methods to the
 creation of strong game characters.
 Let’s start with a very special character: the avatar.
 Avatars
 There is something magical about the character that a player
 controls in a game, so magical that we give that character a
 special name: the avatar. The word is derived from a Sanskrit
 word that refers to a god magically taking physical form on
 earth. And the name is well chosen for a game character, since
 a similarly magical transformation takes place when players
 use their avatar to enter the world of the game.
 The relationship between player and avatar is strange. There
 are times when the player is distinctly apart from the avatar,
 but other times when the player’s mental state is completely
 projected into the avatar, to the point that the player gasps if
 the avatar is injured or threatened. This should not be
 completely surprising—after all, we have the ability to project
 ourselves into just about anything we control. When we drive a
 car, for example, we project our identity into the car, as if it is
 an extension of ourselves. Examining a parking space, we will
 often say “I don’t think I can fit in there.” And if another car
 collides with our car, we don’t say “He hit my car!” Instead we
 say “He hit me!” So it should be no surprise that we can project
 ourselves into a videogame character that we have direct
 control over.
 Designers often debate about which is more immersive: the
 first- or third-person view. One argument is that greater
 projection can be achieved by providing a first-person
 perspective on a scene with no visible avatar. However, the
 power of empathy is strong, and when controlling a visible
 avatar, guests often wince in imagined pain upon seeing their
 avatar suffer a blow or sigh in relief upon seeing their avatar
 escape physical harm. It is almost as if the avatar is a kind of
 kinesthetic voodoo doll for the guest. Bowlers are another
 example of this phenomenon, as they try to exert “body
 English” on a bowling ball as it rolls down the lane toward the
 pins. These movements are largely subconscious and are a
 result of a bowler projecting themself onto the ball. In this
 sense, the bowling ball serves as the bowler’s avatar.
 And it is one thing to project ourselves into our avatar as if our
 avatar is a tool, but the experience of projection can be so much
 more powerful if we actually relate to the character in some
 way. So, what kinds of characters are best suited for players to
 project themselves into?
 The Ideal Form
 The first type of character that is a good choice as an avatar is
 the kind that the player has always wanted to be. Characters
 like this—such as mighty warriors, powerful wizards, attractive
 princesses, ultra-suave secret agents—exert a pull on the
 psyche, since the force inside us that pushes us toward being
 our best finds the idea of projecting ourselves into an idealized
 form very appealing. Although these characters are not much
 like our real selves at all, they are people we sometimes dream
 about being.
 The Blank Slate
 The second type of character that works well as an avatar is one
 that is, as Scott McCloud puts it, iconic. In his excellent book,
 Understanding Comics, McCloud makes the interesting point
 that the less detail that goes into a character, the more
 opportunity the reader has to project themselves into that
 character.
 FIGURE
 20.2
 (Courtesy of Harper Collins. Used with permission.)
 McCloud further points out that in comics, it is often the case
 that characters or environments that are meant to seem alien,
 foreign, or scary are given a lot of detail, because more detail
 makes them more “other.” When you combine an iconic
 character with a detailed world, you get a powerful
 combination, as McCloud shows in the following:
 FIGURE
 20.3
 (Courtesy of Harper Collins. Used with permission.)
 This idea has bearing well beyond the domain of comics. In
 videogames, we see the same phenomenon. Some of the most
 popular and compelling avatars are ones that are very iconic.
 Consider Mario: He isn’t much of an idealized form, but he is
 simple, hardly speaks, and is completely nonthreatening, so it is
 easy to project yourself into him.
 The idealized form and the blank slate are often mixed.
 Consider Spider-Man, for example. He is an ideal form: a
 powerful and brave superhero, but the mask that covers his
 face makes him almost completely iconic—a blank slate that
 could be almost anyone.
 Periodically, gimmicky systems show up that let you take your
 own photograph and put it on your avatar. I’ve heard people
 selling these systems refer to this as “the ultimate dream for
 any gamer.” But these systems, while interesting as a novelty,
 never take hold in the long term because people don’t play
 games to be themselves—they play games to be the people they
 wish they could be.
 In Chapter 16: Interest Curve, we introduced Lens #72:
 Projection as a tool to examine how well players project
 themselves into the imaginary world of the game. We should
 also add a more specific lens, which examines how well they
 project themselves into their avatar.
 #85 THE LENS OF THE AVATAR
 The avatar is a player’s gateway into the world of the game. To
 ensure the avatar brings out as much of the player’s identity as
 possible, ask yourself these questions:
 Is my avatar an ideal form likely to resonate with my
 players?
 Does my avatar have iconic qualities that let a player project
 themselves into the character?
 Illustration by Cheryl Ceol
 Creating Compelling Game Characters
 The avatar is important in a game, just as the protagonist is
 important in a traditional story. But we must not forget the
 other characters. There are dozens of books on scriptwriting
 and storytelling that can give you good advice on how to make
 strong, compelling characters. Here I will summarize some of
 the methods I have found most useful for developing characters
 in games.
 Character Tip #1: List Character Functions
 In the process of creating a story, one frequently invents
 characters as the storyline demands them. But how about when
 the game demands them? A very useful technique when coming
 up with the cast of characters in your game is to list all the
 functions that these characters need to fulfill. Then list the
 characters you had been thinking of putting in the game, and
 see how they match up. For example, if you are making an
 action platform game, your list might look like the following:
 Character Functions:
 1. Hero: the character who plays the game
 2. Mentor: gives advice and useful items
 3. Assistant: gives occasional tips
 4. Tutor: explains how to play the game
 5. Final boss: someone to have the last battle against
 6. Minions: bad guys
 7. Three bosses: tough guys to battle against
 8. Hostage: someone to rescue
 Taking a peek into your imagination, you might have seen these
 characters:
 1. Princess Mouse: beautiful, but tough and no nonsense
 2. Wise Old Owl: full of wisdom, but forgetful
 3. Silver Hawk: angry and vengeful
 4. Sammy Snake: amoral and full of wry humor
 5. Rat Army: hundreds of rats with evil red eyes
 So, now you have to match the characters to the functions. This
 is an opportunity to really get creative. The traditional thing
 would be to make Princess Mouse the hostage. But why not do
 something different; make her the mentor? Or the hero? Or
 even the final boss! The Rat Army seem like natural minions—
 but who knows? Maybe they only have evil red eyes because
 they have been captured by the evil Princess Mouse who has
 hypnotized them, and they are actually the hostages! Hmm… it
 also seems we don’t have enough characters to fill all eight roles
 —we could make up more characters, or we could give some
 characters multiple roles. What if your mentor, Wise Old Owl,
 turns out to be the final boss? It would be an ironic twist and
 save you on the cost of developing a new character. Maybe the
 Assistant and Tutor are both Sammy Snake—or maybe the
 Silver Hawk, the hostage, mentors you by sending telepathic
 messages from where he is being held.
 By separating the functions of the characters from your vision
 of the characters, you can think clearly about making sure the
 game has characters doing all the necessary jobs and
 sometimes make things more efficient by folding them together.
 This method serves as a handy lens.
 #86 THE LENS OF CHARACTER FUNCTION
 To make sure your characters are doing everything your game
 needs them to do, ask yourself these questions:
 What are the roles I need the characters to fill?
 What characters have I already imagined?
 Which characters map well to which roles?
 Can any characters fill more than one role?
 Do I need to change the characters to better fit the roles?
 Do I need any new characters?
 Illustration by Sam Yip
 Character Tip #2: Define and Use Character Traits
 Let’s say we had some dialog between your heroine, Sabu, and
 her sidekick, Lester—simple expositional stuff, which helps set
 up the next level. Something like
 LESTER: Sabu!
 SABU: What is it?
 LESTER: Someone has stolen the king’s crown!
 SABU: Do you realize what this means?
 LESTER: No.
 SABU: It means the Dark Arrow has returned. We must stop
 him!
 This dialog is pretty flat. While it tells us about the situation
 (missing crown) and the villain (Dark Arrow), it tells us nothing
 about Sabu or Lester. Your characters need to say and do things
 that define them as real people. To do this, you must know their
 traits.
 There are many ways to define traits for your characters. Some
 advise creating a “character bible,” where you list out every
 possible thing you can think of that defines your character—
 their loves and hates, how they dress, what they eat, where they
 grew up, etc. And this can be a useful exercise. But ultimately,
 you will probably want to boil things down to a simpler
 essence: a small, distilled list of traits that encapsulate the
 character. You want to choose traits that are going to stay with
 your character through many situations that really define them
 as a person. Sometimes these can be a little contradictory, but
 real people have contradictory traits, so why shouldn’t
 characters? Let’s say we gave Sabu and Lester these traits:
 Sabu: trustworthy, short tempered, valiant, a fiery lover
 Lester: arrogant, sarcastic, spiritual, impulsive
 Now, let’s rewrite the dialog, trying to imbue it with these traits
 —preferably with more than one at a time (remember Lens #49:
 Elegance?).
 LESTER (exploding into the room): By the Gods! Sabu, I have
 news! (impulsive and spiritual)
 SABU: (covering herself): How dare you intrude on my
 privacy! (short tempered)
 LESTER: Whatever. Maybe you don’t care that the king’s
 crown has been stolen? (arrogant and sarcastic)
 SABU (a faraway look in her eye): This means I must do
 what I promised… (trustworthy and valiant)
 LESTER: I pray to Vishnu this is not another story of an old
 flame… (Lester: spiritual and sarcastic; Sabu: fiery lover)
 SABU: Silence! The Dark Arrow broke my heart, and the
 heart of my sister—I promised her that if he ever returned, I
 would risk my life to destroy him. Prepare the chariot!
 (short tempered, fiery lover, trustworthy, valiant)
 It isn’t simply dialog that benefits from this treatment. The
 actions you choose for your character, and how they are carried
 out, should demonstrate the traits as well. If your character is
 sneaky, does it show in their jump animation? If your character
 is depressed, does it show when they run? Maybe a depressed
 character shouldn’t run, but only walk. There is nothing
 magical about having lists of traits and using them—it just
 means that you know your characters well.
 #87 THE LENS OF CHARACTER TRAITS
 To ensure that the traits of a character show in what they say
 and do, ask yourself these questions:
 What traits define my character?
 How do these traits manifest themselves in the words,
 actions, and appearance of my character?
 Illustration by Nick Daniel
 Character Tip #3: Use the Interpersonal Circumplex
 Your characters won’t be alone, of course—they are going to
 interact with each other. One tool that Katherine Isbister
 brought from the world of social psychology into the world of
 game design is the interpersonal circumplex. It is a graph you
 can use to visualize the relationships between characters. It has
 two axes: friendliness and dominance. This complex diagram
 shows where many traits lie on this graph:
 This looks kind of overwhelming, but it can be a simple tool to
 use. Let’s say we wanted to show how other Star Wars
 characters related to Han Solo. Since friendliness and
 dominance are relative characteristics, we always need to make
 them relative to a particular character. So Figure 20.5 is how
 you might graph out the characters relative to Han.
 Laying the characters out on a graph like this gives a good way
 to visualize character relationships. Notice how extreme Darth
 Vader, Chewbacca, and C-3PO are on the graph—these extremes
 are part of what makes them interesting. Also notice that the
 people he communicates with the most are the closest to him on
 the graph. What does the fact that there are no characters in the
 lower left quadrant tell us about Han? Consider how different
 the graphs would be for Luke, or for Darth Vader.
 FIGURE
 20.4
 The circumplex is not a be-all or end-all tool, but it can be
 useful for thinking about character relationships because of the
 questions it can prompt. So, let’s put it in our toolbox.
 FIGURE
 20.5
 #88 THE LENS OF THE INTERPERSONAL CIRCUMPLEX
 Understanding the relationships between your characters is
 crucial. One way to do this is to create a graph with one axis
 labeled hostile/friendly and the other labeled
 submissive/dominant. Pick a character to analyze, and put them
 in the middle. Plot out where other characters lie relative to
 that character, and ask yourself these questions:
 Are there any gaps in the chart? Why are they there? Would
 it be better if the gaps were filled?
 Are there “extreme characters” on the graph? If not, would it
 be better if there were?
 Are the character’s friends in the same quadrant, or different
 quadrants? What if that were different?
