Game Design Is Simple

  Simple != easy
  Simple != obvious
  Simple != intuitive
  Simple != easy to understand

  Elegant == Simple
  Simple  != elegant

I mean... yeah kind of obvs. Very "rest of the owl".

Stories are obviously fun, otherwise no-one would read books, but a story that you interact with meaningfully, that you can change significantly, really hard to do well.

Like every game where you can do good thing or bad thing, and the game punishes you for doing bad thing. It's really hard to write a compelling story where a nasty piece of shit still somehow saves the Fantasy Kingdom from the Prophesised Doom and becomes the hero.

I honestly cant't think of any good examples where game mechanics and stories interacted in a way that gave you significant agency while still being fun. I'd love to be given contra-examples though.

I think of the Mass Effect games and their attempts at this, "Oh you were only 92% Paragon, so now we're at the end, _this_ crew-member has to die for some reason, if only you'd known that 30 hours of gameplay ago when you punched that grifter in the Citadel!"

Or one I still bear a massive, MASSIVE grudge against, Fable III, where if you didn't massively grind for resources before the bit you thought was the end-game - where you fought and defeated the evil oppressive king, you found yourself making ridiculously stupid binary decisions like "Should this multi-storey building be used as an orphanage? Or as a whore-house?" That's literally one of the decisions you had to make. Oh, and the game made sure to tell you "Btw, because you didn't grind enough, if you choose the way that earns less money, EVERY ONE DIES BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO HELP THE ORPHANS."

It was an interesting attempt, to be sure, a brave experiment but I resented the game so much for the heel turn it pulled - "Actually, the evil oppressive money grubbing king you overthrew was RIGHT! Now you have to do what he was doing! Mwahahaha! Irony!"

Worst of all, it never let me make nuanced choices - why can't it be orphans downstairs, sex workers upstairs, and during the daytime, I pay the sex-workers to look after the orphans? Nope, it was either "look after the innocent children" or "four floors of whores". Complete with animations of crying children if you chose sex-workers. Or crying sex-workers if you chose the children. Once again, not kidding.

Once you knew the heel-turn twist, you could game it massively beforehand, one of the best strategies was to buy properties, become an incredibly oppressive landlord by demanding extortionate rents, so when it came time for the "orphans/whores" decisions, you had so much money you could could choose the good path and everyone declared you a saint.

But I felt so disrespected by the game that I didn't even bother.

That's the problem - good stories need direction towards a satisfying end, and it's really hard to give a player agency in a good narrative, and so I felt railroaded into comically absurd black/white choices.

Honestly, I think the only games that have ever done the good/evil choices in a story well were the Knights of The Old Republic series, but once again, it stopped being so much fun when I had to keep on being evil because I'd chosen evil stuff prior.

Can't I just be evil today, and maybe a bit nice tomorrow? After all, the best villains are the mercurial ones.

> Dopamine can release for 'richly interpretable' situations

Ok, and? I mean, Oh, right. The dopamine. The dopamine for gamers, the dopamine chosen especially to entertain gamers, gamers' dopamine. That dopamine?

Others are very obvious though; MMORPGs are the obvious answer and they often don't even have an interesting story or reward to go with the grind, because the reward is a gamble. Ubisoft games are another example, ever since the first Assassin's Creed their games have generally been the same formula of an overworld with a lot of repeated but sameish "quests". The Division series combines the two with randomized, chance based loot. (...coincidentally I'm playing that one right now).

But yeah, the "repeated challenges" thing is best left to that particular class of games. Some people realy enjoy it though.

For instance, I think that puzzles are ok in Mass Effect, but the many mini-games in Final Fantasy 7 are borderline annoying.

It's kind of hard to stay equipped without salvaging though.

But let's simplify this. What are your favorite games, and in what way do they sidestep having any repeated challenges? Do they have one single challenge, after which the game is over? Is that fun?

Sure, RPGs tend to have "repeated" battles or harvesting. Racing has repeated laps. FPS have repeatedly finding someone else to shoot. Coding simulators like Factorio have you repeatedly add automation, and repeatedly replace them with better automation. Platformers have you repeatedly move through platforms.

This is all illustrated and explained in the article, though.

2. This article also does not say that fun equals repeated challenges. The closest thing in there is that fun is about prediction. Even the definition of "mastery" that the article sets forth is pretty explicitly about every type of cognitive challenge you meet in life.

