Cursed Problems in Game Design

[Music] thank you everyone for coming this is cursed problems in game design I'm Alex Jaffe so how do I go far into this thing cool this is amazing okay so welcome to GDC where we make good games gooder with talks like how I balance my shotgun in 90 days and you can to quest markers that even filthy casuals can follow and eight hot loot table distributions for 29 days so these are actually great talks that I love that have done a ton to improve my ability as a game designers I've learned a lot from and I think this is what a lot of our work as game designers is it's it's making games great making great player experiences but these problems that these are trying to solve a lot of them feel more like they feel kinda like pearl diving like there are all these solutions out there and you're this huge array of them to pick from and what you're looking for is the best shiniest pearl to make your game as perfect as it can be and that's great and it's really important but I've often found myself more drawn to a different kind of design problem one that's more like wandering the desert for days months maybe even years looking for a solution wondering where one might be and thinking maybe one doesn't even exist so the thing that's gotten me so maybe interested in these incredibly hard design problems is my own background I'm Alex hi I used to be a mathematician for a few years and when I was a mathematician you know I would spend so long I'm like one problem one problem that maybe people have worked on for decades and you'd usually make no progress you'd spend again months or years on it just kind of banging your head against it and eventually you build a sort of Stockholm Syndrome with a problem like you come to love the way this thing tortures you and and you think maybe I can learn more from this problem that I even can from the solution and I think there's really some truth to that right problems realign our thinking when they're really well posed sometimes finding the solution isn't the most important part and so that's what's inspired this talk and for years I've kind of wanted to focus on this topic and I've thought about it as I did my PhD in essentially computational game balancing at the University of Washington and I've been a designer at SuperBot congregate and spry Fox as well as a data scientist and now I'm a designer at Riot Games and R&D in the Bay Area office it's pretty awesome a lot of you may not even know it exists but it's a great place and so all this time I've been thinking about hard design problems and what I've wondered is all these different problems that if you pay attention to game design you start to notice I wonder if there's anything kind of shared any shared DNA between them that causes them to be so hard that caused them to maybe even be impossible and yeah I think I know what that is at least for many of them and that you may not be surprised is that they are cursed I'll get to a definition in a minute what this means and I'll also get you some examples till you know you want to know what like at least one hard problem is but first an outline okay so they're basically two parts of this talk in the first part I tell you what curse problems are and where to find them and basically this is important because look the problems I'm going to talk about today the category of problems they really don't have a clear solution you can't just go in and solve them you really have to know that they are right in your face so that you don't waste your time and your team's energy on them and so this is the most important part of the talk the talk where we understand what curse problems are and can actually identify them and that's what I do i define them I show you an example and then I sort of give you maybe some intuition for how to identify them through the use of a bunch of examples ok so that's the first part but the second part is defense against curse problems it's what to do when you come up against a curse problem and you have no choice but kind of to bare right ahead or hopefully what I'm really gonna tell you you have to do is you have to tilt a little to the side because you can't solve the problem but maybe you can give up some part of what you're trying to do and you can solve that and so what I'll do is I'll tell you a model for how I think about games in this context and then I'll talk about four techniques for addressing Kirk's curse problems remember I said I'm not gonna solve them because they are unsolvable but they will be ways to handle them and these are techniques that I've sort of I've taken looking at all the techniques game developers have used over decades to address problems like these and kind of bucket them into these four categories and I think it's a helpful framing for what to do when you encounter one and finally I'll show some more applications of these techniques so you build intuition for how to apply them if you ever get there alright everyone aboard there we go let's have a definition this is actually a sub definition I need real quick player promises you may have heard of them I consider them a games essential experiences why did the player actually come to play this right what is the core of this game Zack McClendon has a talk welcome to the yardsale which talks a lot about player promises if you want to learn more about them it's great talk but for me the key thing that's happening here is that promises live in the designers heart it's the thing that is driving us to make this game right it's what we care about at the fundamental level the stuff we don't want to give up but often weirdly they also can lie in the players heart and sometimes you give a player something really simple just a few mechanics few systems and then they immediately come to believe that the game owes them something in specific and you kind of have to accept that you have to deal with the fact that you've made this promise to play the rather wet player whether you meant to or not and you have to add that so now that we've outlined what promises are the curse problem definition it is an unsolvable design problem rooted in a conflict between core player promises you're gonna see this slide a lot so it's basically anytime I'm trying to solve the Sun problem and I have implicitly or explicitly promised two things that cannot coexist it is surprisingly common so one of the key properties here there is no direct solution one does not simply solve curse problems you have to instead you have to work around it you have to give something up like the Gordian knot you kind of have to cut through the problem itself and and find a kind of a strange non solution so that's definition and now you finally get an example thank you for your patience the example will be a little hypothetical at first but it will become more concrete as I move through it so I'll talk about free-for-all politics which I consider a cursed classic so a cursed problem often begins with a dream say it's the 90s and you love be em ups you love the punch in and the kick in and like a crowd control lots of enemies to defeat and it's also the 90s and so at some point Street Fighter 2 comes out you're like wow this is amazing I get all this really high school execution all this tactical choice making knowledge test I get to read my opponents mind and act accordingly and you think maybe these are two great tastes that would go great together how about we give a controller to every one of these characters and we make this huge martial arts brawler game everybody fighting it out with the technical execution and the tactics of a fighting game but the kind of crowd control and chaos of a beat em up this seems like I think a perfectly reasonable hypothetical game something that sounds exciting to me I think it's a nice fantasy but as you go to make this you want this really really high competitive integrity game that's all about managing your opponents you notice something weird which is the best player say jeans dude with the jump that player the one who's great at