There are two ways to implement Gamification (strictly speaking there are dozens if not hundreds of ways, but run with it for a second) an ethical way and an unethical way. Ian Bogost, famed game critic, designer and academic has taken to using a different word as a synonym for Gamification: Exploitationware. Because that is how it’s used. Marketing teams uses them as a new way to push their product, awareness and any other implementation they can think of. I read Game Frame, which is a book dedicated to explaining Gamification and how to implement it. It is a rather unintentionally scary guide on how to create propaganda. The thing is, Gamification is far more insidious than normal billboards, TV ads or other types of passive advertisement.

Games are systems. Systems are the process by which we get a response to input. We get gold stars for right answers and red Xs for wrong ones. In another context we call this learning. Games teach us how to use them, much like how complex systems of the real world teach us how to use them by interacting with it. Why do you think babies stick everything in their mouth? It is because they don’t know anything, but soon they learn. When you use it Gamification as a marketing tool it becomes very powerful and dangerous one.

However, harmtemolder’s article sidesteps that by either ignoring it or is unaware of its existence. I think it is the latter, because no one wants to think about the negative effects of such practice. Both Jesse Schell and Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broken, think of it as a great new future that can be used to improve our behavior for the better. The thing is both of them are game designers so they see systems as games and not forms of indoctrination. The difference between these rather invasive tools and tricks and the things harmtemolder describes is that what he describes are much like a Rewards Zone card from Best Buy or Member’s Card from Barnes n Noble. They aren’t systems so much as mechanics set on top of things you do already; it’s organization rather than indoctrination. It doesn’t influence behavior, it supplements it.

Now here comes the great kicker. If you are going to implement Gamification you must be aware of the caveats. You don’t want to influence your customers or potential customers. This is for many reasons, but I’ll give two.

1. They wont like it. People don’t like it when they feel they are being manipulated and react negatively against what is doing the manipulation. This will hurt your brand and your product.

The second one requires a little preface. Games are on the forefront of most technological advances from the physical computers, to UI and most important for this topic business models. Games venturing forth into new territories of pricing and structure are realizing they can make more money by giving their product away for free and retaining their users for longer. I know it seems counter intuitive for business to give their product away for free, but any technology business is not dealing with products anymore, they are in the business of services. Google and Amazon, two of the most successful technology companies in the world do not make products. The latter doesn’t make anything at all. They provide a service. Their money and success comes from people using that service and coming back. Which brings me to:

2. You want to retain your users because you will have far more success with repeat and continued business at free than you will with a high price point one and done.

That’s where supplementation comes in. Gamification as a supplement to what you are already offering is the key. Gamification will keep them coming back, but there has to be something worth coming back to and that is what every “expert” spouting the buzzword Gamification never says. Points, badges and progress bars are worthless when the user isn’t doing something worth their time. In all of the examples in the article they were all about a service the person was using already or needed to function in our digital age in a digital business. Linkin, Dropbox and even Fitocracy is only used by people who would exercise in the first place (even if they need some incentive to do so). Gamification isn’t about turning your service into a game, but adding game like features to your product. Thing is that will fail. Ironically for the process to succeed your service has to ignore Gamification and be a game from square one. The fundamental service had to be good or you’ve wasted your time and money Gamifying it.

Consider this a friendly warning.

Before you or anyone else embark on trying to design a game, you should first know what the hell that means. A game designer is a creator, a craftsman. This begs the question, ‘what is he creating? What is he crafting?’ Where music is crafting with sounds and writing is crafting with words and smithery is crafting with iron, game design is crafting with rules, boundaries and the means for a person to experience said rules and boundaries.

The basic nature of what a game designer does is figuring out what the players are allowed to do and eliminate that which they aren’t. They create the mechanics of the game, the method by which the player interacts with rule set and has an effect upon the game state. Boundaries are the limits of what a player can do or areas that don’t concern the game at all. Together these are known as the “magic circle.”

The magic circle is the term for the contract between game designer and player. It is the suspension of disbelief on behalf of the player to engage with the crafted experience from the designer. The rules and boundaries accepted to play the game is the magic circle. Board games have literal boundaries. On the Monopoly board you are forever going around in circles regardless of how much property or money you gain. There is no world outside the play spaces on the rim of the board. The chessboard is 64 squares and nothing beyond that. Likewise in Monopoly you can only move as far as the die roll says you can, no more no less and only during your turn. In Chess a bishop must stay on his own colored squares and can only move in direct diagonal paths for as long as it can uninterrupted. Why? Because the game’s rules say so and for no other reason. Is there anything physical from stopping the player from moving their piece one extra space to stop from paying rent, or having the bishop jump over another piece like a Knight. No. All there is are the rules and the understanding to play the game you have to follow those rules and stay within the boundaries.

