Rules of the Game: Five Further Techniques from Rather Clever Designers

[Music] Wednesday to our session rules of the game five further techniques from rather clever designers I want to remind everyone to turn off your cell phones or other noise making devices remember to fill out your evaluations after we really do appreciate the feedback in those and this is a session where we get five illustrious designers to get up and talk for ten minutes each about a rule they use in game design we've done this session for a number of years now you can go check out some of the previous editions on the vault some of them are up on YouTube as well if you want to see them there but what do we mean by game design rules you know I found that that some designers are actually sort of resistant to this term that there being any sort of rules to game design my friend Daniel cooked when we were talking about it he said you know rules are highly context sensitive rarely make interesting predictions for the project at hand and have very little analytical power like actually wrote that in an email he didn't say that in person but he was not he didn't think rules or maybe the way to be going and Eric Zimmerman who authored the book rules of play with Katie salen doesn't like rules either he said it because game designers tend to be structural analytical thinkers coming up with brand sets of rules for good design is very seductive including for me over the years I have tried to cultivate skepticism towards these kinds of systems so why don't we think of might as some people think of these rules as maybe being too constraining on design well if we think of the digital games that a lot of us make the rules in them tend to be very fixed very hard very fast you know there's there's only one way you can play the game and the computer doesn't really take into account like your feelings when it decides on these rules and decides on implementing these rules and you can't put the tetris piece anywhere but where tetris will let you put it things change a little bit in the board game space you know we've all heard about like house rules with monopoly right maybe you go over to friend's house and they play where you get all the cash for landing on free parking many other variants that allow the people who are playing it to have a good time you might think chess has a more fixed rule set but if you might not have talked to my children about that they you know when when I was playing with them they I realized they had worked out a very specific way to handle you know when you get your pawn to the other side and you get back another piece and I said well that's not how this rule works and they didn't they didn't care so you know and if anyone has been you know engage in in Scrabble games you know at friends houses often those have very personal rules to keep them peaceable so they don't turn into something like this you know I find that you know some people get really into their Scrabble and really into their weird set of rules for it I just love that this is the picture you get for googling Scrabble fight but you know I think even more so when you move into like the world of RPGs rules become even more malleable like the goal of a DM is to sort of take the players on a journey like challenge them enough but not too much not make their death arbitrary and seem just just a result of a bad die roll at the wrong time but you know to give them a chance to change the rules a little bit to help them move along in the campaign if we think about - if we move into world of sort of art games and things like that this can be even more important like in a game like Brenda Romero's Train where you know as you realize what the game is doing you realize that the deliberately limited rule set allows you to sort of subvert those rules and try to stop what you realize you're doing now last year Luke Muscat did a talk as a member of this very session which I encourage you to go check out and he talked about you know his whole point was forget rules rules don't matter make goals your king that's what you should be giving your team not rules but goals and he used slightly more colorful language when he talked about it in the session so I gave my own version of this talk a few years ago at another conference and this was where you know I talked the talk was called you know what my parents taught me about game design now my parents are not game designers they don't really played a lot of games to be honest though my mom is a lifelong to this day baseball enthusiast but you know I use this talk as sort of looking at how they have raised me as parents and how that informed how I thought about players and how you treat players in your game and this talk is up on YouTube if you want to go check it out but I'll just give you a spoiler these were sort of the three principles that I found you know I extracted from how they treated me and thought of how you know that's how I end up treating my players in my games and I have a little bit of a addendum to this this is a picture that I likes it shows my dad but also my long flowing locks from long ago and you know in the last year my dad actually passed away and you know as I was going through the process of working on the eulogy and going through memorial service I ended up talking to a number of his students he was a lifelong psychology professor and they said that one thing he always said to them was you know are you asking the right questions so let me give you example of what he meant by that and how he interacted with me one time so he was a long you know lifelong lover of books these are several of his favorite books that that I now have and he talked about you know this one specific book that he gave me was powers of 10 so you know with somewhere around when I was 8 or 10 I had asked about like the relative size of planets or something like that I don't really remember what the question was and he didn't have the answer and a couple days later he came back with this book and said here you go and I said what is this book and he's like what you're asking about planets it's all in there so this is a book that's I don't know some of you may be familiar with it it's sort of a look at scale in the universe at large right and it goes from a sort of an intergalactic scale and zooms down more and more at orders of 10 as it gets closer and closer until it finally zooms through some guy's hand on a in a park in Chicago and then goes down to the subatomic level and again this wasn't a book really suited to my age at the time but it had great pictures I found those cool and I've kept reading it over the years and it sort of just reframed the question again it was like well you're asking about size of planets but here I can answer that but here's this much more interesting set of questions right this will like expand how you're thinking about what you're you know that the subjects you're interested in so I appreciated that I appreciated that he challenged me that way and I encourage you as you're looking at the talks we're gonna have here today to look at these you know not necessarily as a rule you must follow a rule that is exactly the answer to your problems but it's something that just helps you reframe a probably maybe having a game design it helps you do the game design work that we all do in different ways now I must confess my inspiration for this intro partly came from seeing powers of 10 as a reference in saurons talk coming up Aaron will also be asking you if you are asking the right questions of your players later on Stone will show you how he made a board game for a movie he was too young to actually see while josh will tell you why he likes to write only half a story but first we have Raph Koster Raph Koster is widely known for his work in online games going back to Mudds since then he went on to work on some of the first commercial MMOs and Ultima Online later Star Wars Galaxies he now works as an independent designer in a wide range of games both digital and analog and variety of game related projects I give you Raph Koster hi so this is this is like my little rule it doesn't really necessarily mean what it says this is an idea I've had more than once right like literally I've now made four or five games about trying to capture the feeling of playing a kaleidoscope and the thing about an idea like that is that it can really kind of go either way it can be about the math of kaleidoscopes like how they tumble or it can be about the sensation of a kaleidoscope like the human experience of tumbling or being lost in a landscape and I'd like to say you can start from either end right I mean have a strong idea for a game system a set of mathematical relationships a set of dynamics or maybe you have a really strong narrative or experiential idea and that's fine different designers often have really different like tendencies right therefore they'll start from one end or the other and that's perfectly fine like often board game designers start maybe with a bias towards the system's end and certainly Triple A games often start with a bias towards experience and art games many indie games and we'd never say hey you can reskin this telltale game any way you want and think that we still end up with anything that we'd call the same game you know the experience wouldn't be intact but we'd also we wouldn't say hey let's swap out the conflict resolution