Table of Contents
Editorial: R&D Spending on Games
Chris Crawford
Through Hope-Colored Glasses
Don Daglow
Salary Survey Results
Chris Crawford
Reassessing Interactivity
Brenda Laurel
Pictographs in Computer Game Interfaces
Frank Boosman
Three Levels of Interaction
Chris Crawford
Computer Fantasy Games
David Shapiro
Editor Chris Crawford
Subscriptions The Journal of Computer Game Design is published six times a year. To subscribe to The Journal, send a check or money order for $30 to:
The Journal of Computer Game Design
5251 Sierra Road
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Submissions Material for this Journal is solicited from the readership. Articles should address artistic or technical aspects of computer game design at a level suitable for professionals in the industry. Reviews of games are not published by this Journal. All articles must be submitted electronically, either on Macintosh disk , through MCI Mail (my username is CCRAWFORD),or via modem. No payments are made for articles. Authors are herbey notified that their submissions may be reprinted in Computer Gaming Forum.
Copyright The contents of this Journal are copyright © Chris Crawford 1987.
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Editorial: R&D Spending on Games
One of the well-established rules of thumb of the high-tech biz dictates that a company should spend about 10% of its revenues on R&D. Now, R&D is not just blue-sky research; it’s all of the costs involved in putting together a product for the marketplace. Thus, the programming effort for any new product, no matter how pedestrian, is considered R&D. Same goes for the artwork, the preparation of the manual, and so forth.
The games biz, at first glance, seems to equal or exceed the requirements of this rule of thumb. Typical royalties for the designer-programmer alone typically fall into the range 10%-15% of net revenues. All of the other development costs must be added to the designer’s royalty. Thus, it would seem that the games industry is aggressively investing a hefty chunk of its revenues into R&D. One would think that the games industry probably invests about 15% of its revenues into R&D. This would in turn suggest a fast-moving, technically vigorous industry.
There’s a catch, and it involves the common practice of porting games onto other machines. It is no accident that all of the successful publishers have become very efficient at rapidly porting their products onto a number of different machines. From the publisher’s point of view, porting can make a marginal game profitable. From the author’s point of view, porting is often a way to squeeze additional income out of a design. From the customer’s point of view, porting makes available a wider selection of game designs. Everybody wins. That’s why the practice is so common.
But there is a catch: Money spent on porting counts as R&D money, but it doesn’t really advance the industry the way that R&D spending normally advances an industry.
Look at it this way: right now the industry seems to spend about 15% of its revenues on R&D, but about half of that, I would guess, goes into porting projects rather than original designs. Thus, the true figure for R&D, the “honest R&D” figure, is probably closer to 7.5%. This is a very low figure for a high-tech industry, and it suggests an industry that is stagnant, slow to come up with innovations, backward. Sound like anybody you know?
What should we do about the problem? I certainly don’t suggest that we give up porting; that would make matters worse! Porting increases the profitability of otherwise marginal games, making it easier for publishers to pursue innovative and risky new ideas. Publishers would make less money and authors would make less money — that’s not what we want!
I think that the problem arises because there are just too many different machines out there. Right now there are six different machines supported by games publishers: C64, IBM, Apple II, Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari. If we could shave this figure down, porting costs would be lowered. Of course, this is not a decision that designers and publishers can make. Customers decide what machines to buy, and we play an indirect role by deciding what machines to support.
The good news is, this problem will go away with time. The C64 and the Apple II are obsolete and will be shrivel away by the end of the decade. The Amiga and the Atari have had two years to establish themselves, and it is now obvious that, while they won’t die anytime soon, neither will they threaten the iron grip held on the industry by IBM and Macintosh. While the Amiga and Atari continue to sell, their sales rate is much less than that of the PC-clones or the Mac, and so the gap in installed base between the two front-runners and the two hopefuls continues to widen. Thus, I think that within five years we will see a convergence onto the IBM and Macintosh as the standards of the industry.