tactics and great at buttons and graded mind-reading isn't actually winning other players are winning and the reason why is politics which I'll define is competition through social negotiation alliances and manipulation and there's some great treatment of politics in characters characteristics of games by Elias Garfield and good Shara this is probably my favorite or at least one of my favorite game design textbooks and it is sorely under red so please check it out so what happens is players start to play this game they sit down to play and you realize that they immediately figure out who the best player is in terms of the core gameplay and instead they start formula Lyons's against this player they gang up on them they maybe pretend to be their friend and betray this person they you know they play down and pretend not to be so strong and then you know at the last minute they strike and and kick ass and and what happens is you realize that the core skill of playing this game is not the skill that you were emphasizing it's not the game you thought you're making this is a game of Thrones this is a game entirely about politics and manipulation and and yeah maybe maybe punching well is helpful but it's not really what you're what you cared about as a designer and probably not what the player expected so remember Chris problem is an unsolvable design problem rooted in a conflict between core player promises so in this case a player looks at this game they look at all the you know the difficult execution the look at you know all the moves you can do and they think this is a game about combat mastery I want to focus on combat master and be great at this and I want the game to you know emphasize that correctly but it's also it's a you know that we've made this really competitive game and emphasizing the winner I want to play to win these are both reasonable promises to take away from the game I've described but these promises are incompatible because plane to win in a free-for-all game requires politics it is the optimal strategy from a game theoretic standpoint from a psychological standpoint but the focus on combat mastery is not compatible with political play they're different player emphases and so you end up with this big nope you you can't make this game the game is cursed all right this game you have in your head is cursed so you probably wonder anymore can't I do something and yes you can do something you can get out of this situation but it requires giving something up it requires changing something about your core premise so it's a fantasy what do you do you let go of the dream at least a little bit so one thing you could do is just just an example is you could weaken the promises okay so we said the promise would focus on combat mastery and also to play to win but maybe we change our game a little bit to weaken these we pour in a little bit of casts and we end up with the game where you kind of do some cool moves if you can but you don't really expect it and you want to win if possible but it's not something doesn't feel like something you can really really guarantee just by being the best at the core skills and when you do this you make these changes you you change weaken the promises here you end up with something that might even be better even though it's not what you initially expected you end up up with smash brothers this is a very good beloved game it basically takes this premise I described and says screw it just like let it be crazy I'm not talking about the 1v1 game without the items on you know final destination I'm talking about like the party game it's a four player game with random items and stage hazards and smash balls like this is the game that initially made this game big and it's a great game because they knew what they were making they had a wall they had a box of constraints they had a box of promises that they could actually fulfill and I'm not saying that Nintendo saw they were in a curse problem situation and they cleverly found their way out of it though that may be happened I think it just aligns with their values right the game they wanted to make happen to be a game you can make but you can totally imagine another designer in the situation like really really focusing on that initial problem I described and just wandering the desert cursed to wander for years just looking for that one solution to make their game perfect and the worst part is that they might be dragging a whole buttload of teammates with them this is not a good situation you want to recognize curse problems before they really cost you you don't want to get stuck in them but you also want to understand your options to move forward so that is what I will continue to talk about so let's talk about how to identify Cris problems now by the way I'm sorry for the Harry Potter references I've never seen a Harry Potter movie so I feel like somehow that makes it more justifiable okay so I'll give you two more curse problems and throughout the talk I'll show you a bunch more curse problems as it becomes relevant okay and some of them you may look at and kind of like look askance at because I'm gonna talk about really great games they're really successful you think they can't possibly be cursed right but even no game is perfect right and even great games can be suffering in a large way from some failed promise and you know maybe you want to make a different game maybe that game and then the other thing is also we'll see some games that are what they are because they made the sacrifices necessary to get out of a curse problem situation so one example is the quarterbacking problem this one's pretty well known so you're playing a turn-based cooperative game if you played a game like pandemic you try to put out viruses spreading around the world everyone's having a good time I'm going to Australia you're going to I don't know Canada and everybody's kind of doing their own thing in the you know it's cooperative experience until one player who's real clever has this idea that everybody should go to different countries than where they planned and you know we're all good people good friends that we go along with it and we actually perform well as a consequence and slowly this person takes more and more responsibility until they're essentially running the entire show and we're playing a single-player game effectively we're just the hands of this one person with all the clever ideas this is sort of a fundamental property of turn-based cooperative games this can happen because on the one hand you want to have this cooperative experience I want this like harmonious Ocean's eleven feel where everybody's doing their own part like I'm the doctor and that means like I'm thinking doctor thoughts and you can't think my doctors not for me but it's a strategy game so one person sort of can do the whole thing right we want to play to win and the best way to play to win is actually centralized decision-making at least in a game like this and that centralized decision-making is fundamentally incompatible with the interdependence between players that's part of the fantasy of a co-op game so even though this is a great game it fundamentally kind of breaks its own promises is a curse problem and a lot of games like it are okay and let's look at one more for now I call the skill inflation problem so this occurs for evergreen competitive games or PvP games you want to exist for many years games like this launch and they are often awesome that you an amazing time you have all different players playing at different skill levels but slowly as the game matures the audience matures with it right and all the players get better and better kind of in lockstep and what's worse the players who aren't getting better they tend to leave maybe because they're not as invested or because it's frustrating and by the time you're years into one of these games like you may still have a great game but it's very very hard for new players to break it because all the players they see around them are incredibly good they maybe have a hard time