Here is one of the most amazing glimpses into the behind the scenes of video game development I’ve ever seen: deconstructulator

This NES emulator shows how Super Mario Bros. sprites and graphics are stored both on the cartridge and in active memory. It’s really cool.

As a bonus, you get to play the first level of Super Mario Bros. and be reminded of how it’s one of the finest examples of a tutorial level despite (maybe because of) having no text, videos or scripted events. Watch how everything you need to learn is carefully broken down into logical bits, each one building on the last section of the level.

So good.

David Edery on how hard (or easy) you should make your games:

Too many of us are still holding onto design philosophies that were born in the days of quarter-gobbling arcade games. Too many developers get most of their design feedback from QA teams made up of hardcore gamers who have played a game way more than most normal people ever will. Making a game “just hard enough” (be that very hard or very easy, depending on the person playing) is one of the primary keys to fun — and, I think, an under-appreciated way to significantly increase sales. It deserves more attention from our industry, even as we search for ways to incorporate meaningful, educational, and remarkable consequences back into our games.

I’ve long been a fan of the approach of having multiple difficulty levels at once in the same place, using things like optional badges, multiple levels of success and bonus objectives. The simplest form can be found in most racing games, which allow you to pass a race in 1st, 2nd or 3rd place.

Medals, optional missing objectives, secrets, collectibles, level (and game) completion percentages - all of these allow you to have more than one level of difficulty on the same map at the same time, which can substantially reduce QA time and other design problems that come from a situation where you need to run the same content more than once during testing because the rules have changed in some way. If advanced players have the same experience as regular players, except that they skip less, a lot less can go wrong.

David Sirlin’s excellent analysis of Donkey Kong Country 2’s secrets was the first writing that got me thinking this way. Time and time again, working on small games with tight deadlines and short QA cycles, we took advantage of this technique.

This is not to say that it’s impossible to do dynamic difficulty well. People smarter than me are already working on better automated ways of adjusting difficulty in real time and presumably, they’ve solved the QA problem. I wonder how they’ll solve the emotional problem. Some people love being frustrated by games and some people hate them. Until game systems can detect how mad you are, the system will have to err in one direction or the other.

A fixed difficulty with a range of levels of success is the best of both worlds. Instead of dynamically adjusting difficulty is that it allows the player to decide for themselves how difficult they want the game to be, in real time, in a highly contextualized way. If the one section is too frustrating, then they can ignore the side missions and just get things done. If another is going really well, they can reach for the gold. If it’s going poorly but they are still enjoying themselves, they can reach for the gold anyway.

Plus, it makes it easier to compare the size of your achievements.

Last month, James Portnow’s Game Design Challenge was about reinvigorating the WWII genre. In a nutshell, it was: make it a WWII shooter, make it exciting and new, and make it cheap. The results are quite good. I’m especially a big fan of the photographer game. I’ve wanted to play more games like that ever since I fell in love with Beyond Good and Evil.

My attempt stuck closer to it being a shooter than a lot of the winning entries. Mechanically, I think that you could run my idea as an expansion pack to just about any of the AAA WWII shooters. But where these other games emphasized the comraderie, glory and heroism of one of history’s greatest tragedies, I wanted to emphasize the absurdity and confusion of being on the ground.

ULTRA

In 1939, with the help of intelligence supplied from Poland, British Intelligence broke the ‘unbreakable’ Enigma code that the Germans used for almost all of their cryptographic communications. This was a goldmine of information, which carried with it one serious problem: it often couldn’t be used! If Allied forces acted on knowledge they could only have gained from the Enigma decrypts, the Germans would conclude that the code had been broken and change their system. If the new system was impossible to break, the Allies would be cut off from a vital source of intelligence. Before the stolen information could be used, cover stories needed to be constructed. A scout plane would be sent on an otherwise unplanned patrol and ‘happen’ to come across a German convoy. Congratulations messages would be sent to (fictional) informants, thanking them for passing information. Most of the time, these cover stories could be arranged remotely, but sometimes, they needed a more personal touch…

In ULTRA, the player takes control of a (probably) fictional squad of soldiers tasked with protecting the secret of Bletchley Park. Sent on extremely dangerous missions characterized by strange constraints and absurd orders, the squad of elite soldiers progresses through an action packed campaign across the secret battles of WWII.