 Illustration by Kwamé Babb
 Character Tip #4: Make a Character Web
 The circumplex is a nice visual way to see some character
 relationships. But there can be many other factors in the
 relationships between your characters. The character web is a
 good way to explore how the characters feel about each other
 and why. The idea is simple: To analyze a character, write down
 what that character thinks of all the other characters. Here’s an
 example from the world of Archie comics:
 Archie
 Veronica: Archie is lured by her elegance and beauty.
 Though she is rich, Archie doesn’t care much about that.
 Betty: Archie’s true love, but her insecurity constantly gives
 him mixed signals, so he doesn’t pursue her as forcefully as
 he might.
 Reggie: Archie shouldn’t trust Reggie, but he often does,
 because Archie always tries to be a nice guy and Archie is
 kind of gullible.
 Jughead: Archie’s best friend. What they have in common is
 that they are both underdogs.
 Veronica
 Archie: Veronica finds Archie attractive, but sometimes she
 seeks to date him to frustrate Betty and because she can
 always feel superior around him.
 Betty: Veronica trusts Betty as a friend because they were
 friends as little girls. Veronica likes how she can always feel
 superior to Betty in terms of wealth and class, but it really
 frustrates Veronica that Betty is a better person.
 Reggie: Reggie is an attractive buffoon who appreciates
 wealth, but Veronica gets frustrated that Reggie doesn’t really
 respect or love her.
 Jughead: A nauseating freak—Veronica can’t understand
 why Archie is friends with him. Veronica often bribes him
 with food to get what she wants.
 Betty
 Archie: Her true love. She is shy, though, about telling him
 how she really feels, because Betty has low self-esteem.
 Veronica: Betty’s BFF. She can be mean sometimes, and she is
 too money crazy, but friends are friends forever, so Betty
 stays with Veronica.
 Reggie: Betty is intimidated by his wealth and showy
 attempts at class. She feels like she is supposed to like him,
 but secretly she is repelled by him.
 Jughead: Betty thinks he’s cute and funny and glad that he’s
 such a good friend to her true love.
 Reggie
 Archie: Reggie’s archrival. Reggie can’t imagine what anyone
 sees in such a dopey nice guy. Occasionally, Reggie envies
 Archie’s popularity, but he always thinks he can find a tricky
 way to outdo Archie.
 Veronica: Reggie finds her attractive and rich—he likes the
 power of her wealth.
 Betty: Reggie finds her attractive, and though her low selfesteem is a turnoff, to be able to win her, he would show his
 superiority over Archie.
 Jughead: Reggie sees him as a total loser who deserves to be
 bullied, especially since he is friends with Archie.
 Jughead
 Archie: Jughead’s best friend, and the only one who
 understands and appreciates Jughead’s love of food.
 Veronica: The mean girl that Archie likes.
 Betty: The nice girl that Archie likes.
 Reggie: A bully.
 You can see that this takes a little time, but it can be well worth
 the effort because of the questions it raises about character
 interactions you might not have thought about. It’s a very
 handy lens for giving your characters more depth.
 #89 THE LENS OF THE CHARACTER WEB
 To flesh out your characters’ relationships better, make a list of
 all your characters, and ask yourself these questions:
 How, specifically, does each character feel about each of the
 others?
 Are there any connections unaccounted for? How can I use
 those?
 Are there too many similar connections? How can they be
 more different?
 Illustration by Diana Patton
 The success of television shows like Lost and The Big Bang
 Theory comes from a deep exploration of the character web. It
 is rare to see it explored well in games, which makes it an
 opportunity worth pursuing.
 Character Tip #5: Use Status
 Most of the character tips we’ve seen so far come from writers.
 But there is another profession that knows just as much about
 creating compelling characters, if not more—actors. Many
 people have drawn parallels between the unpredictable nature
 of interactive storytelling and the unpredictable nature of
 improvisational theater; indeed, the techniques of the
 improvisational actor can prove quite useful to game designers.
 These techniques are many and are well described in several
 books, but there is one, for me, that stands out above all others.
 It is really not so much a technique, but a lens described
 impeccably well by Keith Johnstone in his classic book Impro—
 it is the Lens of Status.
 Whenever people meet or interact, there is a hidden negotiation
 that constantly takes place. We are mostly not conscious of it,
 since it predates our ability to speak. It is our negotiation of
 status; that is, who is in charge of the current interaction?
 Status is not a matter of who you are; status is something you
 do. Johnstone illustrates this quite well with this bit of dialog:
 TRAMP: ‘Ere! Where are you going?
 DUCHESS: I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch…
 TRAMP: Are you deaf as well as blind?
 The tramp, who you might expect to be very low status, is
 taking on an attitude of very high status. Any time two or more
 people interact in any setting—whether friends or enemies,
 collaborators or competitors, masters or servants—a
 negotiation of status takes place. We do this almost entirely
 subconsciously with posture, tone of voice, eye contact, and
 dozens of other detailed behaviors. What is surprising is how
 consistent these behaviors are across all cultures.
 Typical low-status behaviors include fidgeting, avoiding
 eye contact, touching one’s own face, and generally being
 tense.
 Typical high-status behaviors include being relaxed and in
 control, making strong eye contact, and, weirdly, not moving
 your head while you speak.
 A typical improv exercise is to split the group of actors into two
 groups, who then intermingle—individuals in the first group
 (low status) make brief eye contact, then look away, while the
 second group (high status) makes and holds eye contact with
 others. Most actors who try this exercise quickly realize that
 this isn’t just playing pretend—the actors in the low-status
 group quickly find that they feel inferior and start
 unconsciously taking on other low-status characteristics. The
 actors in the high-status group start to feel superior and take on
 high-status characteristics. Even if you are by yourself, try
 talking without moving your head at all, and see how it makes
 you feel—or try the opposite—talking while turning your head
 frequently, and you will quickly get the idea.
 Status is a relative thing, not absolute to an individual. Darth
 Vader takes on high-status behavior when he deals with
 Princess Leia, but he takes on low status when he deals with the
 Emperor.
 Status can be conveyed in surprising ways—slow motion, for
 example, gives high status, as we’ve seen in The Six Million
 Dollar Man, The Matrix, and countless shampoo commercials.
 The way characters occupy space is also very telling of status.
 Low-status characters go to places where they are less likely to
 encounter others or be noticed. High-status characters are in
 the most important place in the room.
 Status is like a secret language that we all know so well we don’t
 know we’re speaking it. The problem with it being so
 subconscious is that when we create artificial characters, it
 doesn’t occur to us to give them these behaviors, because
 generally we aren’t aware that we do these things. But if you do
 give these behaviors to your characters, you will quickly find
 that they seem aware of each other in a way that most
 videogame characters are not.
 The game Munch’s Oddysee has great examples of character
 status interactions. In it, you control two different characters,
 one of whom is a slave and the other is bound to a wheelchair
 (low status). Throughout the game, you face arrogant (highstatus) enemies and get help from slavish (low-status) followers.
 The interactions between all these are quite interesting to see,
 and a great deal of comedy comes from unexpected status
 reversals, such as the followers mouthing off at Munch or at the
 enemies. The characters in this game show an awareness of
 each other’s presence that, while crude, is a step above many
 other games.
 Status is a largely unexplored area in interactive entertainment.
 Brenda Harger, who first introduced me to the concept of
 status, is an excellent improv actress and a researcher at the
 Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon
 University. She and her students have done some fascinating
 work on creating artificially intelligent characters that are
 aware of their status and of the status of other characters and
 automatically adopt appropriate postures, actions, and personal
 space. Right now, most videogame characters behave the same
 way no matter who is around. It seems likely that the next
 generation of interactive game characters will seem more alive
 because they are aware of status.
 In Chapter 16: Interest Curve, we talked about how important
 things that change dramatically are inherently interesting.
 Status is one of those important things. During arguments,
 people are vying to have the highest status (either by raising
 their own or lowering the status of their opponent), and this
 seesaw of status is what makes arguments interesting.
 Status isn’t just about dialog, though—it is also about
 movement, eye contact, territory, and what characters do. It is a
 way of looking at the world, so let’s put it in our toolbox.
 #90 THE LENS OF STATUS
 When people interact, they take on different behaviors
 depending on their status levels. To make your characters more
 aware of each other, ask yourself these questions:
 What are the relative status levels of the characters in my
 game?
 How can they show appropriate status behaviors?
 Conflicts of status are interesting—how are my characters
 vying for status?
 Changes of status are interesting—where do they happen in
 my game?
 How am I giving the player a chance to express status?
 Illustration by Chris Daniel
 Of course, having an understanding of status does more than
 give you insights into how to make realistic characters—it helps
 you understand and control real-life situations, like design
 meetings and client negotiations, but we’ll discuss those in later
 chapters.
 Character Tip #6: Use the Power of the Voice
 The human voice is an incredibly powerful thing, which can
 affect us at a deep subconscious level. This is why talking
 pictures elevated the cinema from a novelty to the dominant art
 form of the twentieth century. It is only in the past few years
 that technology has permitted videogames to make serious use
 of voice acting. Even now, the voice acting in games seems
 primitive compared to the powerful performances in films.
 Partly, this is true because game developers are often
 inexperienced when working with voice talent. Directing a
 voice actor is a delicate art that takes a certain knack and years
 of practice to do well. But there is another reason for weak
 voice acting in games—it is because we do the process
 backwards. In animated films, a script is written first, and then
 voice actors are brought in to record it. As they do, lines are
 changed, improvisations are made, and the good ones are
 incorporated into the script. Once the recordings are in place,
 the characters get designed (often incorporating facial features
 of the actors), and animation commences. In videogames, we do
 this the other way—the characters are often designed and
 modeled first; then the script is written, often basic animations
 are created; and then the voice acting is added last. This
 diminishes the power of the voice actor, who is now just trying
 to imitate what they see, instead of rightly expressing how they
 truly feel their character would act and behave. The voice actor
 becomes peripheral to the creative process, not central, and the
 power of voice is weakened.
 Why do we do this backwards? Because the process of game
 development is so volatile, it is expensive to create characters
 around their voices, since the script continues to change
 throughout the entire process. Hopefully, with time, we will
 develop techniques that will allow voice actors to become more
 central to game character design and reclaim the power of
 voice. Naughty Dog is one company that takes this notion
 seriously—both the Uncharted series and The Last of Us
 involved dozens of recording sessions that spanned the length
 of the projects, and the iterative work with the voice actors
 seems to have made a real difference in the emotional power of
 these games.
 Character Tip #7: Use the Power of the Face
 A huge percentage of our brains is taken up with custom
 hardware for processing facial expression. We have the most
 complex and expressive faces in the entire animal kingdom.
 Notice, for example, our eye whites—other animals do not have
 visible eye whites. It would appear we evolved them as a
 method of communication. We are also the only animal that
 blushes and the only animal that cries.
 Despite all these, few videogames give facial animation the
 attention it deserves. Game designers are so focused on the
 actions of the characters that they give little thought to their
 emotions. When a game does have meaningful facial animation
 (such as Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker), it often garners a lot
 of attention. The designers of OnLive Traveler, an early 3D chat
 room, had very strict polygon budgets for their characters. As
 they built and tested prototypes, they would ask their users
 each time: “Do the characters need more details?” And every
 time, the answer would come back, “Yes— in the face.” After
 five or six rounds of this, the bodies dwindled away to nothing,
 leaving the characters as eerie floating heads—but this was
 what the users preferred, since this was an activity about selfexpression, and faces are the most expressive tool that exists.
 Facial animation doesn’t have to be expensive—you can get
 tremendous power out of simple animated eyebrows or eye
 shapes. But you do have to have a character face that will be
 visible to the player. Avatar faces generally are not visible to the
 player. The designers of Doom found a way to change that by
 putting a small picture of the avatar’s face on the bottom of the
 screen. Since we can notice facial expression in our peripheral
 vision more easily than we can discern numbers, they wisely
 made the facial expression correspond to the health meter, so
 that players got a sense of how injured they were without
 having to take their eyes off of their enemies.
 Most of all, you should focus on your characters’ eyes. It is said
 that the eyes are the windows to the soul, but so often,
 videogame characters have dull, dead eyes. If you can bring the
 eyes of your character to life, the whole character will come
 alive. Want your villain to seem evil? Focus on the eyes. Want
 your zombie to seem creepy? Give him creepy eyes. Want your
 penguin to seem cute? Focus on cute eyes. Another interesting
 fact about eyes—we use them to tell who is related. Look at the
 cartoon eyes in The Simpsons, for example—each family has
 one set of eyes. Eyes hold many secrets. Give them proper
 attention, and your characters will thank you by coming to life.
