Valve recently released some very interesting stats, including Death Maps, from HL2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2. What are Death Maps? Well, here’s one from the Gravel Pit map for TF2:

I can attest to dying (and killing) quite a few times near the C node in the lower-left corner. Looks like I’m not the only one.

As a designer, I find the TF2 stats fascinating – I would have loved to see similar info on how people played Civ4. Obviously, some of the results are unsurprising. Scouts get the most captures by a ratio of 2:1 over the next best class, the Pyro. Snipers get the most kills. Medics get the most assists. The points category has a little more balance as it includes a number of factors, but there is still a big spread between the Sniper’s 67 points/hour to the Engineer’s 41. The big question, of course, is what Valve should do with this info when balancing the game.

The idea of game balance is a tricky one because many people assume that, in a well-balanced game, all options should be equally valid. Rock, Paper, Scissor is the classic example of an “equally balanced” game, and bringing it up allows me to reference Sirlin’s excellent article on why RPS is a terrible game:

A simple rock, paper, scissors (RPS) system of direct counters is a perfectly solid and legitimate basis for a strategy game provided that the rock, paper, and scissors offer unequal risk/rewards.

Consider a strictly equal game of RPS. We’ll play 10 rounds of the game, with a $1 bet on each round. Which move should you choose? It makes absolutely no difference whether you choose rock, paper, or scissors. You’ll be playing a pure guess. Since your move will be a pure guess, I can’t incorporate your expected move into my strategy, partly because I have no basis to expect you to play one move or another, and partly because I really can’t have any strategy to begin with.

Now consider the same game of RPS with unequal payoffs. If you win with rock, you win $10. If you win with scissors, you win $3. If you win with paper, you win $1. Which move do you play? You clearly want to play rock, since it has the highest payoff. I know you want to play rock. You know I know you know, and so on. Playing rock is such an obvious thing to do, you must realize I’ll counter it ever time. But I can’t counter it (with paper) EVERY time, since then you could play scissors at will for a free $3. In fact, playing scissors is pretty darn sneaky. It counters paper—the weakest move. Why would you expect me to do the weakest move? Are you expecting me to play paper just to counter your powerful rock? Why wouldn’t I just play rock myself and risk the tie? You’re expecting me to be sneaky by playing paper, and you’re being doubly sneaky by countering with scissors. What you don’t realize is that I was triply sneaky and I played the original obvious move of rock to beat you.

In other words, there is no such thing as an “equally balanced” game which is still fun and not just random. Instead, fun games tend to have a “free market” of balance, which ebbs and flows based on the desirability of certain decisions. Scouts and engineers are always going to be important because they are, respectively, the purest offensive and defensive classes. Indeed, these two classes are also the two most popular. However, the Spy can use the sapper to destroy an Engineer’s turret pretty easily, and Pyros are good at lighting Scouts on fire. The Heavy gets the most kills but – as a slow mover – is vulnerable to the Sniper, who is in turn is vulnerable to the Demoman’s grenades. And so on.

The key is that the circle is not complete. Many of the counter units – the Demo, the Pyro, the Spy – do not have counters themselves because there is less incentive to play them in a vacuum. In Sirlin’s words, the classes offer “unequal risk/rewards.” If you play an Engineer, and no one on the other side is playing a Spy, your team is going to have great defense. On the other hand, as more and more people pick Engineers, the more attractive the Spy will become. Nonetheless, the most important goal is to have good defense, not to just be able to screw with the Engineers.

So, we are back at the question of what Valve should do with the stats. By definition, the counter units should never be more popular than the classes they are countering. Thus, it’s ok that the Engineer is twice as popular as the Spy. On the other hand, Valve should certainly learn something from these stats… but exactly what is a bit of a mystery.

So this happened over the weekend. As both Activision and Blizzard/Sierra have been corporate conglomerates for a long time, this move is unlikely to change much for the developers under the new umbrella company. However, one interesting side note here is that the Guitar Hero franchise is now owned by the world’s largest music publisher. I guess we won’t be seeing any U2, Prince, Guns N’ Roses, or (yeah, probably just dreaming here…) Velvet Underground masters on Rock Band anytime soon.

