MatthewDoyleArt.com Blog

I just wrapped up my first round of contract work for a group of up and comming guys out of San Francisco - Shattered Reality Interactive. These guys have a ton of heart and energy, and they’re working on a unique next-gen MMO called Kaos War. My first round of design work was to help them develop a few key design documents, among them a PvP doc.

I really like what these guys are doing, and things are going very well for them. If things pan out, I may move back to good ol’ Cali’. I went to SF once to interview at Lucas Arts, just before coming to AZ. It is a beautiful city and matches my personality. The guys at SR Interactive are considering me for the lead designer position as soon as their next round of funding comes in. It would be an honor to work with Damon and the guys there.

Check out their site here: www.kaoswar.com

It never ceases to amaze me how often I hear a fellow game developer embrace the dictum of complacency, with statements such as ‘Innovation doesn’t sell games.’ While it may appear to be true at first glance that consumers do not care about innovation in games, hence the high sales numbers for the myriads of ‘me too’ titles, this is an extremely narrow view. Ask any biologist or evolutionist, and they will inform you that no organism or biological system can be successful without diversity. An organism may even appear to thrive at first, despite a lack of diversity; however, over a greater period of time, that organism’s conformed existence, or lack of innovation as it were, will doom it to extinction. The same is true for our beloved industry, or any industry for that matter. Complacency is a cancer, spread by executives wishing to ride the coat tails of other successes by doing little more than emulating those titles. I am not preaching Armageddon here, but anyone who chooses to ignore the fact that bad things can and do happen (just look at the video game crash of the 80s), or dismisses talk of a possible crash as conspiracy theory, is simply kidding themselves and ignoring history.

The truth is, ‘me too’ games are rarely anywhere near as successful as the originals. Consumers, particularly casual gamers, are always looking for the ‘next best thing’. Nintendo is betting the farm on this philosophy, and has publicly stated such. The Wii’s core revolves around an innovative control mechanism, not souped-up graphics. The Japanese have long been proponents of innovative gameplay. One has only to look at games such as Katamari Damacy, Loco Roco, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, etc. to name but a small few.

In the infinitesimal, cosmic chance that I were ever to run my own studio again, if a developer in my employ were to tell me “Innovation doesn’t sell games.”, I would promptly inform them to change their perspective or change their career. This type of thinking will lead to failure. No matter how tempting it is to simply sit back and copy the successes of others, the true test of our mettle as developers is to come up with something original. And this challenge, as great as it is, if met head on, will save our industry from another big crash.

Found a cool article about Procedural Content Generation here, which refers to games such as Darwinia, Defcon, the upcoming Spore from Will Wright, and some classics such as Elite:

http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/336/procedural_content_.php?page=1

This type of design has been around for a while; however, I believe it is going to become more and more critical in the future of game development, as does the author of the brief article. This technology, along with emergent AI, emergent gameplay, and simulations (such as physics gameplay) are all leading us, as developers, to a world where our games are more realistic, less restrictive, and may even require less work to create.

Our players are getting tired of the same old puzzles that have only one solution. They want to solve puzzles in their own way. This is where we need to abdicate some of our authorship when designing those puzzles. Using simulations and emergent gameplay concepts, we can give players the perceived freedom they desire.

Procedurally generated content will also provide our players with a sense of variety to the gameworld and characters. Dynamic difficulty as well as dynamic characters and environments provides strong replay to games that would otherwise be sitting on the shelf after the first run through. And of course, the more of our content that is procedural, the less we end up having to build by hand.

In Part I, we talked a little about the types of games and how to represent those games on paper, specifically the matrix game in which strategies are laid out for two players in a table. We discussed how a player’s strategies can dominate each other and that dominating strategies should always be chosen over the ones they dominate. And finally, we discussed the concept of the saddle point; the outcome of the most cautious move by both players and therefore the best move for both players to make. (One thing that was not mentioned was that there may be multiple saddle points). If you recall from that discussion, sometimes there are no saddle points. If this is the case, the players have no way of knowing what move will result in the best payoff. This brings us to the concept of a mixed strategy. In this part of the discussion, the information goes a bit deeper and may require that you reread in order to fully unerstand the material as presented. If you have not read Part I of this essay, you are advised to go back and do so.

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Game Theory is the mathematical theory of conflict and cooperation. It is a study of choices and outcomes, of strategies and payoffs. Mathematicians apply Game Theory to business strategies, wars, global politics and economics; any event that puts two or more ‘players’ into conflict. It is used to predict the payoffs of strategies that a player may take in these ‘games’.

As game designers in the entertainment industry, learning and applying the basic principals and techniques of Game Theory in our daily work will help us build better games. Where mathematicians use Game Theory to predict global events and determine strategies for the players involved, game designers can use it to map out the strategies of our games in a logical and rational manner. We can use it to visually represent the choices and outcomes we want our players to have.

Game Theory is a subject involving complex equations and warrants further study beyond the scope of this essay. However, this three part series will attempt to give you a basic understanding of Game Theory in a way that relates directly to helping you build better game designs.

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