 FIGURE
 20.6
 Character Tip #8: Powerful Stories Transform
 Characters
 People do not change, they are merely revealed.
 —Anne Enright
 One distinguishing feature of great stories is how their
 characters change. Video game designers seldom consider this,
 to their detriment. There is a tendency to treat game characters
 as fixed types—the villain is always the villain, the hero was
 born a hero. This makes for very boring storytelling. A few
 games, such as Fable and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic,
 became famous because of the fact that they do what nearly
 every successful movie or book does—let events change the
 main character over time.
 It is certainly true that meaningful character change is not
 possible for the main character in every game. But perhaps
 character change can happen to other characters in the game
 such as the sidekick or the villain. A great way to visualize the
 potential for character change in your game is to make a
 character transformation chart, with characters on the left side
 and the different sections of your story along the top. Then,
 mark down the places where a character undergoes some kind
 of change. For example, consider the changes in the story of
 Cinderella:
 By looking at each character over time, instead of just the story
 thread, we get a unique perspective that helps us to better
 understand our characters. Some transformations are
 temporary and small, others are great and permanent. By
 considering how your characters should change and making
 the most of that, your game will tell a far more powerful story
 than if they pass through the story untouched by it. This
 perspective of character transformation is our final character
 lens.
 #91 THE LENS OF CHARACTER TRANSFORMATION
 We pay attention to character transformation, because we care
 about what might change us. To ensure your characters are
 transforming in interesting ways, ask yourself these questions:
 How does each of my characters change throughout the
 game?
 How am I communicating those changes to the player? Can I
 communicate them more clearly, or more strongly?
 Is there enough change?
 Are the changes surprising and interesting?
 Are the changes believable?
 Illustration by Chris Daniel
 Character Tip #9: Let Your Characters Surprise Us
 In the novel Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, there is a
 conversation between Rosemary and Dick, which is terribly
 important to us as storytellers. It begins with Rosemary, the
 actress, asking a simple question:
 “I wanted to ask you what you thought of my latest pictures
 — if you saw them.”
 “It’ll take a few minutes to tell you,” Dick said. “Let’s
 suppose that Nicole says to you that Lanier is ill. What do
 you do in life? What does anyone do? They ACT— face,
 voice, words— the face shows sorrow, the voice shows
 shock, the words show sympathy.”
 “Yes— I understand.”
 “But in the theatre, No. In the theatre all the best
 comediennes have built up their reputations by burlesquing
 the correct emotional responses— fear and love and
 sympathy.”
 “I see.” Yet she did not quite see.
 “The danger to an actress is in responding. Again, let’s
 suppose that somebody told you, ‘Your lover is dead.’ In life
 you’d probably go to pieces. But on the stage you’re trying to
 entertain—the audience can do the ‘responding’ for
 themselves. First the actress has lines to follow, then she has
 to get the audience’s attention back on herself, away from
 the murdered Chinese or whatever the thing is. So she must
 do something unexpected. If the audience thinks the
 character is hard she goes soft on them—if they think she’s
 soft she goes hard. You go all OUT of character—you
 understand?”
 “I don’t quite,” admitted Rosemary. “How do you mean out
 of character?”
 “You do the unexpected thing until you’ve manoeuvred the
 audience back from the objective fact to yourself. THEN you
 slide into character again.”
 This advice seems completely contrary to everything we know
 about storytelling and acting. We expect characters to behave
 realistically and believably. But here, Fitzgerald is telling us that
 in a good story, the characters do the opposite of what the
 audience expects. And it is totally true. When you know to look
 for it, you can see it everywhere. It’s in comedies, dramas, the
 classics, everywhere. The popular television show Breaking Bad
 was practically founded on this principle. It’s yet another use
 for The Lens of Surprise. When characters have an emotional
 reaction that isn’t what we expect, we pay attention. And of
 course, fun is just pleasure with surprises, right? If you want
 players to enjoy playing with your characters, design each one
 the same way you would design a toy. Look for ways to let your
 characters surprise your players, and the players will hang on
 your characters’ every word and action.
 Character Tip #10: Avoid the Uncanny Valley
 Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori noted something interesting
 about human response to robots and other artificial characters.
 If you think about how people empathize, you might notice that
 the closer something is to seeming human, the more they can
 empathize with it. You might even lay this out on a graph like:
 FIGURE
 20.7
 And this makes perfect sense. The more something is like a
 person, the more empathy we give it. But Mori noted an
 interesting exception, as he worked on robots that tried to
 mimic humans—as soon as they started to get too human,
 perhaps moving from a metal face (think C-3PO) to one with
 artificial skin, people suddenly found them repulsive. It made
 the graph look like Figure 20.8.
 Mori referred to this surprising dip in the curve as “the
 uncanny valley.” The cause of this uneasy feeling may be that
 when we see things that almost look like people, our brains
 register them as “diseased people” who might be dangerous to
 be around. Zombies are a canonical example of the creepy
 things that live at the bottom of the uncanny valley.
 FIGURE
 20.8
 The uncanny valley shows up in videogames and animation all
 the time. Every frame of films such as Final Fantasy and The
 Polar Express looks gorgeous and natural—when you just look
 at one frame. But when the films are in motion, there is
 something about the computer-generated humans that many
 people find creepy—somehow, they don’t move quite right—
 they got too close to the valley and fell in. Contrast those
 characters to the cartoony characters (fish, toys, cars, robots) in
 Pixar films that have no problem generating empathy, because
 they stay to the left side of the valley, where that puppy dog is.
 Videogame characters can easily have the same problems—
 especially in games that try to mimic reality. The day may come
 where videogame characters are so human looking that they
 can safely exist on the right side of the valley, but until then, use
 caution—it’s a long way down.
 Characters definitely make a world more interesting, but for it
 to be a world at all, it needs something else—a space to exist.
 Other Reading to Consider
 Better Videogame Characters by Design by Katherine
 Isbister. This book masterfully bridges the world of social
 psychology and the world of videogames, presenting many
 practical tools and techniques for bringing your characters to
 life.
 Impro by Keith Johnstone. If you think improvisational
 acting is all about silly jokes, this book will straighten you
 out. It is really about how to create interesting situations in
 real time, or, in other words, game design.
 Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. This book is a
 masterpiece without parallel. If you haven’t read it, do so
 immediately.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
 Worlds Contain Spaces
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-21
 FIGURE
 21.1
 Wait a minute—didn’t we cover the idea of space in Chapter 12:
 Mechanics? Yes and no. We discussed the idea of functional
 space—but functional space is only the skeleton of the game
 space. In this chapter, we will examine the fleshed-out space the
 player actually experiences.
 The Purpose of Architecture
 Yes, build a Frank Lloyd house if you don’t mind camping in
 the front yard when it rains.
 —Aline Barnsdall
 What do you think of when you hear the word “architecture”?
 Most people think of grand buildings, particularly modern
 buildings with unusual shapes. People sometimes seem to think
 that the primary job of the architect is to sculpt the outer shape
 of a building, and that appreciation of good architecture means
 enjoying these building shapes like one might enjoy sculptures
 in a museum.
 And while the outer shape of a structure is one aspect of
 architecture, it has little to do with the primary purpose of
 architecture.
 The primary purpose of architecture is to control a person’s
 experience.
 If all the experiences we wanted to have were to be found
 easily in nature, there would be no point to architecture. But
 those experiences aren’t always there, so architects design
 things to help us have the experiences we desire. We want to
 experience shade and dryness, so we put up shelters. We want
 to experience safety and security, so we build walls. We build
 houses, schools, malls, churches, offices, bowling alleys, hotels,
 and museums not because we want to look at those buildings,
 but because there are experiences we want to have that these
 buildings make possible. And when we say one of these
 buildings is “well designed,” we aren’t talking about what it
 looks like on the outside. What we are talking about is how well
 it creates the kind of experience we want to have when we are
 inside.
 For this reason, architects and game designers are close
 cousins. Both create structures that people must enter in order
 to use. Neither architects nor game designers can create
 experiences directly—instead, both must rely on the use of
 indirect control to guide people into having the right kind of
 experience. And most importantly, both create structures that
 have no point other than to engender experiences that make
 people happy.
 Organizing Your Game Space
 There is a more obvious connection between game designers
 and architects as well—both have to create spaces. And while
 game designers can learn a lot about creating meaningful and
 powerful spaces from architects, by no means do game
 designers have to follow every rule of architecture, since the
 spaces they create are not made of bricks and mortar, but are
 completely virtual structures. And while this sounds like a
 wonderful freedom (it is), it can also be a burden. The lack of
 physical constraints means almost anything is possible—and if
 anything is possible, where do you begin?
 One way to begin is to decide on an organizing principle for
 your game space. If you already have a pretty good idea how
 your game will be played, this should be pretty easy. Just look at
 your game through Lens #26: Functional Space (from Chapter
 12: Mechanics), and use that as the skeleton for the space you
 will build.
 But maybe you are still figuring out your functional space—
 perhaps your game design is still very early, and you are hoping
 that by creating a map, you might get a better sense of how
 your game works. In that case, here are five common ways that
 designers organize their game spaces.
 1. Linear: A surprising number of games are arranged on a
 linear game space where a player can only move forward
 and (maybe) back along a line. Sometimes the line has two
 ends; other times, it loops back on itself. Some well-known
 linear game spaces are as follows:
 1. Candyland
 2. Monopoly
 3. Super Mario Brothers
 4. Jetpack Joyride
 5. Guitar Hero
 2. Grid: Arranging your game space on a grid has a lot of
 advantages. It can be easy for players to understand, it makes
 it easier to ensure that things line up, it keeps things in
 proper proportion, and of course, grids are very easy for
 computers to understand. Your grid need not be a grid of
 squares—it can also be of rectangles, hexagons (popular in
 war games), or even triangles. Some well-known grid-based
 games are as follows:
 1. Chess
 2. Advance Wars
 3. Settlers of Catan
 4. Legend of Zelda (NES)
 5. Minecraft
 3. Web: A web arrangement is achieved by marking several
 points on a map and connecting them with paths. This is
 useful when you have several places you want players to visit
 but you want to give them a number of different ways to get
 to them. Sometimes there is meaningful travel along the
 paths, but other times, travel is instantaneous. Some
 examples of web-based game spaces are as follows:
 1. Fox and Geese
 2. Trivial Pursuit
 3. Zork
 4. Club Penguin
 5. Puzzle Quest
 4. Points in space: This somewhat uncommon type of game
 space is usually for games that want to evoke something like
 wandering a desert and occasionally returning to an oasis,
 like one does in an RPG. It also is common for games where
 players get to define the game space themselves. Some
 examples of this kind of spatial organization are the
 following:
 1. Bocce
 2. Thin Ice (a board game involving wet marbles and a
 napkin)
 3. Polarity (magnetic board game)
 4. Animal Crossing
 5. Final Fantasy
 5. Divided space: This kind of space is most like a real map and
 is common in games that are trying to replicate a real map. It
 is achieved by carving the space up into sections in an
 irregular way. Some examples of games that have divided
 space are as follows:
 1. Risk
 2. Axis and Allies
 3. Dark Tower
 4. Zelda: Ocarina of Time
 5. Civilization
 These different organizing principles are often combined to
 make interesting new types of game spaces. The game of Clue is
 a combination of the grid and divided space patterns. Baseball
 is a combination of a linear structure and points in space.
 A Word about Landmarks
 One very important thing to consider whenever you organize a
 space: What are the landmarks? The very first text adventure
 game, Colossal Cave, had two different mazes. In one, every
 area was described as “You are in a maze of twisty passages, all
 alike.” Just as confusing though was the opposite maze, in
 which every area was described as “You are in a maze of twisty
 passages, all different.” For it is certainly true that too much
 chaos is just as monotonous as too much order. Players of
 Colossal Cave learned to drop items in the mazes, forming
 landmarks that helped them find their way. Any good game
 space has built-in landmarks, which help the players find
 where they are going and also make the space interesting to
 look at. Landmarks are what players remember and what they
 talk about, for they are what make a space memorable.
