I gave a short talk at GDC this year on the importance of understanding what your game has inherited from the past. They have already posted the video here (my part starts at 28:50):

Since my talk was short and scripted, I am also posting the slides and words for your reading pleasure!

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. It’s only when the catcher catches 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 the 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 a swinging Javier Baez, but watch what happens…

…the Nationals catcher Matt Wieters missed the ball between his legs, allowing Baez to make it safely 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 and advanced to the next round.

Thus, an obscure rule knocked the Nationals out of the playoffs. Where exactly did 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 Gutsmuths.

He outlined something called “English Base-ball”, 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 was about fielding the ball AFTER it was hit.

However, what happens when there is a terrible batter who can’t hit anything? In Gutsmuths’ game, he had a special rule for this situation – the batter gets only three swings. On the third swing, the ball is automatically in play whether it is hit or not. So, the batter will run to first 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 to first.

In 1845, the American Knickerbocker Base Ball Club wrote down their rules for the game, and some things had changed.

The pitcher was now much farther from the batter and threw the ball horizontally, which required the new position of catcher. However, they preserved the logic of the old Gutsmuths rule – that the ball was in play after the third missed swing – like old legacy code lying around.

The “strikeout” was actually emergent gameplay because after the third miss, the ball was now technically in play, and the catcher turned it into an out by catching the pitch. Thus, there was no actual difference between the catcher making an out from catching a popup and the catcher making an out from catching the pitch after a third missed swing. In each case, the ball was now “live” and the catcher made an out by catching the ball before it hit the ground.

However, they had to patch the game later because of an unintended consequence of not taking the time to make the strikeout an official rule. 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 were loaded, then the catcher could intentionally drop the ball, pick up it up again, step on home plate for an easy out, and then throw to third and on to second for two more. Therefore, in 1887, they added a new rule so that the batter would automatically be out 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. They 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 catcher dropped the ball, it should have been a strikeout… except, there were two outs, so we’re now back to the original dropped third-strike rule again.

They could have just rewritten the rules so that Three Strikes and 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 catchers 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 inheritance is obvious – Civ 6 inherited from Civ 5 which inherited from Civ 4, and so on.

Sometimes, a designer inherits from the games he or she played as a kid (Mario -> Braid, Myst -> The Witness)

Sometimes, games inherit from themselves. This is a timeline of the development of our economic RTS Offworld Trading Company.

You might make certain development shortcuts or hacks early on just so that you can get your prototype playable, but then 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 games in the same genre.

For example, although Offworld 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 RTSs before us – StarCraft, Age of Empires, etc. Thus, we had scouts, builders, transports, pirates ships, police 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 can be a trap – that 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 re-evaluate your entire design

Sometimes, the problem with a game’s inheritance can be at the conceptual level. Consider Spore…

…which was conceived of as a “Power 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 – not bad for a 10-year-old game.

Indeed, check out this chart, which compares Spore to the two most successful PC games released the same year – 2008. Spore currently crushes them, and keep in mind that 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 Ten concept, but from the editors inside the game – especially the creature creator, which dynamically animated the players’ creations.

However, these editors 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 had been able to ditch the Powers of Ten concept and refocus the game on the editors?

Here’s a classic case study in inheriting bad design. Creep denial is a mechanic in the original DOTA where you kill you OWN units to keep your opponents from getting gold and experience from them.

Indeed, creep denial is one of the focal point of high-level play in DOTA, to maximize your experience point gain relative to your opponents to outlevel them. However, it’s an open question whether this is actually GOOD design.

At the very least, creep denial is ACCIDENTAL design because DOTA inherited it from Warcraft 3 – this was simply how that game handled killing your own units. Indeed the fact that Warcraft 3 even ALLOWED killing your own units was likely an afterthought by the designers.

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 designers may have wanted many things to work differently, but they really didn’t have 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, League dropped it while DOTA 2 kept it.

This is from a Reddit thread on why creep denial is not in League. Don’t worry about reading this; I just want to point out how “RandomGuyDota” 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 a game’s design 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 their 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?

aahdin perhaps sums it up better than I ever could.

At some point, you have to step back as a designer and re-evaluate your inheritance. 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 the 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 which cannot be dropped – and that is taking the scope and complexity of an RTS but focusing the player’s control onto just one unit, which makes the game accessible to a larger audience by an order of magnitude. Everything else, EVERYTHING ELSE, is just accidental inheritance resulting from the genre’s origin as a Warcraft 3 mod.

In fact, although League doesn’t have creep denial now… they actually started with it.

These are League of Legend’s very first patch notes, published in July 2009. They inherited creep denial but killed it very early. So, although they got it from the original mod, they were willing to critically examine their game’s past.