I recently finished The Long Tail, which posits that the Internet is changing the entertainment business by making the sale of niche products viable. In other words, iTunes can derive significant revenue from the extra million tracks it keeps around compared to a bricks and mortar retailer. This effect has yet to make a significant dent in the gaming market – although Live Arcade, Virtual Console, GameTap, and Steam are all quite promising – often because older titles aren’t in a standardized format, unlike older film, music, and words.

Nonetheless, an important Long Tail effect is occurring within the games industry, just along a different axis. It is the long tail of online gamers. For publishers of standard boxed games, the world outside of North America, Western Europe, and Japan – approximately 5 billion people – might as well not exist because of rampant and accepted piracy (see previous post). However, piracy is a near non-issue for online gaming because players have to connect with the game’s servers in order to get the real experience. Further, pricing can be easily adjusted for local markets so that WoW costs one thing in China and a very different thing in the U.S. The essence of this shift is that these 5 billion people are now on the map. I’ve personally seen Internet cafes in countries like Lebanon and Brazil filled with people playing WoW. I’m sure this pattern is repeating itself the world over.

Usually the Long Tail concept describes ignored media or products, which have small audiences but cumulatively add up to a big number. The vast majority of the 5 billion people outside the retail game market are not going to start playing online game, but if a tiny fraction of them does, it would still add up to a big number.

Take Travian, a Web-based PHP strategy game which has attracted huge international audiences by localizing to as many languages as possible. Checking the “Total Players” category on each country’s server, there are big numbers from some unexpected places:

• 160,000 Poles
• 130,000 Russians
• 320,000 Czechs
• 90,000 Slovakians
• 300,000 Turks

That’s a lot of people, and they have over 30 other localized servers, including ones for Chile, Portugal, Norway, Slovenia, and even Bosnia. It’s a whole new world!

When you can have a PolyStation?

Believe it or not, it doesn’t actually take CD’s. It’s actually a cartridge system. I saw this fine bit of trademark infringement while checking out a local game stand in Brazil, which is rife with piracy. Tons of PS2 and PC games were available for about $5 each, on CD’s burnt and labeled by hand. I couldn’t actually find Civ4 in the big pile of PC games and was unsure whether to feel good or bad about that. There is only a fledgling retail games business in Brazil – Sony won’t even sell legitimate PS2’s there – so it’s hard to fault gamers too much for relying on these shops. Nonetheless, the piracy is absolutely crippling the chances of Brazilian game developers to bootstrap themselves up by selling within their native market. The developers and students I talked to at the conference were jealous of the copyright protection we enjoy in the U.S. Most of them are turning to either mobile or online games as it is their only chance.

The SBGames Conference was a great experience. Many universities around the country are building game development programs, and the students have a strong entrepreneurial spirit. Brazilian developers have significant challenges to face, but I wish them the best of luck. It was a wonderful country to visit, with friendly people and great food. Brazilians sure do love soccer. Here is a picture from the baggage claim in Sao Paulo Airport.

Normally, the TV over the baggage claim shows the number of the flight and the origin city. Not in Brazil, though – they’d rather watch a local soccer match!

One question everyone in the games industry hears a lot is “How do I break in?” Typically, these types of questions can be split into two categories:

• How do I get a job making games?
• How do I get to be a game designer?

A number of industry vets have written up pointers on the first question. However, the second question is trickier. The typical answer is that no one gets to start as a game designer; it’s simply too competitive of a field and requires too much experience.

Well, that’s a matter of perspective. Jonathan Mak certainly is starting his career as a game designer. If you’re not able to go it alone, however, I think the question of how to become a game designer deserves a real answer.

First, I need to ask a question: Have you ever made a game (mods, scenarios, and board/card games count)?

If you answered no, then you should ask yourself if you really have what it takes to be a game designer. Painters start drawing when they are young. Musicians learn to play instruments in grade school. Writers start to write. Actors act. Directors direct. Young game designers make games. If it’s a passion – and it has to be a passion for you to succeed – then designing games is something that you have to do, not just want to do.

Designing games is not the same thing as playing them. The group of people in the world who enjoy making games is much, much smaller than the group of people who enjoy playing them. Everyone has to get a job eventually, so if you think playing games is fun, then designing them must be a pretty cool career, right? Not if you don’t love making them enough to spend 2-3 years of your life perfecting a single game concept, and not if you aren’t strong enough to learn from all the criticism which will be heaped on your design ideas.