 Christopher Alexander Is a Genius
 Christopher Alexander is an architect who has devoted his life
 to studying how places make us feel. His first book, The Timeless
 Way of Building (1979), tries to describe how there is a unique
 quality shared by spaces and objects that are truly well
 designed. As he puts it:
 Imagine yourself on a winter afternoon with a pot of tea, a
 reading light, and two or three huge pillows to lean back
 against. Now make yourself comfortable. Not in some way
 which you can show to other people, and say how much you
 like it. I mean so that you really like it, for yourself.
 You put the tea where you can reach it: but in a place where
 you can’t possibly knock it over. You pull the light down, to
 shine on the book, but not too brightly, and so that you can’t
 see the naked bulb. You put the cushions behind you, and
 place them, carefully, one by one, just where you want them,
 to support your back, your neck, your arm: so that you are
 supported just comfortably, just as you want to sip your tea,
 and read, and dream.
 When you take the trouble to do all that, and you do it
 carefully, with much attention, then it may begin to have the
 quality which has no name.
 It is hard to put a finger on exactly what this quality is, but most
 people know it when they experience it. Alexander notes that
 things that have the nameless quality usually have these
 aspects:
 They feel alive, as if they hold energy.
 They feel whole, like nothing is missing.
 They feel comfortable; it is pleasing to be around them.
 They feel free, not constrained unnaturally.
 They feel exact, as if they are just how they are supposed to
 be.
 They feel egoless, connected to the universe.
 They feel eternal, as if they have always been and always
 will be.
 They are free from inner contradictions.
 The last of those, “free from inner contradictions,” is
 tremendously important to any designer, because inner
 contradictions are at the heart of any bad design. If a device is
 supposed to make my life easier, and it is hard to use, that is a
 contradiction. If something is supposed to be fun, and it is
 boring or frustrating, that is a contradiction. A good designer
 must carefully remove inner contradictions, and not get used to
 them, or make excuses for them—so let’s add a tool to our
 toolbox for removing them.
 #92 THE LENS OF INNER CONTRADICTION
 A good game cannot contain properties that defeat the game’s
 very purpose. To remove those contradictory qualities, ask
 yourself these questions:
 What is the purpose of my game?
 What are the purposes of each subsystem in my game?
 Is there anything at all in my game that contradicts these
 purposes?
 If so, how can I change that?
 Illustration by Nick Daniel
 Alexander also explains that only through iteration and
 observation about how something is used can one arrive at a
 truly excellent design. In other words, the Rule of the Loop
 holds in architecture as well as game design. A concrete
 example of this is the system he describes for laying paths
 between buildings in a complex: “Lay no paths at all. Merely
 plant grass. Then come back a year later, see where people have
 worn paths in the grass, and only then begin to pave.”
 Alexander’s next book, A Pattern Language, is his most famous
 and influential work. In it, he describes 253 different
 architectural patterns that seem to have the nameless quality.
 They range from large-scale patterns like “distribution of
 towns” and “agricultural valleys” to small-scale patterns such as
 “canvas roofs” and “windows which open wide.” The scope and
 striking detail of A Pattern Language changes the reader’s
 viewpoint about how they interact with the everyday world.
 Many game designers have stories to tell about how the book
 inspired them. Personally, I was baffled about how to structure
 the world of Toontown Online until I read this text, and
 suddenly much of it seemed obvious. Will Wright is said to have
 designed SimCity based on a desire to experiment with the
 patterns listed in the book. The entire “design patterns”
 movement in computer science stems from the power of this
 text as well. What will you create when you read it?
 Alexander was not content to leave the nameless quality
 nameless. In his later books, he makes a deeper study of what
 truly gives something that special feeling. He did this by
 cataloging thousands of different things that did, or did not,
 have that feeling and then looked for similarities between
 them. In doing so, he gradually distilled out fifteen fundamental
 qualities that these things shared, as detailed in The
 Phenomenon of Life. The book gets its title from an insight he
 had about the nameless quality: The reason some things seem
 special to us is that they have some of the same qualities that
 living things have. As living beings ourselves, we feel connected
 to things and places that have qualities special to living things.
 Delving into detail about these properties is well beyond the
 scope of this book, but it can be fascinating and useful to reflect
 on whether your game contains them. It is excellent mental
 exercise just to think about how these patterns, which mostly
 are about spatial and textural qualities, apply to games at all.
 Alexander’s Fifteen Properties of Living Structures
 1. Levels of scale: We see levels of scale in “telescoping goals,”
 where a player has to satisfy short-term goals to reach
 midterm ones and to eventually reach long-term goals. We
 see it in fractal interest curves. We also see it in nested game
 world structures. Spore is a symphony of levels of scale.
 2. Strong centers: We see this in visual layout, certainly, but
 also in our story structure. The avatar is at the center of our
 game universe—and generally we prefer strong avatars over
 weak ones. Also, we prefer strong centers when it comes to
 our purpose in the game—our goal.
 3. Boundaries: Many games are primarily about boundaries!
 Certainly, any game about territory is an exploration of
 boundaries. But rules are another kind of boundary, and a
 game with no rules is no game at all.
 4. Alternating repetition: We see this on the pleasing shape of
 the chessboard, and we see it too in the cycle of
 level/boss/level/boss that comes up in so many games. Even
 tense/release/tense/release is an example of pleasing
 alternating repetition, as seen in Figure 10.7.
 5. Positive space: What Alexander means here is that the
 foreground and background elements both have beautiful,
 complementary shapes, like yin and yang. In a sense, a wellbalanced game has this quality—allowing multiple alternate
 strategies to have an interlocked beauty.
 6. Good shape: This is as simple as it sounds—a shape that is
 pleasing. We certainly look for this in the visual elements of
 our games. But we can see and feel it, too, in level design. A
 good level feels “solid” and has a “good curve.”
 7. Local symmetries: This is different from an overall
 symmetry, like a mirror image; instead, this refers to multiple
 small, internal symmetries in a design. Zelda: The Wind
 Waker has this feeling throughout its architecture—when
 you are within a room or area, it seems to have a symmetry,
 but it is connected to other places in a way that feels organic.
 Rule systems and game balance can have this property as
 well.
 8. Deep interlock and ambiguity: This is when two things are
 so tightly intertwined that they define each other—if you
 took one away, the other wouldn’t be itself any longer. We
 see this in many board games, such as Go. The position of the
 pieces on the board is only meaningful relative to the
 opponent’s pieces.
 9. Contrast: In games, we have many kinds of contrast. The
 contrast between opponents, between what is controllable
 and what is not, and between reward and punishment. When
 opposites in our game are strongly contrasted, the game feels
 more meaningful and more powerful.
 10. Gradients: This refers to qualities that change gradually. The
 gradually increasing challenge curve is an example of this,
 but so are appropriately designed probability curves.
 11. Roughness: When a game is too perfect, it has no character.
 The handmade feeling of “house rules” often makes a game
 seem more alive.
 12. Echoes: Echoes are a kind of pleasing, unifying repetition.
 When the boss monster has something in common with his
 minions, we are experiencing echoes. Good interest curves
 have this property, especially fractal ones.
 13. The void: As Alexander says, “In the most profound centers
 which have perfect wholeness, there is at the heart a void
 which is like water, infinite in depth, surrounded by and
 contrasted with the clutter of the stuff and fabric all around
 it.” Think of a church, or the human heart. When boss
 monsters tend to be in large, hollow spaces, we are
 experiencing the void.
 14. Simplicity and inner calm: Designers talk endlessly about
 how important it is for a game to be simple—usually with a
 small number of rules that have emergent properties. Of
 course, these rules must be well balanced, which gives them
 the inner calm that Alexander describes.
 15. Not-separateness: This refers to something being well
 connected to its surroundings—as if it was part of them. Each
 rule of our game should have this property, but so should
 every element of our game. If everything in our game has
 this quality, a certain wholeness results, which makes the
 game feel very alive indeed. Lens #11: Unification can be a
 good guide to not-separateness.
 Alexander’s approach to architecture can be quite useful when
 designing a game space. But as you see, the qualities he
 describes for a good space apply to many other aspects of game
 design as well. I have only been able to scratch the surface of
 Alexander’s approach to design here. Reading his many
 delightful books will surely give you new insights into game
 design. As a reminder of his thoughtful perspective, take this
 lens.
 #93 THE LENS OF THE NAMELESS QUALITY
 Certain things feel special and wonderful because of their
 natural, organic design. To ensure your game has these
 properties, ask yourself these questions:
 Does my design have a special feeling of life, or do parts of
 my design feel dead? What would make my design feel more
 alive?
 Which of Alexander’s fifteen qualities does my design have?
 Could it have more of them, somehow?
 Where does my design feel like myself?
 Illustration by Chris Daniel
 Real vs. Virtual Architecture
 Alexander’s “deep fundamentals” perspective on architecture is
 useful, but it is also useful to look in detail at some of the
 peculiarities special to virtual architecture. When we study
 some of the spaces that have been made for popular
 videogames, they are often very strange. They have huge
 amounts of wasted space, weird and dangerous architectural
 features, and no real relationship with their outside
 environment, and sometimes areas even overlap with
 themselves in physically impossible ways.
 These sorts of bizarre building constructs would be considered
 madness by real-world architects. Look at those weird hollow
 spaces and all that water. So why is it that when we play
 videogames, we don’t notice how strange the building layouts
 are?
 It is because the human mind is very weak when it comes to
 translating 3D spaces into 2D maps. If you don’t believe me,
 think of a familiar place, somewhere you go all the time like
 your home, school, or workplace, and try to draw a map of it.
 Most people find this quite difficult—this simply isn’t how we
 store spaces in our minds—we think of them relatively, not
 absolutely. We know which doors go to which rooms, but as for
 what is behind a wall with no doors, we aren’t always quite
 sure. For that reason, it is not important that 3D spaces have
 realistic 2D blueprints. All that matters is how the space feels
 when the player is in it.
 FIGURE
 21.2
 No one would build this in the real world.
 Know How Big
 When we are in real spaces, a sense of scale comes naturally to
 us, because we have so many cues—lighting, shadows, textures,
 stereo vision, and, most importantly, the presence of our own
 bodies. But in virtual spaces, scale is not always so clear.
 Because so many real-world cues are missing, it is very easy to
 create a virtual space that is really much bigger or smaller than
 it looks. This can be very confusing and disorienting for players.
 I frequently have conversation with students and other novice
 world builders that go something like this:
 Virtual Architect: My world looks funny… but I don’t know
 why…
 Me: Well, things seem out of scale—that car is too big for
 the street, and those windows are too small for that
 building. How big is that car, anyway?
 Virtual Architect: I don’t know… Maybe five units?
 Me: So how big is a unit?
 Virtual Architect: I don’t know. It’s all virtual… why does it
 matter?
 And in one sense, he’s right—as long as everything in your
 world is in proper proportion, your virtual units could be feet,
 meters, cubits, or Smurf hats, and it doesn’t matter. But the
 moment that anything is out of scale, or you suspect it might be
 out of scale, it becomes a very important question, because then
 you have to relate things back to the real world. For this reason,
 it is wise to make your game units something that you are
 intimately familiar with in the real world—for most people, feet
 or meters. This will save a lot of time and confusion, because if
 your units are feet, and your car is thirty units long, you will
 quickly know what the problem is.
 But sometimes the elements of your world are properly
 proportioned, but to the players, things look out of scale. The
 typical culprits in this case include the following:
 Eye height: If you have a first-person game with the virtual
 camera very high (more than seven feet off the ground) or
 very low (less than five feet off the ground), it will distort the
 view of the world, since people tend to assume an eye height
 similar to their own.
 People and doorways: Two of the strongest cues for scale
 are people and doorways (which of course, are designed to
 accommodate people). If you have a world of giants or little
 people, it can confuse the player about scale; similarly, if you
 have decided that doorways are very large or very small in
 your game, that can be similarly confusing. If you have no
 people, doorways, or other commonly sized man-made
 objects, players often can get a little confused about scale.
 Texture scaling: An easy error to make when designing a
 world is to have textures that are not at the proper scale,
 such as a brick texture on the wall that is too large or a floor
 tile texture that is too small. Be sure that the textures you use
 match the scale of textures in the real world.
 Third-Person Distortion
 There is another special peculiarity of designing virtual spaces.
