The following was published in the Nov 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine…

“You have to design for success, plan for failure, and then know how to rebound from that failure. Our 1.0 version of AI War was successful but not wildly so. Little irritations added up and annoyed people enough that they stopped playing. When the public gets the game, they find problems that you never did, and you must devote time to fixing them. Once you do, the fans are happy, and the game becomes more successful than it would have been otherwise. You have to eat a lot of humble pie, but after awhile you get really used to that, and the stuff that used to give me a hard time emotionally when I was first starting out is just par for the course now. I don’t even notice. It’s just feedback, and whether it’s viable or not determines if it goes in the ‘yes’ bucket or the ‘no’ bucket or the ‘maybe’ bucket.”

– Chris Park, designer of AI War: Fleet Command, from the Three Moves Ahead podcast, Episode 37

To be a game designer is to be wrong. Ideas do not work out as planned. Certain mechanics prove tedious instead of fun. Players spend their time focusing on the “wrong” parts of the game. The original vision starts to slowly slip away as it come into contact with the gamer.

Furthermore, designers are often bombarded with suggestions – from the rest of the team, from vocal fans, from well-meaning friends, and from dreaded executive fly-bys. Faced with such a deluge, the natural instinct is often to defend the design. These suggestions are simply trials and tribulations to be overcome so that you, the designer, can continue making the game “your” way.

The problem is that processing feedback is a fundamental part of the game design process, as important as the original vision itself. Games are not static objects that can be observed or judged in a vacuum. Instead, they live in the minds of our players, which means that each one might experience the game in a different way.

Thus, designers need to be great listeners more than great persuaders. If a designer ever finds herself needing to explain why a player should be having fun when he is not, something has gone seriously wrong. Instead, designers must listen to players with a great sense of humility, with an understanding that this feedback is the only way to remove the fog which separates the game in the designer’s head from the one that is actually playable.

Ultimately, games must speak for themselves, so designers need to learn not to rely on the crutch of their own enthusiasm and communications skills to sell their ideas. Dropping one’s ego to learn from the criticism can be an emotional challenge for designers who identify too closely with their original vision. Instead, they need to place faith in the design process itself, not in their inevitably doomed first draft.

Listen to the Team?

Thus, gathering and assessing feedback is one of the crucial skills for a modern game designer. The first, and sometimes only, source of feedback is the team itself. Any committed development team should be ready and eager to play its own game and provide the designer crucial early feedback on what works and what doesn’t. However, feedback from the team carries significant limitations.

To begin, the team lives with the game for months, probably even years, far beyond an average player’s time with the game. As veterans of development process, they can play on auto-pilot, making themselves blind to unintuitive mechanics or confusing UI. Developers quickly lose the ability to see the game objectively, often believing that the game is either in better or in worse shape than it really is.

Further, team members are often hired for their special skills – 3D animation, sound design, network optimization – and not because of their passion for the product itself. They might forget some of the simple joys that new players will still experience when starting the game. More dangerously, they might burnout on the game altogether and begin to resent the intense demands of your most vocal community members.

Trust the Community?

The community, of course, can be an overflowing cauldron of ideas and suggestions. When developing Civilization 3, our most active fansite presented us with “The List” – an exhausting, 200,000 word tome detailing their expectations for the upcoming game. Wading into the forums can be an overwhelming experience for most designers, requiring a thick skin as posters rip apart their development choices.

However, no one understands a game better than players who are dedicated enough to join a community and make the game a part of their social life. These gamers might play for hundreds of hours, gaining knowledge of mechanics and systems that elude even the designers themselves.

The challenge with forums is that what players say and what they actually do are often two different things. In a talk at GDC 2011, Ben Cousins described just such a situation with the free-to-play online shooter Battlefield Heroes. The game had not been generating enough revenue, so the team reworked the monetization system – making it harder for non-paying players to “rent” premium items and then beginning to sell these items directly for cash.

The change caused an uproar in the forums; within a week, a 4,000-post thread developed decrying the changes, with many veterans pledging to quit the game. Exacerbating the debate was the fact that Cousins had publicly declared years earlier that “we have no plans to sell weapons.” The press picked up the controversy, leading to articles such as “Battlefield Heroes is Practically Ruined” on Kotaku.

