Mini-Puzzles

I've talked of minigames before, in my previous post about game theory, but when gamers say "minigame" they mean a complete game-within-a-game. Run around in a platformer, take control of a gun emplacement, play Tetris or Breakout or Artillery, break down a wall -- then go back to running around.

The station-placement "minigame" in Transport Tycoon is somewhat gamelike, but the score is ephemeral. There's no win or lose; there's just "better" and "worse", and those measures are fuzzy. I think of it as a puzzle, since there is no opponent, no time limit. There's a goal, and a rough measure of score, and that's it.

What's great about Transport Tycoon is there's a ton of these puzzles in the game. Station placement, track placement, route optimization, and building fast & efficient intersections ("junctions" in the parlance) are all puzzles. And I like puzzles. :) I've got a handful of Hanayama cast puzzles on my desk at work, burrs and other wooden puzzles at home, and I can solve a Rubik's cube. So the game fits me.

One of the main differences between mini-games and mini-puzzles is that the puzzles are integral to gameplay; they are almost meta-games, in that doing such puzzles well achieves a goal beyond what the game sets for you. There's a group of players obsessed with crafting elegant junctions -- both fast and eye-pleasing.

This is definitely the sort of mechanic that makes every game better. Not every player needs to enjoy it; seeing the creations of others is an incentive to try your own hand. These complex junctions are inspiring. As with seeing high-level players in WoW, or the high scores on your favorite XBLA game, knowing it is possible is encouragement to try it yourself. Whether it's jealousy or greed or curiosity or admiration that drives players to achieve the same power doesn't matter. Because your players want to play more.

Would you rather make a game that other designers rate highly, or a game that players love?

My answer is, clearly, the latter. I'm offended--morally offended--by designers that look at games like Myst or The Sims and say "I don't know why people like those games, they're so stupid." That's a topic in itself that I might discuss later but let's gloss over it for now.

Or maybe not. My point of view is not to make games because I want to express myself as a designer -- I want to make something that people will enjoy. Some money would be nice, too.
My goal in this post and in this blog (as it relates to game design) is to figure out how to entertain players.

So back to the topic: I think minigames are 'cheating'. It's easy enough to 'design' a minigame because they are, generally, just executions of known designs. There's some GBA title that I remember being mentioned on Penny-Arcade that's like a billion different 15-second minigames so obviously there's room to stretch. (I feel like I should go look that game up.) Part of the power of the minigame comes from a player's experience with the genre of minigame, however. The power of a minipuzzle by contrast is that it forces the player to make a decision about how he is going to play the game proper.

Take track layout in Transport Tycoon. Building a cheap but speedy rail line around a mountain is no easy task. Yet how that player builds the line affects how his game develops -- if there's enough of a detour to go grab another town easily, if his line will be easy to upgrade, if he needs to buy different engines just to handle this one tricky stretch, etc. And basic stuff like how much he spent on it, and how efficiently the mountain line gets goods to and from each side of the hill.

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Now, do I have a conclusion? Hmm. The lesson, if any, is "add minipuzzles." The tricky part is how. Sounds like a good future topic, eh? Part II in this series explores several good minipuzzles and examines what makes for a good minipuzzle. Part III, not yet written, will look at ways to add and improve minipuzzles.

Status as a Game Mechanic

Note: I've been using "mechanic" to refer to what the game does "behind the scenes", and using "gameplay" to refer to what the player does with his time. However I'm used to using "game mechanic" and "core mechanic" to refer to what I'm now referring to as gameplay... I think I need to revise my nomenclature. (See my previous post on game design theory for some discussion on these terms.)

Definitions

Players give many reasons for playing games, but do you trust your players? Are they all sufficiently introspective and educated to understand their own motivations? They know if they enjoy something, but I'm talking about why they enjoy it. I'll go into my own theory of fun at some later point, but for now, let me say that one of the reasons that players enjoy games is the status that they can show off for their achievements.

I'm not talking about achievement directly. If happiness is the achievement of value, then a well-adjusted person is happy (and enjoys a game) when he achieves game goals that he values. But that's not status -- status is telling your buddy how you did in the game last night, or riding your new mount through a capital city in Warcraft.

The issue is a bit complicated becomes there's both showing others as well as knowing that you achieved that status item. The braggart doesn't care about getting a status item except to the extent that he can brag about it. The latter is like the guy I mentioned above, someone that has internalized the game goals as his own values and enjoys the status symbol as a record of achievement.