mechanic and poker either and think that poker remains intact right I mean it it changes it substantially starting with either end then is it they're both super valid right since by the time you're done you really kind of need to have both ideas in place right really need to have your experience and your system idea in place because after all like almost no games our purely experiences are purely abstract it's just like rarely a thing but starting from one end to the other does have a whole bunch of implications and certainly in my experience I've found it's really important to move towards the middle pretty quickly right like let's say you start from the system which I often do especially because I'm doing a lot of tabletop work these days if you don't move to the middle you can pretty quickly get stuck with an abstract game which fYI abstract tabletop games are really hard to market you might end up with like really simplistic narratives this is how you end up with okay so will provide the experience by wedging cutscenes in between levels of something you know like that kind of really simple wave of providing something finding an experience or a metaphor that fits the system quickly is a better path even though a strong system idea can usually be skinned in a lot of ways right like think of chess sets for example from Lord of the Rings to you know I think in theory of fun I said chess boards designed around different types of snot right you can play chess with all of those it's it's all good well maybe not the snot but you know so if you start though from the narrative or experiential end of things there are pitfalls starting there too right if you don't ever get around to developing a systemic core while the biggest is your games consumable and these days it might get consumed on Twitch long before it gets played at all right so that that's a real risk these days you often have to spend disproportionately on content right you might end up making tons of small minigames and of course each of those is still a game that you have to balance so it multiplies your testing time it multiplies you know all of the work the system design work all of these issues have to do with the fact that you can always layer missions a narrative and static data on top of a sim right it's it's really hard to go in the other direction trying add rich emergence to a game built out of data is usually somewhere between hard and impossible well we'll get into these development projects and think that a bunch of disparate pieces of content will add up to a system and that just almost never happens right it's just really unusual so this matters because game longevity which you know matters to me because I want my art to live for centuries but also because it includes a bunch of stuff that drives revenue if you like eating right it's it's driven by how much space the game can have right and despite what we might want as creators a lot of the power in a game experience actually comes from a loss of control right it comes from letting players have the actual authority over the experience and so what gives that right what is it that gives that core sim and the three critical ingredients I end up looking for first is a space that is is an interesting mathematical or structural landscape right and by this I mean you know a physics system meets that interesting relationships between objects like the relationships between suits and numbers and colors and a deck of cards is an interesting landscape of relationships I look for it to be simple with only a few rules even though it might have room for tons of data right and you know what usually works as a way to have lots of kinds of data that work on top of the same underlying sim and then you can stack as many separate rule systems on the sim as you like so poker leverages the set of playing cards but so does blackjack and so does Go Fish Pokemon leverages Pokemon types and attack types right rich systems and then lastly I look for that set of relationships that sim to not actually have implicit goals I want it to be a toy right I want it to allow players to create their own goals on top of the system it doesn't mean then that you can't lay your goals on top of that right you can have AI with goals it doesn't mean the game can't provide as may goals as you want it means the system itself doesn't imply them we choose them then based on the narrative or experience that we want to provide because there's a difference between a system that all you can do is get to the other side and a system that says here's cool movement physics let's build portal right so just some examples of how I've tried to leverage these Star Wars Galaxies right sadly departed was built entirely around real time procedural terrain that was generated around you as you walk and that sounds like it was a Content tool but it actually opened up all this emergent and narrative gameplay because of the tools that it provided us and that was actually why I wanted it was for the game systems I can build on top of because we couldn't have had players having massive rebel versus Imperial wars with destructible bases that could be built anywhere on the map unless we had an underlying sim that provided you fungible terrain right there's this little game happily not departed 20 consecutive years as of September in this game we started out with a resource system that was intended to drive all the AI every object was made of abstract resource types and all the AI in the game was designed around Maslow's hierarchy of needs and this was a really cool ambitious crazy system that we weren't even able to ship with because it broke but it didn't matter because we'd set up that underlying resource model and it was so powerful that even though the AI never made it out there it unlocked everything about things like the crafting system which unlocked emergent things like color-coded guild uniforms player shops player driven economy player run cities and governments and all this crazy stuff right and of course similar ideas are actually you know minecraft uses an underlying resource model and simple rules and look at all the amazing stuff that comes out of there right and even in also dearly departed even in really small simple games like my vineyard which is a game I did on Facebook you can see this idea working we knew what the experience we wanted was you run a vineyard right I'm pretty straightforward you might remember that in facebook games back then when the map would get bigger just by kind of growing around the edge right if they just expand on all sides and objects were all 1/2 a tile right but you know we use this idea that well but the vineyards yours so you would want to shape it so we allowed you to carve away the forest step by step island life which was the game that immediately preceded this I think we think we don't know was the first Facebook game that we know of that did this and it allowed you to make discovery the central idea of the game which meant not just discovering things that were hidden on the map we did that but also discovering new kinds of grapes new wine varietals new ways to do layout well it made us think about placing objects at pixel granularity rather than tile granularity which hugely opened up the amount of play and led some crazy maps like this that just couldn't be done in something like a farmville right huge explosions of creativity which then led us into new features like maybe we could have vineyard tours across all of the Napa themed vineyards in the entire Facebook ecosystem right and so it led then to having one of the heart highest ROI is at play Tom while the highest retention figures that played them even though it didn't have anywhere near the same sized user base or daily revenue numbers right as many of the other games but on a pound-for-pound in terms of how much we spent on it it actually was Richard so even if you begin with the idea of a particular experience you want to give players my rule now my thought my rule of thumb is the first thing you should do after that is start with a sim I've just consistently found it to be super helpful for the eventual depth of the game so that's my rule if I have an experience I want to get across the first thing I ask myself is how do i model this experience as math and it ends up opening doors that I never expected that's my rule thank you you RAF our next speaker is known for her work on a wide range of smart fun games as a teaching professor Carnegie Mellon's Mellon Silicon Valley campus previous she previously she led design at glass lab and she's also the author of the chaos Knight trilogy fantasy series I give you Aaron Hoffman Jon okay so my name is Aaron Hoffman Jon I am obsessed with precision it makes me feel safe so I have a question for you how many of you come to GDC to learn yeah most of you guys were here right I got a question for you what's learning yeah so you couldn't answer this in a couple of seconds right I would say that if you don't have a clean fast answer to this question it is impossible for you to know whether your mission to learn at GDC is successful or not so this is going to be my story of how I learned that the way that I play tests in the way I think I play tests are actually two different things and it also leads to my rule which is ask players the right questions so in 2011 I joined the glass lab it was a massive collaborative effort between a