Tone and Setting

The battles of ULTRA are behind the scenes events. Players will be the secret heroes of WWII, asked to take on crazy missions and perform covert operations that allow the newsreel heroes to look good. A kind of stoic British stiff-upper-lip sarcasm will pervade the characters and events. Mission debriefs will be period-piece newsreels of the official story which will be in sharp contrast to the true story that the players live out. ULTRA will be a sly-cynical counterpoint to the starry-eyed jingoism of Medal of Honor.

Sample Missions

The missions of ULTRA will be characterized by restrictions designed to maintain a cover story of one kind or another. Instead of kill-them-all run and gun, missions will be a mixture of combat and a kind of global puzzle-solving. We’re not talking ‘open the lock’ puzzles. We’re talking “how can I ensure the Germans identify me as an Italian informant and yet live to tell the tale”.

Pre-D-Day. Intelligence indicates that the Germans are beginning to suspect that we will be landing in Normandy. Take a team, armed as a scouting party to Pas de Calais and land covertly. Encounter German patrols, engage them, but don’t kill them all - they must live to tell their superiors that we were there.

The Listening Post. An allied commander got cocky and sunk too many convoys near the African coast. We need to make it look like we’ve had a listening post in the area for months. Get your team in to an abandoned church covertly, make it look like you’ve been living there for awhile and then have the Italians “discover” you. Your escape should be as spectacular and noisy as possible, but do try to make it out of there alive…

The Warning. A German speaking special operative will be assigned to you. Attack and secure a German radio post without any messages getting out. Then maintain control of the post while the operative delivers misinformation to the enemy. Be warned, there are regular German supply runs to the post. You’ll need to ambush them before they can discover the truth.

The Prisoner. A group of soldiers including an Allied commander with some knowledge of ULTRA has been captured. Disguised as French freedom fighters, mount a rescue operation, discover who he might have been interrogated by, find and kill them. Bring the commander back if possible, otherwise ensure that he’ll remain silent forever. Remember, the French resistance doesn’t have access to the greatest weapons and they don’t speak English…

The Submarine. A U-boat has shipwrecked off the U.K. coast. This is an opportunity to collect critical code books and other information. Capture and secure the sub from any Germans still on board, collect any information you can and then destroy any evidence that you were there. Before it finishes sinking.

Gameplay Mechanics

In support of the cover story missions of the game, missions will be characterized by critical objectives that constrain the player’s actions. Enemy awareness will be a critical factor in most missions. It’s no good dressing up as resistance fighters if none of your victims live to tell command who (they thought) you were. Players will operate on a constant knife edge, trying to keep their people alive and fight effectively while behaving in an authentic manner for the story they are trying to convey to the enemy.

To this end, mission planning will be a critical part of the game play. Players will be given options of different starting points and will have to balance squad load out and equipment between efficiency for the job and believability. If members of the squad are injured, they’ll need to be rescued or killed to prevent information falling in to enemy hands.

Keeping Costs Down

By combining this new awareness mechanic with scripted mission constraints, we will be able to have a wide variety of scenarios without too many different assets. Combat will be at a smaller more intimate scale than most WWII games, allowing us to have simpler AI and avoiding a lot of the costs of a larger scale game. The nice thing about the approach of using known mechanics with different rules of engagement means that a lot of the core gameplay will be a solved problem, minimizing iteration of fundamental gameplay elements.

Doomed to Failure?

The problem with attempting to make a subversive war game is that the people who showed up to play your game don’t want to be called jerks for wanting some escapist fantasy violence. Arguably, this is part of why Blacksite: Area 51 didn’t really work out. It was a middle of the road modern war shooter which seemed to be upset with you for wanting to pretend to be a heroic soldier. ULTRA might let you be a little more heroic, but in a lot of ways it risks making that same mistake.

First Person Shooter, might not be the right vehicle to get players to think about this particular story.

I first learned about Harvey Smith years ago, when I was fanboying about Deus Ex and reading everything I could about how the game was put together. Smith went on to head the in-some-ways-better in-some-ways-worse sequel, Invisible War and then more recently and famously worked on BlackSite: Area 51, notable more for the “it was so fucked up” mini post mortem than anything else.