matchmaking with players at their level and even they go online and they watch twitch and everybody's good and they just feel like a total fraud so this sucks it's we this players even an individual player even a really serious player suffers from this because this player wants a long journey of mastery they want to be able to get better for like decades but they also want a stable vibrant community they want players you know coming together and and playing together and new people coming in and they wanna be able to play this for their whole life these things are incompatible because a long journey of mastery naturally results in a rising skill pool but a stable vibrant community requires a broad variety of skill levels right these don't go together and it again is a curse problem now as I said right all of these curse problems they have answers but the thing I'm going to show you is how these answers end up requiring giving up some small sometimes large piece of the fantasy okay so what isn't a curse problem you may ask it's not all design problems it's not like any time you're weighed any two things against each other we have a curse problem I really want to make this clear let's just consider like any common degenerate core gameplay pattern like for example this is hungrybox playing Jigglypuff in smash melee now we're at the 1v1 version of AoE and this pattern is extremely frustrating to a lot of players including pros right he plays Jigglypuff in this way that's extremely defensive very reactive you make one mistake and he just jumps on you other players are forced to play his game basically and a lot of them don't like it and so you as the smash designer may be totally fine with us like cool this is the game we're playing but you might want to remove it what can you do you could tweak any number of things you could do ink attacks defense movement the pace of the game map all kinds of changes you can make to basically make this play pattern should go away either by making it impossible or disincentivizing it and there's nothing to stop you from doing this because there's no fundamental rule of smash there's nothing like deep within your heart about this game that tells you have to be able to play this incredibly annoying keep away game like it is just an emergent property of the choices they made so they can go in and fix it and it's still going to be the same game can we do a similar thing with free-for-all politics we cannot because no matter what I do to kind of tweak the you know the the main tuning parameters of the game or change the content we're still gonna have this fundamental and compatibility right the the politics it does not go with non no politics and there's no little change you can make to you know move or something that makes make cities not go together makes things go together excuse me so we're gonna play a game all right you the people are gonna tell me what is Harding what is cursed and this is important because I want you to build intuition for these and it's not like some objective thing it is a little subjective so you know reasonable people can disagree about what's cursed but I also think that reasonable people having had enough time to become familiar with this concept will mostly agree about what's cursed and what's not you have to identify two promises they're incompatible with one another and you have to convince yourself that they're actually and the second part is actually where you might have more disagreement but you know all you need to really know is that they're incompatible enough that I have to take a kind of different approach to dealing with the problem so first example exploration games with millions of worlds so no man sky had this huge promise right everyone was so excited about this incredible exploration game traveling through space seeing millions of planets seeing all kinds of diverse flora and fauna lots of stuff to do it was really exciting but when it launched people were disappointed right it felt like the promises were not kept you know there was millions of worlds to explore I promise this vibrant diverse interactive ecosystems promise my question is are these fundamentally incompatible promises is this a curse problem or are these just hard to simultaneously satisfy so who thinks it's cursed alright who thinks it's hard alright Frank's wrong yeah so it is they do I think I think they go together and the proof that they go together is that a year later this is kind of a spoiler bull question because a year later Novus guy came out with an update that was really successful people felt like that promise had been delivered upon you just takes so much work to make the game they had promised there's nothing there's no contradiction in it it's just really hard alright question two of three lute games with efficient training this is the Diablo 3 auction house so besides from the audience so despite what you may think I think this is a cool idea because Diablo is a game about you know gathering lots of loot killing monsters finding all kinds of cool stuff and then often I think when you're collecting so much this commerce fantasy naturally comes online you want to trade with your friends you want to buy you want to sell you want to feel like you're part of this big global marketplace but when it actually launched people felt like it didn't really land and it was kind of like the game didn't work out so the rich loot experience and the ubiquitous marketplace fantasy these are these two promises that you get when you put an efficient trading market into a loot based game are these fundamental incompatible is it cursed raise your hand if it's cursed alright now raise your hand if it's hard okay so a little more disagreement so I'm gonna make a pretty strong claim that this is cursed because varied loot drop experiences is kind of the core theme cork or a piece of a rich loot experience right I need to constantly be able to kill a monster and then wonder what's gonna come out of it and then see this amazing thing pop out and be like this is great the best day of my life but on the other hand this marketplace fantasy means items are fungible for one another every item is essentially just worth to me what I can buy it for in the auction house so what's happened all of a sudden is now every months in the game is basically just pawning gold over and over and over again effectively so I claim it's cursed and I think in the end there was nothing that could have done to tune this to make the core fantasy work out one of the producers of the game or I should say this is a special case of what I called the commodified reward problem when the producer said that the auction house undermines Diablos core gameplay which is to kill monsters to get loot and I endorsed that statement okay so the third and final quiz question always on location based games this is the preferred method of playing Pokemon go so I mean this is a spicy image obviously but in general you know I think location-based games have this interesting situation where the promise is hey you go into the world and it's an overlay on top of your life it's like this extra magical layer in your life where everything is a little bit different and at any moment you know I might want to pull out my phone and you know catch a Pokemon and that sounds cool but also has this tension which is that I might be driving and die or kill someone I might just be walking down the street and trip I might go out of my way maybe in a way that kind of inconveniences me or just in a more banal level I might not really be like present in my daily life right I might not pay attention to my friends so what I'm under in these two things this this the game kind of demands rewards at specific times and places to make it feel like it has that magical overlay but also there's this need for personal safety and convenience and also mindfulness at some level that I think of the basic need that the game doesn't promise but we assumed games will not violate so who thinks it's cursed all right who thinks it's