This won’t solve our problems. We will lose some flexibility and some freedom when there are fewer machines out there. But it will increase the percentage of R&D money that goes to truly original work, and that can only help the vitality of our industry.
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Through Hope-Colored Glasses:
A Publisher's Perspective on Game Development
Don L. Daglow
(Don is one of the old hands of the industry. He started off with Mattell, where he designed several games for the Intellivision, including Utopia. He rose to lead the game design efforts there. When Mattell dropped the Intellivision, Don went to Electronic Arts, where he served as a producer for several years. He is now the Director of Home and Entertainment Software for Broderbund.)
The purpose of this article is to share some perspectives of a Designer-turned-Publisher, to give you an idea of how Publishers in general approach new game designers and game concepts, and to perhaps let you anticipate how you can most easily sell your next idea.
Here's the most important thing to remember: whether it be Activision, Broderbund, EA, Mindscape or whoever else you work with, the Publisher WANTS to buy your game, they WANT you to succeed, they WANT to see you have a great career in game design. Because if we DON'T find anyone to do those things, we have no games, we go out of business, and we go back to crummy boring jobs!
Let's say you've written a great new game. You send it in to a Publisher; let's follow what happens to it--and you--from there.
I. The First Screening: Trial by Fire
The first person who sees your proposal or prototype is likely to be a true game lover, because they see a LOT of them. Your great new game will be routed to this person, best described as a “Screener”, who separates the “No way!” games from the “Hmmm....maybe”. For reasons I'll explain below, the “Wow! We gotta have this!” product is very rare — perhaps a once a year occurrence at best.
What does that screening person look for? It's easier to define what will get you a polite rejection letter than what will get you a contract. Sure, they're looking for games that are fun, games with great graphics (one of the best ways to get noticed is to put in some stunning visuals up front), unique new ideas. But they're also seeing if you fall into some predictable traps--as do 95% of the submissions we see. Just avoid those pitfalls and you heighten tremendously your chances of getting published. Some popular death-knells, no-no's and hari-kiri's:
• Anything that doesn't boot the first time you try it. Sounds obvious, but you wouldn't BELIEVE what a large percentage don't boot or crash in flames within five minutes.
• Anything that's not going to catch a jaded but passionate game player's fancy FAST: Screeners, reviewers and lots of our customers are all jaded but passionate game lovers. They know that if a game is boring after the first 5 minutes the odds that it'll get better are like the odds that Richard Nixon will admit masterminding Watergate, put on a day-glow leotard and open a New Delhi sushi bar.
• Special Interest Group games: “This will really appeal to Lithuanian stamp collectors!” I'm a Lithuanian stamp collector, and I'll agree that all 200 of us will love your game.
• Copycat games...The letter says, “This looks just like Infiltrator, but it's much better!” Caveat: this doesn't extend to what I call genre games: the world has obviously been eager for more than just one flight simulator.
• Games that take twelve hours and 100 pages of documentation before you can START to play them. Remember, long-play games like Ultima IV are still lots of fun the first five minutes--I think Richard Garriott may be the best Designer in the business at pulling players happily into long-term, complicated games, and we can all learn something by analyzing his work.
• Current fads...“Hey, Ed,” the Screener calls out, “we're up to 12 trivia games this week!”
• Games with pretentious cover letters. Try to keep it low-key and confident. Picture the Volvo salesman confident in his product, not the snooty Porsche dealer or Honest Abe's Used Cars and Auto Parts. But never feel bad about “selling” your game to the Publisher — we expect it and, when it's well-done, admire you for it.
• “I won't send you my game until you sign my non-disclosure, and I won't sign yours.” I know a “big name” Game Designer who found himself without any takers for his great new game thanks to this one. This ploy sets off little red warning lights in a Publisher's mind: “this guy's paranoid: if we sneeze he'll sue us for endangering his health.” As Chris Crawford says in his presentations on game design, the major Publishers got where they are today by treating Authors well, not by ripping them off.
• “I'm launching a great company and I deign to send you a proposal” letters from Dentists in Peoria whose cousin Rudy spent eight hours on Saturday making a shooting gallery that teaches single-digit addition.