lot of acronyms so ETS s RI EA Electronic Arts LP the Institute of play all coming together to try to bring triple-a game development practices to education to create transformative data based about educational experiences and through the process of working in this collaboration I encounter people who are really masters in the art of asking the right questions so one of our partners was ETS they make the SAT more in acronyms and what the SAT is is a incredibly carefully constructed series of the right questions and we could argue about whether the SAT is good or not but at the end of the day it is actually intended you can google this to be a social leveling tool it means that wherever you come from you can be measured against the same razor as everyone else so it's intended to raise people up it might not be a great razor because all of our racers are flawed but that's its purpose it's to achieve self-actualization and that is the purpose of education is to take people and give them the power to be able to become whoever they want to become and so in the process of creating those questions we have these incredibly thoughtful scientific people telling us whenever we said this is what we thought we were doing they would say well but have you thought about this because that's what science does it constantly questions and at glass lab we were trying to hit this incredibly precise marker which was to achieve a measurable educational outcome using a video game and through the process of discovering how hard that was with these people who are specialists in asking the right questions I realized how course our objectives usually are in video games is to create fun right and it might be like shooty fun or puzzle fun or fast fun but the end of the day it's fun if you want to go on a side mission you can Google people having fun and you get lots of stock images like this which is really funny to me because it's like this is this what we really think having fun is and what's going on in the minds of each of these people is it really fun and in that guy at the top what's going on like in the relationship between I could stare at this image for hours but I'm not going to do that thankfully so we were actually given SimCity 5 it was this beautiful game and allowed to take it into schools we had to make changes to it and we actually started with a bunch of the wrong questions because we had a lot of assumptions we thought that the question we were asking is here's all the stuff that SimCity can teach we just got a pick a thing we're gonna take it in schools it's gonna be awesome and easy right because SimCity is an educational game and teachers already use it but as we just started to move through each of these ideas we realize oh no that system doesn't work this one's full of misconceptions this one's not right finance civil engagement all of these things that we think SimCity does because it feels like they do we're not actually real when you try to look into the actual teaching science of how those things are taught inside of classrooms which isn't to say that some city is bad I actually think the people that make some city mice done are wizards what they do is magical it's a game that makes you feel smart even if you're not smart you don't have to be smart in order to be good at SimCity and yet it makes you feel powerfully intelligent and that is a magical transformative thing but when you dig into each of these things we tend to think of SimCity as like creating a whole generation of civic planners but if you ask civic planners what SimCity does they say oh no actually it's full of all these misconceptions options that might actually be harmful to our profession and by the way the way that it portrays electricity is not at all right either which of course it's not right is meant to feel right not to be right and so eventually we landed on isolating one of the systems inside of Sim City the pollution system that actually did both align with middle school science standards and was right and we made a game out of that the way that we got to that by was by stepping back and trying to find the right question to ask we asked the question how does Sim City make you feel and how does that feeling attach to something that kids need to learn how can we transform them through the experience of that feeling and once we started asking that question everything started getting easier and then we ultimately did make a game that teachers left because I probably they already loved it's a great game but also it gave them a way to bring it into classrooms in a way that they hadn't been able to do before and it became quite popular and then we actually were trying to do data analysis on the to try to actually turn SimCity into a test of sorts it was kind of a terrible idea but when you look at the data that was coming out of SimCity it was just this torrent of stuff that our assessment experts could make no sense of because it's so massive and so with our next game we decided to start with the question at the core first we started with what should we teach we did this big meta analysis our learning designers attacked this and they eventually came up with argumentation because it's under taught it's a leverage point it's new teachers don't really know how to teach it and from there we asked the question what is the single most important thing we could teach a sixth grader about argumentation and that question is at the heart of this game the mechanics are built from it everything that we ask the player to do is intended to perform the question of whether or not they understand that which means the game from its core is built that way and then we used a pre and post-test there's idea of course from science from education but it's something that you can do with a game where you test where the player is when they start you get them to play the game you test to the other side and then you can iterate and discover whether you're actually achieving your goals the end result was a statistically significant improvement in the kids understanding of argumentation and this was also validated against an external measure so we had a separate test that we knew was already a valid measurement of argumentation stood our game up next to it and found a statistical increase I want to linger on that for a second because this is the young lady's Illustrated primer if you're familiar with Neil Steffensen this is the interactive object which is infinitely replicable which can lift people up through education and I think that's a really powerful idea I hope that we make a lot more games this way so back to play testing if you google what you should ask when you play test you get this kind of series of horrifying questions from the Internet at the end of the day it's like just was it fun there's lots of variations on was it fun and I have a lot of problems with that question some better questions or things more like how should the player feel and these are questions that you have to ask yourself because in the process of discovering the right questions that you need to ask players you have to ask yourself the right questions about what you're even making because most of the time when we start we don't ask that question of ourself as precisely as we should so the usual playtesting questions we tend to ask a categorises stupid questions and usability questions the usability questions are actually really useful the game needs to be usable software has to be usable but we ask these dumb questions about what part the player likes best the real problem with a question like this is that what they what you say is was it fun and what they hear is please validate my existence I might kill myself if you don't they know what you're asking and they see right through you so they're gonna start gaming that question binary questions are usually a bad idea with play testers because they're gonna try to find what you think the right answer is and I would say about usability though you do have to fix the usability the game has to be accessible it has to be accessible to a specific audience that you're intending to strike and in Sim City edu we actually had that problem in particular because students of middle school age were not necessarily the intended audience of SimCity so a lot of adaptations we had to make for that at the end of the day what we were trying to do with Sim City edu was actually an Mars generation one a lot easier than what we have to do with commercial games because our objective was so precise and we could just measure it and iterate against it what we're trying to do with video games is a lot more abstract than expressive that's a hard thing to get a question around but I think that if you break down the idea of what fun is you can look at it through the lens of what specific emotions are being created what are the experiences that we want to evoke in a player and if you throw this sort of palette at them then it gives you a razor against which to measure your intent versus what the player is actually experiencing so it gives you something testable we do this in Mars generation one a little bit we map where the player would start in motion only and then where we wanted them to end up emotionally and then we attach that to the idea of the competency itself so there was a transformation that we wanted to bring about that was purely emotional because we knew that that's what games