With video games, the rules and boundaries are very much enforceable and unbreakable within the game itself. The code enforces what you can and cannot do, where you can and cannot go. Yes cheat codes can get around them, but they were also programmed in.

Let’s take a look at sports. Soccer had boundaries, very literal boundaries. The white lines on the pitch are the boundaries of where play can occur. Should the ball go outside the physical boundaries (because the laws of physics are not subject to the rules of a game in the real world) there are rules to get the ball back into play and the game moving along. So while the areas outside the physical boundaries of the pitch are not part of the play area, they are part of the game, because the game has rules to deal with such boundaries. Should you hit the ball out of the stadium in Baseball, depending on where it goes it’s called a run and they get a new ball so play can continue. That ball is out of the game quite literally. It has left the space of the magic circle and even if it should be returned it won’t matter. It isn’t part of the game anymore. That is a rule and within the game’s boundaries.

I know it sounds confusing, but there are real world considerations made my designers, thought over and rules made for them. A game designer is like a sculptor, except instead of clay he or she works in rules of play. Imagine the magic circle as a mound of clay and all your design work as the sculptures hands push and molding it into a playable state. Even if you do everything right and work hard, that is no guarantee that the final result of this work will be great or even any good. Game design is an art and the game designer is the artist.

The Stanley Parable is a Source Code mod made by Davey Wreden. It took two years of work to make and is a superb think piece. That’s what it is, a think piece in interactive form. It’s not a game in the traditional sense. There are no points. there are no enemies. It’s a first person game with no shooting or jumping. It is a game about choice. That’s all you do during the course of the game: make choices.

They are binary choices, each one of them, but they all lead to a very different conclusion. Why? It’s unusual in that it’s not just a work that may need to be experience again in order to fully appreciate it; it demands that you play it again. In fact there are  6 endings. I’m not sure if I should tell you that before yelling yo to play it, but I feel that you need to know that to appreciate everything. It is easy to miss one of the endings. This way there is no confusion.

But seriously, I highly recommend you go play it now. It will require Source SDK Base 2007 installed on your computer to run and Steam since that’s how you get it. You can download the mod here with instructions.

I think this is an apt game to bring this feature back to Creative fluff, because the game itself is an allegory of the relationship between players and game designers. All the different endings drive that point home. That is the first thing about the game that is great is how Davey Wreden was able convey the meaning of the game so excellently through the method of the narrator, who is excellent by the way. But also he created something that wouldn’t work in any other medium. The post-modern discarding of traditional story order and synthesis of meaning couldn’t be done in more traditional mediums of film or books. You get to play the game’s different ending is any order you wish and you will still come away with the full experience. It may be slightly different to another’s based on the order you play it in, but basic nuggets of thought will be the same.

I don’t want to get into to much detail, because I don’t want to spoil what it has in store for you. Just a few hints of what it is about and the insistence you go and try it out now.

Read more in-depth thoughts at my own blog. Spoilers abound.

Small Worlds is an indie entrant into the Causal Gameplay design 6th challenge, going on right now. The competition’s deadline was October 18th and it has been up since then. The compition’s  parameters are as follows:

Design a game that incorporates our theme (see below). It doesn’t have to be complex nor large in scope. Since you will have just 6 weeks to complete your design, simple ideas are probably the best way to go. You may use any browser-based technology platformyou are comfortable with (Flash, Unity, Shockwave, Javascript, etc.). If we can embed your finished game file on our competition page, you may use that platform to design and develop your game.

For the 6th Casual Gameplay Design Competition, we are asking for entries designed to incorporate this theme: EXPLORE. You are free to interpret that any way you choose; however, the extent to which your game embodies the theme is left up to the competition judges to decide. Use your imagination and be creative. We will select the best entries submitted to represent the competition just like we have done before. Impress us with your game design and production skills.

With that in mind David Shute created a game that emphasises the theme perfectly and with an increabaly atmophereic resonance. Small Worlds is a platformer that utilizes very old school pixel art design that creates a canvus almost as much as it creates a level. The game did have some issues with the jump button that that the creator did apologize for, saying:

“I’m really sorry the jumping control is so screwy – In an ill-fated attempt to streamline the movement code, I changed the order in which key presses are processed, which had an unintended side effect: ‘Jump’ gets ignored if you’re moving sideways off a ledge or walking down a slope.

I’d really love to be able to upload the fixed version right now, but a deadline’s a deadline – and for better or worse, this is the version I submitted.

As soon as the competition’s over I’ll send Jay the improved version though – It’ll give me a chance to fix some other (minor, cosmetic) problems that slipped through the net too.”