just really hard all right I want to know how you guys want to solve this because because I for the life of me these two things seem fundamentally incompatible so I think that now I know why this might happen why it might seem hard so I'm saying that these are this is cursed because you sort of need to be able to play anywhere at any time in order to satisfy the first promise but to satisfy the second you need to play when appropriate and I know why it might seem like this is just a hard problem because you're like well surely we can put limits in the game right we can make it so you only see you know monsters at times that are appropriate or what other people are playing around here or something like that and I think that all of those once we get a little further into Chris problems to see that all of those kind of are violating that first promise to some extent and so that's why I say this is curse because the moves that you have to make to actually make this situation go away kind of turn it into a different game at least a little bit and I think that's why you still have these problems in these games years later because you don't want to break that first core promise okay so a general lees that calls like a life disruption problem and there are other very different games that encounter these problems so this is where we are the big ocean there is your game it's a wide sea of possibilities all kinds of things for players to do have fun and that eldritch horror that living in the heart of your game is your curse problem right there just there underneath the sea kind of corrupting everything around them and it's not like a fish you can't just like spirit and pull it out the thing about Cthulhu is he's not leaving the ocean like he's just there he's a its core baked into the premise of your game so what do you do when you encounter an eldritch horror that won't leave you make sacrifices so you kill your babies and that's what we're gonna do there's four little kinds of sacrifices down here we can make and each of them is a little different right they're different ways of giving up some subtle sometimes implicit piece of one of your promises and that's the rest of the talk okay so we talked about curse problems we've talked about why they are hard why they will likely screw you over if you don't notice them now we're gonna say alright well if you still are dealing with one if you still want to make this game how can you make a sacrifice give up some piece of your fantasy and make it a slightly different game that hopefully is still sound makes you happy so that was good enough so first I'll present a game model like what is Wow how I think about a game that will build these techniques on top of and it will look scary at first but it won't be scary so remember a curse problem is an unsolvable design problem rooted in a conflict between core player promises and I'm gonna talk about a common special case of this in which these two promises aren't just anything one is an experience and one is an objective so by experiences I mean moment to moment gameplay what is this game like to play but by objectives I mean like the goals of the game the driving forces the things that I'm trying to get out of the game in the end and these are these objectives are kind of pulling us through motivating us through different experiences whether we think they're great or not and I think it's okay to limit us to just this definition of curse problems for now because first of all it covers a lot of the cases probably more than half but second it's just a much simpler case to talk about the techniques I'm going to talk about will kind of are easier to explain in this context they do generalize to the to the general case that looks like this any two player promises but we're focusing on this so remember the free-for-all politics problem so in this case we have the desire to focus on combat mastery that is an experience and the desire to play to win is an objective that's the kind of contrast I'm talking about so here's my model it's a game start state is asked and the objective is wherever you're going oh and the objective can be given by the game but often it's at least partially supplied supplied by the player and all the nodes in between other play space it's all the things you can do in the game kind of like a state machine but you should think of these nodes as including kind of the player's mental state as well as the digital state of the game and these objectives they pull players through the game they as I said they kind of guide you into certain places one after another and they guide you through the sort of golden path like this is the right way to play and you might not want to play this way but it's what you're gonna do and there might be multiple golden paths but kind of use one as an example so I'm attracted a little this here is your game and this is your game on curse problems this is the situation we get into where the fire represents promise is not being met right the experiential promise that was sort of given by the designer or just the player imagined themselves is just not being met but the player is taking themselves through it because they want to get to that objective so to make this concrete in this case the fiery health gape is political play the grassy lovely area is unrestrained combat the players were promised and the objective is winning okay so you notice by the way that they may spend a little bit of time to understand combat you're not doing political play all the time but there's enough of it that this probably isn't what the players sign up for so what can we do what's out are our options well that is where these four techniques will come into play games have faced curse problems for throughout time often of course people didn't know that they were facing them sometimes they didn't even know they were facing a hard problem at all because they naturally found their way into a way to address some previous hard problem but along the way not nonetheless designers have made the sacrifices needed to address these problems and really I think they these sacrifices really bucket nicely into four techniques you don't really have to worry about it too much here this is what they look like looks absurd I know it sounds absurd barriers gates carrots and s'mores those are the four techniques I'll talk about I'm gonna go through them one by one so that they make sense all right so the first technique is barriers this is cutting affordances that allow players to break promises right basically it's the players doing something that we don't want them to do just make it impossible if you can and then they're going to have to spend time in the grassy how do you blend so let's look at an example for free-for-all politics one thing you can do is limit players agency over one another so for example in a footrace it is very hard to play politics because you can't do anything to affect the other players State for the most part but there are softer examples to battle royale games are actually kind of an incredible innovation in free-for-all games because players are so far apart and there's so much hidden information and there are so many players and lethality is so high that it's just not viable to play a political game I can't be like oh yeah I know which player I'm going after right I mean maybe you can't but it would be an insane idea and you can't make a line from the people because they might just like shoot you at any moment you can try to do these things but it's basically not a viable option instead you're forced to play hard right you play the game of shooting and jumping around and building that is what this game promised it's limited your agency over other players basically through spreading you apart and as a consequence you don't get politics so now the important part is remember I said you always sacrifice something even if it's a subtle implied goal in this case what you sacrifice is some of the PvP fantasy of control I think part of PvP games of many of them is being