do they actually evoke feelings all media do so I would say that what you do is identify the emotional transformation that you want to bring about in the player and that starts with asking yourself the right questions the questions of what is my real intent what is the outcome that I want is the intent that I have actually precise if I create these emotions is that unlike anything I've ever seen or does it remind me of something else there's a lot of questions in that process then you can actually create a pre and post-tests or at least a series of survey questions if you don't want to think about it that scientifically about what you're going to ask players in order to reveal how will I know that they're feeling what I want them to feel because emotions are really hard to pin down and I would just linger on that for a moment to say you can use pre and post-tests in video game development this is something that I don't think I've ever heard talked about but it's something that we can do measuring both where they start as well as where they end up as opposed to just asking them to end whether they liked it or not so again good questions what is the core emotion and the core emotional blend is that blend unique and do my mechanics perform the feeling of that by themselves if they don't they're probably the wrong mechanics and then for players what were you feeling what does this remind you of it's a whole little bit sideways it's not direct because you ask a direct question they're gonna game the question which people who design the SAT certainly know as well I would say as a warning that this can be a habit forming process I hope that it is because once you start to look at your game this way with this level of precision efficacy it can become a transformative process for your own development process and I would also say that it's okay to iterate the pre and post-tests something that I think we didn't realize was that if you have started out with the wrong questions we thought all over they were screwed that's terrible it's not part of the process of the process of using these questions is to sharpen your idea of your intent so you can change the questions and then keep working against them and that's it thank you very much good next up we have someone who is most known for perhaps for his involvement with a civilizations 3 & 4 he now runs indie studio mohawk games who shipped not that long ago economic RTS offworld trading company and recently announced their next game is 10 crowns he's also on the advisory board for this very conference so you can direct your complaints to him I give you Soren Johnson everybody all right so three strikes and you're out this phrase is so common it's basically an idiom indeed while some of our non-american friends here might be baffled by baseball in general they probably still know this rule however it's not actually true the batter is not out after the third strike strike it's only when the catcher catches the ball that the ball that the batter is out if the catcher drops or misses the pitch then the batter is not out and has a chance to advance to first this almost always results in an out as the catcher simply picks up the ball and makes easy throw but occasionally this little-known rule can become a big deal as it did in last year's final game in the playoff series between the Chicago Cubs and the Washington Nationals Max Scherzer threw a third strike past swinging Javier Baez but watch what happens the Nationals catcher Matt Wieters missed the ball between his legs allowing Baez to safely make it to first base this would have been the third out of the inning instead the Cubs scored two more runs and later won the game by only one run in advance to the next round thus an obscure rule knocked the Nationals out of the playoffs where exactly this rule come from it actually reaches back to the very first time the rules of baseball were put down in print by the German Johann Christoph Friedrich Koontz myths he outlines something called English baseball which was a game of innings with a batter fielders safe bases and scoring at home plate however there were no strikes or balls yet the pitcher stood close to the batter and more or less delivered the ball as a soft lob to be hit the pitcher wasn't trying to challenge the batter the game is about fielding the ball after it's been hit however what happens when there what happens when there is a terrible batter who can't hit anything you know in GU Smith's game he has special rule for this situation on the third swing the ball the ball is automatically in play whether is hit or not so the batter will run to first either either after hitting the ball or missing for the third time indeed there is no catcher to receive the ball so the pitcher would need to run to home plate to pick it up and throw the first in 1845 the American Knickerbocker baseball club writes down their rules for the game and some things have changed the pitcher is now much farther from the batter and throws the ball horizontally which requires the new position of catcher however they preserve the logic of the old gut Smith's rule that the ball is in play after the third miss swing like old legacy code line around the strikeout is actually a merchant gameplay because after the third Miss the ball is now technically in play and the catcher turns it into an out by simply catching the pitch thus there is no actual difference between the catcher making it out from catching a pop-up and the catcher making it out from catching the pitch after a third Miss swing in each case the ball is now live and the catcher makes it out by catching the ball before it hits the ground however they had to patch the game later on because of an unattended consequence of not taking the time to make the strikeout an official rule because of the ball because the ball would be considered live after a third strike the possibility for a cheesy double or triple play existed for example if the bases are loaded then the catcher can intentionally drop the ball pick it up again excuse me pick it up again step on home plate for an easy out and then throw the third and then on to second for two more therefore in 1887 they added a new rule so that the batter would on a automatically be out season if a runner was on first base and there were less than two outs thus three strikes and you're out the way everyone assumes baseball is played is true but only under a very specific set of circumstances the opted for an ugly patch instead of just rewriting the rules to match how the game was actually being played indeed think about the situation with Javier Baez there was a runner on first base so even though the drop the ball it should have been a strikeout except there were two outs so now we're back to the original drop third strike rule again think about it they could have just rewritten the rules so that three strikes that you're out applies at all times wouldn't that be simpler more intuitive why go to the trouble of fixing the one glaring issue with catcher's intentionally dropping the ball and not just get rid of the old vestigial rule the reason is that we inherit our game design from everything that comes before us sometimes this inherits this is obvious six six inherited from sir five which inheritance from so four and so on sometimes the designer inherits from the games he or she plays as a kid you know Mario led to braids missed led to the witness sometimes games inherit from themselves this is a timeline of the development of arc of our economic RTS off-road trading company and you might make certain development shortcuts or hacks early on just so that you can get your prototype playable but then these these assumptions are now baked into your design whether you want them there or not you have to remember that it was an accidental or arbitrary choice the most common thing to inherit however is game mechanics usually from the games in the same genre for example although off-road trading company is an RTS it's notable for being one without units however we didn't start there as we inherited from all the other RTS is before a StarCraft Age of Empires and so on thus we had Scouts builders transports pirate ships pleased ships and so on over time we discovered that this inheritance was weighing the game down forcing the player to spend time wrangling units that would have been better spent playing the market slowly we took these units out one by one first the transports then the combat units then the builders and finally the scouts the game looks like a radical break with the past but it took us a long time to get there the problem is that iterative design could be a trap but you can no longer see those parts of your game that are holding you back from a much better design it's easier to make small changes that fix glaring issues rather than to reevaluate your entire design sometimes a problem with the game's inheritance can be at the conceptual level level consider Spore which was conceived of as a powers of 10 game that went from cellular scale all the way up to galactic scale that was the hook the point of making the game this part of the game was widely seen as a disappointment that the five disparate levels felt like five different games duct-taped together however something interesting happened with the failure of Spore which is that it wasn't actually a failure after all this is how many people are playing spore