• Board Game conversions...“This is like Monopoly, only better!” Let's see, if you land on all three red planets then you get to build a space colony...
• Show the Market What It Ought to Be Like games. This is a tough category to criticize because, frankly, it's one place Publishers try to take chances. “There aren't enough games aimed at women, so I made one” is a line we often hear. Trouble is, the games usually look like they try to solve the shortage of “Games That Insult Women's Intelligence.” Design a game which is lots of fun for both men AND women and you've got everyone's attention, because thus far we've done a poor job of doing just that.
• Proposals for the Cray. “My adventure will have 2 billion planets, each with its own detailed civilization and complete geography and history. It will fit in a 16K cartridge.” PLAN whether or not your idea will fit in a machine before you send in your proposal; if it's going to look like a tight squeeze, write up HOW you'll do it as part of the proposal.
• Proposals covering the years 1987-2015. If actuarial tables indicate you're likely to have a heart attack before the game is finished, we're not interested.
• Games in Basic. I hear lots of Publishers say they'll never publish a game in Basic; I think the truth is “almost never.” I'll publish a really great game written in Fortran...IF it's a REALLY great game.
• Proposals for machines with small audiences. Not too many Publishers will look at Atari 800 games any more, and IBM and Commodore are probably the only real safe bets in these times of confused consumers.
That sounds like a lot of negatives, I know, but the fact is that if your game doesn't fall into any of these pitfalls you're likely to get past the Screener. If it gets past these criteria, it's fun, original, and a Definite Maybe.
II. In the Land of the Definite Maybes
So where do all the Definite Maybe's of the world go to? To people called (depending on the company) Producers, Publishers, Product Managers, Creative Managers, Editors. These are the people who continually hound the Screener: “Seen anything good?” Like the Screener, they WANT to publish your game. They're looking for great games to publish, because if they don't publish games, they don't get a paycheck.
So your game lands on their desk and they give it a look. They'll be thinking the same things the Screener is thinking: fun to play, great graphics, new idea, lasting play value, easy to understand. But they'll also be going one critical step farther: they'll be thinking about what it'll be like to work with YOU. If they like what you've sent, you're likely to get a phone call; a good phone call leads to a meeting; a good meeting leads to a contract. Here are some good and bad moments from hundreds of such calls I've made...
“I'd look forward to hearing your comments,” the Author says, “because I know sometimes I just get too close to the thing to see it clearly. I do think the essential focus of the game play is right, though.” “Great,” the Publisher thinks, “this person is open minded but has a backbone to stick up for what they really believe in. If they have the talent to back it up we'll have a dialogue with them that will produce a healthy consensus on design issues.” Dan Bunten, a guy often referred to as the most talented Designer in our business, is also a person who listens intently to any and all comments made by anyone about his games, looking for good ideas or new perspectives.
“I have some real strong feelings about what the package ought to look like, so I want to have the right to approve it.” We're not looking for package designers--we have them already. The reasonable Author knows he or she will be consulted and kept informed about the package.
“I'm not going to change the graphics”, or a refusal to consider changing anything else. I'm willing to listen to the Author try to talk me into things; why aren't they interested in listening to me trying to talk them into things?
“One way or another, I'm going to finish this thing.” Music to my ears! The killer instinct of the Designer who won't give up is invaluable--whenever I see it I admire the person and hope the game is worth that commitment.
“I'm going to finish this thing by June 15. Whatever isn't in by then won't get in.” Fine--working towards deadlines is a great plus, and sometimes omitting extra features really is necessary. I just wish I was hearing something about “It isn't done until it's done right” and “I want this thing to be the best damn game on the market.” Used Fiats, old KC and the Sunshine Band records and computer games are all not suitable for purchase in “as is” condition.
“I'm sending this to several Publishers and I'll sell it to the highest bidder.” How would you like it if somebody told you that they were invited to four different parties on Friday night and they'd come to the one with the best food?
