On Board Games vs Video Games

I had a pretty interesting thought recently on the big differences between board games and video games.

Besides the mainstream stuff like Monopoly or Chutes and Ladders, my real introduction to board games came when I met some folks in college who showed me the meat and potatoes of board game geeks. Settlers of Catan, Carcassone, Dominion and the like. Initially I felt board games were substantially more strategic than video games, which was refreshing like a mint julep in a sauna. They also made the necessity of Schell's 4 Pillars of game design (my term) more obvious (particularly the pillar of "technology"), so analyzing them was a good exercise. But playing board games felt different from playing video games, and trying to figure out why was like trying to bob for apples in a shark tank, impossible using traditional techniques.

I believe now, that the difference is a matter of player approach. I'll put it this way: Board games encourage modeling, video games encourage discovery.

What do I mean by modeling? Making models, ala Mouse Trap? No. I mean mental models. Board games exist almost entirely in the players heads. I will argue that a box of Monopoly pieces is really just a set of physical mnemonics and a random number generator. You open the box and you begin to play using an agreed upon rule set, which you can modify on the spot (with bullshit rules like taxes go to Free Parking, for example). If someone makes an illegal move, someone has to notice that it doesn't fit the mental model that the players are supposed to share, and prove it with the rulebook if necessary (which actually adds a fun meta game to an already meta genre). Board games are to rules what Kinect is to video games. There's virtually no feedback from the game itself about any of the actions you take. Board games are the drunken father who let's his kids play with shotguns because it shuts them up for five minutes. I think this is also why board games seem more strategically focused. You're forced to absorb a set of logical premises for manipulation, which are more pointed and discrete to allow stronger mental modeling.

Compare this with video games: Video games I would say are discovery driven because only in the most simplistic of video games can the rules be conveyed with an adequate level of precision in less than 30 pages. Because you have a computer acting as ultimate arbiter of the model of the game (replete with large fluffy beard), you don't even have to bother memorizing the rules, and better yet, because of inherent flaws in computer software design, the game's creators might not even know all of the rules. They know the rules they wanted, but only the code knows (makes?) the real rules of the game. Furthermore then Bearded Judge allows players to "feel out" a solution to their problems by supplying feedback for whatever gameplay experiment they engage in. DISCOVERY.

Thinking about games this way does ignore the more tactile sense of video games, and the freedom inherent in board games (and incidentally, all non video games) which is another important distinction. Sometimes a video game is more than just a puzzle. Tricking the proprioceptive sense and putting the player in the game.If a board game is boring, you can easily change it to make it more exciting for your particular social blend. These are important differences if I were to host a real debate on board games versus video games. But I think this discussion of approach is interesting.

How Ghost Trick Solved the Adventure Game

A few months ago I finally managed to get my hands on Ghost Trick, which sells itself as an investigative game in the same vein as Pheonix Wright(with which it shares a creator). This isn't really a game review but I will say that ghost trick was certainly worth the money (granted I only paid $20 for it). The dialogue is pretty well translated, the story is really interesting and wonderfully convoluted (I guess that's something most people don't like though) and as far as I can tell, is logically consistent from start to finish. The art is great (except the horrendous box art), the music is great (even if it could use a couple more tracks) and possessing things feels great.

So the real meat of this post is why Ghost Trick is the secret genius of the DS-driven reawakening of the Adventure genre.

I didn't really grow up with adventure games. I was almost exclusively a console gamer, and stuck to action games. My first real adventure game was Myst when I was a wee lad but Pheonix Wright was when I really discovered the genre and began pursuing it. For the sake of narrative though, I'm going to use Pheonix Wright: Ace Attorney as a placeholder. I love this game to death. Because the actions available to the player are so limited, the game is able to put the player in the middle of several fierce courtroom dramas/verbal sword fights with a great backstory to lead up to them. The role of the player is to watch the story unfold, and sniff out contradictions (a whiff of which will send Pheonix into a crack-like frenzy). There aren't too many games that make you feel as smart as PW:AA does when you know what's going on.