right now which is not bad for a ten-year-old game in fact check out this chart which compares spore to the two most successful PC games released that same year 2008 spore currently outpaces than both and keep in mind the spore didn't even launch on Steam what happened was that the most interesting part of the game did not come from the powers of 10 concept but from the editors inside the game especially the creature creator which dynamically animated the players creations however these others were developed midway through the project Maxis started making a game about one thing and accidentally ended up making a game about something else one of the big unanswered questions about Spore is what could we have done if we have been able to ditch the powers of 10 concept and refocus the game on the editors so here's here's a classic case study in inheriting bad design creep denial is a mechanic in the original dota where you kill your own units to keep your opponent from getting gold and experience from them indeed creep denial is one of the focal points of high-level play in dota 2 maximize your experience point game relative to your opponents to out level them however it's an open question whether this is actually good design at the very least creep design is accidental design because dota inherited it from Warcraft 3 this was simply how that game handled killing your own units indeed the fact the Warcraft 3 even allowed killing your own units was likely an afterthought by the designers so dota inherited this rule because the game was literally built inside of Warcraft 3 as a mod thus MOBAs inherited a ton of design and mechanics from Warcraft 3 the original dota 2 dota designers may have wanted many things to work differently but they really didn't have much of a choice given the limitations and assumptions of the Warcraft 3 editor dota 2 and League of Legends of course inherit their design from the original dota mod but they made different choices about their inheritance of creep denial basically Lee dropped it while dota2 kept it this is a reddit thread while why creep denial is not in league don't worry about reading this I just want to point out how a random dota guy is trying to explain why creep denial is bad for the design using the game mechanics themselves this is pretty typical reasoning for something that has become part of the game designs inheritance the burden of proof is always on why it should be removed from the game not on how it got added in the first place however I have a simpler explanation for why creep denial is bad design I mean come on you want your players to be spending the time killing their own units is that really a core part of what makes MOBAs work the game would fall apart if you couldn't kill your own guys Auden perhaps sums it up better than I ever could so at some point you have to step back as designer and reevaluate your inheritance you know does the core gameplay survive without the feature is the feature unintuitive making the game harder to understand or to pick up is there a better way for players to be spending their time than on this feature in the case of creep denial the answer to all those questions suggests that the game would be better off without it there is only one magical core feature to MOBAs the one feature that cannot be dropped and that is taking the scope and complexity of an RTS but focusing the players controls onto just one unit which makes the game accessible to a much larger audience by an order of magnitude everything else everything else is just accidental inheritance resulting from the game's origin as a warcraft 3 mod in fact although lead doesn't have creep denial now they actually started with it these are illegal legends very first patch notes published in July 2009 they inherit it creeped now but as you can see you know highlighted here they killed it very early so although they got it from the original mod they were willing to critically examine their games past in contrast here's the history of creeped now from dota 1 to dota 2 you can see an awareness the creep denial might not be the best thing for the game so look at like for instance six point eight - denied creeps now give less experience a clear sign that they want to weaken this feature by rewarding players less for focusing on creep denial however instead of ripping it out they're making small changes around the edges basically they were doing what baseball did when they patch the drop third strike rule by making it not apply in certain circumstances instead of just getting you rid of the rule itself remember my questions on the value of creep denial this is the core gameplay survive without the feature is the feature unintuitive making the game harder to understand or to pick up is there a better way for the players to be spending their time but on this feature running this exercise with the drop third strike rule gets us to the same place that is bad accidental design that is ultimately hurting baseball now here's a comparison of the two games and some other MOBAs there are many reasons why League outpaces dota by an order of magnitude an almost three-hour head start is a pretty big one but I also believe the riots philosophy of re-examining their inheritance from the original maude which extends well beyond just removing creep denial is a very important piece now I also have thoughts about last-hitting but fortunately I don't have time for that I say fortunately because heroes of the storm which is the only one of these three to drop last hitting is less successful than dota 2 let alone League thus I can't really make an argument that the market has proven the last hitting is bad design further I don't think it'd be reasonable to expect a riot to experiment to experiment with dropping last-hitting at this point it's just too late League is one of the world's most popular games indeed they are lucky that they dropped creep denials so early in their development before doing so might have split community opinion we don't always have the luxury of looking at the game to prove our decisions which is why re-examining the games inheritance is such a difficult and important issue choosing to race your inheritance takes real bravery sometimes you have to trust you trust your own rational design process if you see a problem sometimes you have to go with your gut ultimately you must be willing to see your history know how it leads you to where you are today and then have the courage to drop the past thank you [Applause] next up our next speaker has been making RPGs for quite some time going all the way back to his work at the illustrious Black Isle Studios on Icewind Dale after a stint working near me on a gauntlet game that we don't need to speak about Josh moved on to obsidian working on titles like Fallout New Vegas and the pillars of eternity series with pillars of eternity two dead fire shipping soon I give you Josh Sawyer hello by the way if you want to deal with a nightmare of legacy design make a party based fantasy role-playing game for real all right my talk is about how I always try to give 50% or how I learned when to stop telling a story and let the player tell theirs so if any of you have played in a D&D game or run a D&D game or any sort of tabletop role-playing game you have probably had an experience where your players take the story off of the rails a lot of computer role-playing games try to emulate the tabletop role-playing game environment we do this in a lot of different ways we can try to emulate the rules themselves we can try to emulate the aesthetics whether that's in the lore the visuals of the game but in a lot of cases especially at obsidian what we're trying to emulate is player choice player choice and player consequence within the context of a story being able to make your own character express that character and have it have an impact in the world in my experience playing tabletop games and running tabletop games the best dungeon masters and game masters are the ones who improvise they construct some idea of a grand story or maybe they just have parts of a neat story in their mind and when the players screw it up they don't fight against it they let the players go and they let the story run away and everyone has a great time because it's a little bit of what the dungeon master prepared and it's a lot of what the players brought to it as well in a sea RPG outside of the mechanical systems which is a I think an interesting contrast because if you look for example at a game like divinity original sin - it just much more oriented around the play of the game and sort of experimentation with things versus something like pillars of eternity which is more traditional and sort of tabletop base we're not there to improvise with the gameplay content so what we have to do when we're constructing the story is effectively try to think about a wide range of players sitting across from us and imagine the types of things that they want to throw back at us ideas about what types of characters they want to play anything from the sort of equipment that they brought their background what spells they have what skills they have if they want to be an if they want to be a smartass all this sort of stuff by the way it's not exactly 50% that's just an idea so I'd like to talk about some of the ways at obsidian that we try to step away from really being strict about how we author the story and let the