Game Design Advance

Left 4 Dead is a game about love.

Perhaps ‘love’ is a strong word, but playing Left 4 Dead on a high level with a team of other players requires all the traits of a healthy relationship: trust, communication, and occasionally self-sacrifice.

While they’re always carrying heavy firepower and an emergency health pack, players are consistently outnumbered and often exposed on several sides. Beyond that they have more than zombies to worry about, there are several ‘Boss Infected’ that each have the ability to completely incapacitate a player.

In short, you can’t make it on your own; you have to rely on your friends.

Altruism is not the opposite of self-interest, of course. It’s easy to do the math and figure out that one player down and out means 25% less force that can be brought to bear on the undead hordes, as well as one less person to carry important things like healing pills and pipe bombs.

However, many of Left 4 Dead‘s best moments rely on more complicated emotions. Such as when a player fires on a group of zombies attacking a friend before turning to defend himself, or when a group hunkers down to help a wounded ally make those last few steps. These are moments that don’t have much to do with a cost/benefit analysis of the situation.

Of course, the same scenarios that present opportunities for heroism also create stages for cowardice. Games can be lost when someone refuses to heal another player, or when they dodge behind another player while still firing wildly.

It might not seem obvious at first, but this game about the zombie apocalypse has a lot of heart. Even without long cut-scenes, text blocks, or dying NPCs, Left 4 Dead manages to be the most meaningful game of the year.

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One of the subjects that’s been slowly churning in the small ecology of game blogs has been the question of criticism. Why isn’t there a more robust critical culture around games, and what steps can be taken to mature future discussions?

Right now the growing consensus seems to be that what is lacking is a vocabulary. The supposition goes that the current iron triangle of game reviews, ‘graphics’, ‘gameplay’, and ‘story’, are no longer sufficient to express the complicated responses that modern games elicit in their players.

The subject broke somewhat to the surface recently with Leigh Alexander calling the lack of critical vocabulary one of her biggest disappointments of 2008. About the same time Iroquois Plisken started a series of posts called ‘Essential Jargon’, aimed at clarifying some of the nascent terms that get thrown around.

As I’ve said before, I’m keenly interested in the critical culture around games and its health because I believe that better critics make for better designers (and vice versa). With that in mind I’d like to say that I think most of the problems that get discussed on blogs and podcasts these days are simply side-effects of the real problem, which lies mainly with game critics themselves.

The real problem with game criticism is that game critics are too nice.

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… and they are us.

A while back I was talking with our friend Frank Lantz about when games break, and I was suggesting that a game was as bad as broken when a computer could always beat a human at it. What reason would anyone have for playing a game when they knew that high level play was exclusive to super-smart AI?

Well, that day is a long way off and may, in fact, never arrive. The day that is here, however, belongs to computer augmented champions. In Chess, at least. The Atlantic has a piece in its newest issue about how a decades old computer program called Chess Base 10 is helping new players reach higher levels of play faster. The article itself is a little scattered and I wish it went into more detail, but it does have a few nice little tidbits.

How long before the highest level play in Chess is done by computer-coached humans, or human-coached computers? Will the powers that be ever allow that to even take place?

Technology and games have an interesting place in games these days. Where some innovations, like the swimsuit worn by Michael Phelps that reduces his friction in water, are welcomed but others are shunned, like performance enhancing drugs. Does anyone know of some good articles out there that go into this discussion in more depth?

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From Noopur Agarwal, a friend who works at mtvU:

Hey guys — I would really appreciate if you could help me spread the word about a contest we are doing. It’s for Indebted, our new campaign about the fiscal crisis.

We are asking young people (ages 18-28) to propose an idea for an online video game to help raise awareness and encourage action.  The winner will receive $10K and be credited in the game.  It’s a pretty easy way to make some extra cash.  The details on the contest can be found here: http://indebted.mtvu.com/the-challenge/.  Please spread the word to anyone you know under age 29 — they do NOT need to have any gaming experience.

And for a quick sense of what the campaign is all about, watch the 30 minute version of the documentary IOUSA (the 90 minute version has just been shortlisted for an Oscar nom!).  Here is the link: http://indebted.mtvu.com/iousa-video/

Thanks, in advance, for your help!

Well, I’m technically too old to apply, but sounds like a great opportunity!

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Rhythm Tengoku is video game design 101.

Most designers make the mistake of thinking that the more they give the player to do, the more actions they can take, the more fulfilling and deeper the game will be. This is the mentality that leads to games like Itagaki’s Ninja Gaiden, which has the moveset of a fighting game injected into a single player action/adventure game. What Nintendo’s R&D1 discovered (or re-discovered) with their left-field masterpiece WarioWare Inc., is that a game built around a single action can be just as compelling.

Like its older brother, Rhythm Tengoku is a collection of mini-games, each dressed up in its own quirky theme. However, Tengoku carries WarioWare‘s central insight, that an entire game can be built around nothing more that a single reflex action, to its logical extreme. In doing so it creates what is basically an interactive textbook for good game design:

Assignment One – Establish an action for the player. In the case of Rhythm Tengoku, pressing a button in time to a piece of music.

Assignment Two – Create varying conditions in which the established action must be performed.

It’s on this second lesson that Rhythm Tengoku excels. The simple action of tapping the ‘A’ button along with a beat is escalated over the course of the game, with the visuals, audio cues, and rhythms becoming more complex with each mini-game.

However, because it never asks its player to do anything more complex than tap a button, its challenges always seem to be right at the cusp of the player’s abilities, lulling them in and out of flow-states with incredible ease.

Should all games be as simple and straight-forward as Rhythm Tengoku? Absolutely not. There is no doubt though that every game designer should understand how and why it works.

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