My point is that it doesn't matter why a given player wants a status item -- just that he does want it.

The lesson is obvious: put status items in your game.

Examples

Many games have implicit status items. In RPGs, it's your character's gear. This is one of the great driving forces in WoW: do you have your dungeon 3 set? A flying mount? An epic flyer? Tier 4? Tier 6? Legendaries? Status in MMOs also comes from the group you play with: has your guild cleared Kara, Gruul's, or Black Temple? How far are you through the Plateau? I'm calling these status items implicit because the only obvious score in the game is your level - and is the same for all players at max levels.

In platformers, progress through the game and the accumulation of collectibles and tokens are status indicators. The game tells you what the status items are, and how many you've gathered so far. Yet these items are intrinsic to gameplay; the game is essentially nothing but pushing your status up.

In multiplayer first-person shooters, your status is your standing on the leaderboard. There's not much else to the game other than that score. Single-player shooters might also have a leaderboard that's shared; XBox 360 games typically have a Live component that shows how you measure up against the playerbase. (Level-based shooters have implicit status measured as progress through the game.)

The 360 brings up another way of gaining status: achievement points. I was playing Guitar Hero with a friend last weekend and he was going for a bunch of easy achievement points to push his Gamer Score over the 20,000 mark. We were joking about the arbitrariness of the achievement, even while going for it.

That's the way the brain works

It's the way the brain works -- which is my message here. Even if you know you're shooting for an arbitrary or meaningless goal, you do it anyway. Some people gloat in their shiny new beemer or tier 4 set piece or gamer score, and for them status symbols are clear motivators. The rest of us kinda catch the same disease by association. We might not feel the need to tell everyone about our status, yet we seek it just the same.

It's the score, it's what you're supposed to do.

This ties in a bit with my previous discussions on open worlds. Be careful of removing any sort of status indicator, or your player might think he's stumbled on a toy and wonder what he's supposed to do with it. Obviously we don't want to play or design boring games that people feel stuck playing just because they're chasing some status symbol. However, if your game is good, that status symbol can show them the way.

Don't be afraid of character levels; players like them. Use them to point your players towards the fun stuff you put in the game.

Games, Game Theory, and Puzzles

The difference between games and puzzles is that puzzles are static; games have an opponent or an element of randomness. Both have a goal; you can solve a puzzle or win a game.

The difference between toys and puzzles are that puzzles have a goal.

The difference between games and toys is that games have goals. With a toy, you have to think up your own goal. Building toys like Lego blocks and Tinkertoys are a bit puzzle-like in the way they respond to your actions; they don't really 'behave' different. If you built a tower out of them, though, it creates a new context. You can build a fort, or a car. But a toy like that isn't a game unless there's a goal.

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Game Theory is, well, the study of games. It's the attempt to capture, in mathematics, game-like behavior. It's typically mentioned in discussion of economics, ethics, and politics. You might built a tree of "if I do this, then my opponent might do one of these three things, and for each of his responses, here are my possible reactions...", and then weight each action by some probability and/or 'strength', eg how close you are to 'winning'.

If you play a game against a rule-bound opponent, one whose response to your actions is dictated by a formula that doesn't involve randomness, then what you have is really a puzzle. Puzzles are generally amenable to solving through logic, although some puzzles are grossly difficult to solve without tools. Simple tools would be pen & paper; maybe add a calculator. A more complex tool would be a computer program.

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To some extent, the goal of the meta-game of poker is to figure out how to turn it into a puzzle. It's not really a puzzle due to randomness, but then, I'm not talking about poker proper. You can sit down and play one hand of poker; that's a game. But if you play against the same opponent over and over again, you can start to analyze your opponent's behavior. Assign each of their actions a percentage, due to randomness. Once you've done that, game theory will tell you how to act.

Likewise, from session to session over the course of a year, you'll face many similar opponents. If you can put your opponents into buckets -- rock, fish, shark -- then you can again apply game theory to the problem.

This is what happens in many video game communities, most especially in RPGs and Sims. Players want to figure out the rules, and then from there figure out how best to beat the game. WoW players figure out where their best items drop and go farm; Sim and RTS players calculate their optimum build orders.

Game designers can do the same thing, of course. It's a great way to find the holes in your design; possible exploits; build strategies that can make the game too easy or too hard.

I guess I don't have a lot to say here. :) I thought it interesting to think that game theory reduces games to puzzles.