Having said all that, here are some general tips on how to become a game designer.

1. Learn to Program

Games are a very broad category, often encompassing multiple art forms at once (words, music, visuals, etc.) Some games have strong story elements. Some are almost pure abstractions. However, the one aspect they all share is that they are based on algorithms. Code is the language of games, and a designer who knows how to code is always going to attract more attention than one who does not. Further, coding will allow you to make your own mods and prototypes that you can trumpet on your cover letter. Prospective designers without technical abilities are just like anyone else who thinks they can design games, stuck in the endless loop of needing experience to get a job and vice-versa. It’s possible to make that work, but the odds are not in your favor.

2. Join a Mod Team

It’s a given that you will be making games yourself that you can show off to potential employers (here are three simple games that I made before getting my first job). The next step is to join a mod team, offering your talents and spare time to help as best you can. There are two big advantages to working with a team. First, companies value teamwork highly, so being able to show that you made positive contributions in a team environment is a big plus. It doesn’t even matter if you were a leader or a follower, just that you were able to collectively pursue a single vision. Second, the modding world is getting more and more competitive, so team-built mods have a much better chance of attracting notice in the wider gaming community. Fall from Heaven is the most popular Civ4 mod, and it’s wiki lists 14 major contributors. Game developers check out mods all the time; imagine your odds if the person reading your resume has actually played your mod!

3. Expand your Influences

Back in school, I used to dread writing. Writing the world’s millionth essay on fate, injustice and sacrifice in A Tale of Two Cities felt more like drudgery than anything else. Now, of course, my attitude towards writing is much different – I am a blogger after all. It’s not necessarily that I now love to write, but I do love to write about game design. The trick is having something to write about. The same is true for game design. Games don’t exist in a vacuum; they need to share a historical or fictional context with their audience. Sid often says that all of his games are inspired by picture books he read when he was young, books on pirates or railroads or Civil War battles. I was truly inspired to work on Civ because of my love for history, and I am sure that I would have been far less successful as a designer if I started working in a context that interested me little (like, say, car racing). Your games can only be interesting if you have interests. Thus, expose yourself to as much of the world as possible. Read the Economist. Watch Casablanca. Travel to Japan. Play Settlers of Catan. Go to the Met. Join a soccer team. Study psychology. Listen to Kind of Blue. Video games alone will not be enough.

4. Work on Interface or AI

Assuming you can get your foot into the door at a game company (and do whatever it takes – Beyond the Sword co-designer Jon Shafer got his start at Firaxis because he just started documenting our Civ4 Python code on his own), getting to be an actual game designer is still not an easy task. However, there are two areas of game development that are not strictly thought of as “game design” but actually are: AI and interface. Personally, my path into game design came from working as an AI programmer on Civ3 . Because artificial intelligence – controlling the behavior of non-human agents in the game world – is so inseparable from gameplay, it is impossible to work on AI without having daily interaction with the designers. If you do a good job and make it clear that you are ready to accept extra responsibilities, it’s just a matter of time before you start working on the game rules themselves. This relation is even more true for interface work, which is on the very forefront of the user’s experience. Simply put, interface design is game design. The best part of the “interface track” to game design is that very few game developers want to work on the interface. Experienced programmers and artists often view interface work as being beneath them and only suitable for junior developers. Use this prejudice to your advantage and volunteer for the job. I guarantee there are a multitude of development houses right now looking for developers excited to work on interface design.

5. Design an Expansion Pack

Another nice side path into game design is working on expansion packs. The stakes are inevitably lower for these products, and your company’s official designers are probably already planning the Next Big Thing. Expansion packs are great opportunities to step forward and declare you ambition to be a designer. Companies want to see their employees develop into designers as these positions are usually the hardest to fill via hiring; expansion packs provide great, low-risk opportunities to train them internally. (I am surprised at how common it is for companies to farm out expansion packs to external developers; if a company has no junior developers itching for a chance to prove themselves as game designers, perhaps it has been hiring the wrong kind of people?) Working on the design for an expansion pack also has a huge benefit for you. Namely, you won’t be dealing with the challenge of “finding the fun” from a blank slate, which can create crippling pressure for a new designer hoping to prove herself. Instead, you can simply keep iterating the design, applying lessons learned from the game now being in the hands of of thousands and thousands of players.