The metrics, however, told a very different story; revenue tripled with no discernible decrease in active users. It is hard to tell if the posters who pledged to quit were actually lying or not, but they were clearly not representative of the average player. Cousins dug deeper and found that only 20% of players had ever visited the forums and that only 2% had ever actually posted a message.

Furthermore, compared with the silent majority, community members had a much higher conversion rate (27% vs. 2%) and ARPPU ($110 vs. $32). Thus, the thoughts expressed on the forums were an inaccurate and misleading representation of the player base’s actual feelings. The posters were perhaps making threats to change the game as they wanted (to save themselves money) instead of revealing their actual beliefs.

The Heroes experience highlights the importance of metrics as a secondary source of feedback. Watching what players actually do can be as important as listening to what they have to say. Still, metrics have their limitations as no set of numbers is going to help the designer understand why people have stopped playing the game.

While measuring how often unit X is built instead of unit Y provides a valuable tool for balancing an RTS, it’s not necessarily clear that making the two units equally viable will actually make the game more fun. Metrics are great at answering specific objective questions that require real data – what difficulty level is most commonly picked first? – but to learn whether a game is actually fun, the designer’s only option is to find out what players are feeling by listening closely to what they are saying.

Find Your Voices

Thus, designers are left with the conundrum that their best source of feedback – the vocal fan community – is not only an unreliable source of information, but one that might be actively trying to mislead the developers. Perhaps most frustrating is the possibility that the more forum posters are aware that the team is listening, the more likely they are to lie to the designers to get what they want. MMO developers are familiar with the player type who will always argue that his or her character’s class is woefully underpowered, all objective evidence to the contrary.

This problem can be handled with a more proactive approach to gathering fan feedback. Not all fans are the same – a precious few are able to see the forest and provide accurate feedback that speaks to the health of the game’s overall experience. While developing Civilization 4, we cultivated just such a group of enlightened fans to provide feedback we could trust.

These players had a history of being reliable sources of information during the post-release development of Civ 3, and we provided them with a special, private forum for direct communication with the team. This group became our primary source of feedback both before and after release, providing us with much greater certainty about which ideas were working and which ones were not; Civ 4 would have been significantly differently – and certainly worse – without their input.

These groups must be managed carefully, however, to prevent the members from developing a sense of entitlement or superiority over other players. For this reason, the group’s existence should be, if possible, a closely guarded secret. Further, the developers must try their best to find a representative group of players, perhaps looking outside the forums for new members.

Listen Early, Listen Often

Another accurate way to gather feedback is with “Kleenex” testing, so named because players get access to the pre-release game once and are then thrown away. The valuable lessons here come from players’ initial reactions to the game, before they become accustomed to UI holes or gameplay quirks. Valve famously runs these tests regularly by gathering up random players from local game stores.

However, depth testing is also important, which can only be achieved by giving players continual access to the game before release, to explore and experiment with the game’s systems and mechanics. Big publishers often have trouble giving fans early access to their games, for fear of leaking cracked versions to pirate sites or spreading confidential information to rival publishers.

Indies developers actually have a big advantage here because their greatest danger is not security, but obscurity. Thus, many recent indies (Spelunky, Desktop Dungeons, The Wager) have released early versions of their games, generating both marketing buzz and valuable feedback.

Some indie games, such as Frozen Synapse, Minecraft, and Spy Party, have even generated revenue by selling access to these alphas. This option gives teams the chance to bootstrap their way along while also learning how the game performs in the wild, a great option to help fight the long odds that most indies face.

The following was published in the May 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine…

In a GDC speech from March 2010, ngcomo’s founder Neil Young described the advent of free-to-play gaming in the West as “the most significant shift and opportunity for [game developers] since the birth of this business.” Since then, more and more game developers are making this transition.