Years ago, before they were called blogs, Smith maintained a site at Planet Deus Ex (who remembers the “planet” brand”). It hasn’t been updated since 2004 (and before that, like 1998) but it contains a lot of gems about good design. Witchboy’s Cauldron.

In particular, Distinct Functions in Game Units and Features Without Interface are really worth reading. His Half-Life review is also really good and a blast from the past.

At The Escapist, Wendy Despain looks at game design with new eyes.

Did you know you can win the first level of Star Wars just by standing in one place, turning in constant circles and holding down the “X” button? Aunt Wendy got something right. He was thrilled. And when he heard the cheerful chimes, a signal to those of all ages that you’ve won something, there was jumping around and fists in the air and lots of shouting I didn’t understand.

But then the next level came up, and things started to go downhill. The instant it began he looked confused. It took him a few seconds to put it into words, but then he said it. “I already won this level.”

And suddenly, the decision to make Super Marios Bros. World 1-2 happen in a cave is revealed to be utterly brilliant.

Cracked.com’s story about 7 Real Conspiracy Theories reminded me of a game I’ve wanted to work on for ages. I started thinking about it in college when I was simultaneously obsessed with Robert Anton Wilson and Civ II. In keeping with my philosophy that ideas are cheap and that it’s implementation that matters, here’s the game so far.

The main concept of the game is that there are secret masters of history behind the scenes, controlling and crafting events. The player takes on one of these puppet masters, in conflict with all the others, which are controlled by AI (or other players?). The goal is to (secretly) take over the world.

At first glance, the game appears to be very similar to any game in the Civilization series. However, all nations are entirely AI controlled. The player has no direct ability to manage unit production, send out settlers or any of the other standard Civ activities. Instead, they can direct members of their conspiracy to infiltrate organizations and governments, foment dissent, assassinate or indoctrinate leaders and other shadowy things. The idea is to shape history and humanity in a way that matches the ideology of your conspiracy.

Early portions of the game are Player vs City and then Region and then Nation. The conspiracy grows, takes over other groups as puppet organizations, and slowly winds its tentacles around the immediate area. As agents infiltrated different levels of government, the player gains more and more ability to see and then affect the direction of policy-making by the AI Nation. In time, the player encounters another shadowy organization and the real war begins.

The conflict plays out backstage, with assassinations, infiltrations and counter-infiltrations of puppet organizations, occult ceremonies, and the occasional out and out attack on your enemies. Wars are started and stopped, economies collapsed and restored and surveillance systems are created and cracked. Half the battle is getting accurate information about where and who your enemies are.

Once the existence of other secret masters comes to light, the game becomes an exercise in paranoia. Are the leaders that you’ve installed actually loyal? Is the information that you’re getting from your agents compromised? Have you really infiltrated the enemy, or is it yet another front or has your agent been brainwashed? With each passing turn, the player must sift through public information (which may or may not be lies) and secret reports (possibly also lies), attempt to sort out what’s going on and act accordingly.

All the while, the player is attempting to drag humanity toward enlightenment or bring about total submission or cause Armageddon or just built enough new landing strips for their Extra Terrestrial allies.

Aside from the Civ games where you play an apparently undying ruler over millennia, the closest game I can find for this idea is Republic: the Revolution a game I had high hopes for - hopes dashed by the lukewarm reviews. Steve Jackson’s Illuminati also has some inspiring material, though it doesn’t have a world simulator running underneath the main conflict.

Someone should make this game!

Starting in the 1930s, a psychologist named B.F. Skinner did a series of experiments involving rats, pigeons, and something called a Skinner Box. The experiments involved conditioning the animals to activate a lever and rewarding them for the behaviour with food based on a variety of different reward schedules.

It turns out that a Variable Ratio schedule, where you give out rewards after random number of actions is the best way to get an animal to hit a lever over and over again. Unlike more predictable schedules, which are associated with a lull in activity after the reward is given out, Variable Ratios mean that any lever press could be the one that dispenses food. In the delightful language of psychology “Variable schedules produce higher rates and greater resistance to extinction than most fixed schedules.” Extinction is when you stop doing something because it’s stopped rewarding you.