 Each of us has developed a natural sense of the relationship of
 how our bodies fit into the world that we see. When we play a
 third-person videogame, where we can see our body, our brain
 does an amazing thing; it somehow lets us be in two places at
 once—in the body of our character, but also floating eight feet
 behind our body—all the while letting this strange perspective
 feel very natural. And while we get tremendous benefits from
 being able to see our virtual body in a game, something very
 odd happens to our sense of proportion. In wide-open outdoor
 scenes, we mostly don’t notice this. But when we try to control a
 character who is in a normal-sized interior space, the space
 feels frustratingly crowded, like we are driving around a house
 in a car.
 FIGURE
 21.3
 Weirdly, most players do not identify this as a problem with the
 third-person avatar system, but they think the room too small.
 Is there a way to distort the room so that when it is experienced
 in this peculiar perspective it looks normal?
 FIGURE
 21.4
 Solution 1: Scale up the room and the furniture. If you scale
 up all the walls and furniture, it does make more room to move
 around but gives a weird feeling of your avatar being tiny like a
 small child, as normal-sized objects like chairs and sofas
 become too big to sit on.
 FIGURE
 21.5
 Solution 2: Scale up the room, but leave the furniture
 normal size. Now you have a cavernous room with furniture
 huddled together in lonely looking clusters.
 FIGURE
 21.6
 Solution 3: Scale up the room, leave the furniture normal
 size, but spread the furniture out. This works a little better—
 the room no longer seems such a cavern, but it leaves the room
 looking strangely sparse, with unnaturally large spaces
 between objects in the room.
 FIGURE
 21.7
 Solution 4: Scale up the room, scale up the furniture a little
 bit, and spread the furniture out. This solution, pioneered by
 the designers of Max Payne, works very well. In a first-person
 view, this looks kind of strange, but in a third-person view, it
 does a very good job of counteracting the distortion caused by
 the eyepoint being far from the body.
 Level Design
 We’re nearly at the end of this chapter, and we haven’t yet
 talked about level design. Or have we? In truth, we have been
 covering it all along! Not just in this chapter, but through the
 entire book. All a level designer does is arrange the
 architecture, props, and challenges in a game in ways that are
 fun and interesting—that is, making sure there is the right level
 of challenge, the right amount of reward, the right amount of
 meaningful choice, and all the other things that make a good
 game. Level design is just game design exercised in detail—and
 it isn’t easy, for the devil is in the details. Level design is
 different for every game, because every game is different. But if
 you use everything you know about game design when you
 design your level, examining it carefully through many lenses,
 the best level design choices will start to become clear.
 Other Reading to Consider
 The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander.
 Genius advice for any designer. The first Alexander book you
 should read.
 A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al. Read
 this, and never see the world the same way again. Read this
 one next.
 The Nature of Order, books 1–4. Future generations will
 marvel that we were unable to appreciate these books while
 Alexander was alive. Read these last.
 Level Design for Games: Creating Compelling Game
 Experiences by Phil Co. A solid book full of practical advice
 for the detailed design and documentation of your games.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
 Some Interfaces Create a Feeling of Presence
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-22
 FIGURE
 22.1
 How do you know that your surroundings are real, and not an
 illusion? We are presented with illusions all day long…
 photographs, videos, even 3D movies. Videos and movies,
 especially, have a power to pull in our consciousness, and fully
 engage our minds. But, as engrossing as they may be, and as
 realistic as they may look, we are never fooled into thinking
 they are real, in a real place with us, because we can see and
 feel that our bodies are not in the same place as the images we
 look upon. We might project our minds into these experiences,
 but we never project our bodies. But at night, we go to sleep,
 and dream. And in our dreams, we are presented with another
 set of illusions. Despite their many gaps in logic we accept them
 in the moment as real, so real that sometimes we wake with a
 smile of delight on our lips, or with a shout of dismay in our
 throats. The illusions of dreams are different than most waking
 illusions. In dreams, not only do we experience rich sights and
 sounds (all without using our eyes and ears), but we experience
 smell, taste, and touch, and something more. In dreams, even
 our bodies seem to be present in the illusions our minds create,
 and as a result, we believe the places and events we dream are
 real.
 People tend to think of virtual reality (VR) and augmented
 reality (AR) as technologies designed to fool the eye. But it might
 be more correct to say that these are technologies designed to
 fool the body. Well, not the body itself, but rather the mind’s
 sense of the body. The technical term for this sense is
 “proprioception,” a word coined from Latin in 1906, meaning “a
 sense of one’s self,” and it is a very powerful sense. The
 relationship between our body and the world is how we define
 much of our identity, and how we decide what is and isn’t real.
 The expression “pinch me, I must be dreaming” is an
 expression of the idea that my eyes and mind might be fooled
 by illusions, but what happens to my body is real.
 The true magic of VR and AR is not simply 3D images. Those
 have been around since the invention of the stereoscope in
 1838. No, the magic of VR and AR is that they let us bring our
 bodies into the world of the simulation. And this is important,
 because, surprisingly, we do a lot of thinking not just with our
 brains, but with our bodies. Traditional games (children’s
 games, athletic games, party games) frequently involve the
 body, but most digital games try to involve the body as little as
 possible. The twitching tips of your fingers are the only part of
 the body most videogames acknowledge. But bodily presence is
 a real thing. VR developers see it most in the unconscious
 behaviors of players in their worlds. A VR player who is trying
 to solve a puzzle, and has to stop and think will often casually
 lean on a virtual table or counter, only to suddenly realize that
 it isn’t real and they are in danger of falling over. Of course,
 they never intellectually believed that the virtual table was real,
 but some subconscious part of their mind found the
 presentation of the immersive 3D world realistic enough that it
 was prepared to treat virtual objects as real ones. This feeling of
 presence, not well understood by psychology, is the central
 magic of VR.
 But what about AR? There is much debate about which will
 have the greatest impact on the game world: VR or AR? While at
 the time of this writing, VR seems to have the most promise for
 games, due to its ability to transport you to a fantasy world, it is
 common to hear people say, “I’m not interested in VR – what I
 really want is AR.” What they are really saying is that the idea
 of sending their body into a virtual world is not appealing to
 them, that what they want is for simulated objects and entities
 to come to them, to have these things join them in the real
 world. And this is understandable—the idea of sending your
 body to another place is exciting to some, but can make others
 feel uncomfortable and vulnerable. Not only could the fantasy
 place be weird or scary, but losing track of your body in the real
 world, as your mind focuses on a virtual world instead, is a
 disturbing concept. One could say that AR experiences are
 about bringing simulations “here” where my body is, and VR
 experiences are about sending my body “there” where the
 simulation is. Put both real/simulated and here/there on
 different axes, and you get a diagram showing four different
 ways of interfacing with reality:
 FIGURE
 22.2
 Different play experiences, of course, are suited to different
 quadrants. To date, there have been very few games in the
 “telepresence” quadrant, but, who knows? Perhaps the day is
 coming when telepresence robots become common, opening up
 whole new categories of games.
 As game designers, we make new realities all the time. Every
 simulation is a kind of new reality. It is worth thinking about
 some of the many kinds of reality that we can create:
 Logical Reality defines the rules of cause and effect.
 Spatial Reality defines how I move through space.
 Proprioceptive Reality defines where it feels like my body
 is.
 Social Reality defines how I interact with others.
 Previous chapters have talked a lot about creating compelling
 logical realities and spatial realities, and upcoming chapters
 will talk about social realities. But proprioceptive realities,
 created by the power of presence, are something very special,
 and also worthy of our consideration. Presence might be more
 important than it seems. After all, some say that the secret to
 happiness is “to be present,” and some who meditate claim that
 by “being present” on a daily basis, the very meaning of life has
 unfolded before them.
 The Power of Presence
 When a new medium appears, people copy things from the old
 one. When motion pictures were invented, people filmed stage
 plays, not realizing that cuts and editing would be the heart of
 the new medium. When Internet video was invented, people
 created expensive thirty- and sixty-minute programs for it, not
 realizing that short amateur videos were what people really
 wanted. And, similarly, now that VR and AR have appeared,
 many people are trying to copy what has worked in the worlds
 of console, PC, and mobile gaming, not realizing that the heart
 of VR and AR is something new. The heart of VR and AR is
 presence.
 Six Presence Breakers
 Unfortunately, presence does not come for free with these
 technologies. Presence is a fragile illusion, a magician’s trick
 where one awkward interaction can spoil the whole effect. If
 you are going to design an experience centered on a feeling of
 presence, you must consider the disturbing notion that
 presence might be even more important than gameplay.
 Remember the Lens of the Toy? Players are glad to fiddle about
 with the elements of a world in which they feel presence, even
 if no gameplay is there. But if the presence is broken or
 interrupted, the player becomes very aware that they are in a
 headset, and may even become annoyed by the whole
 experience, no matter how good the gameplay actually is. This
 is inconceivable to many game developers, who believe
 wholeheartedly that gameplay comes first, no matter what. But,
 consider: if the very point of your VR or AR experience is that
 the player feels present in the virtual world, and that illusion of
 presence is broken, what experience are you providing? Those
 who spend time working in these new media come to realize
 how fragile an illusion presence really is, and how much effort
 must be expended to preserve it. To that end, here are six of the
 greatest dangers to the feeling of presence.
 Presence Breaker #1: Motion Sickness
 When you think about it, the phenomenon of motion sickness is
 incredibly strange. A person is confronted with unusual motion
 (say, that of a boat, car, or roller coaster), or the appearance of
 motion (say, an IMAX movie, or a VR car race), and their body
 responds by becoming gradually more nauseous, and possibly,
 ultimately vomiting. Why vomiting? Why not sneezing, or
 getting chills, or feeling tingly, or any other number of possible
 physiological responses? Why any response at all? The answer
 is known as the “toxicology hypothesis.” Certain poisons (from
 some mushrooms, for example) can disrupt the neurology of
 the brain such that the input from the little hairs in our inner
 ear (which detect acceleration and rotation) do not align with
 the input from our visual system. These poisons must have
 been a significant problem sometime in our evolutionary past,
 because wise old nature has programmed our brains to vomit
 when this happens, saving our lives. The problem is that
 poisons are not the only way to cause this disconnect—reading
 in the car, riding the Tilt-a-Whirl, and engaging in certain VR
 experiences can do the same thing. AR experiences, at present,
 are less likely to cause motion sickness, because they are less
 likely to give false information to the outer edges of our visual
 field, which is what the brain uses to register motion. But, as AR
 technology advances with a wider field of view, it too will be
 able to trigger this neurological poison control mechanism.
 Can we disrupt this mechanism somehow? Certain drugs
 (Dramamine, for example) do just that, but as Spalding Gray
 once noted about using drugs to disable specific brain activities,
 “there is no such thing as precision bombing,” and these drugs
 tend to make players feel drowsy and disconnected. One day
 (around 2060 or so, by my guess), we’ll probably have some
 kind of nanotechnology that can safely calm our motion
 sickness circuit without side effects, but until then, we have to
 live with it. Exactly what triggers motion sickness differs vastly
 from person to person, but it is possible to create great
 experiences with no “motion discomfort” by following these
 tips.
 1. Keep the framerate up. Consider 60 frames per second (fps)
 your new absolute acceptable minimum. 90 fps or more
 should be your goal. Yes, I know this is hard. Yes, I know that
 hardware platforms are variable. I don’t care. Your head and
 eyes can move quite fast, and when you are much below
 these high frame rates, your brain starts to sense something
 is wrong. Some people disagree, insisting that the brain can’t
 even detect the differences between such high frame rates—
 that film has established that 24 fps is plenty. If you feel this
 way, try this experiment. Go out under a fluorescent
 streetlight one night, and toss a ball in the air. The streetlight
 is pulsing at 50–60 times a second. If you just look at the light,
 it seems to be continuously on. But if you look at the ball, you
 can clearly see the individual light pulses. But you don’t even
 have to go outside. Pick up your PC mouse and shake it back
 and forth, and watch your cursor. Your screen is likely
 updating at 60 fps—and you can clearly see the discrete
 positions. The way the brain perceives motion is not simple
 or easy. In the new world of VR, frame rates below 60 fps are
 no longer feasible.