In June, Turbine announced that it’s profitable, subscription-based MMO Lord of the Rings Online would adopt a free-to-play model, based on the success of a similar change with their MMO Dungeon and Dragons Online, which increased the game’s revenues five-fold. In November, EA announced Battlefield Play4Free, a downloadable, free-to-play shooter built on the Battlefield 2 engine, meant to improve on the success of the similar, WW2-based Battlefield Heroes. In February of this year, Riot Games, developer of the popular free-to-play strategy arena combat game League of Legends, was purchased by Chinese games behemoth Tencent for $400 million, signifying the massive revenue potential of the format.

Indeed, few major franchises are not being considered as raw material for a transition to free-to-play; the revenue potential is simply too large to ignore. In March, at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2011 Consumer Conference, Activision CFO Thomas Tippl stated that, shockingly, Starcraft 2 was not worth the effort from a financial perspective. Although the game sold very well, grossing over $250 million dollars, the lack of any ongoing revenue coupled with the high development costs meant the final return on investment was simply not high enough. Ultimately, publicly-traded companies, like Activision, must invest their money in projects with the highest potential profit margins and, increasingly, free-to-play games are beginning to dwarf single-purchase games in that regard.

Neil Young’s own ngmoco provides an interesting example of how this shift can change a company’s priorities. The smartphone developer’s first major hit was Rolando for the iPhone, providing the young startup with its first major revenue stream. However, ngmoco soon discovered that although they could make modest profits on singe-purchase mobile games, their most profitable releases were free-to-play games built with in-app purchases. Within a month of release, their kindgom-builder We Rule became the highest grossing “free” game on iOS devices.

Understanding that free-to-play games would be the only way to scale their business, ngmoco cancelled single-purchase games, including the guaranteed money-maker Rolando 3, in favor of games which fit the freemium model. In Young’s words, “If we can’t make the game free-to-play, we’re not going to release it.” The strategy worked as his young company was purchased by the Japanese social gaming giant DeNA in late 2010 for an impressive $400 million.

A New Design

Today’s game designers will increasingly hear similar mandates from their own management teams. However, shifting to free-to-play design is not a straightforward process. Indeed, designers of single-purchase games have a much easier job as they only have to focus on one thing: making the player’s experience as much fun as possible. In contrast, designers of free-to-play games must make the game engaging enough to attract and retain players while also holding back enough of the experience to drive microtransactions.

The energy model is a proven mechanic that maintains this balance for many free-to-play games, including my own Facebook-based RPG Dragon Age Legends. Under this model, certain player actions, such as starting a battle in Legends, consume a set amount of energy. Once a player uses up all of her available energy, these actions are unavailable until the energy regenerates, commonly at the rate of one point every five minutes.

Thus, with a full energy bar, the player can typically fight four or five battles before getting stuck. At that point, he can either decide either to let the energy recharge naturally, which might take two hours for an empty bar, or to purchase an instant refill with real money. While they still have energy remaining, free players have access to the full game experience – the battles in Legends do not work differently for paying players – but they have to deal with some impatience after they hit the energy gate.

In single-purchase games, designers would rarely build a game mechanic that intentionally tests the player’s patience; in fact, that is a hallmark of bad game design. Thus, free-to-play games upend many of the assumptions that designers bring to the table from traditional single-purchase design. Indeed, this break is creating a great deal of anxiety within the game design community as many developers feel that their original motive for making games – to bring players as much fun as possible – is now in danger. Noted independent designer/programmer Chris Hecker recently echoed his own concerns:

The problem I have with free-to-play is business types rarely talk about what you’re giving up by going to that model.  Microtransactions warp game designs, not necessarily for the better or for the worse, but they certainly make the designs different. If the profitability of microtransactions makes it so most companies go towards this model with their big-budget titles, then that is a shame and a loss, because there are lots of designs that are interesting and important to the art form to explore, but that don’t lend themselves to microtransactions and free-to-play. I hope single-purchase, “complete experience” games don’t go away; not because I’m old and curmudgeonly–although I am–but because there is an entire subspace of game design there that still needs to be explored.

A New Hope

League of Legends, one of last year’s most successful strategy games, provides an interesting case study which ultimately shows that Hecker’s primary concern – the design space explored by single-purchase games could be lost – is valid. The game is commonly held up as the best example of free-to-play design done right. Not only has League of Legends been both wildly popular and commercially successful (see the $400 million purchase above), the game has also garnered critical acclaim, sweeping the first-ever Game Developers Choice Online Awards. Most importantly, however, the game’s business model has been accepted peacefully by the core gamer community, one which typically views microtransactions with suspicion.

