and crucially, the observation in here that you can start with either end -- the experience you want or the systems -- but you gotta make them meet in the middle.
These days, game design is generally taught as "decide on your experience, and fit systems into that." But I favor being open to starting from either end, and also in general think that focusing so strongly on the experience has a LOT of dev pitfalls:"
Lastly -- starting at this end is just as artistic as starting from a chord progression, a cool synth sound, a color palette, or a piece of wood with interesting grain. Just as with any other craft-centric view on things, it's fine to start at a formal or an experiential end -- both are artistic.
Towards the end of the article, I say this: "If you just make the same game, the one you know how to make, the players get bored because it’s nothing but problems they have seen before and already have their answers to. Sometimes, they get so bored that an entire genre dies." -- the last phrase links to a video about how MMOs are dead. :D
Towards the end of the article I mention "some of us have been working out the rule set for how you can link loops into a larger network of problems for literally over twenty years."
That is referencing the "game grammar" effort undertaken by myself, Dan Cook, Stephane Bura, Joris Dormans, and many others. It is very specifically about arriving at a notation system for gameplay logic.
The principles in this talk went on to be used by the field of computational modeling of games, AI game generators, and also used in training AI game players.
No, it's not a very local definition at all, it's actually a generalized definition for all forms of game and entertainment -- and art, even!
You seem to be assuming I have a reductive definition of game, when the definition given in the article is basically "anything people choose to play." See https://www.raphkoster.com/2013/04/16/playing-with-game/ which is linked in there.
I strongly disagree with lumping "intelligence" into the question though, so I am with you on that.
1. As the article says, "People will be willing to go along with pretty simple and pretty familiar problems as long as the feedback is great."
2. For arbitrary n x m boards, Candy Crush (and Bejeweled, it's predecessor), has been shown to be NP-complete. That means as a general class of problem, it's officially hard. This is why I said that "A lot of very good problems seem stupidly simple, but have depths to them." If you look at some of the ones I examine in this talk: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/games-are-mat... you'll see they are often what seems very simple!
"Hard to play" has almost nothing to do with "the underlying game system is Hard in a complexity sense." And both are somewhat orthogonal to the complaint about "adding more stuff" -- doing so may make something more complicated, but that doesn't mean it becomes more complex mathematically.
Adding more stuff in general may very well make something harder to play, but it has more to do with how many of the added things are simultaneously visible. We can go back to the old 7+/-2 rules of thumb on that one.
Candy Crush is Hard in a math sense. So are Battleship, Minesweeper, Pipes, Othello... they are all easy to play. They are fun because they are Hard in a math sense.
Dark Souls is not hard in a math sense, meaning it is not formally complex. It is hard to play mostly because it is a reaction and timing game that presents very difficult challenges, and the ambiguity comes from mastering signals and reactions.
Civilization is complicated, and almost certainly Hard in a math sense. But it has solid onboarding and is not that hard to play.
Dwarf Fortress is complex AND complicated, and has no onboarding, and a ton of stuff in it, and is both Hard and hard. DF is built out of a ton of separate Hard game atoms.
I would be fine if cutscenes were feedback, or reward for gameplay.
But that doesn’t explain games where as soon as you start it up for the first time, there’s a minimum of 20 minutes of (often unskippable) cutscenes before you can even control a character. Or cutscenes at the beginning of a level/mission where you kinda have to watch it to know what’s going on at all, but they’re like 10 minutes long, so you’re gonna be there a while. Sometimes even those ones are unskippable. I remember playing Jedi Fallen Order and I just left the couch and cleaned the kitchen for a while because I could not have given a shit less about the story they were pushing on me, and I came down and it was still going.
Games need to respect my time. You turn the NES on, press start, and there’s Mario on the left side of the screen. You’re playing now. You turn on Forza Horizon 6 or whatever and it’s 20 minutes before you can control a car, at minimum. And that’s a fucking racing game, with no story I would ever possibly give a shit about.
This goes back to the motivations thing. For those who are motivated by narrative stuff, that opening works well. It sets up uncertainties and ambiguities that engage curiosity and prediction.
But you don't like those sorts of problems as much (or don't want them in that moment). Which is fine. No game works for everyone the same way.
(There is also an offhand remark in the article about gamemakers being failed moviemakers... ;) )
> But that doesn’t explain games where as soon as you start it up for the first time, there’s a minimum of 20 minutes of (often unskippable) cutscenes before you can even control a character
I honestly wonder if this is done to reduce returns. Steam, for example has a <2hrs policy.
Put 30+ minutes of cut scene in, 60 minutes of intro/tutorial, and you’re past 2 hours of game launched time before discovering the game itself just isn’t fun for you (too predictable? Grindy? Too easy? Too hard?)
Remember, it's about prediction (point 1 of the 12). Pure random cannot be predicted. From a prediction point of view, it is therefore ironically, an already determined result. So it is solved, and therefore not interesting.
In Theory of Fun, I phrased this as "everything has patterns, but if you are not equipped to see the pattern, it becomes noise, and therefore boring."
which leads to
https://www.raphkoster.com/2014/01/15/a-vision-exercise/
and its critique counterpart:
https://www.raphkoster.com/2014/01/06/how-i-analyze-a-game/
and crucially, the observation in here that you can start with either end -- the experience you want or the systems -- but you gotta make them meet in the middle.
These days, game design is generally taught as "decide on your experience, and fit systems into that." But I favor being open to starting from either end, and also in general think that focusing so strongly on the experience has a LOT of dev pitfalls:"
https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/rules-of-the-...
Lastly -- starting at this end is just as artistic as starting from a chord progression, a cool synth sound, a color palette, or a piece of wood with interesting grain. Just as with any other craft-centric view on things, it's fine to start at a formal or an experiential end -- both are artistic.
FWIW, I have an MFA. :)