David Sirlin’s Playing to Win series of articles changed the way that I thought about games. Until I read them, I was a scrub.

Now, everyone begins as a scrub—it takes time to learn the game to get to a point where you know what you’re doing. There is the mistaken notion, though, that by merely continuing to play or “learn” the game, that one can become a top player. In reality, the “scrub” has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He’s lost the game before he’s chosen his character. He’s lost the game even before the decision of which game is to be played has been made. His problem? He does not play to win.

The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevent him from ever truly competing. These made up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. In Street Fighter, for example, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” So-called “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub.

I was a Starcraft scrub. I logged onto Battle.NET and only played “friendly” games marked NO RUSHING and whatnot. Every now and then, some jerk would ruin the game by rushing even though it said NO RUSHING and someone would disconnect in disgust. After months and months of play, I never got any better. It never occurred to me that it would be useful to make more than one Barracks (doing so doubles the speed that you can pump out Marines). I was totally inefficient with my resources. I more or less thought that rushing was unbeatable and totally annoying and game-ruining.

And then someone linked me to the Terran build order. Suddenly, I could defend against an early game rush. I started looking forwards to them. It turned out that most players who joined a NO RUSHING game in order to rush, didn’t have any skills past the first attack - they were relying on the other guy quitting in anger.

I’ve never had the drive to become anything close to a professional player, but Sirlin’s series (now a book) gave me a new understanding of truly competitive play. It taught me not to dismiss any move as “cheap” no matter the game.

There is a certain arrogance that comes from being a scrub. It’s the idea that you know better than the designers whether or not their game is balanced. It’s the lazy assumption that because you can’t figure out a better way, that there is no better way. It’s blinding yourself to whole rich fields of strategy and tactics. It’s weirdly choosing not to play the entire game and then blaming others for failing to make the same mistake.

It is in appreciation of the truly competitive game player, the one who understands in detail how the mechanics work and uses ALL of them, that I present the following, taken from a Snopes article about a truly strange soccer game.

Barbados needed to win the game by two clear goals in order to progress to the next round. Now the trouble was caused by a daft rule in the competition which stated that in the event of a game going to penalty kicks, the winner of the penalty kicks would be awarded a 2-0 victory.

With 5 minutes to go, Barbados were leading 2-1, and going out of the tournament (because they needed to win by 2 clear goals). Then, when they realized they were probably not going to score against Grenada’s massed defence, they turned round, and deliberately scored on their own goal to level the scores and take the game into penalties. Grenada, themselves not being stupid, realized what was going on, and then attempted to score an own goal themselves. However, the Barbados players started defending their opponents goal to prevent this.

In the last five minutes, spectators were treated to the incredible sight of both team’s defending their opponents goal against attackers desperately trying to score an own goal and goalkeepers trying to throw the ball into their own net. The game went to penalties, which Barbados won and so were awarded a 2-0 victory and progressed to the next round.

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.

“What if we’re all just brains in a vat?”

Before becoming the premise of the (increasingly disappointing) Matrix Trilogy, this was one of the more popular Epistemological essay questions for undergrad Philsophy students the world over. “If we got ourselves put in a situation where all of our experiences were simulated, would they be real?” and then “If you could arrange to put yourself into such a simulation, would you want to?”

There is a lot of hand-wringing in Epistemological circles about whether or not certain experiences or knowledge are ‘genuine’. This involves a lot of strange thought experiments with painted albino zebras and twins sitting in front of complex arrangements of mirrors. Being a dedicated gamer by the time all of this came to my attention, I had a lot of trouble understanding what the fuss was about. There are already millions of humans choosing to spend a large chunk of their leisure time having crudely simulated experiences. The first company to patent the Holodeck is going to clean up.

The media and our disapproving parents and friends also already know the answer to the first question: No the simulated experiences are not real, get outside and read a book. The latest warrior to toss her hat in the ring on the side of all that is good and genuine is Susan Greenfield.

She sets out a catalogue of repercussions: the substitution of virtual experience for real encounters; the impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry; a decline in linguistic and visual imagination; an atrophy of creativity; contracted, brutalised text-messaging, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complex thinking. Her principal concern is how computer games could be emphasising what she calls “process” over “content” – method over meaning – in mental activity.