He and all the other contestants were allowed to upload updated versions. Another note, Small Worlds proudly wears the Art Game label, whether or not it was intentional. I don’t wish to spoil anything, but it is an expirience well worth having. The game is work safe. Try and play it in an eviornment where you wont be bothered. The music, by Kevin MacLeod is that good.

I am amazed that Small Worlds took only 6 weeks to make, not because it is brimming with compexity in its code or visual, but rather its concept. The design is subtle and intricate that it is able to draw you in with a few colored blocks and slowly reveal itself . It is so basic and succedes at being art better than most AAA PC and console titles published today. Don’t take that as a negative, art is not the direct opposite of fun or engaging; the two words have nothing to do with each other. The best works are those that are engaging and consumable as well as deep and meaningful. This is one of those games.

David Shute’s Small Worlds

Rather than repost all the thoughts here I’d rather just link you.

http://wordsonplay.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/the-big-triangle/

They aren’t as in depth as say Valve’s Source Engine or the ability to create levels like Little Big Planet, but Uncharted 2: Among Thieves offers a set of Machinima tools in a “Cinema Mode.” You can take recorded video footage from matches and change camera angles or alter things and upload the edited recording. But probably most impressive is a green screen mode that allows you to take the characters from the game and put them into any setting the game can offer and move them around as you will. It even allow you to use the blue-tooth headset to record dialogue that the game with lip-sync the character’s lips too.

I’m not sure how indepth the movie creation aspect of the game will be or if it will allow you to drop in you’re own features, but as a basic concept it is an interesting new look into the possibilities of user generated content.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves comes out October 13th for PS3 at $59.99.

I quickly explained the controls, all two of them, started him on the opening level and then watched him play. It took a little while, but he was enjoying flying all over the place.

While the overall experience was pleasant for him, if I wasn’t there to nudge him in the right direction when asked he might not have gotten as much out of the experience as a normal gamer would have. For starters the game doesn’t explain the controls explicitly. If you are paying attention throughout the start up screens and the room you might figure out that it works by tilting the controller. Then you’d only have the problem of pushing a button to move forward. But on your own you would have had this problem in trying to understand what the buttons do.Through experimentation you’d learn that X would send you forward, but it might cause problems if the player didn’t realize that all the buttons do the same thing as they try to figure out any differences.

At one point my dad asked me, “what am I supposed to do now?” This was before he hit his first flower. As an environment he thought it was pretty, but it needed a purpose and that purpose wasn’t obvious. Once he got the hang of it he began looking for the halos that surrounded the colored flowers, but to find them he often went to get an areal view, because he couldn’t find his way or where the next one was. Many of the visual clues that gamer’s take for granted escaped him. In the first level he didn’t connect yellow grass with where the flowers would be based on the earlier experience at the beginning of the level. he often ignored the few seconds where the game took the camera away from him and kept trying to play. This was a problem, because he then found he didn’t know where to go next.

The problem may come from the total immersion style that Flower goes for. Most games have a definitive break between gameplay and cutscenes or in game indications to signify them as such. Flower just moves the camera. There is no switch in the engine or even a cut in camera angles to signify a change. The simple shift in the camera in the same manner that the petals flow doesn’t signify stop laying and pay attention to this. A person who plays games even only occasionally would be able to pick up on this, but a non-gamer might not be able to understand some of the language games have crafted for themselves. Flower is using the basic language of games, but is doing it far more subtly than nearly ever other game out there. The break between the parts are nearly unnoticeable.

Finally there is the last section to the design.  The end of the level. To end the level you simply enter the swirling vortex at the end. This wasn’t understood at first by my dad. At first he took no notice of it and was looking for more flowers despite having bloomed them all. He then saw it, but just saw the swirls as wind and nothing special. I eventually gave up hoping he would figure it out and just told him.

The design choices for Flower seem a bit divided. On the one hand they are creating an environment to be experienced, but also they are creating a symbolic narrative. The first requires a quick rundown of the controls and what some basic interactions, but the latter needs a non-intrusive interface. The designers did a good job in trying to meld the two together, but I think that it only ended up  going against one of the things they were shooting for. The choice to rely on game language to convey the game requires the player to be a gamer or at least subconsciously aware of it. However, this is not the case with non-gamers that Flower is trying to be open towards.

That was a look at the design of the game, now you can follow the link to the game’s aesthetic effect on the experience.

http://www.thegamecritique.com/recent-posts/flower-a-dads-expirience-aesthetic/205/

Either way its a good read over at gamasutra. Read it here.