 2. Avoid virtual camera movement. I know. You want to make
 a first person shooter, you want to make a racing game, you
 want to have a dogfight in space. All of these require a virtual
 camera that whizzes all over the place while the real camera
 (the player’s eye) stays still. Well, guess what? Any time you
 create a disconnect between the eye and those little hairs in
 the inner ear, your player can become nauseated. So, yes,
 that means a lot of kinds of gameplay are off the table. Keep
 in mind, though, that for everything that VR takes away, it
 gives something new that couldn’t be done before. Being able
 to move your head and body through an environment, even
 for a short distance, is an incredible experience, as is
 manipulating virtual objects with your real hands. It requires
 some creativity to design within the bounds of the VR box,
 but if you are willing to do it, you can create powerful
 experiences that have just about zero motion sickness. This
 isn’t to say that VR experiences with spatial motion are off
 the table—it just means that you take a risk when you create
 them, and you must work extra hard to give your players a
 comfortable experience.
 3. If you must move the camera, don’t accelerate. Funny
 thing about those little hairs in your ears—they can only
 detect acceleration, not velocity. They can’t tell the difference
 between zipping down the highway at 80 miles per hour, and
 sitting perfectly still. What they notice is speeding up and
 slowing down. When I coded up the locomotion system for
 Aladdin’s Magic Carpet VR Adventure at DisneyQuest in the
 late nineties, I took advantage of this fact by programming
 the motion of the carpet to be as linear as possible. Some
 amount of acceleration was necessary, though, and as a
 result, some motion sickness was inevitable. It was very
 limited, however, because the experience is on a five-minute
 timer, and most people can endure five minutes of mild
 virtual motion without much discomfort. For home play,
 however, five minutes is generally not an acceptable
 duration. It is not uncommon for home players to want to
 keep playing VR experiences for over an hour at a time, and
 motion sickness can have a cumulative effect.
 4. Hide the edges. Have you ever been sitting on a bus or train,
 and suddenly had a feeling of motion, only to look up and
 realize that your vehicle is not moving at all, but rather the
 one next to you is? The reason for this sensation of motion is
 that our brain uses the edges of our visual field to decide how
 we are moving. Clever VR developers have realized that if
 they hide the edges of the visual field with what is commonly
 called a “vignette” they can significantly reduce feelings of
 motion discomfort. The first commercial game to use this
 technique was Eagle’s Flight. This technique is not a cure-all,
 as there are times when it can distract players, thus breaking
 presence. But use it at the right time, such as when players
 are intensely focused on moving toward a specific location,
 and players don’t even notice it is there.
 5. Teleport sparingly. Since virtual motion can cause motion
 sickness, an obvious choice of travel is teleportation—it gets
 you there quickly, and causes no motion sickness—perfect,
 right? Unfortunately, no. Surprisingly, teleportation can be a
 significant presence breaker. It seems the way your mind
 creates the illusion of presence is by building a mental 3D
 model of the space around you. But it can only do this if you
 have looked at that space. It is a subtle thing, but each time
 you press that teleport button, you take yourself to place
 where you have no presence, and you won’t get the presence
 back until you spend time looking at your surroundings. So,
 while teleportation does prevent motion sickness,
 experientially it saps away presence, the very thing we most
 need to preserve. To paraphrase Doctor Who, it is a cheap
 and nasty form of space travel.
 6. And whatever you do, keep the horizon level. Certain
 kinds of motion, virtual or real, are shortcuts to trigger your
 motion sickness alarm circuit. Rolling the camera in a “barrel
 roll” style, so that the horizon does cartwheels in front of the
 player’s eyes, is the quickest shortcut to nausea city. So—
 don’t do that. The canals in your inner ear that control all
 this are circular and very good at detecting rotation, so,
 generally, you should avoid virtual rotation (where the
 camera rotates separately from the player’s head) of any
 kind. Part of what makes VR unique is that it lets players
 really turn around—for real! Use real rotation to let players
 look around an environment, and avoid virtual rotation
 whenever possible.
 It is very important to take the problem of motion sickness
 seriously. Not only can it disrupt the experience you are so
 lovingly trying to create, it can have much more far reaching
 effects. Most people have had a traumatic experience with some
 food that makes them nauseous, only to find that years and
 decades later, the sight or thought of that food still makes them
 physically ill. The mind takes poison control very seriously, and
 if your players’ subconscious minds come to believe that your
 games are toxic, players will avoid them for the rest of their
 lives, because they get sick to their stomach just thinking about
 them.
 Presence Breaker #2: Counter-Intuitive Interactions
 Of course, in any game we create, we want interactions to be
 clear and intuitive, but in VR, the stakes are much higher. A
 physical interaction that is confusing or counter-intuitive will
 break presence in an instant. And in VR, the importance of
 player interactions matching reality is much higher than in a
 screen-based game. For example, in a traditional adventure
 game, objects are often uni-taskers: screwdrivers are for
 unscrewing and nothing else. Knives are for cutting and
 nothing else. It is a sort of “key and lock” mentality. But when
 the phenomenon of presence takes over, and your body thinks
 the virtual world is real, a great deal more richness of
 interaction is expected. At Schell Games, we developed a spythemed VR game called I Expect You To Die that contains a
 puzzle where you need to unscrew a panel from a car’s console.
 We placed screwdrivers within sight, which we fully expected
 players to use for this purpose. However, we found many
 players tried to unscrew the panel using a pocketknife they
 found in a glovebox. This surprised us, because we were
 thinking about this too much like a traditional presence-free
 adventure game. Our players, on the other hand, who were
 experiencing presence felt that since they might use a knife as a
 screwdriver in the real world, it seemed perfectly natural to do
 so in the game. Initially, this silently failed, and it was a real
 immersion breaker. Allowing players to unscrew the panel with
 a knife would require us to radically change our puzzle
 structure, so ultimately we added a dialogue line from our
 narrator: “I’ve seen you do many creative things with a knife,
 but I don’t think turning screws will be among them.” This is
 kind of a cop out, and still a mild presence breaker, but at least
 it acknowledges the player’s attempt, and asks them to move on
 to something else. Other interactions we handled better:
 shooting the champagne bottle with the gun shatters it, and the
 broken glass can be used to cut things. Lighting the money on
 fire with the lighter causes it to burn. Players love using objects
 on other objects—if you can handle these interactions
 realistically, you will delight them. If you don’t, you’ll remind
 them this is “just a game,” and break their presence. The only
 way to find these deep interactions is through repetitive
 playtesting. It is much wiser to create a small game with rich,
 natural object interactions than a big game with weak ones that
 will destroy presence.
 Presence Breaker #3: Intensity Overload
 Many players crave thrill and intense action—these are
 important pleasures in games. And VR is a powerful way to
 deliver these things. But some designers fail to realize how
 much more intense VR can be. We have a special nucleus in our
 brain that is responsible for paying attention to objects that
 come close to our bodies. Ask someone to put their hand near
 your face (it doesn’t work with your own hand), and you can
 feel that nucleus turn on. Traditional videogames cannot
 activate that nucleus, but VR and AR can. Many of our greatest
 fears involve bad things happening to our bodies, and VR can
 be used to make players feel like these things are really
 happening! VR can make you feel like your body is falling from
 a great height, like you are drowning, like bees are swarming
 around you, like creepy monsters are touching you. These
 things can be thrilling and exciting, but they can also be so
 overwhelming that people want to rip off the headset and stop
 the experience. The moment someone thinks “this is too much –
 I want this to stop,” you have already lost them, because their
 inner voice is quietly repeating, like a parent to a child, “it’s
 only pretend… it’s only pretend…” which means your player’s
 mind is actively fighting against the presence you are trying so
 carefully to create.
 Presence Breaker #4: Unrealistic Audio
 If I pick up a virtual coin and hold it in my hand, turning it over
 to look at front and back, I might be really immersed in what
 I’m doing if it looks realistic. But if I then drop it, and it makes
 no sound, I’ll be reminded that the world is fake, and my
 presence is destroyed. If instead, it makes realistic “ping” and
 “ching” noises as it bounces around on the cobblestone street,
 my presence will be maintained. Sound is closely related to
 touch, and so your mind uses your sense of sound to decide
 where your body is. Put another way, hearing is believing.
 Presence Breaker #5: Proprioceptive Disconnect
 Proprioception is more than your sense of where your body is
 located, it also is your sense of how your body is positioned;
 your awareness that you are sitting or standing, for example, or
 that one foot is crossed over the other. In a screen-based
 videogame, our proprioceptive sense is irrelevant. In VR,
 making our real and virtual bodies match is key to maintaining
 presence. If you are seated while playing a VR game that
 involves your character walking about a room, your body
 perceives it as fake, and presence is broken. The scale alone is
 confusing to your body: if your physical body is seated, but your
 virtual head is six feet off the ground, your body and mind can
 perceive either that you are floating, or that the world is very
 small, for, even though you are looking at tall adults eye to eye,
 your body knows that if you stood up, you’d be the equivalent
 of eight feet tall! Your mind knows this isn’t possible, so it can
 create the strange feeling that everything around you is small.
 Another type of proprioceptive disconnect involves objects
 penetrating the player’s body—walking through a virtual table,
 for example. Players do not like having their bodies penetrated
 by virtual objects. It feels disconcerting at first, as your mind
 and body struggle in subconscious fear, but soon it simply
 breaks presence. The fastest way to bring about a
 proprioceptive disconnect is to give players awkward virtual
 bodies that they can see. If visual sense of your body differs
 from your proprioceptive sense (those fake hands or feet aren’t
 positioned where your real ones are) your mind quickly rejects
 the reality as fake. Much better to show no body (your brain
 doesn’t mind this much, for some reason) than a body slightly
 out of place. Consider this the uncanny valley of VR avatars.
 Presence Breaker #6: Lack of Identity
 Presence is the pervasive sense of being somewhere. But to be
 somewhere you must be someone. Presence and identity are
 closely entwined. VR filmmakers often fail to understand this. If
 someone make a screen-based movie of two people talking at a
 table, and we watch it, it seems quite normal. We are used to
 screen-based media being a sort of floating eye that flits around
 scenes invisible to the actors. But if the same movie is filmed
 with VR, suddenly your body is present, and you start to
 wonder, “Why are these two people ignoring me? Can’t they see
 I’m right here?” and of course, your presence in the world
 immediately makes you wonder about your identity in the
 world. Failing to address the question of the player’s identity
 will be a nagging reminder to the player that they aren’t really
 there.
 Six Presence Builders
 While it is very important to remove all the presence breakers
 that you can from your experience, it is not enough. Presence
 doesn’t just happen. Like starting a fire with only flint and
 tinder, presence must be patiently fostered and encouraged.
 These six techniques can help.
 Presence Builder #1: Hand Presence
 Because VR and AR are technologies of the body, and not just
 the eyes, the way we use our bodies during these experiences is
 very important. And the main way that humans interact with
 the world is with their hands. Remember our definition of play?
 “Manipulation that satisfies curiosity.” The very word
 “manipulate” comes from the Latin word “manus,” which
 means hand. There is something about seeing one’s own hands
 that is very special. “Lucid dreaming” is the name for the
 unusual experience of realizing you are dreaming, yet
 continuing to experience your dream. This is hard for most of
 us, for when we realize we are dreaming, our dreams tend to
 quickly fade. When avid lucid dreamers realize they are
 dreaming, a common technique they use to stabilize the dream
 state is to stare at their dream hand. Something about seeing
 one’s own hand seems to convince the mind that the world is
 solid and real. Similarly, there is a world of difference between
 VR and AR experiences that involve just looking at a world, and
 those where you can reach out and touch it. The effect is so
 strong that VR developers often refer to the power of “hand
 presence.” Hand tracking of some kind is a must for hand
 presence to happen, but it is not enough. The strongest and best
 hand presence occurs when the player is able to meaningfully
 and naturally manipulate the environment around them. This
 requires a lot of thoughtful design, and a deep understanding of
 the relationship between the mind and the hands. For example,
 when using a tool, the mind no longer thinks of the hands—the
 mind goes to the tip of the tool the hands are holding. Savvy VR
 designers have realized that this means it is acceptable to make
 hands invisible when a tool is in use. Can you name which VR
 experiences do and don’t use this technique? Most players can’t
 remember, because they simply don’t notice their hands have
 become invisible.