I first came across the Variable Ratio reward schedule in an article on Gamasutra about using behavioural psychology to make games more fun. If you stop and think for a moment, you’ll recognize the schedule in the loot drops of Diablo and just about every MMO and RPG in existence. You’ll see it in the random power-ups dropped by enemies in FPSs and SHMUPs. And you’ll see it in slot machines, Craps tables and just about every other form of gambling.

We have a funny relationship with addictiveness in this industry. When reviewers talk about a game being addictive, it’s high praise. When publishers talk about it it’s a laudable business goal or a selling point. As part of the Civilization IV marketing campaign they released a series of ads and a website for CivAnon, an Alcoholics Anonymous for Civ gamers.

Perhaps conditioned by years of defending ourselves from the charge that games are corrupting the youth, when it comes to the idea that games might be addictive for real we tend to circle the wagons.

At some point, the industry is going to have to take serious stock of the charge the claim that games are addictive. More specifically, that we have a moral obligation that conflicts with our financial obligations to decide how addictive we want our games to be.

Consider this quotation from the Gamasutra article:

The distinct pause shown under a fixed ratio schedule can be a real issue for game designers. Having a period of time where there is little incentive to play the game can lead to the player walking away.

The business side screams “OH GOD NO, we can’t let them walk away from the game! They might stop paying!” The ethical side should be asking “Ok, I want them to like this game and keep playing it, but I also want them to have a rest of their life. Where’s the balance?” Jonathan Blow asked this question eloquently at MIGS 2007. Raph Koster asked it again just last week.

If we can agree that the tobacco industry should be held culpable for deciding how much nicotine to put in its cigarettes and we can believe that there is such a thing as problem gambling, then we have to accept that it’s possible to make games that are too addictive. We have to accept the possibility that we may already have.

N’Gai Croal at Level Up has a pair of interviews with Sony and Microsoft marketing about the 64/36 sales split of Grand Theft Auto IV on the Xbox 360 and PS3 at Gamestop. The close to 2-1 advantage in favour of the Xbox is a clear victory… for everyone!

You see, while there was a 64/36 split on GTA purchases, there is a 70.7/29.3 split on U.S. installed Xboxes and PS3s. While the 360 won on pure sales, the PS3 came out slightly ahead per capita. In other words, it’s a wash. Watch how each of them plays with the numbers and analysis to tell their story.

Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg has the easier job. The raw numbers look very good for the Xbox 360 and so the only real task is to dismiss the per capita advantage of the PS3 by arguing that they expected it to be worse. Taking advantage of the email interview, he completely ignores the final question, hits ’send’ and then knocks off for some lunch.

Poor Sony’s Peter Dille has to really make the numbers sing. Using the magic of rounding, the sales advantage becomes a mere 60/40 and the console advantage swells to 3-1 (3-1 would be 75/25). Given these new numbers, Playstation is doing FINE, in fact it’s practically 50/50! Later, when talking about the console race, Dille, perhaps realizing that there such a thing as being so far behind that you’re just a loser, quietly revises the earlier rounding and scrappy underdog PS3 pulls ahead to a respectable 70.1/30 install ratio.

The endearitating thing about Dille is that the tactic WORKS. As other blogs,news outlets and fansites pick up the story, they paste Dille’s money quote (”If I had an installed base advantage of 3-1, I wouldn’t be crowing too much about a 60-40 sales advantage.”) uncritically, letting the dodgy math stand.

Yesterday I was involved in a workshop for a bunch of teachers about new media. We spent part of the day talking about using games to educate and I gave them some advice, which I’ll repeat here.

There is no question that games teach skills and knowledge. You need only watch this video of a guy playing both ships in Ikaruga to see skill. Hold a conversation with a child about all 493 Pokemon (with stats) for a glimpse into the amazing powers of recall of the human mind. Moral content aside the only real complaint an educator can level against games is that they are teaching the “wrong” knowledge or skills.

Why is this so?