In contrast, here is the history of creep denial from DOTA 1 to DOTA 2. You can see an awareness that creep denial might not be the best thing for the game.

Look at 6.82 – “Denied creeps now give less experience” – a clear sign that they are re-evaluating this feature by changing its rewards. However, instead of ripping it out, they are making small changes around the edges.

Basically, they are doing what baseball did when they patched the dropped third-strike rule by making it not apply in certain circumstances instead of just getting rid of the dumb rule itself.

Remember my questions on the value of creep denial? 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 the players to be spending their time than on this feature? Running this exercise with the dropped third-strike rule gets us to the same place – that it’s 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 2 by an order of magnitude – an almost three year head start is a pretty big one – but I also believe that Riot’s philosophy of re-examining their inheritance from the original DOTA mod, 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 that last hitting is bad design. Further, I don’t think it would be reasonable to expect Riot 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 denial so early in their development before doing so might have split community opinion.

We don’t always have the luxury of looking at the market to prove out our decisions, which is why re-examining a game’s inheritance is such a difficult and important issue.

Choosing to erase your inheritance takes real bravery. Sometimes, you have to 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 led you to where you are today, and then have the courage to drop the past.

(For more background on the dropped third-strike rule, check out this article.)

GDC is next week! Things are nowhere near as crazy as last year when we were pitching 10 Crowns to at least ten different publishers (which is a subset of the thirty different publishers that I had any level of discussion with for the game). We met with Starbreeze for the first time during the show and signed a deal with them a few months later. Looking forward to sharing more about the game!

This year, I get to just enjoy the show and stockpile some more podcasts. This time, the line-up is Alexis Kennedy, Jon Ingold, Andy Schatz, and Josh Sawyer. I’ve got over a year’s worth of recordings – coming soon, a three-parter with Brian Reynolds! – so look for these episodes in late 2019, I guess.

I am giving a ten-minute talk on baseball’s dropped third-strike rule and creep denial in DOTA. The mini-talk will be part of Richard Rouse’s annual “Rules of the Game” series, which has a pretty impressive lineup this year. Hope to see you there!

I gave a talk at GDC 2008 on developing the AI for the Civilization series. I highlighted the difference between “good” AI and “fun” AI and how writing AI for Civ is tricky because it fits somewhere between those two extremes. Unfortunately, the talk was not filmed, and because I always wanted to get it online, I went ahead and reconstructed it from the original audio and slides. If you give it a watch, let me know what you think!

I gave a talk at GDC 2010 on the interaction of theme and mechanics in games, specifically arguing that a game’s mechanics take priority over its theme when determining the game’s meaning. (The talk was based heavily on these columns written for Game Developer magazine.) Unfortunately, the talk was not filmed, and because I always wanted to get it online, I went ahead and reconstructed it from the original audio and slides. If you give it a watch, let me know what you think!

The Civilization series is turning 25 this year, and I join Sid Meier, Bruce Shelley, and Brian Reynolds at DICE to discuss the history and design of the franchise. A video of the panel is now available on YouTube.

I also joined Jon Shafer and Rob Zacny on Three Moves Ahead to discuss the Civ series, especially the ones that Jon and I designed: https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/episodes/civilization-at-25

GDC started posted lecture videos a couple months ago, and they recently posted my talk from 2014 on transparency in board game design. Enjoy the mohawk!

I am very late to post these links, but I have also been on a few podcasts since the release of Offworld:

• Memory Leak on My Career
• Game Wisdom on Offworld Trading Company
• Three Moves Ahead on Early Access
• Core Elements on Offworld Trading Company

Next week is GDC, and it’s going to be my craziest one yet, which is saying something. I’m doing a bunch of interviews about the release of Offworld. I’ll be trying to catch up with all the people in the industry I only get to see once a year. I’m going to be doing five new Designer Notes podcasts, with Bruce Shelley, Chris Avellone, Jamie Cheng, Nels Anderson, and George Fan. Finally, I am on a panel late Thursday afternoon on Early Access games, with which I now have direct experience. Hope to see you all there!

Description

With the advent of Kickstarter and Early Access, many teams are now developing their games in the open, providing beta, alpha, and even prototype builds to any player willing to buy in early. In this panel, four game developers who have direct experience with open development will share their experiences with this method.How often should the players be updated to the current version? How best to communicate changes and new features to players? How does the team filter the waves of online feedback? What happens when players express displeasure over a change? How important is it to remind players about what is still missing from the game? How do the project leads ensure that feedback from the players is heard and valued while making sure that the developers can still do their jobs? Once a game has been publicly available for so long, how to ensure that the actual release is still an important event?

Takeaway

Open development is a powerful tool for making better games, by breaking teams out of the feedback vacuum that leads to wasted time and misguided features. Developers don’t have to release games while holding their breath anymore.