 Presence Builder #2: Social Presence
 Humans are social creatures, and a significant amount of our
 brain is dedicated to processing human faces and gestures. VR
 and AR have the power to create a special kind of
 telecommunication, one that feels more natural than a screenbased video call, because of the feeling of presence of another
 person. Being able to speak and gesture naturally with someone
 else in VR and AR is a very special experience, one that will
 become quite common when the number of connected headsets
 rises over ten million. Even a simple audio phone call creates a
 form of presence, as you feel you are in a sort of social space
 with that remote person. The presence created by making eye
 contact and seeing the gestures and movements of another
 person in the same space with me goes a long way to making a
 space, and that person, seem real… and if we can hand objects
 back and forth, all the better.
 Presence Builder #3: Familiarity
 Remember how we said that in order to feel presence, you must
 look around your environment so that your mind can build an
 internal 3D model of it? That is only true when you are in an
 unfamiliar place. If a familiar location is presented to you, such
 as a car interior, a fast food counter, or a basketball court, if
 these types of places are already familiar to you, your brain will
 fill out the details without you even looking, building presence
 quite quickly. As we’ve discussed, novelty in games is very
 important—but giving the right amount of familiarity,
 especially in your immediate surroundings, can give a feeling of
 presence that is surprisingly strong.
 Presence Builder #4: Realistic Audio
 Whatever amount of sound design and integration you
 normally do on a game, expect to double it for a VR experience,
 because so much more sound design effort is required to make
 interactions with objects seem realistic. Partly this is because
 spatialized sound (the illusion that sounds are coming from a
 particular location) is powerful and important in VR, but also
 because realistic sound is very contextual. Sounds echo
 differently in a small room than they do in a large one. Collision
 sounds are especially contextual. Dropping a coin on a wooden
 table sounds very different than dropping it onto a glass one. In
 a screen-based videogame, the difference might go unnoticed—
 but in VR, getting these details right does a huge amount to
 build up presence.
 Presence Builder #5: Proprioceptive Alignment
 Proprioceptive disconnects degrade presence, but
 proprioceptive alignment, where your real-life body and virtual
 body are strongly aligned, does a great deal to build presence.
 In I Expect You To Die, we designed the game for seated players,
 and so we developed seated scenarios (sitting at a desk, sitting
 in a car) and it did a great deal to strengthen presence. Many
 games have been experimenting with novel ways to give strong
 proprioceptive alignment, such as archery games where your
 arrows are stored in a quiver on your back. In order to get a
 new arrow, you must reach over your shoulder and grab it—a
 very natural and proprioceptively aligned action. As
 technologies improve, and foot and full-body tracking become
 the norm, proprioceptive alignment will be even more
 important, and lead to even stronger presence.
 Presence Builder #6: Comedy
 It sounds strange, but it is much easier to build presence in a
 comedic world than in a serious world. The success of Job
 Simulator, an early VR title all about doing silly tasks in various
 workplace environments, illustrates the point. In a cartoonish
 comedy world, you don’t expect everything to work right. In
 fact, discovering the crazy rules of the world is part of the
 delight! In an early version of Job Simulator, a kitchen scene
 presented players with a knife, and some vegetables. Naturally,
 players wanted to cut the vegetables. This would be a
 technically challenging scene to develop, because arbitrarily
 sized geometry would have to be created with each cut. The
 developers avoided that problem by allowing something
 strange to happen. If players tried to cut the vegetables, the
 knife would unexpectedly shatter into pieces, providing a weird
 comic moment, and avoiding the problem. In a serious world,
 this would break presence, because it is so obviously unlike the
 real world. But in a comedy world, weird events like this only
 serve to reinforce the rules of this strange world, thus
 reinforcing the player’s sense of presence.
 Encourage Looking Around
 As noted as far back as 1996 in Randy Pausch’s study of Disney’s
 Aladdin Magic Carpet VR Adventure, players new to VR are
 hesitant to turn their heads and look around. This seems to be
 because most of us have a lifetime of training that screen-based
 media is best enjoyed by sitting still and facing forward. On top
 of that, creating media that requires players to look around
 their environment is a bit of a subtle art form that many VR
 designers do not get right. Further, many early VR experiences
 with low (<60 fps) frame rates trained players to keep their
 heads still if they wanted to avoid motion sickness.
 Giving the players reasons to look around is critical, as that
 helps build presence, as the mind builds a 3D model of the
 space. New players will not be inclined to do so at first.
 Gradually, though, you can lead them to it. I Expect You To Die
 does this by putting players into a place where they don’t
 expect to move around freely. If your players can navigate
 forward, they want to look forward. If you hold them in place,
 they eventually start to look around. One level of I Expect You
 To Die takes place in a parked car. The player is sitting in the
 driver’s seat. Initially, they examine what is in front of them—
 the steering wheel, the gas and brake pedals. When these don’t
 do anything, the player gradually starts to explore the car: the
 gearshift, the glove box, the passenger seat, and eventually they
 wonder what is in the back seat. Most players, once they start to
 explore the car, are startled at how real the world seems. This
 appears to be familiarity and looking around working together
 to build a sense of presence. If, instead, this were a game about
 driving a car, I am doubtful that the presence would arrive so
 quickly (though motion sickness likely would).
 Not only do you need to give players reasons to look around
 (and interesting things to look at and interact with), but you
 would be wise to give players an opportunity to look into
 things. Designers, wanting to be helpful, have a tendency to
 make everything easily visible from the player’s starting point.
 But keep in mind the power of positional tracking. In our game,
 we gave players lots of reasons not just to turn, but to move
 their heads. Multiple glove boxes, items in the back seat, fine
 print, physics that allows objects to fall onto the floor of the car,
 and even an retinal scanning system that demands you lean
 forward (and then tries to kill you with a laser if you don’t
 move your head out of the way) were all different ways we
 encouraged players to move their heads around in the
 environment.
 Consider Brownboxing
 Most developers understand that when you undertake a game
 project with a lot of unknowns, you have to leave a lot of time
 in the schedule to deal with discoveries and problems. VR and
 AR projects have a lot of unknowns, and necessarily require
 time for experimentation and adaptation. But, here’s the funny
 thing: since you are trying to simulate reality, you can actually
 learn a lot by building your experience… in reality! Shawn
 Patton pioneered the technique of “brownboxing,” that is, using
 a bunch of old cardboard boxes to simulate a VR scene in the
 real world, and then playtesting it the way you would any paper
 playtest, having someone act as the game master, and telling
 you what happens as you touch, pick up, or manipulate
 different objects. You can’t test everything that way, but you can
 learn a lot quickly about how the player wants to interact with
 the scene using their hands, and what they can reach. Once
 your brownbox iteration is complete, measure it, hand it to the
 modeler, and you’ll have an excellent basis for your first
 “whiteboxed” digital prototype.
 FIGURE
 22.3
 Shawn Patton and Matt Mahon test the submarine level of I Expect You To Die.
 Different Hardware Enables Different
 Experiences
 The VR and AR inputs that you use very much define the
 experience you create. Systems that simply use a gamepad are
 very different from ones that use motion-tracked hand
 controllers, which are very different from ones that track your
 empty hands. Systems that require standing still create very
 different experiences from ones that give players the freedom
 to walk around. On top of all this, there are radical differences
 in the amount of processing power, how audio is delivered, and
 many other factors.
 It will be the rare VR experience that can easily be ported to the
 variety of different VR input systems. As a result, if you want to
 create a great VR experience, you should first choose the input
 system you plan to use, and design your game around that. Yes,
 this will mean your game may be hard to port to other
 platforms, but it will be great on the platform you have chosen.
 Remember the Lens of Transparency? Here’s a good partner for
 it.
 #93½ THE LENS OF PRESENCE
 Presence is invisible, ephemeral, fragile, and central to human
 experience. To remember where your player really is, ask
 yourself these questions:
 Is my player experiencing a sense of presence? Could it be
 stronger?
 What in my game is diminishing or breaking presence?
 What in my game is building or strengthening presence?
 Illustration by Josh Hendryx
 At the time of this writing (2019), VR and AR systems are only
 beginning to be treated as serious game platforms. By writing
 this chapter, I take a risk that what I say here may all sound
 foolish within a few years. However, I decided that these were
 ideas that are important to share with you, because while it is
 unlikely that VR and AR systems will become the dominant
 form of videogame hardware, the powerful experience of
 presence that they provide makes me certain that they will
 have a permanent and important place in the world of game
 design. And though their forms and technology will evolve and
 change rapidly, I am confident that the importance of presence
 in these platforms will remain constant.
 Given that presence is so influenced by the look and feel of your
 experience, this might be a good time to talk about aesthetics.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
 The Look and Feel of a World Is Defined by Its
 Aesthetics
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-23
 FIGURE
 23.1
 Monet Refuses the Operation
 Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
 around the streetlights in Paris
 and what I see is an aberration
 caused by old age, an aiction.
 I tell you it has taken me all my life
 to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
 to soften and blur and finally banish
 the edges you regret I don’t see,
 to learn that the line I called the horizon
 does not exist and sky and water,
 so long apart, are the same state of being.
 Fifty-four years before I could see
 Rouen cathedral is built
 of parallel shafts of sun,
 and now you want to restore
 my youthful errors: fixed
 notions of top and bottom,
 the illusion of three-dimensional space,
 wisteria separate
 from the bridge it covers.
 What can I say to convince you
 the Houses of Parliament dissolve
 night after night to become
 the fluid dream of the Thames?
 I will not return to a universe
 of objects that don’t know each other,
 as if islands were not the lost children
 of one great continent. The world
 is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
 becomes water, lilies on water,
 above and below water,
 becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
 and white and cerulean lamps,
 small fists passing sunlight
 so quickly to one another
 that it would take long, streaming hair
 inside my brush to catch it.
 To paint the speed of light!
 Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
 burn to mix with air
 and changes our bones, skin, clothes
 to gases. Doctor,
 if only you could see
 how heaven pulls earth into its arms
 and how infinitely the heart expands
 to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
 —Lisel Mueller
 The Value of Aesthetics
 Aesthetics is the third quadrant of the elemental tetrad. Some
 game designers have disdain for aesthetic considerations in a
 game, calling them mere “surface details” that have nothing to
 do with what they consider important—the game mechanics.
 But we must always remember that we are not designing just
 game mechanics, but an entire experience. And aesthetic
 considerations are part of making any experience more
 enjoyable. Good artwork can do wondrous things for a game:
 It can draw the player into a game they might have passed
 over.
 It can make the game world feel solid, real, and magnificent,
 which makes the player take the game more seriously and
 increases endogenous value. Consider the axis and allies
 story in the “pleasure of sensation” section in Chapter 9:
 Player.
 Aesthetic pleasure is no small thing. If your game is full of
 beautiful artwork, then every new thing that the player gets
 to see is a reward in itself.
 Powerful game worlds have a certain “atmosphere.” It can be
 hard to describe what that is, exactly, but it is created by the
 way the visuals, sounds, music, and game mechanics all work
 together.
 Just as the world often ignores character flaws in a beautiful
 woman or a handsome man, players are more likely to
 tolerate imperfections in your design if your game has a
 beautiful surface.
 You already have many of the tools you need to evaluate
 aesthetics in your game. Obviously, Lens #71: Beauty is useful,
 but you can also improve and integrate your aesthetics by using
 these other lenses in a new way. Stop for a moment, and
 consider how you might use each of these lenses not to observe
 the mechanics of your game, but the artwork in your game.
 Lens #1: Emotion
 Lens #2: Essential Experience
 Lens #4: Surprise
 Lens #6: Curiosity
 Lens #11: Unification
 Lens #12: Resonance
 Lens #13: Infinite Inspiration
 Lens #17: The Toy
 Lens #18: Passion
 Lens #19: The Player
 Lens #20: Pleasure
 Lens #27: Time
 Lens #38: Challenge
 Lens #46: Reward
 Lens #48: Simplicity/Complexity
 Lens #49: Elegance
 Lens #51: Imagination
 Lens #53: Balance
 Lens #54: Accessibility
 Lens #55: Visible Progress
 Lens #60: Physical Interface
 Lens #61: Virtual Interface
 Lens #66: Channels and Dimensions
 Lens #68: Moments
 Lens #72: Projection
 Lens #75: Simplicity and Transcendence
 Lens #81: Indirect Control
 Lens #83: Fantasy
 Lens #84: The World
 Lens #85: The Avatar
 Lens #90: Status
 Lens #92: Inner Contradiction
 Lens #93: The Nameless Quality
 And let us add one more.