Putting the Game Before the Book What would your favorite piece of literature look like if it had been created as a game first? In a time when bits of Dante’s Divine Comedy are being carved out and turned into a hack-n-slash game, I find myself longing for intelligently designed games–games with a strong literary component–not merely literary backdrops. So rather than challenge you to imagine the conversion of your favorite literature into games, I challenge you to supersede the source literature and imagine a game that might have tried to communicate the same themes, the same message, to its audience.

Feel free to ignore the technical constraints of the era in which the book was written. In fact, feel free to ignore the technical constraints (within reason) of today and push the envelop a bit. Also notice that I didn’t specify video game. Feel free to imagine a board game, card game, RPG, or sport, that could have been created during the same time period as the book in question. Be as vague, or as detailed, about the design particulars as you like. Work together with another blogger, or work alone.

I look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Well many blogs contributed their design concepts, including yours truly. It was an interesting game design challenge and will be further continued in February:

Turning Over a New Leaf: (We’re trying something new with the topic this month, so please read carefully.) February’s BoRT invites you take a game design suggested by another blogger in last month’s Round Table and build upon it. You should ignore the literary source of the original design, but attempt to communicate the same themes and/or convey the same mood as the proposed game. This means you can alter the game genre, change the setting, and add new layers to the game mechanics. This is not an opportunity to critique a previous design, but to honor it by striving to reach the same goals, while adding your own personal touch.

After the January challenge concluded at the end of the month, Corvus held the first ever Round Table podcast. He drafted in three guests to talk about their favorite entry and why it was their favorite. They also get into some of the design aspects of the ideas. It’s a good listen and only around 30 minutes long.

You can listen/download here:

http://blog.pjsattic.com/corvus/2009/02/bortcast-january-2009/

This is a demo, but its short, really short. It’s only a little longer than Heavenly Sword’s demo. There is a lot to go over in the demo. I’ll start with the most touted part of the game, the new environment changing weaponry. The main question that has been raised is, can this mechanic sustain an entire game? The detractors say it’s a bit too gimmicky and only one tool, while other cite Portal as a game that did that sort of thing well. After going through the demo a number of times, I say no. Not on its own. Portal was a masterpiece success not because of its mechanic, but how it used it and the world it formed around it. That and the game was only six hours long. I’ll explain what I mean.

The main weapon in Fracture is a machine gun with two extra functions. You can’t swap out this gun for one lying around. You have a second slot for that purpose. The extra functions are connected to the left and right trigger buttons (L1 and R1). When shot into the dirt one will raise the level of the ground, the other will cause it to lower. These allow for some basic puzzle solving of the run and gun variety. See a sewer pipe filled with dirt, shoot it out of the way by lower it. Can’t jump over a wall; raise the dirt in front of it to get some height. Raising the ground also can create a shield in an otherwise open section of the level. Doing it under an enemy throws them into the air. There are two sets of grenades that serve the same function. The lowering ones act as normal grenades in the absence of dirt. The only other landscape-using weapon in the game shown is something like a bomb tunneler. It travels under ground and blows up either when you hit the detonate button or it hits a wall.

Those are the functions and from what I’ve seen this is a clear example of the Portal Effect that went over in my previous article. The idea is that this is an end result and not a new source of design space. Portal as great as it was could not support new ideas or expand the concept further than it had. I believe that Fracture is the same way, though this maybe because the designer decided to go the shooter route. Really the two games take up the same kind of design space of exploring new ways to distort/change the landscape around the player.

In Fracture there are plenty of other weapons, rocket launcher, sticky grenade launcher, sniper rifle, machine gun. A few others are shown in the loading screen at the beginning, but are not in the game as shown. From other previews around the net there are even more guns that can terraform, but they didn’t show up here. Other than the gimmick there is really nothing else new here. The gimmick is fun, especially when they added real gravity physics to running up and down surfaces does give an additional sense of strategy of how you can use the landscaping tools, but honestly the way the shootouts are, I doubt you’ll have the time or the reason to use any of them. Now come the most dreaded part of this preview.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before. The character is also a gruff, grizzled supposedly brown haired marine in a suit of armor with regenerative shielding with a HUD that is explained as seen by the character through an ocular implant. The story is about fighting a general who was gone off and declared war or something. It’s your job to take him down, except he has an army at his back full of genetically enhanced soldiers. This is all we get from the demo, though I suspect that there isn’t much else there.

Overall the sound is good, the visuals are a little sub par and there are times when the game has to freeze for a second or two to load. Honestly this seems like another run of the mill shooter. The idea of terra formation and deformation sounds interesting, but did they have to put it into a shooter. That’s an idea that sounds like it could have been a great platformer or game based on exploration.

Fracture is a third person shooter by the developer Day 1 Studios set to be released on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 on October 7^th.