“I did send this to a couple of other Publishers, and they seem to be interested. I'll try to keep you informed if I get any offers so everyone's aware what's going on. I'm after the best deal I can get, obviously, but what I really want is the company that'll sell the most games for me and help me create more hits.” Fair enough.
“I'm writing a novel right now” or “I'm playing gigs in a new-wave string quartet three nights a week” or “I'm remodelling this old Victorian.” The Publisher is busting his or her ass to try to make a living out of computer games. You think they wanna deal with anyone who's doing it part-time?
“I want half the money up front.” You planning on going somewhere? Confucius say Author who want much money and get it early often not stick around for late late show. “The project's been going for a year and a half, the last new disk was three months ago, and the phone is disconnected.” Put two Publishers in a room with more than one ounce of alcohol between them and I guarantee you'll hear that story in less than twenty minutes.
“I won't give you my source code. That's mine.” Gosh, since when were we on different teams? I look for people who discuss how we'll do things together; I try to avoid people who seem preoccupied with “us” and “them.”
“I gotta admit--I'm getting tired of this thing. But I'm gonna stick it out.” I'm behind the Author all the way. He or she was honest enough to admit what every Publisher already knows.
III. So Why'd You Say There Almost Never are “Wow! We Gotta Have This!” Games?
Two reasons, really. First, our business is getting mature enough that all the obvious great ideas are taken. Every year a few new ones come along that seem obvious, but we can't explain why we didn't think of them last year. They become obvious not when the Author first proposes them to the Publisher, but when they sell 100,000 copies. Then everyone says, “I knew right off that was gonna be a hit!” Uh-huh. Sure.
The second reason is that once we Publishers discover someone with real talent with whom we enjoy working, we tend to try to keep working with that person. Established Authors and Publishers tend to talk about what game to do next before they finish the last one they contracted to write. By the time the work itself is started, the company may very well feel like “Wow! We gotta have this game!” But the company also has a Designer with a good track record and has had the opportunity to have input to the choice of theme or content of the game; both are key ingredients for Publisher enthusiasm.
But where did that Author with the all the talent and the great track record come from? From a proposal or a prototype that went to the Screener. That was a Definite Maybe. That led to a phone call. That led to a meeting. That led to a contract. That led to a game. That led to a discussion of what game to do next. And so, as Vonnegut says, it goes.
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Salary Survey Results
Chris Crawford and the Readers of the JCGD
Enclosed in last issue’s mailing was a postcard. I asked the readers to write down 1) the percentage of their time devoted in 1986 to game design activities; and 2) their 1986 incomes from those activities, and return that postcard to me. The response rate was low, but I did receive sufficient responses to provide some useful information. Here is a summary of the raw data:
Percent time Income
100% $83,000
100% $46,000
100% $41,000
100% $34,000
100% $33,500
100% $32,400
100% $30,000
100% $27,200
100% $23,000
75% $16,800
50% $600
21% $0
15% $0
1% $0
The average of the values of those working full-time is $38,900. This represents the best estimate we have of the average annual income of a professional computer game designer. I suspect that this figure is high, skewed upward by the extraordinary top figure in the list. Toss out that single figure and the average drops to $33,388. Even so, compare this average with the $42,667 average salary for engineers, and you see that computer game designers take a hefty pay cut to work in this business.
What does it all mean? I see three conclusions that can be drawn from this data. First, the average annual income of a computer game designer is about 25% less than that of the average engineer. Second, only the full-time workers make decent money. The part-timers just don’t earn anything to speak of. Third, it is possible to make a good living as a game designer, as evidenced by the top figure on the list.
I was surprised that they came out so high; I had expected lower figures. Even so, I don’t think that we can congratulate ourselves for having achieved proper compensation for our efforts. There’s still a long way to go.
What can we do to improve these numbers? There are two possible ways to increase the income of game designers: increase the royalty percentage, and increase the total sales of the product.
The first avenue, increasing the royalty percentage, is an issue to take up with publishers. I suspect that many game designers obtain a royalty rate lower than they deserve. There are a variety of reasons for this: ignorance of prevailing rates, poor negotiating skills, a reluctance to utilize the sole option (going to another publisher) that enforces fairness.