Because Leagues of Legends is a highly-competitive, team-vs-team arena combat game, microtransactions which could give one side an advantage over another would be wholly unpalatable to a large portion of the Western audience. Instead, the game only hands out bonuses to players who have invested large amounts of time in battle.

The meta-economy employs a dual-currency model common to many free-to-play games, with a time currency (IP) which is earned through play and a cash currency (RP) which is bought with real money. Items which can boosts a player’s abilities (Runes) can only be purchased with the time currency (IP), providing players a strong incentive to keep player to earn more IP. Cosmetic items, which only change the player’s appearance, can only be purchased with the cash currency (RP), which simply appeals to a player’s pride or vanity.

The player can also buy a temporary boost with RP which increases the rate IP is earned. This microtransaction present a time-vs-money question to the player; she can spend some money now to earn Runes faster, or she can simply play some more games to earn the extra amount of IP required.

Still, the most interesting microtransaction is the character unlocks. League of Legends descends directly from the popular Warcraft 3 mod Defense of the Ancients, in which the player gives up control of an army of units for control of a single hero. The mod’s depth came from the different combination of hero types – 103 in the current version. League of Legends has a similarly large stable of “champions” – 72 as of March 2011.

However, these 72 champions are not all available at all times. Instead, a rotating selection of around ten are available each week, which means that players have only limited control over which champion they can use. This cycle can greatly upset a player who has become quite good with a specific champion but who must now learn a new one. Some players enjoy the challenge of mastering a new set of skills and attributes, but many others prefer to keep winning with a champion that works for them.

Accordingly, League of Legends gives players the option to unlock champions permanently, with either IP or RP. Like the energy mechanic common in social games, the character unlocks are charging players for their impatience. Can they wait weeks until their favorite champion is again available for free or days until they earn enough IP to buy the unlock, or will they just spend some real money right now to get back into the action with their favorite character? This model works well for both gamers, who are getting an incredible experience for free, and for the developer, who can rely on player impatience to generate revenue.

Nonetheless, single-purchase games would never be designed this way, with players limited to a small sub-set of possible characters each week. (Indeed, the single-purchase strategy game Command and Conquer 4 was roundly criticized for forcing players to “earn” the right to build certain units over multiple play sessions.) Although League of Legends could make the transition to a single-purchase game by simply unlocking the majority of champions immediately, not all single-purchase games could just as easily make the transition to free-to-play.

For example, StarCraft 2 is not so easy to imagine as a free-to-play game. The franchise is a model of a tight, elegant ruleset, with no extraneous parts or redundant options to muddy the design. Indeed, even with the new units added for the sequel, Blizzard removed enough old elements to keep the unit count down near the original 12 per race. Indeed, few reviewers even felt the need to comment on the lack of a fourth race to differentiate the two versions.

Could StarCraft 2 follow the League of Legends model? Perhaps Blizzard could allow everyone to play the Terrans for free but only offer the Zerg and the Protoss to paying players? This model would probably fail both for business reasons (not enough opportunity for repeatable purchases) and for design reasons (having 90% of the players forced to use Terrans would destroy the balance). Anything more aggressive – like actually selling extra siege tanks during battles – would violate the concept of a fair playing field, a core tenet for strategy games.

An Old Lesson

Thus, if Activision believes that making a game of StarCraft 2’s scope is not worth the effort, will this type of tight, intricate design simply disappear? Although microtransactions are still relatively new in Western video games, they are not new for physical games in the West. The emergence of Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games (CCGs) in the ‘90s showed the power of microtransactions for encouraging players to make recurring purchases within the same game system over many years. The makers of CCGs have been dealing with this new world which necessarily mixes business and game design at least a decade before us.

However, the wild success of CCGs – Magic still regularly grosses over $200 million yearly, which dwarfs non-collectible card games – did not send single-purchase, “complete experience” physical games into extinction. Indeed, the card and board game industry is more diverse and innovative than ever before.