 #94 THE LENS OF ATMOSPHERE
 Atmosphere is invisible and intangible. But somehow it
 envelops us, permeates us, and makes us part of the world. To
 make sure the atmosphere of your world is properly
 intoxicating, ask yourself these questions:
 Without using words, how can I describe the atmosphere of
 my game?
 How can I use artistic content (both visual and audible) to
 deepen that atmosphere?
 Illustration by Ryan Yee
 Learning to See
 It makes sense to view your game artwork through many
 lenses, because the key to creating great artwork is in your
 ability to see. Not just to see a salt shaker and say “that’s a salt
 shaker,” but to really see it—see its shapes, colors, proportions,
 shadows, reflections, and textures—to see its relationship to its
 environment and to the people who use it, and to see its
 function, and to see its meaning. This kind of deep seeing is a
 visual equivalent of the deep listening we discussed at the
 beginning of the book.
 FIGURE
 23.2
 It is amazing how difficult it can be to actually see things as
 they really are. The reason for this is efficiency—if we just
 stared in awe at everything we saw, taking in every little visual
 and audible detail, our minds would be so absorbed we would
 never get anything done. So, for efficiency, our brains, at a low
 level, categorize things before they enter our consciousness. We
 see a salt shaker or a dog, and our left brain just slaps a label on
 it, because it is easier to think about a label than to actually
 deeply see the thing itself in all its detail and uniqueness. When
 you are looking at and thinking about artwork in your game,
 you must learn to get your left brain to take a little break and
 let your right brain come out and play, for the right brain is able
 to see details that the left brain cannot. Betty Edwards’ excellent
 book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, is a marvelous text
 on this subject that is designed to teach anyone to draw by
 teaching them how to see. This is a fascinating virtuous circle—
 really seeing helps you draw properly, and drawing helps you
 see properly.
 How to Let Aesthetics Guide Your Design
 Some people mistakenly believe that it doesn’t make sense to
 get artists involved in a game project until the game design is
 near completion. But our minds are very visual, and it is often
 the case that an illustration or pencil sketch can completely
 change the course of a design, because the way a game looks in
 your mind’s eye is often very different from the way it looks
 when it is drawn on paper. Sometimes, an inspiring piece of
 concept art can provide the uniting vision of the experience a
 game is trying to achieve. Other times, an illustration can make
 clear whether an interface idea is possible or not. And
 occasionally, a little doodle done as a joke to poke fun at a
 design suddenly proves to become the central theme of a game.
 Game designs are abstract—illustrations are concrete. In the
 painful process of converting your abstract design into a
 concrete game, illustrations can serve as a simple, effective way
 to ground your design in reality at the very start of a project.
 If you have some artistic skill, it can be a great boon to you as a
 game designer—because you can sketch, people will think your
 creative vision is as clear in your mind as it is on the paper.
 More than that, it might make you famous. There are only two
 categories of famous game designers: first, ones who design
 “god games,” such as Will Wright, Peter Molyneux, and Sid
 Meier, presumably because it is easy to imagine a designer of a
 world as its god; and second, ones who have a very distinct
 visual style, such as Shigeru Miyamoto and American McGee.
 So, if you have a distinct and appealing art style, you should
 seriously consider basing your games around it.
 But what if (like me) artistic talents do not come naturally to
 you? What if you have neither the major nor minor gift when it
 comes to drawing? In this case, the best thing you can do is to
 find an artistic partner. For if you can find a talented artist with
 whom you communicate well, your nebulous idea can become
 a concrete vision very quickly. Partnerships like this can be
 golden, for a pretty picture is nice for a moment and a good
 idea is nice in theory, but a well-rendered image of a good idea
 is compelling in a way that few people can resist. Strong game
 designs that have good concept art will
 Make your idea clear to everyone (you didn’t think anyone
 would actually read your design document, did you?)
 Let people see, and imagine entering, your game world
 Get people excited about playing your game
 Get people excited about working on your game
 Allow you to secure funding and other resources to develop
 your game
 Now, you might think that the idea of having some detailed art
 at the beginning of a project goes against the idea of rapid
 prototyping, where often the game elements are completely
 abstract. But it isn’t so—an illustration is just another kind of
 prototype. It is almost like riding a seesaw—the abstract
 prototype gives you ideas for how the game should look, which
 drives you to make more concept art, and the concept art can
 give you ideas for how the game should play, which drives you
 to make new abstract prototypes. If you keep cycling this way,
 eventually you will arrive at a beautiful game that is fun to play
 and in which the artwork and gameplay complement each
 other perfectly, because they grew up together.
 How Much Is Enough?
 But this raises an important question—What is the right
 amount of detail for your concept art? Most artists want to
 make everything they do look absolutely gorgeous—but
 beautiful art takes time, and sometimes rough sketches or
 rough models are enough to do the job. Young artists, especially,
 are afraid of doing rough sketches and showing them, for they
 fear that the rough quality will make people misjudge their
 talent. Creating sketches that are simple, rough, and useful is a
 valuable skill that must be practiced.
 But of course, there are other times when only gorgeous fullcolor renderings will do to show the true feel of the game. One
 artist I used to work with had a great trick—he would create
 rough pencil sketches that were large and elaborate, then pick
 one key element of the picture, and render it with full color,
 clean lines, and nice shading. This was a marvelous balance—
 the viewer could see the scope and complexity of what he was
 presenting but also the quality of finished detail. The viewer
 could easily imagine what the whole image would look like if it
 were finished to the level of detail of that one key element.
 Even in your finished product, you need to be judicious about
 where to put detail, for a few details in the right places can
 make your game world seem far larger and richer than it is.
 John Hench, one of the great Disney Imagineers, would often
 say that anyone can make things look good from far away—it’s
 making them also look good close up that is hard. An example is
 Cinderella’s castle at Disney World. People see it from a distance
 and are drawn to it because it is so beautiful. If, when they got
 close, they found it was crudely painted fiberglass, they would
 be filled with disappointment. Instead, they find that close up it
 has gorgeous mosaics and beautiful stone crafting, which
 exceeds their expectations, making it seem deep, beautiful, and
 real.
 J.R.R. Tolkien’s worlds are famous for being deep and rich—one
 way he achieves this is through a trick he referred to as “distant
 mountains.” In each of his books, he gives names to distant
 places, people, and events that are never actually encountered
 in the book. The names and brief descriptions make it seem like
 the world is larger and richer than it is. When fans would ask
 him why he didn’t add more detail about these things, he would
 reply that he could tell them all about the distant mountains,
 but if he did that, he’d need to create more distant mountains
 for those distant mountains.
 Use Audio
 It is very easy to fall into the trap of only thinking of visual art
 when you think about the aesthetics of your game. But audio
 can be incredibly powerful. Audio feedback is much more
 visceral than visual feedback and more easily simulates touch.
 A study was once performed where two groups of players were
 asked to rate the graphics of a game and only the graphics. Both
 players played the same game but for one difference: the first
 group had low-quality audio, and the second group had highquality audio. Surprisingly, though the graphics were identical
 for both games, the “high-quality audio” group rated the
 graphics of the game more highly than the “low-quality audio”
 group.
 One serious error that game developers often fall into is to not
 add music or sound to their game until the very end. The Kyle
 Gabler technique mentioned in Chapter 7: Idea, bears repeating
 here. Choose music for your game at the very beginning of your
 process, as early as possible—possibly before you even know
 what the game is! If you are able to choose a piece of music that
 feels the way you want your game to play, you have already
 efficiently made a great many subconscious decisions about
 what you want your game to feel like, or in other words, its
 atmosphere. Like a theme, the music can channel the design of
 your game—if you ever find that part of your game is
 conflicting with the music that you feel is so right, it is a good
 indication that part of the game should change.
 Balancing Art and Technology
 The tight integration of art and technology in modern
 videogames makes for some very challenging design problems.
 The artists are simultaneously empowered by and restrained by
 technology, and the engineers are similarly empowered and
 restrained by art. So much of the art in games seems high tech
 that it is tempting to just let the engineers loose to create the
 artistic vision of the game—something they are often all too
 ready to do. Don’t let this happen! Talented artists have trained
 for a lifetime to imagine and define glorious, integrated artistic
 visions. They see the world differently from the rest of us, as
 Lisel Mueller’s poem illustrated so vividly at the start of this
 chapter. Whenever possible, let them drive the aesthetic bus.
 Am I saying you should ignore the engineers’ aesthetic
 participation? By no means! Make the engineers the navigators
 and mechanics—let them recommend new routes and shortcuts
 and let them soup up the bus, but let the artists decide the
 destination and let their talented hands steer the way to a
 beautiful game. Don’t just let the engineers include whatever
 shadow algorithm is the flavor of the month—instead, let the
 artists draw and paint the kind of shadows and textures they
 would want to see and then challenge the engineers to match
 that vision.
 One thing you should consider carefully is finding a technical
 artist for your team. This unusual individual has the eye of an
 artist and the mind of a computer programmer. A talented
 technical artist can build bridges between the art team and the
 engineering team by being able to fluently speak both of their
 languages and by helping to build tools that make the artists
 feel in command of the technology and the engineers feel in
 command of the art. This balance is not something to be taken
 lightly—when it is not right, it feels like your game is cracked
 down the middle, but when you achieve it, your game is
 gorgeous and powerful in ways your players will have never
 seen before.
 Other Reading to Consider
 The Art of the Videogame by Josh Jenisch. A great history
 of games as well as an interesting examination of the layers
 of art needed to create a great game.
 The Art of Videogames: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect by
 Chris Melissinos and Patrick O’Rourke. This companion
 book to an exhibition of videogame art at the Smithsonian
 provides a thoughtful history of video game art.
 Drawing Basics and Videogame Art by Brian Solarski. Not
 just for artists, this book is an excellent bridge between
 classical and digital art.
 Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.
 Can’t draw? Everyone should be able to draw. Follow these
 instructions, and you will learn to draw.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
 Some Games Are Played with Other Players
 DOI: 10.1201/b22101-24
 FIGURE
 24.1
 We Are Not Alone
 It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one
 trifling exception, is composed of others.
 —John Andrew Holmes
 No one ever said on their deathbed, “Gee, I wish I had spent
 more time alone with my computer.”
 —Dani Bunten Berry
 Man is a social animal. Humans generally avoid being alone
 whenever possible. In most cases, we don’t like to eat alone,
 sleep alone, work alone, or play alone. Prisoners who behave
 badly are put in solitary confinement, because, although being
 trapped in a cage with a dangerous criminal is bad, being alone
 is worse.
 And, if you look back over the centuries, the history of game
 design reflects this. The majority of all games created are
 designed to be played with other players or against other
 players. Before the advent of computers, solo games, such as
 solitaire, were rare.
 So what happened with videogames? A tremendous number of
 them are single-player experiences. But why? Is there
 something about the technology that makes us want to give up
 our natural human tendency to socialize? Of course not. In fact,
 the trends are clear—each year, more videogames have a
 multiplayer or community component of some kind. The
 explosion of Facebook games and asynchronously social mobile
 games is a massive blossoming of human nature. The singleplayer phenomenon appears to have been a temporary
 abnormality, born partly because of the novelty of single-player
 interactive worlds and partly because of the technological
 limitations of game software and hardware. Now that more and
 more game platforms are going online and becoming
 connected, it is becoming the case that games not featuring a
 multiplayer component are once again becoming the rare case.
 The more technology advances and technological novelty wears
 off, the more electronic games start to fit the ancient social
 molds humans have had for thousands of years.
 Does this mean that a day will come when there are no singleplayer games? Certainly not. There are plenty of times that
 humans do want to be alone for a time—reading books,
 exercising, meditating, and doing crossword puzzles are all
 delightful solitary pleasures, and videogames have elements in
 common with all of these. But humans tend to spend more time
 social than solitary, and in the long run, games will do the same.
 Why We Play with Others
 Every person is a half-open door, leading to a room for
 everyone.
 —Tomas Transtomer
 Clearly, playing with other people is natural and, in fact, the
 preferred way for us to play games. But why? In this book so
 far, we have discussed dozens of reasons people play games: for
 pleasure, for challenge, for judgment, for rewards, for flow, for
 transcendence, and many more. Although some of those are
 enhanced by the presence of other players, none of them
 require that presence. What is it that we specifically seek when
 playing games with other people? There seem to be five main
 reasons:
 1. Competition: When we think of multiplayer games,
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