6. Focus on Feeback

Game design is part talent and part skill. Noah Falstein has postulated that a disproportionate number of designers are INTJ’s, which suggests that some personalities are better suited to game design than others. (I too am an INTJ, especially strong on the N and J…) However, talent won’t get you all the way there; you’ll need to develop your design skills, and there is only one way to do that: listening to user feedback. My design education didn’t really begin until October 30, 2001, the day Civ3 was released, when many of my assumptions about how the game played out were proven completely false. A game is not an inert set of algorithms, it is a shared experience existing somewhere between the developers and the players. Unless you are constantly exposing your game to an audience, your game design is only theory. Push for your game to have private pre-alpha testing as much as possible – your design skills will only grow stronger with each successive exposure.

7. Study Primary Materials

Game design is a new field, and our universities are just beginning to grapple with how it should be taught. For the moment, the best option is to access as much primary material as possible. Sign up for Google Reader and subscribe to all the developer blogs as you can find. (You can start with Raph Koster’s blog and just work recursively.) Volunteer to work at GDC and then sit in on developer sessions. Listen to the audio commentary on the Orange Box. Read as many designer interviews as you can find; Richard Rouse III’s Game Design: Theory and Practice has excellent, lengthy interviews with Sid Meier, Will Wright, Doug Church, Steve Meretzky, Ed Logg, Jordan Mechner, and Chris Crawford. Speaking of Chris, his 1982 book The Art of Computer Game Design is, remarkably, still relevant today. (However, I would recommend starting with his more recent book, Chris Crawford on Game Design.)

8. Be Humble

This final suggestion is more of a philosophical one, especially as a number of, shall we say, counter-examples exist. However, I strong believe that personal humility is a key attribute for success in today’s game industry. A designer must accept that a majority of his ideas are not going to work. Further, game designers are always going to be bombarded with suggestions from the rest of the development team, some being gems and some not so much. Your job as a game designer is not to follow your muse or your ego to make the game “your way.” Your job is to choose a vision but also to let your team guide you there. Designers need to be humble listeners, not persuasive orators. Here’s a simple rule-of-thumb: if you ever find yourself explaining to someone why a prototyped game mechanic is fun, then your game might be in big trouble. Designers still need to be assertive and confident – or else no one will ever take your ideas seriously – but humility will give you the clarity to see things as they are, not how you wish them to be.

Not sure how many Brazilian readers I have, but I am going to speaking next week at the SBGames Conference in Sao Leopoldo. Latin America is one area that is usually off the radar for game developers, so I’m looking forward to learning more about the games market down there. I know Civ always had a sizable fan community in Brazil although I’m not sure how many of those fans actually bought legit copies of the game. As the PC gaming industry moves from boxed retail to online distribution, it’ll be interesting to see if these forgotten markets like Latin America, Russia, India, the Middle East, or even Africa become more important.

Gameplay is a word.

I have written a lot about game design over the years, and I have finally gotten sick of seeing the red squiggly little lines in Word show up every time I type “gameplay” – the closest thing we have to defining the essence of our art.

Here’s a list of words that don’t get the red squiggle from Microsoft:

plot
story
quest
character
dialogue
movies
graphics
polygons
textures
resolution
monsters
bosses
weapons
shields
spells
lives
victory
defeat
rewards
levels
cheats
walkthroughs
Xbox

…but no gameplay. Or replayability either. Hmmm…

Christopher Kline, lead programmer of Bioshock, just gave an excellent post-mortem on the project at a Montreal IGDA event. I always find it interesting to hear about design decisions which seem obvious from the outside but took multiple iterations to get right internally. Namely, the Little Sister characters started out as sea slugs and only ended up as young girls after a number of rewrites. Obviously, we feel a lot less empathy for slugs than children, and the game’s central moral choice – to harvest or to save the Little Sisters – would be a lot less meaningful without that empathy.

