Creating Complexity in Turn Based Games

There is a broad variety of rich and complex turn based games that are renowned and enjoyed for their depth and skill. This article details some common techniques the designer uses to create a engaging experience for the user.

Variety of Choices

There must be a variety of choices. In general, this means choosing something to be good at. This usually involves choosing how to allocate offensive, defensive and other more esoteric skills such as crafting, earning income, etc.

Some games employ a specific “boons and flaws” system in which the player must choose weaknesses, while other games are balanced to treat a lack of skill as a weakness itself. The key is to have many types of things be important, while making it impossible to get all of those things. This forces the player to work around key weaknesses.

Weaknesses and Resistances

Weaknesses and resistances are always relative to a some “average” character. I've heard this character called “The Mario” before. In most of his appearances, Mario is fantastically average, the second best at everything. In Mario 2, he is the second best jumper, and the second fastest at picking up objects.

In Dungeons and Dragons, humans are, statistically, “the Mario” with average scores in every stat. They are not so tough as dwarves or nimble as elves, but they make up for it in their broad aptitudes.

Other races wear their weaknesses on their sleeves and boast their resistances proudly. Dwarves are quite resistant to poisons and see well in dim light. Elves are resistant to enchantments. The weakness of Humans, and of “The Mario” in general, is the same as their strength. Their lack of specialization make them the second best at everything.

The Mario must develop a strong Plan B to make up for his lack in superiority at Plan A. The Mario is willing to sacrifice of his strengths if he can force his opponent to do the same. A complex design forces a character or player out of their comfort zone. Spellcasters will be forced to deal with magic resistant monsters, and sneaks will likewise be thrown against dogs with a keen since of smell that they must avoid.

Likewise, dwarves will be put in situations that call out their lack of nimbleness, elves will have to pay for their lack of toughness. The illiterate barbarian will be forced to talk to highborn kings and shrewd number counters.

Limited Resources

Limited resources keeps “broad spectrum” characters like bards from winning the day. Mario is forced to specialize in some skills instead of increasing his skill in everything at the same pace. Without focusing adequately on “Plan A” threats take too much time or resources to deal with. A good damaging attack is still a great answer to a lot of problems. Focusing too much on “hedging your bets” must hinder your ability to take out key threats quickly.

The tension between focusing on Plan A and Plans B,C,D becomes the key concern of great players in strategy games. This is seen keenly in the board game “Go”. With Go, the player must focus on expansion and focus on securing his territory. A great player will find a way to do both. Not only will he attack key weak points in the opponent's territory, but he will do so in a way that forces a sequence that benefits him, and leaves him stronger and with more territory.

This idea carries over to many turn based games: expand while defending your weaknesses.

Layering

Ideally, you manage to find a design that is “simple to understand, years to master”. Yes, it's cliche, but it's true. Typically this means that your interaction are, on their face, easy to understand, but have deeper uses and have overlaps over other game systems.

Consider the Wizard101 spell “Sacrifice”. The printed text reads “Take 250 [death damage] to give 700 [health]”. On it's surface the card is straight forward, you take some damage and then heal some life. In fact, most players will read this as if it simply heals them for 450. However, if the player has an effect that double death damage they deal (or receive), or changes their healing effect, this will work much differently for them. Likewise, if they are near death, this spell can actually bring their hit points below 0 and then back up again, which will clear any buffs or debuffs on them.

Immersion

"Immersion" (like "Role Playing Game") is another term that has been flogged to death by video game critics and developers.  This term refers to the user's experience of playing: it means that the user is "totally engrossed" in the medium or experience.

In sports like swimming, this is a given.  In a video game, the term is much more floppy (even for the mighty Virtua Boy).

Take Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero, for instance.  A particularly challenging level might allow me to do a great "run" of steps or notes, taking me to the limits of my ability to read and react at the same time.  This challenge short circuits my brain's ability to process the step between seeing and doing.  When I skip the cognitive phase entirely, I experience an odd heightened awareness.

Some users may report tunnel vision, time shortening or lengthening, or other strange mental phenomena.

Still, it's an accident of design.  The game Dance Dance Revolution is not "immersive".  It merely presents the user with ever increasing difficulties.  When the user finds the right challenge, immersion is a probable circumstance.  The human and the machine are intended to enter a dialog.  If this feedback loop occurs faster than the human can process, the loop breaks.  If it is too slow, the human is bored.  Either case prevents "immersion".  A sophisticated game design attempts tune this interaction.