The answer is easy. We don’t play educational games because most educational games suck. The tragedy is that they seem to suck in a predictable, systemic way. When people get together to make educational games, they make EDUCATIONAL games instead of educational GAMES. The problem with this approach is that once you get past about age 4, the old “Hey everyone, let’s play the tidying up game!” trick stops working. Kids can tell when you are giving them something lame and unfun to do but calling it a game.

The key to making a good educational game is to have the educational part be a secondary rather than a primary focus of the gameplay. It’s difference between having a quiz show game with questions about European geography and setting Diplomacy in Europe using real city and country names.

In the first game, the goal (learning) IS the play. And if people aren’t in to the goal, they won’t play and the learning won’t happen. In the second game, the learning is a side effect of the goal. The goal of Diplomacy is to take over Europe with your little armies. As you master the game, you can’t help but memorize the map, just as a consequence of staring at it and talking about it all the time.

This isn’t new. Phys Ed teachers have been using games to trick people into doing exercises since the beginning of time, but for whatever reason, this knowledge hasn’t ported well over to the other kinds of games in an educational context.

Thankfully, there are exceptions. Oregon Trail and Sim City are shining examples of educational games done right. With any luck, Spore will be another.

Make fun games and ground them in educational knowledge instead of fantasy knowledge. The result will be addictive experiences that keep people coming back for more, while you drip feed test answers into their brains.

There’s a kerfuffle on the Internet about the fact that you can kill people in a video game series and how you can pay to have sex with women in the same series and how you can choose to do these things in rapid succession to the same fictional person. The geniuses at IGN decided to put out a video featuring hooker killing.

The result has been an entirely rational discussion consisting of game enthusiasts and feminists coming together to form a nuanced understanding of freedom of speech, the troubling depictions of women in violent situations, and the interplay of player agency and creative narrative and mechanics in forming the content of a game along with the shifting line between stereotypes and satire. It certainly has NOT resulted in shrill protestations of innocence by gamers who often fail to even grasp why there is a big deal and even shriller condemnations by feminists, many of whom have never played the game that they are tearing apart.

The problem with trying to find a nuanced middle ground here is that it’s difficult to defend the game without falling back on either the “it’s just a game” or the “well no one HAS to kill a hooker” defenses. Both are disingenuous.

If we believe that video games are an important cultural force (and I do) then when the criticism comes, we can’t back away and say “hold on, it doesn’t count here”. There should be no take-backs. If we think that games have merit then we should be able to defend them on their merit. Grand Theft Auto 4 has a Metacritic score of 99/100. It’s pretty clear that the gaming press broadly agrees that GTA:IV is a good and important game. So it should be defensible as such.

We can’t hide behind “no one has to kill a hooker” or “it’s the players not the designers doing the murder” either. The fact is that any video game is created by a bunch of people and the collective decisions of the developers, publisher (and sometimes regulatory bodies) determines what rules and verbs are implemented in the game. Designers shape the world and decide what can and can’t be done. In GTA:IV, for all its realism, I can’t climb over a wall that’s waist height. At some point during development, Rockstar had a meeting about my character’s movement abilities and “climbing short walls” was left off the list.

Which is just to say that if they’d wanted to, Rockstar could have prevented hooker killing. They could have left hookers out of the game. They could have made it so that the hookers were invulnerable to damage after you’d paid them. They could have had cut scenes as part of the sex act that involved the hooker walking away to safety while the main character dozed in post-coital bliss in his driver seat. They could have made the game’s sanction for killing paid hookers (perhaps a bunch of crazed heavily armed pimps) so high as to make the decision untenable. There’s no way that Rockstar was unaware of the controversy around this feature in earlier games from the series, so we can’t argue ignorance or emergent gameplay. Hooker killing is in the game and it’s in there on purpose.

Does this make the game misogynist?

GTA:IV is a game about transgression. Liberty City, as photo-realistic as it is, is not a neutral simulation of the world. Just get in a car (you can borrow your cousin’s) and try to avoid committing a crime and you’ll see what I mean. The controls are tuned for high speed chases - it takes real finesse to stay under the speed limit and in your own lane without causing a pileup. Traffic moves at a snails pace and you can’t help but gun the engine and blast past all the suckers, careening around corners sending cars, pedestrians and lamp poles flying. Cars are disposable and easily stolen and a multiple homicide killing spree and police chase can be ended by ducking in to a spray shop to give your car a new coat of paint or simply by laying low for a few minutes out of sight of the police. You can attack, at any time, anyone that you see. It is far easier to be violent than it is to be law abiding in the GTA universe.