like I own you you are gonna do what I say and I can take you down exactly the path I want to take you down and that's just isn't really it's definitely possible footrace and it's sort of not possible for most of a battle royale game you've limited agency over each other and so naturally players cannot affect impact each other as much ok so now let's see a second example which I called gates gates are basically a softer touch version of barriers you don't completely lock the player out of the actions that might allow the promises to break but you do make them very difficult to perform and challenge is something we get to add in wherever we see appropriate in games it's a nice specific affordance of the medium so for example you know you might spend most of your time not in political play but players might figure out a way to do it a little bit so in the case of referral politics one thing we can do is limit visibility of players success so in free in PlayStation all-stars battle royale which I was a technical designer on it's a it's another brawler for a player brawler one of the things we did was we hid the player scores notice there's no score in here listed and not only we hide it we actually made it harder for players to about your score in this game is twice your kills - your deaths so that means that it's kind of hard to like play this game plays hard as you can and also keep track of everybody's score and know who's in the lead and moreover you sort of have this plausible deniability that lets you just go hard like nobody knows how well I'm doing like I'll just go ahead and just kick as much ass as I want and that's what lets players play freely and not go as hard into politics so what do we give up well among other things we give up some of the tension of buzzer-beaters right we don't get these situations where we know you know all the players are really really close together you wonder who's gonna win because you kind of just like don't know and then the game ends you're like Oh turns out you know Jerry won okay so the third example is carrots this is where you know we changed the objective if the objective is what's drawing them through these problematic states let's change it or let's create some new goals that help keep them following these objectives all the way to the to the goal without spending time during political play so how can we do this with free-for-all games one way is to add meta game effects this is kind of not a well-known technique I think but you know I found my way here through using this framework and I look for example of games that did it so an interesting case it's actually in a tournament context for Settlers of Catan tournaments they don't use you know whether or not you want a game to determine your placement at a tournament and how you move through it they actually use your performance in an individual game so if you win a game you get four points but if you get third place you get two points and all of these points end up determining how you move through the tournament and how well you perform so this weird thing happens where I'm not so incentivized to play politics because I don't care as much who wins or who loses what I really care about is raising my own own performance up just getting from third place to second place is like great for me and I think politics is naturally diminished as a consequence but there's also the side effect which is you kind of diminish the magic circle of an individual game right like the game doesn't have this win or lose clarity it's just kind of like okay more points for the point bucket that's going to end up determining maybe what I really care about which is whether in the tournament alright so the fourth technique again I'm gonna say these are pretty much all you can do to deal with curse problems is s'mores it's just to say okay players are violating the promises that we think we're making for them but maybe we can just make that fun maybe we can lean into that so much that the promise kind of dissipates and players understand that they're playing a different game so you guys so give the marshmallows to melt in the fire and then you got s'mores okay um so you know players will spend their time here and it's still great so how do you do that with free-for-all games well you've probably seen games like this before you can give players tools to actually lean into that political play make it really deep and fun through for example adding secrecy which is sorely missing from brawlers especially if you don't mind your players never being friends again you can even diplomacy and they'll have a great time for one game and you know what happens here is like they have this incredible game of Game of Thrones esque intrigue and you can see it right there on the box it says the game of international intrigue it's very intriguing but the consequence is that you have this lack of emphasis on moment to moment action right it's not so much about exactly where I place my units it's really about the relationships I break along the way so and I also want to call out by the way that first example that I showed you of creating smash through weakening promises this is another example of s'mores right we've said okay we had these hard promises that this game seemed to imply what can we do to change our game so the game itself no longer makes those promises to the player it's another instantiation of s'mores okay so you've seen the four techniques barriers gates carrots and s'mores I want to call out that these are they are general-purpose design techniques it's not like you can't use these for uncursed problems the thing that I think is interesting is that this is sort of all you can do in a curse problem setting and you know I really want you to think of this as like a tiny design framework something to apply when you get into certain kinds of situations it's not going to tell you how to do the work you're not gonna be like oh what do I do oh I don't care it's now to solve this problem but it gives you a structure for a difficult creative process this has worked for me many times I'm looking at a problem and I actually think through these four categories it prompts my brain to think about directions that I never would have gone down otherwise because your brain doesn't want to make these sacrifices right it wants to solve the problem exactly it's defined and it can't so you need something to tell you like I have you you know considered like refinance in your home or something so that's it now I'm just gonna give you a few more examples that's all we're doing right now we're just doing examples so you can build intuition for how these techniques work and I'm gonna show you exactly one more example for each of the techniques I already showed you all four techniques on free-for-all politics but now I'm going to do two for another problem and two for one after that just an interest of time you can apply all these techniques to all these problems so I'll talk about the coop abuse problem this sucks so high-stakes co-op games often involve a lot of terrible treatment between players and I think you know as game developers we have a responsibility to do what we can to make this better and some of this as meg janeth so eloquently said yesterday involves you know telling the worst players like the Nazis to get the out of our games but they're also thinking we have responsibilities with designers as well to say like what can we do as our game in our games to make these this behavior less likely now unfortunately it feels like there's this fundamental incompatibility players want to play to win right that's these games signal themselves as sort of wind oriented but a lot of players also they come for social belonging the reason why you're playing a co-op game among others is because you want to feel like a part of something these two things they often don't go well together because players who want to play to win will not be satisfied human beings feel like a game is fair when they win seventy percent of the time and that's