So, how did they start so far off the mark with the sea slugs? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the players would have a whole different game inside their heads once they are making a decision about a fellow human being? This question is key to understanding why good game design is so difficult. When you build a game from scratch, nothing is obvious. Games are only as good as the number of times your team can go through the design-implement-feedback loop. The sooner you start – and the wider a net you cast for play testers – the better.

Btw, does anyone know how I can embed this video without having it stick to the left margin?

Jonathan Blow, of Braid fame, recently gave an interesting talk at the FreePlay conference in Australia. (The video is available here.) His main point is that we are not asking ourselves “Why do I want to make this game?” Instead, we are usually asking “How” questions, such as “How do I get into the industry?” or “How do I get publishers to notice my game?” It’s an unusual way of looking at game development, and I bet most developers have never asked themselves this question.

I was asked a similar question a couple months ago by fellow Sporean (Sporite?) Chris Hecker – he asked if my game design had a theme. Was there a specific idea or experience that I was trying to convey to the player? The answer that came to me also answers Jonathan’s question. Namely, I want players of my games to feel that “no one choice is always right.” In other words, the challenge is adaptation, looking at a specific environment and finding a successful path. In Civ4 terms, if you start the game next to marble and stone, you might want to focus on wonders. If you start between Napoleon and Montezuma, you better make sure one of them is your friend. If you’re surrounded by jungle, better prioritize Iron Working; if you’re water-locked from the rest of the world, better get to Astronomy. Of course, in each game of Civ, multiple situations and challenges come at you at once, so it’s a question of prioritizing, deciding which opportunities to take advantage of and which ones to ignore.

So, why do I believe that it is important to understand that being flexible is better than being rigid? Why is it better to build a plan from your environment instead of forcing your strategy onto the world? The answer is my own philosophical background, my world view.

If the twentieth century has a single theme, it is that ideology itself is a dead-end, a failure. The growth of mass media enabled ideas to motivate people in ways never before imagined. Time and time again, these ideas allowed dogmatic leaders to demonize the “opposition,” which usually meant helping the strong to terrorize the weak. From the Nazi death camps to the Soviet gulags to China’s Cultural Revolution to America’s McCarthyism, the twentieth century was full of ideas that gave power to autocratic leaders not afraid to destroy the lives of those who resisted. Much as we hate to admit it, these leaders were supported by the masses of people who believed blindly in the ideas they represented. Before becoming a dictator, Hitler was initially elected to power. (“People will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.”) For much too long, Stalin had an embarrassing number of communist apologists all around the world. (“One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”) They are now primarily remembered as mass murderers.

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; in fact, people are more important than everything because they are, in fact, the only thing.

I don’t imagine that Civ4 tackles these issues as well as it could have, but I do know that my inherent distrust of ideologies does lurk under the surface of the game. Take the civics system, for example. Unlike previous Civ games, which let you could choose between broad labels like Democracy or Communism, Civ4 lets you build your government à la carte. You can mix State Property with Free Speech, or a Police State with a Free Market, or even Slavery with Universal Suffrage. Ideologues love labels because they dehumanize and obscure the opposition; both sides of the Cold War made liberal use of the terms “Communist” and “Capitalist” to differentiate each other, even though the United States government has slowly adopted communist programs piece-meal over the last century. Why exactly was the U.S. – a country with social security, medicare, welfare, a minimum wage, labor laws, and trade unions – fighting to keep Communism out of Vietnam? In fact, if you took a typical Red-fearing, trade-union-busting industrialist from 1907 and sent him 100 years into the future and explained how America now works, he would assume that the Communists won after all! Labels exist to separate and control people, and I wanted the civics system to encourage people to look behind the labels and at the actual choices a society needs to make when governing itself. It was no accident that I attached Mt. Rushmore to Fascism; carving mammoth statues of your country’s greatest leaders into a MOUNTAIN is fascist, even if we do not live under Fascism. Our own self-labeling as Democratic and Capitalist does not protect us from charges that our country is damaging the world when our policies hurt people, real people.

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

So, Ensemble recently released a trailer demonstrating the gameplay of Halo Wars, their much-anticipated RTS for the 360.

This existence of this game is officially a Big Deal. Ensemble is one of a handful of top-flight real-time strategy developers, and the console RTS nut has yet to be cracked, despite some noble efforts. Presumably, the opportunity to lock up a console RTS from Ensemble was one of the reasons Microsoft acquired Ensemble back in 2001. (Wow, has it really been that long?) Attaching it to the Halo franchise must have been icing on the cake.