player bring their own sort of ideas into it one of this is trying to eliminate as many critical characters as we can from our stories letting the player kill virtually everyone here are a few examples of this in play the first is yes man eternal yes man from Fallout New Vegas in Fallout New Vegas you could kill every single character in the world except for children and there was one character who is a fall through character his name was yes man he was a robot who would do literally whatever you asked him to do and we he was the fall through so he would help you with the independent path and even if you pissed off every single other faction head you could still go back back - yes man - progressed the plot so we wrestled with the idea of like well if he's your fall through and he allows you to get through the plot how are we going to stick to our guns and say let the player kill them well the lucky thing is that he's a robot and he's an AI that gets downloaded into other robots so we actually allowed the player to just blast yes man right in the face and he would die and then a minute later another securitron robot with his face would roll on up and he would say I'm sorry I must have made you really angry I'll try not to do that again in the future now how can I help you so technically we adhere to this while still allowing the player the agency to pull out whatever weapon they wanted employment blow away and by the way a lot of players did do this every time they'd go back to talk - yes man they get a new mission objective and they'd say hey thank thanks man blam and they'd walk out the door and then they'd come back get a new mission objective thanks again yes man you're the best lamb another example of this in play is the blood pool from pillars of eternity we put a lot of effort into our companions arguably too much um we write a lot of companion dialogue we spend a lot of resources on unique character art but we don't require the player to take these characters along with them we don't require them individually we don't require them as a group you can play through these games completely by yourself if you want to sometimes you might even really despise a companion so we added the blood pool in pillars of eternity it is a pool full of blood dedicated to a crazy God and at the blood pool you can sacrifice a companion that you really just don't like and you can get a stat boost out of it and every one of your other companions is extremely horrified by what you've just done and you can do it by the way if you bring your savegame into pillars of eternity two dead fire we remember that you did that so get ready some other stuff that we try to do is account for the weird and the funny by the way this is a place where really we're starting to get away from the idea of system driven design this is more about again these like sort of weird edge cases that you come up with where you know how many times have you been a tabletop game I'm just assuming everyone plays a ton of tabletop games and a player tries to do something really weird they have some desperate like they have some item they try to use in some last-ditch effort and they manage to save the day and it's really great so we try to figure out ways to account for these really weird situations it's a niche of a niche but when players find it and we hope that one player will find one of these things every playthrough they feel really rewarded for just carrying some stupid crap around with them or picking one special background that comes up in a really cool circumstance one example is the corpse tracker from ISO and Al - one of our designers at the time Damian Vlado he realized that there were three quests in the game that required you to carry around a dead body and we never got rid of those dead bodies so you would you could be carrying around a dead man a dead woman and a dead cat they weighed a ton there was no reason to carry these things around but some players kept carrying these things around so at the end of the game there was a character who would start talking to in the middle of his dialogue who'd go are you uh are you carrying around three dead bodies uh are you are you a crazy person and you would start going off and he's like wait a minute I think maybe I've underestimated you I I don't think I really want to mess with you you know what you can just go off on your own it'll be totally fine and it was just again this weird little niche thing for people who decided to carry three corpses around with him the psycho squad in Fallout New Vegas there was a quest called flags of our foul-ups written by Travis Stout and there is a group of soldiers called misfits they are horribly incompetent NCR soldiers and they were trying to get into shape and you could train them you could go the normal way you could teach them to throw a grenade teacher to shoot a gun teach them all these things that you need to know so that they weren't huge screw-ups or if you were carrying around an enormous amount of psycho which is a combat drug that makes you go crazy you could say you don't need to be good soldiers just take a bunch of this drug and that would actually resolve the quest for you and they'd be like wow awesome well we got to do is take this drug that's really great so you would resolve the quest and go on your merry way and then at the end of the game they actually they performed really well in combat and then they went on a murderous spree and they want it being hung for war crimes so this is a we always try to have these long-term payoffs for these like little things that the player can do in this case carrying around I think it was like 25 doses of psycho which is really sort of excessive and then finally Eric Fenster makers know-it-all Nicolas from pillars of eternity eric Fenster maker was really a champion of letting the player establish their background and then develop it early on in the game so they could really get a sense of who they who they are this this ties into another point that I'm going to go into in a second so if you took the Philosopher's background you could talk to this character kaliesha in the early game and you could say yeah I'm a philosopher and I believe this or I believe that and one of the things you could say is like I don't I don't really believe in anything I believe this is all an illusion this is a bunch of fakery and that sort of marks your character as an illustrative attorney spoiler here sorry so at the end of the game when it's revealed that the gods are not real if you picked the nihlus background you get a special line that says I knew it again this is these accounting for the weird and the funny things that the players pick so sometimes it's important to just ask the player why they're doing what they're doing I mean ask it narrative lis within the context of the game not as the as the designer them themselves so why ask the player why because it makes them ask themselves why why am i doing the things that I'm doing one of the first examples is the Anna Mansi trial in pillars of eternity so you are given exposure to Anna man see which is the science of reading Souls within the pillars of eternity universe it's used for some good things very often it's used for some really bad things a lot of characters in the world have different opinions on it and by the time you get to this point the game you've really seen a lot of these examples and you're asked for because of your experiences to testify to the Duke about what you think about Anna man C and this is a way to really get the player to think about well you know I've been kind of playing through the game and I've seen all of these things but what do I really think about it and obviously you can only account for so many opinions but it is a nice way to make the player go like okay well I'm playing this character and I've seen this oh well I think this and it just helps really sort of ground the character and their understanding of who they are in this world and being able to express it instead of just having it inside their head another example is arcade and Fallout New Vegas I apologize that I don't have any credit for this art I found it on tumblr and as you know if you try to find the original source of something on tumblr you will never find it so arcade and Fallout New Vegas is a character who is pretty moral he's with the followers of the apocalypse and if you go to Caesar's Legion to the Caesars camp Caesar is a crazy dictator and arcade stops you and he's like what in the world are we doing we're accepting an invitation to from a dictator to go over and talk to him he enslaves people he's torturing and crucifying all these people what could you possibly hope to get out of talking with this guy and this conversation is partially a way for you to try to either mollify arcade or to maybe just think about it yourself like well what am I trying to get out of this you know you got an invitation and so you're doing a quest but are you doing it because you to hear him out are you doing it because you want to get some sort of advantage with him in the future you want to get close to them this is a way again of getting the player to really think about the motivations for why they're doing what they're doing by the way there are sacrifices to doing all this crazy stuff it is a lot of work we write a lot of dialogue and a lot of that dialogue comes down to making choices available to the