probably not going to happen in your PvP game so if that player also is lacking anger management skills and tends to blame others more than themselves you're gonna get them feeling too satisfied and frustrated the social belonging meeting player wants psychological safety needs it for that to happen but these things don't go together and I say sometimes here because it depends on the player depends on the player state of mind it feels like there's this fundamental tension in any co-op game that has high-stakes PvP or otherwise but of course so the problem is cursed but of course as I said there are things you can do you just need to be willing to give something up if you really really want to go down this path by the way it was funny totally independently a couple of my colleagues at Riot Naomi MacArthur and Kenny Shores gave a talk like yesterday or day before impact of social systems and game design and player interactions just talked about a similar topic what you can do in your design to de-emphasize player abuse that's a cool one to check out so we're gonna look at barriers now alright so one approach is to just limit player communication right and you can see a great example of that in a game like journey it's not a high-stakes co-op game but we still learn from it they basically said hey we want to create an online game in which everyone could have a beautiful time together and they cannot treat each other like and they did it they made this game we're basically you can run around and walk and jump and make beautiful pings and you feel connected to someone and it's it's a huge success and you can generalize this to PvP games even though we haven't seen much of it I think apex legends is proof that you can because they have such a in such a kind of communicative ping system that you could easily imagine just turning off voice and text communication this game entirely and still having a great game the sacrifice here among others is the rich social channel for relationship building right like we play co-op games one of the reasons is so that we can you know build relationships make friends and it's very hard to practice disclosure when you can't use your words so maybe there's some way to tie these you know tie this together into a game that slowly opens up into more communication but you know you see that we are giving something out by doing this alright so tech to connect technique to is gates can we make it difficult to abuse each other and yeah I mean one way to do this is to limit individual responsibility and here's the storm I think does this very intentionally they take the MOBA formula and they say let's have players share responsibility more let's make it so everybody contributes to a shared gold pool for example and as a consequence I don't even know who is doing well and who is doing poorly at least on this front and it makes it that much harder for me to pick someone out to abuse to blame my problems on there's an even more extreme example this and something like a gaming werewolf or mafia or any social deduction game in which you know one of the teams doesn't know who else is on their team it's really hard for me to flame at you for not helping me out if I don't even know that you're supposed to be helping me out at the end of the game players may all hate each other but at least during the game it's all kosher so here we give up some of the fantasy of harmonious cooperation right like because players are less individualized there is less of that Ocean's eleven feeling of like you know I'm using my bomb skills and you're using your not werewolf skills wherever they are and each of us is coming together to contribute individually to this fantasy of cooperation okay so we saw barriers and gates for co-op abuse now we are going to see carrots and s'mores for what I call the quantified creativity problem so this is the same spore it's an example of a creative game with goals now I had this experience when I bought the sims 1 as a teenager that might resonate with you which is I was super excited by it initially I loved you know the weird storytelling and the relationships and building crazy houses and so on but slowly I got sucked into what almost felt like another game which was the the rat race of improving in my sims career and he was a scientist and I really really wanted to get into level 10 because we got the level 10 he was an astronaut and it was so excited and finally I got there and I spent all this time and all this effort just focusing on leveling him up and you know living the life I needed you to get him there and he goes into space and I'm like yes and he comes down and like I think both of us got post space depression because it was like what's left to do now we got there right like my life dream is complete and I noticed I'd completely forgot about what initially interested me about the game which was this creative play this wild storytelling and fun and an expressiveness and I you know this is a problem is players see a game like this they want to express themselves the game clearly signals they should but the game also wants to draw them in with goals and that ends up making players want to progress their character or whatever whatever form the progression takes and these things are in conflict because expressing yourself involves following intrinsic goals kind of like following your heart basically and progressing your character involves following extras goals doing what the game says you should do and it's pretty well known that extrinsic goals tend to subsume intrinsic goals right the more time I spend focusing on getting those carats the less I really care about what it came for in the first place it's just kind of seems to be a rule of thumb in games in in life so these two things don't go together the problem is cursed and note that the Sims is obviously a wildly successful game as I said but I suspect that the players who really latch on to this game are the ones who completely ignore the progression right for whom it basically does nothing and who just really focus on that self-expression and I think the designers clearly here want to create a game in which both of these things can come together right into this harmonious union so can we do this with these techniques let's try carrots so can we incentivize players to be creative well yeah we can actually give them concrete reasons to be creative and this is super weird because this is going to turn your game into a very different game but it might she'll still share some of the DNA like one game that kind of does this is clash of clans it's a game about building all these towns put all your little stuff down and and you can make really wild and creative shapes and layouts and you actually are incentivized to because you want to play off meta if players are gonna come at you with a specific you know set of armies that are there to destroy whatever the typical maps are you benefit from doing this weird creative map as weird layout right you're gonna tend to win it's like bringing a magic deck to a tournament that no one was prepared for so that's cool like you still get to be creative but the game is actually telling you to at least to some extent for a very different example you can look at alpha bear which we made at spry Fox and this is the game it's oh it's a word game you spell words from tiles on a grid and the tiles expiring you want to use up all the letters before they expire and there's this weird tension where players they try to win this game I spell in using all the words but they also really like the spelling funny weird words like that's a kind of creative self-expression they get through the game and the game was was not incentivizing at all there was nothing pushing players towards this kind of fun creative play and then for totally unrelated reasons we added this mad libs feature that would take words that you spelled in the game and then put them automatically into a mad lib so you've spelled Yeti and it says I code so someday we can afford a Yeti of our own and maybe