Gameplay and Irony

What you spend your time doing in a game isn't necessarily what you think the game is about.

One of my favorite game genres is sims; games like Railroad Tycoon or Settlers. These games are ostensibly economy-building games, but that's not what one spends their time doing in the game.

Take The Settlers. I remember building up settlements from next-to-nothing. Once you build a structure it runs on its own. In an hour-long play session, I might only build 20 or so structures. That's one structure every three minutes. So that's not really what one spends time in-game doing. What do you do for the rest of those three minutes?

I was optimizing the pathways to speed up production -- to eliminate transport bottlenecks, to get manufactured goods from one step in the production chain to the next, and make sure my favored buildings were getting their requirements. I was micro-managing my prospectors, finding optimal locations for new buildings, and assessing stockpiles and production rates.

An so that was the gameplay: micromanaging transport routes, placing buildings carefully, and figuring out what the settlement needed for the next stage of production.

Transport Tycoon was very similar. The game is loosely about building new rail lines and improving service at existing stations. I've spent more time thinking about the game, and I know that at its heart it is those two things. Building new rail lines is a combination of two mini-games: a tetris-like problem of finding the optimal place to put a station in a city, and the task of building a line around a mountain and over hills that allows a train to move quickly (without having to spend a lot on rail construction).

Both of those tasks were defined by the game's square grid. Without that grid, both tasks would be both simpler and less interesting. Deciding to build a rail line, or to place a station, is easy. Placing it is the puzzle. Games that try to get rid of the "old-school" square grid also get rid of that puzzle.

When you think of a game that you really enjoyed, it's important to remember both the highlights as well as the details. The highlights of Diablo are killing boss creatures or finding great new loot, but the details -- what you spend minute-to-minute doing -- is the click-fest of combat. MMOs like WoW have highlights like finally buying your (epic) (flying) mount, downing raid bosses, or finishing a gear set, but the details are in the combat system. Doom III has some scary-moment highlights, but you spend most of your time creeping around corners and trying to pick off enemies from afar.

If the details sucked, then the highlights are likely to just be a rationalization for playing. I've talked to people that really enjoyed the socialization in EverQuest and in Asheron's Call, and the way they describe it really makes clear that the details -- the minute-to-minute gameplay -- in both games was boring and grindy. ATITD has intriguing highlights: finishing obelisks, tackling newly opened tests, giant group efforts to finish massive structures. But the gameplay sucked. ATITD's three major gameplay elements are running around (i.e. long runs), waiting, and mindlessly clicking.

Dave Sirlin on occasion points out that bad gameplay elements, no matter how they appear to shape the rest of a game, aren't good things. Your game would be better without them. In ATITD, the timesinks seem to be something to give the player to do (since the rest of the game is so barren). WoW took similar ideas but vastly improved on them. Fishing is a great example. In ATITD, you stand near water, hit the 'fish' button, and wait 5 seconds. WoW asks you to stare at a bobble and click on it when it moves, somewhere between 3 and 20 seconds after you cast it. The WoW approach is much slower, but it forces the player to pay attention.

Is WoW fishing bad? It's not boring; you have to pay attention. It's kinda distracting, because you can't really dedicate yourself 100% to some chat conversation, or browsing your recipe book, or watching the TV out of the corner of your eye -- you need to be ready to click on that bobble within a second of it moving. It's not horribly complicated; there's no tricks involved at all.

ATITD has some much better minigames, such as charcoal production. Getting a good batch of charcoal is a skill-based tradeskill. After loading an oven up with wood, you have a few controls to tweak -- adding more wood, opening or closing the vents, or even throwing a bit of water in the oven to get a raging fire back under control. If only the rest of the tasks were as interesting...

Transport Tycoon is an empire-building game and Settlers is an econ-building game, but in both of them the economics serve as a framework for what's really going on. Like saving up for a mount in WoW, they're the goals, but it's not the game. However interesting and motivating your game's end-points, the process is what players spend their time doing and should be what they enjoy.