Flow allows the user to try to create this balance manually by opting into higher difficulty levels.
Left 4 Dead's AI director dynamically adjusts dramatic moments, pacing and difficulty.
Tony Hawk games have a increases difficulty as a trick is maintained.
Games like Go and League of Legends use complex player matching algorithms to match opponents.

All of the above facilitate immersion, but they do not "have" or "create" immersion and they all use very different mechanics to create very different effects.

My plea is that game designers and critics focus on methods and mechanics that a game uses to facilitate an engaging feedback loop rather that labeling a game as "immersive".

Next Term:  Risk-Reward.

Role Playing Games

Role Playing Game:  It's a term that has been literally flogged to death by the last generation of game development.

I have no problem with it's application when used in a tabletop RPG.  Traditionally, this medium has the ability to have the player's choices affect the world in a meaningful way.  Video games typically must define stories ahead of time, rather than adjusting on-the-fly like an RPG premade module.  Video games lack a present-tense adjudicator however and they have difficulty interacting with a dynamic player.  They must limit interactions or buckle under the pressure of handling every contingency.

A good dungeon master can handle a shifting plot-line.

In videogames, the term RPG has come to mean a game with advancing statistics, but this is only one common point that these games have in common with older games like DnD which actually focus on role playing.

Furthermore, statistic advancement has bled into every genre of video-game. This term is now so diluted that it doesn't really mean anything anymore.  My take, the RPG designation should revert back to a tabletop term until videogames can catch up to a real life DM in ability to adjudicate autonomous decision making.

In Defense of Angry Birds

Over the last few years iOS opened the door for a new round of simpler games to help us continue define what successful video game are like.  Chief among them, Angry Birds has proven to be a great success.  

Angry Birds had no intellectual property or previously successes to look at, but it was a breakaway hit.  Here is a list of some of the things I think helped it become a real star.

1.  An extremely simple primary interaction mechanic.  Angry Birds didn't try to do anything crazy with the input device.  Press, drag, release.  It's important to note that games like Doodle Jump, Cut the Rope, and Tiny Wings all had a habit of keeping it simple.

2.  A motivating, but simple, level structure.  The first level in games like these should always show the simplest case that proves out the game.  Angry Birds first level is "fling the basic red bird at a pig".  It's simple, trivial, but still cute and easy.  Cut the Rope also starts with easy first levels with a single, easy to understand "tutorial" instruction.  

This is important.  

It requires the essence of the game to be distilled to a single action verb like "cut the rope" or "fling the bird".  Don't mistake this for a lack of potential complexity.  Levels become more complex as you linearly move through time.

3.  Increasing complexity.   Once you unlock the "yellow bird", the "blue bird" and the "bomb bird", you gain a form of player package complexity (namely complexity you use directly).  By this time you'll also be seeing different block and pig types to interact with.

4.  OCD Bonus.  This is a term borrowed from World of Goo, which took it very literally.  The idea is that a given level should have a "win more" condition.  This can be seen in World of Goo, Angry Birds, Peggle, Cut the Rope and many more game.

5.  Gimme Advantage.  My step-dad who works with cows and has never really played games once took my mom's iPad to beat a level she was struggling with.  Some great games like Tony Hawk never really get here, since mastering the game at an input level is impossible without holding the controller for hours at a time.  Angry birds is easy to understand by watching the person playing.  

Going Right

Boiling down games to their barest essential elements can yield results that are illuminating, jaded, fascinating and just plain misanthropic. Here are a few examples:

Mario is a game about going right.
So is Sonic, Mario 3, and the Lost Levels.
Pacman is about eating everything on your plate.
Oregon Trail is about how life isn't fair.
Batman Arkham Asylum is actually just Rock Paper Scissors.

Mostly, though, Mario had the best premise.  It's no surprise that Mario was a success when you consider how easy to understand it was.  It started with a surprising lack of opportunities .

1)  Go left.  This worked for a few steps, but really, no-one even tried this.
2)  Jump.  Great option, but it only really gets interesting in conjunction with the first goomba, the brick blocks, or the ? block.
3) Go right.  Unlike the other verbs, this one actually moves the screen.  AWESOME!

The first level also lets you go DOWN some pipes, but this is optional.

3D games suffer for this reason.  I'm not sure that they are capable of the saturation that "go right" style games are capable of.  In a 3D game, all goals are much more nebulous and understanding intensive.  "Defeat King BoBomb" or "Free the Chain Chomp" are good examples.  Fun, but comparatively cerebral.

Game or Toy

This question bugs me a bit, but it's important, so here goes.