In fact, two of the most successful card games of the last few years have taken a mechanic directly from Magic, adapted it to fit the format of a single-purchase game, and found commercial and critical success. Dominion turned the meta-game of a CCG into a traditional card game by having players build and play a deck of cards during the game. 7 Wonders turned drafting, a folk method for distributing CCG cards, into a game by conducting a single draft after each individual card play.

These examples of successful single-purchase games emerging from the shadow of Magic prove this format can still thrive in a world with microtransactions. Indeed, these designers brought some of the gameplay of Magic to a new audience simply because not everyone is ready to buy only a small part of a card game, which will never be complete. Many gamers will never be ready for CCGs, just as many gamers will never be ready to spend money on a free-to-play game.

Thus, if every video game adopts microtransactions, many players will be left behind who are looking for a different type of experience. Microtransactions DO warp the game design towards a model that supports recurring purchases. However, this shift leaves a great deal of space behind as a vacuum ready to be filled by smaller publishers and developers who are looking for great opportunities. The profits from single-purchase games can easily justify the development costs for teams that take their budgets seriously, and these profits can only go up as more and more big publishers abandon this still fertile design space.

The following was published in the March 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine…

“This is what games are for. They teach us things so that we can minimize risk and know what choices to make. Phrased another way, the destiny of games is to become boring, not to be fun. Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination.”

– Raph Koster, A Theory of Fun

Many players cannot help approaching a game as an optimization puzzle. What gives the most reward for the least risk? What strategy provides the highest chance – or even a guaranteed chance – of success? Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.

Games, however, are so complex that it is difficult to anticipate exactly how players will optimize a game until after release, once thousands bang away at the game and share their ideas with each other online. Often, designers don’t even understand their own games until they finally see them in the wild.

A phrase we used on the Civilization development team to describe this phenomenon is that “water finds a crack” – meaning that any hole a player can possibly find in the game’s design will be inevitably abused over and over. The greatest danger is that once a player discovers such an exploit, she will never be able to play the game again without using it – the knowledge cannot be ignored or forgotten, even if the player wishes otherwise.

Civilization 3 provides a simple example with “lumberjacking” – the practice of farming forests for infinite production. Chopping down a forest gives 10 hammers to the nearest city. However, forests can also be replanted once the appropriate tech is discovered. This set of rules encourages players to have a worker planting a forest and chopping it down on every tile within their empire in order to create an endless supply of hammers. However, the process itself is tedious and mind-numbing, killing the fun for players who wanted to play optimally.

Tank-Mages and Infinite City Sleaze

One of the dangers of players looking to optimize a game is that a single dominant strategy will emerge that drowns out all others. In the MMO world, the shorthand term for this predicament is the “tank-mage” – a reference to Ultima Online, in which certain hybrid class builds could both wear heavy armor and cast powerful damage spells.

Thus, the character served as both the damage absorber (the “tank”) and the damage dealer (the “mage”), displacing most other possible character builds. Almost every MMO has experienced some version of the tank-mage as players try to find the optimal build for all situations.

The Civ series has its own version of the tank-mage – the strategy of spamming settlers for “infinite city sleaze” (or ICS), a bane of the franchise from the beginning. The essential problem is that 50 size-2 cities are more powerful than 5 size-20 cities as a number of bonuses are given out on a per-city basis. For example, every city gets to work its home tile for free, which means that a size-2 city works 3 tiles with only 2 citizens (1.5 tiles per citizen) while a size-20 city works 21 tiles (only 1.05 tiles per citizen).

The problem is that while ICS makes beating the highest difficulty levels trivially easy, handling 100 cities is a management nightmare. Players who pursued this strategy – or even less extreme versions of it – were always aware that they were breaking the game but often simply couldn’t stop themselves.

Armed with knowledge from the earlier versions of the game, we were able to counter ICS ahead of time with Civ 4 by adding a per-city maintenance cost that scaled with the total number of cities. Thus, building too many cities too early crippled a player’s economy, killing ICS at long last.

The reason to kill tank-mages and ICS is that a single, dominant strategy actually takes away choice from a game because all other options are provably sub-optimal. The sweet spot for game design is when a specific decision is right in some circumstances but not in others, with a wide grey area between the two extremes. Games lose their dynamic quality once a strategy emerges that dominates under all conditions.