But therein lies the problem. When the critical details aren't clear, you spend a maddening amount of time trying to figure out why the gun which obviously implicates the parrot isn't stopping the curry shop owner from talking (spoilers!(the spoiler is that that is not a spoiler)). Though I'm ashamed to admit it, I brute forced my way through more than one cross examination using the overly generous/easily exploitable quick-save feature. This is a common issue in almost all adventure games and completely destroys any immersion that's been established.

So now let's talk about Ghost Trick. Ghost Trick pretends to be about investigations (seeming very Pheonix Wright-ish), but it's a big lie. Ghost Trick is about haunting shit and saving lives. As a ghost, your power is to turn back the clock a few minutes and then try to possess things to prevent someone from dying. You push bowling balls off of shelves and turn on air conditioning units to move flags around to change the circumstances. Each of the game's levels is basically a small physics puzzle, with one amazing twist: There's no physics engine.

See the problem with Adventure games is that the conditions for progress are hyper specific despite a facade of choice and freedom. Hidden behind the veil of a realistic world with realistic characters and consequences is a set of finite and ultimately arbitrary switches. When you feel you have an answer that fits the situation, you go crazy because your set of level pulls doesn't match the one in the secret diagram. Games with physics engines have the opposite "problem". They can't cover every possibility because the situations are almost never exactly the same.

But that's where Ghost Trick triumphs! Whenever you make a guess at the answer to the physics puzzle, the reason it won't work is immediately clear. The ball doesn't bounce that high, the board falls too far, etc. When you restart a level you go back in time. Logically, every particle in the room is exactly the same as when you first saw it. Thus, the switches under the hood are reset just like the world whose representation you're interacting with.

I suppose the genius of it is presenting the fixed (digital, if you will) operations of the game space as physics (or analog) operations, then allowing the player to "rewind time", and close up any consistency issues that show up. This means that the player won't feel that something arbitrary and solvable outside the illusion of game space is preventing them from proceeding. It's an amazing solution to an old problem of gaming

I suppose it's hard to copy without ripping Ghost Trick off, but let's all at least give it the round of applause it deserves. Lord knows nobody played it.

Why games may always be for kids

So I was pulling up Kotaku at work, like you do, when I found this article that feels like it might change my life: A Fresh Look at the Video Game Time Suck.

Did you read it? Good.

Let me get this rolling with a bit of a confession. Despite my deep, sub-sub-conscious love of video games, I actually haven't played them as much in recent years. I've always blamed it on a combination of not enough time and not enough games that are truly interesting, as the industry slowly stagnates and rehashes many of the same ideas.

But this article suggests that perhaps I'm accepting crybaby game fan rhetoric when something much more fundamental is at play! The article says that people more focused on the future play games less. Holy shit!

I think when you're adult you are forced by the responsibilities of being an adult (washing your bed sheets, buying cans of beans, sitting at desks for 30 hours a day), to focus and plan on what your day is going to be like, and what you're going to accomplish. By having goals and working towards them, you limit your game time subconsciously! What an amazing revelation! This explains why so many responsible adults virtually drop off the game playing spectrum. It's not a matter of maturity (at least, not being too mature for gaming), it's really a matter of responsibility forcing you to be predisposed to not playing games.

I wish the article had a guide on getting into a present focused state of mind.

The Future of Console Gaming: Not For Dinosaurs

As recently as a few months ago, the CEO of Rovio (makers of every soccer mom and auto mechanic's favorite game: Angry Birds) made a pretty strong declaration. He basically said consoles will die, because phone gaming is cheaper to produce, innovates faster, and reaches a broader audience. Upon reading I laughed to myself and closed the browser window.

Then one of my business associates began asking me, "Do you think consoles have a future?" I assured him they did, and closed the chat window.

Now I load up Kotaku and find a fairly complimentary article about Nintendo, which basically says the same thing.

Is it true? Will my NES, SNES, PSX, PS2, Xbox 360, etc. all become relics of a bygone era? Will the power of mobile phones so rapidly outstrip consoles that history will repeat the tragic murder of the community arcade?

I really doubt it. Most people who are talking about these things and cherry picking their facts. In fact, I would say these predictions have two citing factors: 1) Almost everyone has a cell phone and the capabilities of modern cell phones will soon rival consoles and 2) Games on cellular platforms make a boat load of money, meaning money not going into console developer's pockets.