player also when you allow people to just kill everyone you do have to handle that it's it's a lot easier to just say no this character isn't available you don't have to deal with them in pillars of eternity - we actually have faction heads so we have four factions and we have multiple faction heads for each faction and we keep them separated in different scenes to prevent the killer from taking or the plan sorry the player who is a the player who is a murderer from wiping them both out in one one fell swoop so you do have to do a lot of work thinking about all the contingencies for this stuff because it's not systemic ly driven it's all custom content if you want to make a hero's journey goodbye like it's not really great if you're trying to make this big emergent thing it does not survive the process because players love screwing with heroes journeys the scale on the scope of the impact of the choices that you make especially if you litter the game with it has to be by its very nature relatively small if you want it to be all over the place it can't be earth-shattering so you have to try to take solace in the fact that you have a very rich game with lots of little outcomes if you try to make massive changes at every fork in the road it's gonna take you forever also you need to think about the scope of player voice motive and identity when you allow people to play a wide range of characters from beatific Saints to psychotic murderers your player voice is going to have to cover a range and you have to decide as an author how why do you want to make that range B because you can't account for everything you can't account for every single thing the player can do you shouldn't try to do that what you should try to do is think about it from the player's perspective think about the person sitting across the table playing D&D and what they might want to bring into the story that you've created a framework for that's it thank you very much our fifth and final speaker began his professional work going back to Maxis on things like spore and SimCity as we heard earlier he also teaches classes at Carnegie Mellon and now is a lead designer at Riot Games and earlier today he told me that his name is pronounced to sound like brandy which some of us are thinking about right now is it being the end of the day I give you stone the brandy alright thank you so ever ever since I was a kid I've been making paper games it's just something I've just always done went and saw Star Wars when I was young super impressed by that movie and immediately had to make my own board game based on Star Wars where the rebels are trying to blow up the Death Star before it rotates into position and kills the rebel base this is a game that I made based on rollerball which I was too young to actually see but it looked like the most awesome movie ever when I was a kid and I just like I got to play that game I've got to play that futuristic death sport how does that work so like just looking at advertisements and reading reviews and things I've kind of pieced together my own a rollerball a game that I can play it and see what that was like and for me building these paper games it's really just a way like making the rules making the pieces it's just a great way to understand the system's the relationships between all of those systems and it's something that I still do today so it's not really probably too much of a surprise that my rule here for the day is to play it on paper so even though I work with digital games all the time I still try to do as much on paper as possible so when I gave my first GDC talk in 2009 it was about paper prototypes on Spore I'm actually curious if anybody here was at that talk anybody oh actually a couple hands surprised okay so yeah nine years ago and that middle bullet point there was I didn't have time to actually talk about how to make paper prototypes I was just talking about the ones that we made during that project so I'm actually nine years later gonna patch that little hole in that talk and fix that so by the way this isn't up on vault for some reason I think is too old to be on the vault but it's up on my website that's don't Ronix calm if you're interested in checking that out later alright so first of all this is what not to do so I thought to get that out of the way sometimes when people think like I'm gonna make a paper prototype of my computer game so let's make every unit the entire campaign and that and an expansion pack while we're at it and let's just try to make this the most complete thing we can possibly get but actually the truth is you need to do the opposite of that you need to make it as small as possible and then make it smaller after you figured out what that small is so let me talk about four different ways that I I kind of think about the problem so first of all is state your intention why are you even making this prototype in the first place what is the key question that you're trying to answer by building this and there could be a lot of reasons for this it might just be something that people on the team are asking that they're confused about might be a question that you have yourself but the game is just not further for far enough along and development for you to be able to answer that with the game and so this might be a way of jump-starting or bootstrapping the process really quickly and the second thing is what's the scope that you're gonna be trying to tackle like how much of the game are you gonna try to do and like I said it's like the smaller is probably the better so it's just one simple idea like maybe you want to know how much potions should cost or how often the potion should restock in the store so very specific very key question part of the game just to see how that might work out maybe you want to expand a little bit more and go for a session session might be if I say you're doing a farming game and the the fall season is coming up and you want to know how people are going to allocate resources so you can make a little game that kind of tests out what kind of resources you would need and how many there might be now you can go out and do the full game and unlike the Starcraft example that I just gave when I said the full game it's gonna be a very narrow slice of the full game so in this example here is like maybe I'm just curious about how players will allocate skill points as they go from the beginning of the game to level 50 and so we're gonna go through the entire game but we're only just going to be looking at a very simple set system which is how a skill points are allocated and finally maybe you're going beyond that you were just wanted about the meta game you don't really even care about the actual game you want to know about kind of the reward systems that happen between each game and how the player may say if it's a deck building game how they may modify their deck as new cards come into the environment their choices change and there options change the third thing is really to specify the purpose why like why are you making this thing what are you really trying to get out of it so one thing that's kind of common is like I just want to do this mechanical simulation I can't play it yet so I'm just gonna pretend to play it and I kind of cautioned against this because computers are really good at doing this and papers terrible at doing it but it can still come into play at times it still can kind of work if you're really concerned about like distances cause and effects relationships things like that you can kind of mock these things up the opposite of that would be something very abstract where this is something a player will never see it doesn't actually occur anywhere in the game but it's a way for you to get information about the game and how the players are going to perceive the different systems from a very high level so the player may be down in the game but you want to know everything's in this case maybe it's the relationship between monsters and weapons and maybe you're just concerned about the emotional engagement you want to know how players are gonna feel how they're gonna respond to certain events so say we're making a skateboarding game and there's a combo system our players gonna laugh when they fail the combo are they gonna get frustrated at what kind of surprises are going to occur or is everybody cheering together at the same time and so you can kind of gauge the reactions in that way from the players and then the fourth thing is the time scale how relative to what the actual game will be running what is your paper prototype how is that going to be working and so it's pretty common case that it's gonna be much slower than the game that you're working on the intended time scale and this might be a case of let's say you're working on a shoot er game and you want to understand player decisions and reactions and how they responded if in events so you make this little card game maybe each card takes like a minute to play while people think about it but in the actual game it's a second while they pull the trigger or push the button you can go real-time as well again this is a little dangerous computers are great at this so maybe it's just better to do this in the computer but I have seen some examples where you just want to test reaction time you want to see if the players under pressure how does that change their decision-making process are they able to still make great decisions