Intended Audience

Anyone interested in how open development could improve their own games would benefit from the hard-won experience of these four panelists.

Last night, Frank Lantz posted “Parley”, in which he attempted to clarify, defend, and rework a previously highly-criticized post on Gamasutra, which in turn attempted to clarify, defend, and rework a previously highly-criticized post on TwitLonger. In other words, Frank is is stuck in a cycle that, judging from the first two comment on his post, is not going to end anytime soon.

Reading “Parley” hurt, for a few reasons. First, I think very highly of Frank and his work (indeed, I did a podcast interview with him just last month), so it is tough watching him deal with the anger and heat that his posts generated, which in his words, “made me flinch at how much offense I had caused.” Second, I am very sympathetic to almost everything Frank wrote, including his oft-repeated line that “Everywhere *we* look we see pretend worlds and childish make-believe, imaginary dragons, badly written dialogue and unskippable cutscenes in which angry mannequins gesture awkwardly at each other.” Indeed, I wrote Game Developer articles with titles like “Theme is Not Meaning” and “Should Games Have Stories?” so it’s not very hard to figure out where to place me within the tired and undead narrative-vs-mechanics debate. Finally, it’s very clear that Frank’s pieces are, at their core, an attempt to take back the value of games-as-systems from the group-that-will-not-be-named (or, to use Frank’s words, “philistines”) who like to use it as a blunt instrument:

I don’t want my ideas to provide cover or support to ignorance and aesthetic & cultural conservatism, and I don’t want to be associated with anti-progressive ideas.

I can feel Frank’s frustration that he is arguing with the people with whom he agrees while he is ignored by the people with whom he disagrees.

And yet…

There is a Miguel Sicart quote in Frank’s piece which jumps out and slaps me in the face:

For proceduralists, games have meanings that are prior to the act of playing the game, and somewhat determine the meaning of the game; there is an essence to any game, and that essence is to be found in the rules. In words of The Dialectic of Enlightenment: “For enlightenment is as totalitarian as any system […] for enlightenment the process is always decided from the start” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2010, p. 24). Much like Enlightenment, then, proceduralism is a determinist, perhaps even totalitarian approach to play; an approach that defines the action prior to its existence, and denies the importance of anything that was not determined before the act of play, in the system design of the game. [source]

I feel these words in my bones because I live them every day as a designer. In games, the worlds player inhabit are, by definition, limited, arbitrary, and artificial. The rules become the air the players breath, the water they drink, and the food they eat. For example, the brilliant Papers Please! created player empathy for an immigration officer – an immigration officer working for an oppressive, dystopian government, no less – by putting morally gray choices within the context of the character’s need to just do his job so that his family can eat and just stay warm.

I have always found the endless public debate on the theoretical dangers of video game violence to be endlessly bemusing because it misses the true danger of video games by a mile. Video game are dangerous, but not because they might inspire players to imitate the well-armed protagonists in absurd, fictional situations. Saying that what makes video games dangerous is that they might make the player violent is a bit like saying that what makes Mein Kampf dangerous is that the reader might write a terrible autobiography. A game’s ruleset is dangerous because, in Sicart’s words, it “defines the action prior to its existence, and denies the importance of anything that was not determined before the act of play, in the system design of the game.”

In other words, games make us all fascists and communists; anarchists and tycoons; kleptocrats and ascetics, so we better hope that games are not as powerful as we once dreamed they might be.

And yet…

What makes our totalitarian game rules so slippery is that often the dynamics that emerge from these rules are actually at odds with the beliefs of their creators. For example, Will Wright, an atheist, began making Spore as a game about evolution but somehow eventually shipped a game about intelligent design. Monopoly started life as The Landlord’s Game, a board game meant to teach about the evils of capitalist landlords, who unfortunately ended up being a lot of fun to play. In his 2014 GDC talk on The Novelist, Kent Hudson described a poignant moment of crisis in the game’s development when he realized that the game’s rules had evolved into something that said the exact opposite of his own beliefs about marriage and parenthood. Basically, the death-of-the-author folks should have put down their Proust and gone down to the basement to see what video games their kids were playing.

In college, my dream was to make games about history, that made the past real in ways books never could. Thus, I started my career with my absolute dream job when I joined Firaxis to work on Civ 3. Five years later, when I shipped Civ 4, my old dream was dead (although, to be fair, a new one had started). Civilization was supposed to be a game about history but – despite my best efforts – many of the lessons it taught were somehow the opposite of what I actually believed: that revolutionary change could be controlled, that the orientation of a society flowed directly from its leader, that history was a story of continual, upward progress, and that “upward progress” could even be defined.