The first point is very fair. I'm not here to say that mobile gaming is not here to stay, a huge industry, or a legitimate source of sustainable income. I just think it's garbage to say that it will destroy the console game industry. Why?

Well, first I'd like to call your attention to another industry that's in a similar boat. The Movies. Now to my understanding, home entertainment systems have been at nearly movie quality for about 5 years. You can get ridiculously high def tvs, ridiculously high def speakers, ridiculously high def popcorn, all in your own home. Going to see a movie in theaters once, costs a little more than half the price of owning the movie for ever. "Traditional movie viewing is too expensive" people should be saying, "You don't have to deal with the crowds, you get a front row seat, and you don't have to drive!" they should be saying.

People saying that would be idiots. Movie theaters aren't going anywhere. The experience of going to the movies is too appealing to die. The screen is huge, the speakers are huge, the popcorn is huge. Gaming's going to be the same way. It doesn't matter how powerful a phone gets, playing a game on your phone is never going to compare to playing it on a TV.

Secondly, I really think as time goes on the two markets will move in very different directions. I believe there are a few games for mobile that offer a compelling single player experience, but generally their time wasters. There's nothing wrong with time wasters, but are we really saying that time wasters are going to destroy a narrative form? Please.

Thirdly, controls. This is probably a bigger one that most people are going to give credit to, but not having to fit all your tech in a space less than a cubic 4 inches gives you lots of opportunity to make shit like Kinect, Move, and the Wii. Maybe the rise of mobile gaming will force the industry to innovate harder. In that case I say more power to mobile developers! Put the console makers on point and everyone will benefit!

Logic Challenges: A Man's Best Friend

My final challenge type sounds like a cop out at first. If you buy into Jesse Schell's idea that a game is really just a complex puzzle with lots of moving pieces, this challenge type is obvious. Not only that, you could also argue that all the other challenge types fall under this category, and its a catchall for any types that have evaded my most ingenious taxonomy.

These criticisms are all true, but let me defend myself before we dive in: Though this challenge is arguably a parent to the other challenge types, I am attempting to highlight a particular slice of the challenge that is meaningful in modern game design analysis and discussion. It's nature as a super challenge is why I saved it for last, but in certain genres it is overwhelmingly present and distinct from the other three types of challenge.

Can you guess what it is from that set up? Probably not.

The last challenge type is the Logic Challenge! What's a logic challenge? I'm glad you asked!

A Logic Challenge is any challenge that requires the manipulation of a set of axioms and principles to find a valid solution.

This challenge is fairly self explanatory. A logic challenge can be thought of as either a proof, or more importantly and equivalently, a math problem. As I noted above, the astute reader will shout that all other challenges are logical challenges. Spatial challenges require a solution to a more real time representation of "If a train leaves Albuquerque at 1,000 miles per hour and another train leaves kalamazoo at 5,000 miles per hour when and where will they meet if both trains can tunnel through moutain ranges and fly over the ocean?". It's true, but for my purposes logic puzzles are meaningfully distinct in that they involve the willful manipulation of numbers and rules.

My example for this will draw on the Shin Megami Tensei series, a hardcore RPG series that's almost older and certainly deeper and absolutely more intense than any other RPG series I've heard of. The first, and most prominent application of this challenge in the SMT series, is simply that it's a traditional turn based RPG.

All RPGs (at least, the old school ones before action got involved...not including Zelda 2), are about statistics. Characters have their resources (challenge type number 3!), but they also have an attack, defense, speed, and whatever other stats the developers included. Playing an RPG is tackling the interplay between the stats of your characters, and the stats of the opponent. If I have an attack rating of 70, and the dragon I'm about to take on has a defense rating of 5000, I need to crunch the numbers (as trivial as they are in this example) to realize that I am far too weak to take on the dragon. Obviously in most RPGs, these calculations are much greyer (for one thing, you usually don't know your opponent's defense rating), which is half the fun (I think), but that's beside the point.