Greenfield is an actual scientist and so enlightened by her argument, I humbly apologize to all the world for the part that I played in the imagination holocaust that is game development. I promise to turn my back on the simple spoon-fed menu options of The Sims, Grand Theft Auto and Fallout and devote myself to the genuine free-ranging inquiry of Independence Day, Sex and the City and anything by Danielle Steele.

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.

It seems like the key to being a tech columnist is having discussable opinions about things. Knowledge is for the sissies over in the reporting department. Making pronouncements of either Doom or Ultimate Glory for some new device is the kind of thing that puts (something I like to call “asses in the seats 2.O”) links in the blogs. It is in this spirit of prophecy for page views that Brian Caulfield of Forbes asks whether or not the Apple iPhone could kill the Nintendo DS. Showing the kind of visionary spunk that gets you employed at one of the top business magazines, Caulfield doesn’t let the fact that a clear answer, “no,” already exists.

It’s a good gambit. Like small town residents cheering whenever their name is mentioned on the Tee Vee, the industry, perpetually suffering from “hey we’re relevant too” syndrome, gets excited when one of the big players mentions us. Here is my prediction about Forbes’ prediction: lots of gaming sites will link to it and then it will turn out to be utterly wrong. Things start to go badly in the early paragraphs.

The Nintendo DS has had a good run, too, dominating the market for handheld gaming gizmos despite determined assaults by Sony and Nokia .

The DS didn’t HAVE a good run. It’s HAVING a good run. There are over 70 million of them out there right now. The PSP is doing well too, with over 30 million units sold. But to describe the sad joke that is the N-Gage - a failed Gameboy Advance competitor / phone that launched in 2003 and may not have even sold a million units - as a “determined assault” by Nokia is to severely misunderstand the market.

Apple is the first to master a pair of tricks that have made Nintendo’s latest products so compelling–a touch-screen interface and the ability to pick up on motion. The key difference: Unlike Nintendo, which has created a gaming console with a motion-sensitive controller and a touch-sensitive handheld gaming system, Apple has crammed both capabilities into its iPhone and iPod Touch.

Leaving aside motion sensing, which the DS doesn’t actually have, Caulfield’s argument is that the iPhone has a touch screen which the DS also has but you can download new software on to the iPhone, and he heard that some companies were making games for it, so it’s a DS killer.

Let’s compare them for real.

The DS is a rugged little single purpose gaming system that retails for $130 in Canada. It has two screens, including a dedicated touch screen and dedicated control buttons, plays GBA games as well as DS titles, has build in local wireless networking for multiplayer gaming as well as a connection to Nintendo’s ‘it just works’ worldwide multiplayer service. It is supported by brands such as Mario, Pokémon and Final Fantasy. You can find it at just about any department store in the world and it’s loved by kids, casual and core gamers.

The iPhone is a multi-purpose device which retails for $400 (minus contract subsidy). It has a single large screen (lord help you if you drop it), no local networking, no wireless gaming service and no library to speak of. In order to buy one, you need to sign up for cellphone service and in order to buy and download games you will need a credit card and an iTunes membership. It is not a device for grubby handed kids, Nintendo’s bread and butter.

If there is any direct competition to be had, it’s between the iPhone and Sony’s rumoured PSP phone. They’ll (probably) cost about the same, and both are convergence devices meaning that for a slight premium, you can get them do to several things that you don’t really want.

It’s too late to kill the DS. The DS is a runaway success. iPhone gaming might have a chance at killing some future Nintendo handheld, but I wouldn’t want to start mouthing off about it. Much as Sony learned when they went after portables, Nintendo is much, much smarter than you think and they know games very, very well.

Over at trustygamer.com, smakus writes an at once touching eulogy and scathing rant about the colour palettes used in modern games. Current screen shots and updated list of buzzwords aside, he could have saved himself the typing and simply linked to page 3 of Old Man Murray’s Rune review. Which is nearly 8 years old.