This last is, I think, the greatest single factor contributing to the poor negotiating position of some game designers. Few designers are willing to play the field, freely talking with a number of publishers. I understand the rationale: once you have built a comfortable relationship with a publisher, it seems an act of betrayal to approach a competitor. The question you must ask yourself is, are you in the business to make your friends at the publishing house rich at your expense? Remember, good publishers need not fear greater mobility from designers; only bad publishers have cause for fear.
The other path to greater income is to increase total sales of our products. This involves a number of activities: actively discouraging piracy of our work, maintaining public interest in our work, but most of all, creating better product in the first place.
Making better products is our best overall strategy. As our games get better, the demand for them increases, and that directly increases our income. It also improves our negotiating position with publishers. When a game can be worth a million dollars in income to a publisher, that publisher will take very seriously the designer’s option to take it to the competition.
This Journal can play a role in improving the position of game designers. The salary survey was a first attempt. We’ll repeat it next year. And I intend to try other experiments.
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Reassessing Interactivity
Brenda Laurel
[Brenda has worked as a software designer, programmer, marketeer, researcher, and producer over the last ten years. She completed a Ph.D. dissertation on the topic of computer-based interactive fantasy systems in 1986, and has also published on such topics as first-personness and multi-modal interface design. Currently, she is consulting for the Multimedia Group at Apple Computer.]
Software designer and publisher Tom Snyder is an expert at dropping pearls of wisdom into warm martinis. Several months ago, he articulated what I think may be the most valuable lesson to be learned about our business in the eighties: “Interactivity is highly overrated.”
At first, I resisted Tom's analysis. I've been grailing as hard as anyone else in the software business for the last decade. When will games get smart? When will the awesome power of the technology really be tapped? When can I become Captain James T. Kirk? But in my last life as a producer in a game-software publishing company, I had occasion to come in contact with what marketing guys call “the Numbers.”
The Numbers don't look so good. The boom times show no signs of coming again. The audiences for adventure and twitch are no longer multiplying like rabbits. And in the lean years since 1983, nothing has come along that would induce “the rest of us” to go out and buy a computer or a videogame machine.
This brought me to a nasty realization. Maybe 48 hours humped up over a hot keyboard just isn't a mainstream attraction. In the Atari days, we used to do a lot of talking about “Joe Six-Pack.” Atari got his attention for a couple of years, but Joe's thumb has returned to normal size and his old VCS is gathering dust. The real question is: what constitutes impressive, robust interactivity for a couch potato? Or a (gasp) housewife? Or even a computer-literate professional whose brain is tired but whose imagination is wide awake? Who have we been trying to please, anyway?
Reigning Models and Fantasies
The answer may be that we have been trying to please ourselves. Now don't get me wrong—there's a lot of value in using the stimulation of one's own curiosity, sense of wonder, and funny-bone as measures of good design. But we are the priesthood, not the congregation. From the venerable computer jocks who brought you Adventure and Space War to the Infocom junkies of today, being a “good gamer” is very closely related to being a hacker. One has mastered the secret wisdom; one takes special pride in having been initiated to the mysteries (“i don’t understand that word”). It's a special kind of macho. But it's not for everybody, or even for a good percentage of everybody.
Many designers are simply reacting against games that are stupid (or games that assume the user to be stupid). This is, of course, an admirable and important goal. But too often, it seems to me, we confuse robustness with complexity. One result of this confusion is what I call the “obstructionist model” of game design (most prevalent in the adventure genre), where the user is confronted with hundreds of annoying and largely spurious puzzles and problems to solve. Such obstacles are used to beef up the apparent complexity of the plot and to extend gameplay. The gamer/junkie may feel a sense of triumph at completing such a game, but “the rest of us” just don't have the energy to plow through it. Curiosity and engagement are the user's fuel supply, and they are sorely depleted by fussy little puzzles and problems that are extraneous to the real action (or plot) of the game. The point here is not to confuse lots of interaction with good interaction.