The real meat of a logical challenge is manipulating rules. Number crunching is a (complicated) extension of this point, but rule manipulation is demonstrated beautifully in SMT. In several of the Shin Megami Tensei games, each character has an elemental affinity, and along side that, there are several elemental spells and attacks. By attacking a character with an attack that belongs to the opposite elemental affinity, the effects of your attack are greatly modified.

This is really what logic challenges are all about: It's a question of, this rule states that if I use this command (say a fire spell), against you (you're an ice demon), my chances of success are greatly increased (because I deal double damage). As I stated before, it's not hard to argue that this is true for all challenges, but this is a significant distinction, particularly in the case of RPGs.

I suppose a big application of this challenge for me is essentially arbitrary laws that modify a more intuitive rule set. Another great example of this is Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. In FFTA, there are rules governing battles, like "no Swords", which change over a set interval (oh look, a timing challenge!) which you can plan around. This is sort of where the lines get blurred on challenge types, but that's okay.

In my experience, logical challenges add a lot of richness to gameplay for advanced players but increase the barrier to entry for beginners substantially. As a result, I think it's fair to say that the more rules you enforce on the player, the higher the difficulty. Though I think it's worth also mentioning that the effect of the rules is important too. If SMT's elemental system offered modest gains in damage (like Final Fantasy games), but nothing crucial to victory, then nobody feels put off by not understanding the systems in place.

Fundamental Challenges Part 3: Resoure Challenges

Now we come to my favorite type of challenge. This type of challenge may be the most fundamental challenge type for games of all mediums, because this challenge type defines the win/lose conditions. I call it the Resource Challenge. In modern game design (starting around the last console generation) resource challenges have exploded. They add nice constraints on the player which encourage resourcefulness and exploration of the game's mechanics. But even traditional games involve resources in the number of "chances" (or less formally "lives") players have to not lose. The number of lives in Mario, the number of cards in your hand in Rummy, etc. But before I can define a Resource Challenge, I need to define a Resource. dictionary.com defines a resource as:

A source of supply, support, esp. one that can be readily drawn upon when needed.

This is a suitable definition, which we will extend for Resource Challenges:

A Resource Challenge is any challenge which involves maintaining the quantity of a resource within predefined tolerances.

Let's talk first about the most important resource in video games: Life. I would describe Life as the primary resource, and the reason that this particular challenge type is so vital to gaming. Whether this resource is plentiful (like the giant lifebar in Mischief Makers) or practically non-existent (Like in any old school Mario game, where getting touched while small kills you), Most games have an inherent life mechanic, expressing your leeway in performing the game's tasks. This resource forces the player to attempt to play as skillfully as possible, because the game will end if they do not manage their most important resource. I would argue that games without life (such as Wario Land 3) demand no skillful execution, and in general are puzzle games, but that's a separate blog post.

There are of course other prominent resources in use today. RPGs have Mana, which the player must maintain if he wishes to use more effective abilities in battle, and Gold, which players must keep stockpiled in order to power up their characters. Strategy games, such as Starcraft quite literally have resources to manage. For a period of time, fighting games were getting crazy with resources, Guilty Gear had the guard bar which filled as you blocked attacks and would give your opponent unscaled damage in their combos. Marvel Versus Capcom 2 had life as well as red life, which was life you could regain by switching out your characters.

All of these resources force certain behaviors on the players. In Guilty Gear, to take an example I'm intimately familiar with, the Guard Bar exists to promote players to go on the defensive.

Now what factors into the difficulty of a resource challenge? There are two main avenues for difficulty, and a third sort of obscure one that I'll cover here. The first metric for difficulty is the number of resources that need to be managed. Most RPGs give you two resources to manage: Hit points and magic points. This is pretty common practice even outside of RPGs, personally I think 3 resources is a nicer number, but that's a separate blog post. More than 3 resources, however, and things start to get fairly difficulty

The second metric is the quantity of the resources. In this case I've always found that scarcer the resource, the more difficult the game is. This is pretty intuitive, the less of a resource you have the more difficult and important your decisions become. In old school platformers, for example, your resource was your life, and you really only had enough life to take one hit. As a result those games were extremely difficult. Compare that with modern shooters where not only do you have plentiful life, but it also regenerates and tops itself off. Life in modern shooters is not a rare resource at all, which may be part of why modern games feel so much easier than older ones.