or really decisions based on the time constraints that you're putting on them and then it's also kind of common to do the faster well your your game is gonna play out much much faster than the actual game the video game so let's say I'm making a campaign style game where these tribes are attacking each other and the main part of the game might be the battles but I'm gonna just simulate those with a simple die roll and I because I really want to see how the continent is used how the land is used as the tribes start to spread out across the world alright so those are kind of like the four things like why am I even making this paper prototype where is it happening in the game what's the purpose that I'm trying to get out of this and then the when the like what part of the time is that really happening so those are all kind of little toy examples that I gave somebody give some real examples here I'll kind of end up with five of these and this one is from when I worked at Blizzard North we were on the Diablo team but we were asked by Blizzard South an Irvine if we could come up with a card game that would appear in World of Warcraft and the idea would be they would kill a monster in World of Warcraft and it might drop a trading card and if you collect enough of these cards you could build a deck and then you would go into a tavern and you would play this tavern game inside of World of Warcraft never got picked up they ran out of time to do it but that didn't stop us from making hundreds of these cards and playing this game at lunch pretty much every day for a couple couple months so for this one the intention is just mentioned it's like what would that card game be how could you play it in a tavern inside of WoW our scope was session based that we were trying to figure out like what a session of this game would play like but we're also really interested in the meta game like again how the cards would change over time as we introduced new factions and things into the sets very mechanical simulation it played out a little bit slower than what we'd expect it's a card game in WoW and a card game in real life so they're fairly close but when the computer shuffles for you and keeps the track of status effects and the like the game actually would play a lot faster on the computer this is another one never saw the light of day this is from Blizzard North where we were looking for something to do besides Diablo so we decided to make pitch an idea that would be Diablo but set in the Starcraft universe so a science fiction Diablo if you would we called a star blow not the best name but the so one part of that was figuring out what are all the weapons you know the Apple is a lot about collecting all these items so what were these weapons set to be how would they all work and so I made these little trading cards they were outside my office and originally they were all blank like the two that you see in the middle but I told the artists that if you give me art I'll put it on the card and I'll put your name on it as the illustrator of the card and that started this little kind of competition among the artists like grab the cool weapons and do the art for them first and get them to me so they could be on these trading cards and there's something about like oh you know this could have been just a spreadsheet and it didn't need to be these actual trading cards but the making them tangible making these things things that actually got passed around really added a lot and got the whole team kind of involved in the idea of what these weapons could be so the intention to get the feel for the weapon sets just a single idea very abstract it would never really appear anywhere in the actual game and I said timescale none but kind of thinking about it also is kind of it covered the whole game because we knew where every weapon was what act they would appear how they would be unlocked over time this is from working at EA on The Simpsons game and my job on that project was a lead designer of what we called living Springfield which was the place where you could run around with Homer and Marge and everybody and so we just kind of set this up in the middle of the design pit and just kind of grew this map over time to really try to figure out where the all the different key locations would be within Springfield so we started out with the first one is just all cardboard boxes that we cut up in the yellow sticky notes and then it got cooler and cooler as we iterated throughout the course for the project trying to figure out like where the you know Moe's Tavern is compared to Duff brewery compared to homers home so very mechanical in that way that we really wanted it to be very precise to how the the map would end up being in the final game and then would didn't really play like a game but it was very fast in the sense that we could see the entire scope all at once this was from the expansion pack from Spore this is called galactic adventures and by this point we knew a store and had mentioned that is like it's all about the editors and so this expansion pack lets you make your own stories and games in Spore and so we knew that the editor was going to be key to this process so to mock it up really quickly we just got you can see just a bunch of paper cut it up and we had people come in and pretend to play the game and they would say like hey make a story for me and so KQ Joe and he's good he's got a key and his friend Amy or you know comes in and we would just like make these cards really quick and cut them out and put them on and simulate that whole process so it's mostly a kind of a UX study to validate interactions at a session scope and originally I think the intention was more of a mechanical purpose but we got really into the emotional gauge mint became more important as we saw people actually look they really care about these stories how can we kind of really let people express themselves through this product man fairly real-time in the beginning it was kind of slow cuz we were cutting out the cards but we actually got pretty fast as more and more people came through because we already had a lot of the elements that we needed to play with and this last one is from riot when I very first started working at riot I had the opportunity to pitch five different little games this one just as a disclaimer is not being worked on at riot so the idea though was that it would be a turn-based fighting game with the champions and it looks kinda like a card game but actually each card is an action that you could take so it's more like each cards kind of a button that you could push as you work your way and I guess technically this isn't a paper prototype because I laser cut it out of acrylic cuz I was really into the laser cutter at the time so this one the intent was a pitch document which is why that I was justified about probably poorly that I could spend all this time on this and make it look really cool but I really wanted to get people excited about it I really said hey this could be like rights next game so I want to do like the best forward facing pitch on that that I possibly could covered the full game very mechanical like one to one simulation of how the game might actually play out turned out to be like super slow time scale it would take like 30 minutes to play the game and when we finally did the first kind of unity prototype I think we could play game in like three minutes because there was so much stuff that the computer was doing for us that you would have to do manually I'm in the board game alright so that's it some quick final thoughts here one is always write down your goals before starting on a paper prototype like as your first piece of paper and pencil like write down why you're doing these things and just get that out of the way and make a statement because it's so easy to just kind of sprawl and go off in all different directions on these and lose your focus because you've eventually kind of really get into it as a separate project instead of just answering that one question one size doesn't fit all and that basically any one of you who is gonna try to do this or maybe already does this already knows they're all unique they're all different so I gave you several different examples that kind of cover everything guaranteed your things will be different than what I showed here it doesn't need to be fun people get caught up on this all the time we're like you know the paper prototypes not very fun so therefore the game we're working is gonna suck but the purpose of the paper prototype is not to be fun maybe it would be and that's great if you can achieve that and the more power to you but you wouldn't go into it saying that we're trying to prove the fun because ultimately the paper and the digital version are just not the same thing and then kind of getting at this last point it really doesn't even need to be a game you're not trying to make something where there's a winner and a loser and it's got the whole flow that a normal board game would have you're really just trying to experiment and answer questions as quickly as possible so that's it thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: GDC

Views: 49,142

Rating: 4.888164 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, josh sawyer, raph koster, soren johnson, game design, video games

Id: bh5oqH1Dv8g

Length: 70min 6sec (4206 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2019