A less blatant and more seductive kind of trap is what I would call “Turing-fu”, a set of ideals which also arises from the desire to design games that are not stupid. Crawford and I have both spent a good deal of rhetorical energy promoting Turing-fu over the years, so it is a delicate subject to attack. The paradigm here is that the bandwidth of information flowing from the user should be equal to that flowing from the program. Computer games should be (or seem to be) as smart as users. Crawford represents this view in his “Interaction Circuit” theory: “A properly designed game allows the player to say just as much back to the computer as it says to him. Ideally, the player would have exactly the same expressive language available to him as is available to the computer; this, however, is difficult to achieve in practice” [Crawford, 1987]. I've said it another way in a theory of first-personness which promotes design goals of maximal range, frequency, and significance in the kinds of choices available to users, and which also calls for direct correspondence between input and output modalities [Laurel, 1986].
The problem with Turing-fu is that, in increasing the game's responsiveness to user input, the demands and constraints on the user tend to be increased concomitantly. It is, after all, hard work being Captain James T. Kirk in anything approaching a realistic manner, and it's even harder learning and keeping in mind all the interface conventions and constraints which inevitably crop up in less-than-fully-multi-modal systems. The paradigm is robust and could eventually lead to some magnificient stuff, but instantiations employing current computer technology would simply demand too much effort to be fun for most users. There they are, humped up over the keyboard again.
Demanding such “intelligence” from games tempts us to neglect some other useful techniques—namely, the art of creating illusions and means of evoking the powers of “passive interaction”. The goal of creating good illusions is often at work in the realm graphics and animation, for instance, and in designing interfaces (a good parser, for instance, creates the illusion of understanding on the part of the program). Good programs can also create the illusion of responding to “wide-bandwidth input” on the part of the user. Crawford uses talks about the shortcoming of games in which the user's input “language” is impoverished: “What does the human player get to say...? 'Up', 'down', 'right', or 'fire'. How can you get any kind of rich interaction with so limited a set of inputs?” [Crawford, 1987]. While I agree in principle with his objection, the joystick user is also sweating, screaming, and pounding on the fire button—physical and kinesthetic “inputs“ that can seem quite real to the user when the system responds in the same mode —and at the same level of dramatic intensity. Just watch somebody play Star Raiders (now I'm showing my age). It doesn't require AI, it requires dramatic pizazz in design and the artful deployment of modalities and moods.
The notion of “passive interaction” is a wiggly but intriguing one. Is watching TV interactive? Does the ability to change the channel make it more so? The more one is able to choose what to attend to, the more choice he has in what he can experience as a result. How about watching TV with somebody else? When my husband and I watched a new episode Hill Street Blues together, there was a massive amount of interaction going on—between us , as we tried to predict the next turn of plot. There are useful ideas for game designers in these phenomena, as I hope the next section will illustrate.
Alternative Models and Examples
Shifting points of view: The genre of “interactive fiction” has been, by and large, a flop. Users are bored by text, paralyzed by parsers, plagued by uncertain pronouns (I? you? he? Who am us, anyway? Ask the interface.) The graphics adventure genre has so far failed in capturing the waning audience of the old adventure/interactive fiction genres. Most of the time, we've been trying to do the obvious, “smart” thing—let the user become a character and influence the plot by his choices and actions. My Ph.D. work was a four-year quest into how to do just that—and my conclusion was that it requires, not only speech processing, story generation, and expert systems, but also genuinely multi-modal interface environments. Not your consumer product of the '80's. And here we are, back to the baroque paradigm.
“What if,” asks Tom Snyder, “the whole game is just deciding whose eyes to look through?” Agatha Christie demonstrated the power of that technique in every book she wrote. But what if you could do it dynamically, as the (fixed but multi-dimensional) plot unfolds in time? Suddenly the user is wandering around in a universe of thinking, acting characters and piecing together the whole plot with his own brain. Pretty interactive. And you don't have to get humped up over the keyboard.