The third, and more obscure metric only comes in to play when there are multiple resources. The resource's (word I'm going to get from Tommy), or the similarities between each resource, factors in hugely to how hard it is to manage the resources. Funnily, this metric is difficult at either extreme, rather than being a perfect scale. If there are many resources and they function on different scales, and are valuable in different situations, then players have to weigh and balance their "objective" worth in a given situation at a substantial mental calculation cost.

The opposite of the spectrum is the Demon's Souls method. In Demon's Souls, all actions are dependent on the number of souls you've collected. Items you buy from the shop are paid for in Demon's Souls, spells you learn are acquired using Demon's Souls and the only way to level up your character is with Demon's Souls. It forces the same decision making process as above, but in reverse. Which choices are important enough that you should spend your limited resource on, rather than determining which resource is more important in the situation.

The primary application of this challenge is to direct players and to modify their play styles. The applications of it are fascinating to study.

Fundamental Challenges Part 2: Spatial Challenges

The next challenge type in our survey of fundamental game elements brings us to the Spatial Challenge. The Spatial Challenge is a fundamental component of almost all games, and is particularly important to video games due to their inherent narrative elements. Almost all video games feature a (engrossing at best, superficial at worst) storyline with characters, which implies entities, which imply space. Beyond that, even more traditional games almost always include space. The only one I can think of off the top of my head that doesn't include space is The Prisoner's Dilemma. The importance can't be understated, so without further ado:

A Spatial Challenge is a challenge involving manipulation of positional relationships between the player (or his avatar, minions, etc.) and other agents or obstacles within the game space.

What do I mean by that? Let's use Chess as an example. Chess is primarily a game of spatial relationships. Each piece owns a single point on the board (the spot its sitting on), but also controls all the spaces it can attack. The bishop for example, applies pressure on diagonals. If a pawn is diagonally aligned with a bishop, it's being threatened by the bishop through their spatial relationship. If a queen is sitting right behind the pawn however, the spatial relationship between the queen and the pawn protect it from its relationship to the bishop. Chess is an extreme example but it really highlights the complexities of spatial relationships, especially when you factor in all the pieces on the board.

Chess, however, does not cover all aspects of Spatial Challenges. I would argue there is a second component at play in spatial challenges that is particularly absent from Chess: Orientation. Chess has no real orientation factor (besides Pawn's forced forward procession), but for a First Person Shooter, orientation is critical. First Person Shooters present their players with a two level spatial challenge. Not only must you position your body/gun to be at a coordinate where it can fire on the enemy, but you must also orient your body/gun to score a head shot.

Maybe a stronger example of orientation being a factor of spatial relationships is Tetris. The spatial relationships between pieces in Tetris are defined by their orientation. The pieces need to be oriented to fit in snugly with the current set up of pieces. The magic of Tetris is how the spatial relationships of pieces are completely redefined each time the next piece is rotated.

Spatial Challenges (both involving orientation and not)exist in almost all games. Poker, for example is a game with a surprisingly important spatial component in via the dealer button. In Poker, the players farthest from the dealer button have the most information about other players (the dealer button determines turn order). They can play riskier hands because of this spatial advantage. Puzzle games, likewise, almost always involve a spatial component. From Tetris to Gunpey to Polarium.

An interesting note of Spatial Challenges is that they often dictate the Timing Challenges of a game. In Super Mario Bros. for example, the timing of Mario jumping to land on a Goomba is completely dependent on the spatial relationship between Mario and the Goomba. The Active Window in this case is a function of Mario's jump height (spatial), and the Warning Window is defined by the Goomba's distance from Mario (spatial). If a platform is a long jump away, the player must press jump right before the end of the platform he's running on. The Warning Window is essentially the distance of the platform up until the range where a jump will be successful, which begins the Action Window.

While I don't think this challenge type is as practically useful as the others (it's so essential that any game is almost guaranteed to already have one), it is helpful to have in hand. Stick around for the next post where we start getting into one of the more lacking challenges in modern game design.