if you're really lucky you can afford a whole town of yetis that's some industry humor look it up bad story okay so so the thing about what's happening here is players actually got really incentivized to to like make these funny weird words right to spell them out even though it's nothing to do with the incentives of the actual game we've created this sort of social intrinsic metagame around the kind of extrinsic ly motivated internal game and even though there's no real scoring or anything in the social game you know there are likes on Twitter or whatever people who share these a lot and it felt like the players could play these two games simultaneously in harmony and it almost seemed like the fact that they were separate games made it easier to hold both of these things in their head players really enjoyed looking forward to spelling the words that would make these mad libs okay what do you sacrifice you sacrifice the safety of unconstrained creativity obviously in both of these examples I don't get to just go wild and do anything I want right I'm really I still trying to win you know and that means I'm gonna be way less expressive than I would be otherwise but maybe that's okay for you as a designer in each of these cases you're developing your game you have to decide what kinds of sacrifices you're willing to make alright for a final example how do we use s'mores how do we say okay maybe the lack of creativity isn't so bad well you'll end up in a very different place here but I claim there still a connection you could create rich deep goals around the simulation in the game like Sim City or The Sims and maybe forget a total different game well you actually got here is Civ civilization in a weird way is Sim City with the creativity kind of sucked out nothing can't be creative in Civilization it's that you wouldn't be this isn't the game you would pick because they realize that there's so much depth there in the core gameplay there's so much strategy and so many interesting constraints and goals that they just lean right into it and say okay we're gonna make a different game but it still has some of that core DNA of what's a sim city is and you know you focus a lot more on on winning these games than you do unlike making a really weird civilization and of course here you've given up most of the original self-expression goal right this is kind of the most extreme of the sacrifices but you want to know the full spectrum because you might find yourself in a really cool space by being willing to relax their goal so that's it these examples have shown two examples for each there are a lot more out there but as much as I have time to show you so you can build this intuition for how to use these techniques so to wrap up Chris problems cannot just be solved they require sacrifice you have to give something up but there's kind of an exciting silver lining to the existence of these cursor problems I've talked about what to do when you run into one right and you kind of stare it face down but you can also seek them out Chris problems are the highest hanging fruit out there like people are ignoring them because a lot of people think they're impossible but they're also the rapists problems right there they have so much potential for finding new ways to discreate games and if you actually seek them out and decide to you know pivot a little bit you find this whole new open area so here are some challenges just a few things that people told me kind of are impossible there are many more cool ones but so one is making a multiplayer game with player generated content that somehow lives in harmonious balance that isn't totally broken another is you know creating PvP games like I said in which all players feel there was a just outcome despite the fact that they want to win seventy percent of the time and the last one is a game that maintains a sense of mystery and discovery in the age of the Internet in which all secrets are laid bare these sort of seemed fundamentally contradictory but the idea is when you have a contradiction you only have to pull out kind of one pin of those promises and you get this whole wide-open space so the next time you find yourself wandering the desert this cursed to search forever for the solution to your problem and maybe with your whole team with you stop looking turn around there's a lush forest of possibility behind you thanks also please fill out your speaker forms okay so I think we have time for questions it's for 48 we have 12 minutes of questions available all right does anyone have questions hey I'm going what's your name Ebru Abram cool did you see a situation where adding monetization would conflict with the player goals and create a curse power problem oh yeah definitely I mean that's definitely one of the curse sort of canonical Chris problems that I think of in the modern era there are a lot of ways to frame it like there are multiple pairs of promises that break even for an individual player who sorry the question was can I see monetization creating curse problems when you added in and yeah even for an individual player who is you know promised this opportunity to make their game more exciting by spending money like you could you can create that right I think like that player might be satisfied but you sort of naturally create a fundamentally devalued experience for other players right we're very well aware of that the fact that other players can pay to win or improve brings down the sort of feeling of value for the other players you have this natural conflict between promises for sure yeah and I think that's it's a great area to actually try applying some of these techniques and figure out if you can find clever ways to make monetization work for everyone any other questions I think I further talked it was interesting what generation my name is Anatoly nice to meet you I wanted to ask are there any like examples of you using this example in your actual write work I thought someone might ask that and the answer is I cannot talk about it at all sorry that's the funny thing about giving talks when you're in R&D yeah but thank you for asking I'll tell you in a couple years Hey hi my name is Matias I was rendering the Russo talk during the war design day the Ortiz board game design track about a defense for King making yeah what did you think about it and do you think it's a viable approach to you know this curse problem so I love that talk that talk I went to see it because I was related this to talk by Cole I don't know pronounce the name where'll who was a designer root which is a board game it seems really cool I haven't come to play yet and basically he talked about King making which is a special case of free-for-all politics where players get so far behind in the game that they know they're going to lose and the only thing they can do is basically decide who's going to win that's where they get their fun from now it's like it's considered kind of a dark anti-pattern in games and his whole talk was like a defense of King Mickey and how this is actually a really cool form of game play that's that's really unique and offers a lot of individual potential and the other talk was awesome and I recommend you check it out in general so King making is itself it's a curse problem but it doesn't fit the framework that I talked about where experiences conflict with objectives King making is actually it's a it's a curse that applies I'm trying to remember exactly the framing but I think it applies across players because you can't have these curses where one players promises are in conflict with another players and so finding solutions to it kind of is naturally harder but yeah you can't apply these techniques and you know you can make games about King making and and that that can be super fun he have some good examples in that talk of games where you know you that's that you know that's what you're there to do so it doesn't feel so bad when at the end of a game that's all you can do okay that it alright thank you so much everyone for coming [Applause]