Is ______ a game or just a toy?

Let's try SimCity, Minecraft, Falling Sand or any number of great electronic toys in this blank.

As a philosopher and a game designer, I should be really excited to talk about rewards structures, goals, and all sorts of things that are actually important in addressing this question.  Unfortunately, like most philosophical questions, there's a shortcut that's good enough.

If it's fun, if it's engaging, it's a game.  Sorry Raph, but that's close enough for now.  Any definition of game seems to leave little holes that slip through the cracks, or they tend to leave out strange interactions like Peek-a-Boo that most people regard as games.

It's a fun question, but it has the problem that most definition exercises have. The reader already knows, a posteriori what a game is, and any humble definition is a hollow attempt at some form of correlation with the understanding the masses have already formed.

For the future and current game designers, I would humbly ask both you and I to consider the Will Wright.  Wright thought that city planning is pretty neat and made an electronic experience to contain that truth.  Let's both think of games more as containers for something neat and novel, and less as rewards structures.

Nouns and Verbs. The Grammar of Level Design.

A star tops a lonely tree in a forest glade.  How would you get it down?  You can write anything and it will appear to help you.  This question was Scribblenauts pitch, and a great summary on what Scribblenatus did well.

The idea was to create a very complex game with a very simple, solitary interaction.  I remember playing this first level over and again.  Beaver, Lumberjack.  Termites.  Chainsaw.  The ways I could help my main character, Maxwell, to get to the star piece seemed infinite.

In the end, Scribblenauts did not have it so easy.  You could write any noun, but verbs on the other hand required the user to take action.  Sometimes this was simple, other times difficult.  How to attach the rope to my helicopter using a stylus.  How to move using a stylus.  (Many times I would do both and fall into a pit)!

Verbs, indeed, tend to be "the rub".  This is where a designer must focus so much of his time and energy.  The noun "goomba" in Mario holds within it an image of a walking blob.

What verbs might we conjure when thinking of a goomba however?  To name a few:

• Avoid
• Squash
• Hurdle

We must avoid the goomba while hurdling it or squashing it by landing on its head.  Turtles add a new verb: kick. 

Mario also contains player verbs such as jump, run and move.  Poweups give Mario a new verb, such as shoot.

All games teach us something.

In a great game, we spend time learning more and more about verbs.  What can our character do?  What can the player do?.  What can enemies and the environment do?

In games like Portal, we spend most of our time learning what you can do with portals.  Since the player has direct control of portals, Portal largely becomes a journey of self-discovery.

In Mike Tyson's punch out, the goal is more focused on learning how to defeat certain enemies.  The focus is more on "what can this enemy do" rather than "what can I do".

Tony Hawk has different areas you must perform tricks in.  Tony Hawk games encourage you to plan a "run" or sequence of moves through an area.  Learning about the environment encourages us to use certain moves at certain times.

There are many, many areas of discovery.  Identifying where these lie reveals the type of game.

The game designer must encourage the player to discover these interactions.  The real goal of level design is to allow discovery at a pace the user finds engaging.  One difficulty here is that too slow a pace may lead to boredom, while too fast a pace may isolate some players.

There is a temptation to refer to a game as "hardcore" as a means of forgiveness of bad pacing.  But a game's intensity has little bearing on this.  Many modern rhythm games such as Guitar Hero use difficulty levels to teach skills incrementally.  The goal is to leave the Expert level gameplay undiluted by considerations for players novice players while doing just the opposite for the Beginner level gameplay.

Games like Demon's Souls do a great job at satisfying players who already have a good understanding of how to navigate 3D spaces, while moving attacking and blocking.  At the time of this posting, it has obtained an impressive 90 metacritic rating.

This shows the devil of the rating system.  This game was made for reviewers.  Indeed, for a player who has the broad basis of gaming knowledge, this game offers a new level of challenge and discovery unseen in many of its contemporaries.

It does very little in the way of teaching basic controls and interactions to a novice player, however.

The challenge is how to quickly size up a player.  How to keep them at the perfect level of discovery and engagement?  Some simple games like Flow have attempted this, while games like Left 4 Dead allow the AI director to keep the right amount of pressure on the player.

The simple option of allowing the player to choose their own difficulty, for now, seems the best option.  Perhaps new innovation will occur in this area.

Until then, I will leave you with this plea.  Unfold discovery like a miser and tactician.  Dole out new challenges sparingly, and double back on old lessons, with a fresh twist.  The player will never notice it, but they'll stay engaged but curious as to what awaits them next.