Undervaluing Time

When presenting players with a choice, games typically pair a specific reward with a certain level of risk. When gamers discover that one play style offers a trickle of reward for little or no risk, they will inevitably gravitate towards that degenerate strategy.

In other words, players will trade time for safety, but they risk undervaluing their own time to the point that they are undermining their own enjoyment of the game. A classic example is the skill system from Morrowind, which rewards players for repeating any activity. Running into a wall for hours increases the Athletics skill while jumping over and over again increases the Acrobatics skill. Many players couldn’t stop themselves from spending hours doing mindless activities for these cheap rewards.

Another example of players undervaluing their own time comes from growth, production, and research overflow in the Civ series. Every turn, cities produce food, hammers, and beakers, filling up various boxes. Once these boxes are full, new citizens, buildings, units, and technologies are created.

For example, if a civilization produces 20 beakers per turn, and Writing costs 100 beakers, the technology will be discovered after 5 turns. However, if the same civilization produces 21 beakers per turn, the box for Writing will contain 105 beakers at the end of 5 turns. In that situation, after Writing is discovered, the extra 5 beakers are thrown away so that the box will be empty when the player starts researching Alphabet on the next turn. Players quickly realized that when they came close to finishing a tech, they could adjust their tax rate so that no beakers would be wasted (because those beakers are all potential gold at a different rate).

A similar dynamic exists with food and hammers for city growth and production. Thus, the game’s rules encourage players to visit every city every turn to rearrange their citizens to ensure no food or hammers will be lost. This micro-management is actually a somewhat interesting sub-game, but clearly not how the designers want the players to be spending their time as it completely bogs down the game. (We solved this in Civ 4 by simply applying the overflow food/hammers/beakers to the next citizen/unit/building/technology.)

Players who adopt this strategy often refer to the game as being heavy on “micro-management” because they can no longer resist playing the game without squeezing every last drop out of their cities. The problem is even worse in multiplayer as gamers who don’t micro-manage their cities will always fall behind in the race for more growth and production.

The designers don’t want people to play this way; nonetheless, the rules inadvertently encourage it. Again, designers often don’t understand their own games as well as the players do. The problem with a gamer undervaluing his own time is that, while the easy rewards may feel good at first, eventually the amount of time required will slowly seep away the fun per minute, until the game begins to feel like a grind.

Good Exploits?

However, designers can go too far by trying to remove all exploits from a game. Often, the right choice depends upon the game’s context. Does the exploit drown out all other play styles, or is it a fun, alternative way to play? Does the degenerate strategy create an endless grind, or is it a quick shortcut for players who need a little help?

The famous, endless free lives trick from Super Mario Bros. – in which the player bounced a turtle shell repeatedly against a block staircase for long strings of 1UP’s – was actually not a bug but a feature the team included on purpose. In exchange for mastering a small dexterity challenge, players can quickly mine all the free lives they need to progress in the game. Discovering and abusing a hole in a game’s design can be a fun experience – giving the player a unique sense of mastery – as long as the exploit doesn’t ruin the game for the player (or the player’s opponents).

If possible, designers should provide the ability to turn an exploit on or off, giving the players control over their worst instincts. For example, most games with save/load functionality can be abused by players to improve their odds; an RPG in which smashing a box produces random loot can be reloaded as many times as necessary until the best possible weapon or armor appears.

With Civ 3, we introduced a feature that preserved the game’s random seed in the save game file, guaranteeing that individual combats would play out the same way regardless of how many times the player reloaded the game. No longer were players tempted to reload every bad combat result, which could slow the game to a crawl.

However, the community response was not what we anticipated. Although some players appreciated that they were no longer tempted to reload combats, many others were frustrated that one of their old tricks disappeared. Indeed, some angry fans actually felt that the game was cheating on them by always reproducing the same combat result!

We solved this problem by turning this feature into an option on game start. Players who want the chance to reload a particularly unlucky roll can use the old exploit, but the game, by default, discourages this work-intensive strategy. Ultimately, the designer can’t go wrong putting the player in control of his or her own experience.