The main storyline tells the tale of a Eastern European immigrant’s rise through the ranks of the underworld, with all the violence of Scarface (the movie) and with the body count of a Mario game (which is to say - a lot). It stars a mostly male cast of racial and cultural stereotypes, though some female characters are present. In order to advance the story, you’ve got to commit a whole lot of crimes.

It also, incongruously, features one of the most robust dating simulators I’ve ever seen in a video game. You meet girls over the course of the game, you exchange phone numbers and then you can call them and ask them out. Sometimes, they call you. Once the date is arranged, you can choose to actually meet them, you can calls to cancel or you can just stand them up. Sometimes you have to choose between completing a game mission and keeping your plans. They’ll comment on your car and your clothes as you take them to places you think they’ll like (bowling, darts, cabaret show, drinks) and have awkward small talk with them. You can decide whether or not to go in for a kiss when you drop them off (I haven’t played long enough, but I’m pretty sure that you can’t date rape them, thankfully).

But it is misogynist?

On balance, I think that it’s hard to argue that GTA:IV makes it hard to play a misogynist lead character. As far as I know, there aren’t any male prostitutes offering their services, and you definitely can’t play a female lead (though to be fair, even Deus Ex had to cut the female option because of time and space constraints). There is sex in this game and the sex is clearly aimed at a straight male audience.

That said, it’s easier still to be an equal opportunity scum bag. Of all the people I’ve passed (or run over) on the street, I haven’t identified a single prostitute. The game pulls from criminal and mobster pop culture for its tropes, so the vast majority of the people you will be gunning down will be men. You have to go out of your way to hunt down and kill women. It’s part of the game play but it’s not a core part. There are tutorials or how to date someone properly in the game. You have to work out for yourself (or read about it in someone’s angry or purile screed) that you can hire and murder prostitutes.

The difficulties in talking about games like GTA:IV are legion. For one thing it’s so big that every player’s experience will be very different. Comparing notes with a friend, I learned that he’d spent a good chuck of time watching TV in the game! I didn’t even know you could do that. The scope, scale and detailing of the world in which the game happens is astounding.

The biggest reason for any of the controversy around GTA is that it sits on this weird crossroads between a realistic setting and video game ethics. No one is up in arms about the death toll in any of Super Mario Bros, Mega Man or Final Fantasy despite the fact that the number of flattened Goombas in a single session is APPALLING. GTA takes that ethic and transplants it into a world that looks very much like our own. It’s very easy to stop seeing pixels and start seeing real people, which is why Jack Thompson characterized the games as “murder simulators”.

So cultural commentators see a video featuring the death of two virtual women and get up in arms and the defense, which is “yeah but I killed hundreds of other people too” just takes the discussion on a turn for the worse. Grand Theft Auto 4 is probably one of the best games ever made. It’s also one of the most violent both because of the mandatory storyline killings and because of the freedom you are given to prey upon civilians (prostitute or otherwise) whenever the whim strikes you. It’s a fantasy about being able to cause mayhem in the real world and is all the more effective for how real the world seems.

Warren Spector, who is one of the smartest people in game design, sums up my feelings really well in an interview with Gamespot.

I am frustrated that the games in the GTA series, some of the finest combinations of pure game design and commercial appeal, offer a fictional package that makes them difficult to hold up as examples of what our medium is capable of achieving. The fictional context of GTA all but ensures that it will be portrayed in the mainstream press (and, I guess, in the courts!) as little more than a ‘murder simulator’ when it clearly is so much more–if you take the time to look.

Sadly–and this is part of the point I was trying to make in the interview last week–most people won’t take the time to look past the surface, the fiction, the context. They don’t see the fun and the freedom the game provides. They see carjackings and gun battles and hookers. You can talk about game design genius ’til you’re blue in the face. The people who want to regulate games, and the mainstream audience we want to reach, will ignore you. And then they’ll drop the hammer on our medium. Hard.