Here I am rollerblading on top of a city bus that’s travelling across a layer of concrete beneath which is - presumably - a river of sewage. The Japanese creators of Jet Grind Radio were polite enough not to make me visit it. And that’s after we bombed the darn heck out of them in World War 2! Developers: Note bright colors and sky and sun.

smackus’ post is weird, relying on a ‘back in the day’ golden age that I don’t think exists. First, the strange assumption that it’s a choice between realism and colourfulness, as if real reality wasn’t colourful as hell. The real conflict is between drab and bright. Then, smackus uses screenshots of Super Mario 64 to show us what a colourful game could look like. As if that was the last example of bright palettes in gameplay. As if Super Mario Galaxy didn’t just come out.

The truth is that an enormous number of brightly coloured games (you get the idea) are being released, even in modern times. The real question is why so many blockbusters continue to be set in Blade Runner, Mad Max or a sewer. This is not new. The same year that Super Mario 64 came out, iD released Quake. Old Man Murray again:

Here’s a depressing rundown of the levels you’ll death-march through: Nali village, cave, cave, cave, cave, dark castle, lava cave, lava dungeon, lava waterfall, lava sewer, cave, dungeon, sewer, Nali village, dungeon, cave, sewer, cave, Nali cave, tall cave with the ceiling removed, cave, dungeon, cave. I think I forgot a sewer in the middle there. If I wanted to visit a dank, lightless cave, I could go explore my own edgy basement right now. For free. I have no explanation for the tedious, sewer-centric art direction in virtually every game. Maybe publishers have convinced developers that the game buying public is composed entirely of homesick C.H.U.D.S.

I have a different theory: I think that publishers have convinced developers that the game buying public is composed almost entirely of teenage boys.

If the binder doodles, film and music consuption habits of my friends in junior high is any indication, adolescence is as much about proving that you’re not into “kids stuff” anymore, as it is about anything else. Remember when Nintendo made Wind Waker more cartoony? Remember how sales spiked when Prince of Persia went from this to this? Remember what the monsters of Doom 3 look like?

This is the legacy of teenage boys that continues to shape our industry. We sell to our audience, our audience thinks that they want “mature” titles and someone told them that mature meant dark, dank and bloody. Dystopian novels English curriculum, I am looking in your direction.

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.

Of the many things I like about James Portnow’s weekly design challenges (and there are many) my favourite thing is the way that it quietly breaks down the oh-so-common myth that good game ideas are hard to come by and need to be kept secret.

It’s stunningly common in the industry for people to try to hide ideas. I used to interview candidates for an entry level positions at the last company where I worked. When it came to talking about game design ideas, so many of them clammed up (and so weren’t hired). They claimed they had ideas, but they didn’t want us to steal them. You see this over and over again on message boards, with prospective designers asking how they can approach a publisher with a new game idea for funding without risking that the publisher will take their pitch document and run.

Here’s the thing. Every company has a massive vault of ideas that they’d like to work on. At Capybara it was an excel spreadsheet with hundreds of entries, which grew every time we had another pitch meeting. There would be 20 ideas of which 5 were good with only 1 slot for a new project. We had a running joke for every good idea on our list: Within 12-24 months, someone would announce that they were making the game. It happened over and over again. Every idea you have, someone else is already working on or has thought about and rejected for one reason or another.

Apparently, George Lucas has people who’s job is to open every letter to him, destroy the ones that have suggestions for improving Star Wars, pass on the rest and then never talk to him. You could argue that he might have been better off if he’d peeked at a few of them but this is so that he can’t ever be sued for accidentally coming up with the same idea as someone else.

Game developers and publishers don’t need your ideas. The limiting factor in this industry is not the rate and which ideas are being produced. It’s the rate at which ideas can be implemented, tested, tweaked polished and shipped.

Good design is about the thousands of tiny decisions that happen at every step of development. Consider the hundreds of tiny decisions that led to Juiced instead of NFS: Underground 2.

So I love James Portnow’s design challenges, because they get people to approach ideas the right way, as disposable sparks that need to be examined, explored and subjected to criticism by your peers in order to have any value. Design exists in a context of creation, and the realization of the ideas is far more important than the dreaming of them. We all know what happens to those who forget this truth and start shouting “design is law”.