3. This article does not imply that stories cannot be fun. In fact, I specifically pointed out that stories that you are unsure where they are going, and stories with more interpretability are more likely to be fun that predictable ones. If you follow the links in the article, you will see

4. I don't exclusively work in the MMORPG space. I have worked in tabletop, puzzle, trivia, casual, and single-player RPGs.

There's a lot of things about our real world, that if told by an alien race, would make us sound like ethereal wizards.

"They convinced the sand itself to think for them, guided the power of Sol to move them, and spoke to eachother through the very fabric of energy that moves invisibly through us all"

Similar to that, there's a bunch of magic/fantasy storytelling that can kind of pull me out of disbelief, because I can't help but think "yeah we have that, it's electricity" or "witches are just pharamacists without good research"

But like AAA has never been an adjective that meant good or fun. Just that the budget is big.

Cut scenese are an opportunity for a change of pace and to tell the story in a different way. Or as a way to emphasize a game action. When you get a touchdown in Tecmo Bowl, you have a little cut scene which is nice (but gets repetitive). The cut scenes in a Katamari game give you some sort of connection to the world, but you can always skip them.

I think I've managed to skip most big budget games for most of my gaming life. That's fine, lots of other customers for those, I'll stick to the games I like.

So you have Legend of Zelda games where pretty much all puzzles are so simple you can instantly tell what the solution is the very moment you see them, ie. downright retarded with few rare exceptions. This also applies to difficulty, etc.

As a result, AAA games can only be appretiated or enjoyed for not much else but production values. The soundtrack, the setpieces, the massive worlds and how much money must have gone into it, etc.

Taking agency away from the player is usually a bad thing, so its not something you want to do when the player has other goals to work on. They are a fine tool to break up the action and games are also about the story and world building so expositional sections are a natural thing.

Its important to not mess with the game pacing, though.

After a heavy boss fight where the player doesn't even know what their next goal is anyway? Perfectly fine time for some exposition.

Running past an NPC on the way to do something? That's a horrible time to whip around the camera and tell the player something.

AAAs have huge momentum so you'll often see plot points and exposition that needs to be shoehorned in to fix some writing issue or what have you. Of course, you also just have game directors making bad decisions.

Two things to consider regarding cut scenes. First, sometimes they are mandated by the game story writers and backed up by artists wanting to show off. Second, and more importantly from a game developer's perspective, they are a useful tool for hiding scene loading I/O such that the customer experience does not notice a nontrivial delay.

But they are also not gameplay, obviously.

https://www.raphkoster.com/2012/01/20/narrative-is-not-a-gam... https://www.raphkoster.com/2012/01/26/narrative-isnt-usually...

...and maybe https://www.raphkoster.com/2013/03/13/why-are-qtes-so-popula... since you dislike QTE's. :)

The thing about cutscenes, as with most aspects of AAA games, is that they test well in their target market. Cutscenes aren’t exactly cheap to make, especially if acted. They wouldn’t do them if they weren’t popular.

But it’s perfectly fine that you, like many (and me), don’t like cutscenes. Embrace that and accept that perhaps those games aren’t for you, because there is so much choice out there that that you will certainly be able to find things more to your tastes.

This is not exactly a new phenomenon. The final cutscene in Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008) is 71 minutes long (Guinness world record). The total cutscenes add up to around 9 hours according to a Reddit user. Maybe more games are doing this now compared to 15 years ago, but I wouldn't bet on it.

I just picked up Prodeus, if you like games like old Doom and Quake you’ll probably love it.

Also, From Software games (Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Sekiro, Armored Core) are basically all gameplay. Cutscenes are kept to a minimum and gameplay is is tight AF

- proper games ("play"): if you remove all the lore, cinematics, dialogs, etc the gameplay can stand on its own and the user find it fun. (ex: Elden ring, Pokemon. you can play a cut-scenes ripped version in a language you don't understand and still enjoy both, chess and other abstract games are the extreme end of this category)

- interactive DVD menus ("media arts"): it's a movie but sometimes you get to interact with it. in this category you have also have visual novels with branching trees/DAGs. they are more than a movie but still ultimately the most important test: they can't stand alone without the story/lore.

I enjoy both, but I wish games and steam pages were more front and center about which camp they are in the beginning before I even buy them.

my ultimate sin is games that think they are in category 1 who give you unskippable cut scenes.

Yes. In general it's because they're made by a different team, with different incentives, working to a different schedule.

They're often made using an earlier version of the game lore and story. Due to the massive effort required to make changes and render frames, they often don't match up with late-breaking changes made by the game team.

But sometimes you get lucky and the cinematics team excels. I worked with Blizzard's cinematics team in the '90s, and those spectacular folks produced an amazing body of work.