Games slip away from their designers because water finds a crack. The problem, so to speak, is the players, who quickly understand games far better than their designers ever could. Players are endlessly inventive, reworking forgotten chinks in the rules into dominant strategies, turning an AI’s predictable patterns against itself, and modding games into something almost unrecognizable to the original creators.

If games are about anything, they are about the futile effort of designers to create totalitarian worlds while players gleefully slip through their fingers.

And yet…

I am still hard at work, trying to build new cages for players to break. My new game, Offworld Trading Company, is set on Mars, but it is not about Mars. It is an economic game, but considering my understanding of economics can be summed up as “buy for a dollar, sell for two,” I can’t really claim the game is about economics. Instead, the game is about understanding that there is never one right choice, that success depends on seeing the world clearly, without prejudice, and then adapting. Indeed, I gave a similar reason back in 2007 to the question of why I made Civ 4:

I personally despise ideologies because they inevitably lead to a belief that there is one set of solutions to the world’s problems. One set of solutions means all other options are heretical, which means they must be controlled. Ideologues put ideas above people, which is the beginning of terror and oppression. People are more important than ideas.

Of course, discouraging rigid thinking is not the only reason I make games, but it is the best answer I can give to [the] question. If I ever get to release my dream strategy game, this idea will be clearly be at the center of the design.

I don’t know if my games can really kill fascists, but if Woody Guthrie thought his songs could do so, I don’t see why we can’t aspire to the same goal.

I created one of those new-fangled Steam curator pages. Here are my comments:

Atom Zombie Smasher – A well-scoped RTS that keeps everything important and nothing else. The bizarro atmosphere helps too.

Brothers – A beautiful experience, and few game narratives integrate their actual game mechanics into the story so well.

Crusader Kings 2 – Requires an upfront commitment, but no historical game has ever made PEOPLE so important.

Frozen Synapse – Because turns can be submitted in any order, this game is ideal for asynchronous play.

FTL – A perfectly paced game, of just the right length to enable consequence (by being short enough) and progression (by being long enough).

Magicka – A hilarious game, especially in multiplayer. Wonderful joy of discovery if the player stays away from walkthroughs.

Mark of the Ninja – A masterpiece in transparency. Exposing the details of a stealth game (as well as limiting it to 2D) creates amazing intentional play.

Papers, Please – Games have immense powers of empathy, and no game does a better job of creating unexpected empathy.

Spelunky – A monument to the ability of video games to create new worlds from scratch; the last game this amazing was Seven Cities of Gold (for its time).

Steel Storm: Burning Retribution – Simply feels great to play; this game gets every little detail of twitch right.

Swords and Soldiers – 2D? 3D? How about a 1D RTS? This game is a lesson in how simplification leaves room for greater engagement with the actual game mechanics.

Thief Gold – Did you know the original Thief is on Steam? Well, the original Thief is on Steam.

Thirty Flights of Loving – Apparently, this game was made by the same guy who made Atom Zombie Smasher. I assume that’s impossible, however, as nobody can be that versatile.

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon – Get a few friends together, team up on Terrorist Hunt, thank me later.

Unity of Command – Remarkably accessible for a wargame. The supply mechanic creates an important perspective on the battles.

I was very pleased to hear that the GDC folks posted my 2014 talk for free on the Vault, so everyone can watch it now. I was actually quite surprised during the talk that my content only lasted 40 minutes – I had well over 100 slides, and the presentation was a much expanded version of my 15-minute mini-talk from PRACTICE. The downside is that I incorrectly thought that I wouldn’t have the time to address games that run counter to transparency, including dynamic ones such as Europa Universalis or Out of the Park. The upside is that plenty of people brought up this omission in the Q&A, and I did the best I could on the spot to clarify the value of transparency for different types of games. (I’d point to my answer to Randy Smith – who helped design Thief‘s arrow grammar! – at the 49:00 mark.)

Basically, games like EU are so complex that it’s almost impossible for them to have a transparent rule system because the explanations would probably have to be done as algorithms. Nonetheless, for dynamic, rules-driven games, transparency is still a goal to reach towards; in Crusader Kings 2, the characters’ attitudes towards the player character are broken down in explicit detail (“Long Reign: +8, Liege is Just: +10, Desires Duchy of Ostlandet: -20”) to open a window into a very complicated algorithm. For Civ 4, we similarly exposed the diplomatic AI by detailing all the factors that determine a specific ruler’s attitude towards the player, which increased player comfort significantly. I mentioned that system in the talk, but what I failed to mention is that the designers of Civ 5 tried to move back to a more opaque system by hiding these numerical values but had to patch it back in because players felt too lost dealing with the AI. Ultimately, transparency is a specific game design aesthetic that may not right for all games, especially ones which value mystery, discovery, and perhaps even player frustration, but if a game is meant to be dynamic and replayable, then transparency is a very important goal.