I have been following the game’s news (little as there was) since it was first announced, and I had been encouraged by reports that the game would be focusing on very small squads, perhaps suggesting a rethink of RTS for the new platform. Thus, I am a little disappointed by the new video as Halo Wars appears to be another real-time strategy game focused on unit wrangling, which becomes significantly more stressful on a platform lacking a mouse and keyboard.

There are nice touches here, to be sure. The full-screen build menu nicely solves the modal problem so common to console games. The graphical detail is, of course, incredible. However, the firefight near the end of the video looks just like your standard RTS headache. Trying to handle that many units with a joystick in such a high-pressure situation looks like stress, not fun.

At the very end of the video, however, there is a tiny suggestion of just how fun an RTS could be on a console. The human side has some sort of orbiting uber-weapon they can use to wreck massive destruction on a specific target. The console interface for this system is a snap – it’s simply a huge reticule. Just aim and shoot. Sure, it’s a strategy game, but why not? The effect is not unlike the God Powers of Age of Mythology, Ensemble’s PC RTS from 2002. However, this mechanic is a perfect fit for the console. Personally, I was hoping that Halo Wars would focus more on these types of interactions – ones where the player is taking advantage of the joystick interface instead of fighting it. RTS’s truly need to be built from the ground up for consoles, without the expectation of controlling multiple groups of soldiers. Ensemble is one of the best developers in the business (Age of Kings was probably my favorite game of the ’90s), so they are more than capable of delivering an awesome title. They just need to unlearn some of what they have spent the last decade learning on the PC.

So, how should an RTS on the console work? I don’t know, of course, but there are a few games out there that hint at possibilities:

Moonbase Commander: The Psychonauts of the strategy genre, this brilliant game got overlooked because, ironically enough, it should have been a console game. The mechanics are hard to describe; the simplest way I can explain it would be as a cross between StarCraft and Tiger Woods. In other words, it’s a land-grab, space-themed strategy game using a golf-swing game mechanic. The remarkable thing about the design was that a) it was a blast in multi-player and b) it would have worked perfectly on consoles, the native platform for most golf games. (Technically, Moonbase Commander is a turn-based game, but it moves fast enough that it “feels” like an RTS. Further, one could tweak the rules easily enough to make it work in real time.)

Rampart: This arcade classic has some similarities to Moonbase Commander in that it is a strategy game that involves firing projectiles at your opponent – a very natural action for a console controller. Rampart also includes a Tetris-style puzzle for repairing your castle. I would love to see a more detailed modern version with co-op play where one teammate focuses on rebuilding while the other focuses on lobbing cannonballs at the enemy.

Defense of the Ancients: The most popular Warcraft III mod by far, DotA is the natural progression of the hero-based RPG gameplay Blizzard introduced in the core game. Instead of controlling an army, the player controls a single hero, on a team with three other human heroes and AI-controlled grunts. The AI units fight the battle using standard RTS rules while the human heroes wander around the battlefield, acquiring levels and loot, while trying to turn the tide of battle in their team’s favor. DotA is still an RTS, but the player’s interaction with the world is confined to a single hero unit, taking away the mental burden of handling large groups of units. Obviously, consoles handle avatar-based games quite well. Judging from the popularity of DotA, a console version of this RPG/RTS hybrid is a hit just waiting to happen.

M.U.L.E.: If you’ve read my writing over the years, you would know this one was coming. You could make a convincing case that M.U.L.E. was the first significant real-time strategy game ever made. You could also make a case that it is one of the greatest games ever made. It’s a game of cutthroat competition where you destroy your opponents not with missile but by controlling the market, driving up prices while reaping huge profits. The auction mechanic was legendary for creating head-to-head conflict. You don’t know triumph until you’ve made your friends pay through the nose for energy. Most importantly, M.U.L.E. was designed for a joystick, meaning that consoles would be a natural fit for the proven gameplay.

I hope this list emphasizes that console RTS’s do not need to play like PC RTS’s. There are always more games out there to make than we can possibly imagine, and I don’t feel like we have scratched the surface yet for strategy games.