What exactly is the right way to tell a good story though a game? The only other ways I've seen are:

1) Text boxes or Bethesda-style dialogue trees

2) Dark-souls style slow-drip storytelling.

Although they can both work, I don't think I prefer either one over cutscenes. (1) especially is more like something I'll forgive rather than like because I know cutscenes are difficult for smaller teams and limiting for games that emphasize player choice.

It's one of the reasons I liked Baldurs Gate 3 so much -- suddenly the cinematic cutscenes don't feel like a tradeoff for sacrificing choice.

I played that in my teens, and 30 years later, I can still remember the name of the peaceful agricultural planet that had blimps as their main form of transportation - Bex.

Why? Because the cutscene played and I was like "Wow, look at this place, this is nothing like New Detroit".

And it didn't make you (IIRC) watch the cutscenes. Every. Damn. Time you landed thereafter.

I don't think it's a modern thing, I tried playing the original Kingdom Hearts on my PS/2 but gave up because there are so many mandatory videos that are unskippable during combat. Not going back as far, Bayonetta series has a ton of quicktime sequences, that I hate, have to beat an enemy, die to due slow reflexes and unexpected quicktime event, repeat and hopefully get the timing right on button press which is sharp contrast to the otherwise fluid combat in Bayonetta.

There was also at one point in ancient history a very big deal to have cinematics integrate seamlessly into gameplay, using the same engine for both, instead of prerecorded video sequences. So then games did that just as a point of pride, and having the cinematics in game engine it possible for non specialists to add (or storyboard and leaving final result to specialists) cinematics into a game's flow.

A bit of juice is fine and necessary, but the moment your juice starts to look like interactive gameplay, but isn't, it went way to far and just becomes noise. I rather have some less spectacular debris I can interact with, then just a particle system filling the screen with non-interactive nonsense.

TotalBiscuit was ranting about it ages ago[1]. 2kliksphilip also has numerous videos[2] on the lack of interactive physics in modern games.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOHyD49DaeA

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxQW2GL64U0

I don't mind complexity, some of my favorite games are ridiculously complex (Dwarf Fortress), but the complexity needs to pay for itself.

An extreme example of more-is-better are games like EU4, where just understanding how trade works, is more complicated than most entire games, and that's just a single subsystem. You can ignore it, but mastering it can be satisfying. Or frustrating.

In that sense of the word, it's not only about random things, but also things like "will I click at just the right time to head-shot that enemy?" or "I will checkmate the next turn unless my opponent thinks of some clever move that I don't?"). And the theory is that once you run out of uncertain things there is no more a game, as the player know how it will end and there is nothing more that can fail or anything unexpected that can happen. Basically like reading the end of a book you have already read before, so you know exactly what will happen.

And depth from a game design pov is also not necessarily strictly positive. Make the game too deep and there is, as you say, pure random. You could keep adding rules to chess to make it 100% impossible for any human to remotely guess what kind of move to make, and that's when you added so much uncertainty that it became too deep.

E.g. slight variations in inputs should produce a slight but ideally meaningful variation in output, so the outcome of pressing keys is both reliable as well as an open space for further mastery.

It's also important that you can trace and understand what happened in retrospect. Just missing because of a 5% chance isn't fun. Missing because you didn't consider wind direction and the movement of an object between you and the target on the other hand is perfectly grokkable.

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."

But it's the same underlying point.

Fun, among other things = remaining in the tight channel of flow, where your skills get challenged without ever reaching a point of frustration. Too little challenge = boredom.

Skills improve as they get challenged, i.e. when our prediction and pattern matching system receive enough feedback to improve upon our previous actions to get a more optimal outcome.

So, fun is (among other things) getting better at doing something, and as we get better, what was once a challenge turns easier, so a fun game needs to have a well-tuned difficulty progression to keep in pace with your improving skills.

And it's kind of weird, but I preferred the old-style questing (many repeated quests and perhaps less streamlined experience) compared to what came afterwards.

In Cataclysm they tried to improve the quest experience, add more variety, but somehow the game lost a bit of its magic - at least from my point of view.

That doesn't mean that it has to be bad or destructive! Fun is a positive thing, and most game designers I've met from across the industry are in it because they just want to make people have fun.

Dopamine release is a bit of a curio, really. You don't make design decisions based on optimising dopamine release; there's no way of doing that. But it's interesting to know the physiological reasons why people think that things are fun, and it's useful evidence when building a framework such as Raph's.