Channel: GDC

Views: 408,666

Rating: 4.8589101 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: 8uE6-vIi1rQ

Length: 52min 0sec (3120 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Phoenix0902]

Making trading difficult is the core solution to making loot meaningful. That's why GGG refused to implement all the trading solutions that have been proposed for years.

[u/SneakyBadAss]

His whole premise is wrong. Diablo's auction house failed because the itemization sucked dick not because it was efficient.

Diablo 3 gearing system wasn't meaningful nor efficient.

[u/deljaroo]

I find that I really don't care that enemies drop loot and are much more excited about finding currency so I can pick out what items I get. While those 2 things may or may not be incompatible, I don't care about "rich" loot drops. Like finding an ex valued item is not more exciting than finding an ex... it's just more work and also some concern that I don't really know the value of the item

[u/Gniggins]

Maybe im weird, but i don't play POE longer because of the pointless busywork they give us to pad out metrics.

[u/evouga]

There is a universe where PoE is balanced around meaningful looting; where players are excited to identify their yellow items. That universe was PoE circa Domination league, or the first few hours of a modern PoE league.

Modern PoE is balanced around trade. So much so, in fact, that it is highly disingenuous to imply that there is any kind of tension between trade and looting. Nobody except the greenest noob bothers to identify any yellow items; at best they get tossed, unidentified, into the chaos recipe. The only meaningful loot comes from endgame bosses and complex crafting mechanics (fossils, influence, beastcrafting, unveiling, etc) that have nothing to do with the loot you find during ordinary mapping.

The fault isn’t the trade system’s efficiency. It’s PoE’s balance and design. Several steps could have been implemented to make self-looting more meaningful, eg: - a uniques dusting and crafting system, so that a character can turn useless unique drops into the build-enabling uniques they actually need; - allowing all affixes to appear on rares, so that it is at least possible for a un-ided rare drop to compete with a crafted item on the trade sites; - QoL improvements to in game crafting and currency management so that self-crafting an item becomes competitive with looking for a slightly-less-perfect item in the trade system; - etc.

Tl;dr PoE is consciously designed around trade rather than meaningful looting. Using this to argue against improving trade QoL is not a valid or good-faith argument.

[u/lmaogoaway]

I think the idea that the two goals are mutually exclusive is incorrect. Its not the opposite though. You cannot have a perfect system of unique assets and comparable worth.

However you can have assets that are worth more or less to those who need it and dont.
A doughnut is always a doughnut, but a ratchet socket wrench is a mere hammer to my mother.
Some need that doughnut more than anything to sate their hunger, but its always worth the same calories and taste. It has no other use than to eat. Thus its worth is always the same even if you dont want it (like picking up wisdom scrolls or armor scraps)

[u/Dawnguards]

Having a lot of bots and meaningful loot is fundamentaly incompatible... was this mentioned there yet?

[u/Kahzgul]

I’m gonna cry false on this one. Hard, but not impossible.

Look at diablo 2 after the 1.10d patch.

Every item, every single item, is worth something to someone. The horadric cube lets you turn even “trash” grey items into good versions of the same. Add sockets, improve gems, tunes, etc etc. but there’s a big investment there, so you don’t want to hoard loot that is easier to find, right? So what do you do? Trade for it once you’re ready to invest in all of the upgrades. And because the upgrade is expensive, you’re never going to do it twice in a season, so you’re happy to trade for what you need, or to trade duplicates of what you’ve already used.

Class specific look also helps, as you trade class loot you can’t use for loot for your own class.

Finally, the fact that there.’s a full reset and character wipe every few months makes hoarding a poor strategy, so you want to trade because time is of the essence.

There you have it: meaningful loot and robust trading.

PoE could easily have robust trading alongside meaningful loot if they restricted it to leagues and races, for example.

[u/zenollor]

My only issue with trade at the moment is when people list things with no intent to sell - not being afk or mispricing things, but straight up putting fake listings up. It ruins the buying experience and warps the market..