The keyword here is dynamically . If you remember The Mystery Disc or its progeny (interactive fiction on videodisc), you know how thin the interaction seemed when there were only a few well-labeled, binary nodes. The whole thing seemed too canned, too contrived, and too simple. The user must be able to wander at will, like an invisible Hercules Poirot, dancing back and forth through time and across distances to investigate the whole event “simultaneously.” I think Snyder has figured out a way to do that (without a videodisc)—keep your eyes peeled.
Wandering around: When Mike Naimark unveiled his latest interactive videodisc piece (programming by Ken Carson) at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, our eyes were glued to the 12-year-olds who tried it out. The piece, entitled The Golden Gate—A Study in Scale and Place , is an aerial “movie-map” of the San Francisco area (it's still there—go see it). Naimark's team videotaped the city and environs from the sky, keying in on the Bridge, following a rectilinear grid. The videodisc player is interfaced to a computer which displays the grid and allows the user to move around it with a track ball. The computer grid drives the video display, flying the user around San Francisco airspace at high speed. It's visually breathtaking, it's interactive, but is it a game? Experts may quibble, but the eye-, hand-, and body-language of the 12-year-olds told us “yes.” Some of them actually got humped up over the track ball.
Of course, a real space with real video is not the only kind of “location” one can wander around. How about William Gibson's cyberspace? Timothy Leary's been thinking a lot about that. Even “information spaces” can be entertaining places to wander, especially if the “map” lets you make new and startling connections. The point here is that just looking around a new environment, whether virtual or real, can be both interactive and entertaining. It becomes even more so, it seems to me, if the space itself is dynamic.
Playing with moods and styles: And speaking of Dr. Leary, you can't open a magazine without reading something about his “mind-movie” project (based on Gibson's Neuromancer , it's reportedly under development through Activision). In Timothy's formulation, the user does not change the actual plot of Neuromancer ; rather he directs a “movie” of the story in which he can select the actors (who will bring different styles to the characters), the style of the dialogue, and the visual style of the piece. The product would offer seemingly endless permutations of style and mood without having to handle plot-level choices by the user [see Bunnell, 1987].
Leary's notion offers the user a lot of interactivity on levels that we don't often consider in the game design business. Choices involving elements of style such as diction, visual design, music, etc. are probably easier to implement and yeild richer and less predictable results than the plot-level types of choices that we are used to allowing users to make. Such a game requires from the user much less left-brained head-banging and much more feeling around with instinct and imagination. I'm willing to bet that a larger percentage of user choices have interesting outcomes, too.
Changing masks: Communicating with other users through a computer network isn't a new idea. Pretending to be somebody else, somebody different from oneself, on a computer net isn't new either. What is new, as Lucasfilm's Habitat project demonstrates, is the ability to manufacture and project an animated image of one's “character” as one communicates. Today I feel like a tough punk with a mohawk. Being able to see and project myself visually as that character inspires my imagination as I color my attitude and diction on the net. And my input is somebody else's output—pretty slick.
Using humans as interactive components: I began hatching my “interactive fantasy system” theory at the Atari Research Lab in 1982. We didn't have anybody around who could whip up an expert system that knew something about real-time playwriting, so we decided to use Ray Bradbury instead (the pilot project was to be an interactive version of his “media room” short story, The Veldt). There were no intelligent animation programs hanging around in the VAX in the basement, so we decided to use actors with headsets. Originally, the point was to try out my system design (especially in terms of the flow of information) without having to build it. What turned out to be the case, however, was that we learned that a part-human, part-computer system was a viable design in itself (of course, anyone who's read Niven and Barnes' Dream Park already knows that).
Steve Arnold of Lucasfilm Games Division has been working on a theory that casts a new light on the function and importance of the human component in interactive systems. His notion depends upon sytems that support multiple users. In such a system, Steve says, “the technology does the appropriate thing, which is to support the interactive experience among participants.” Human-to-human interaction, already the richest kind available, can be beefed up even further by fantasy support, amplification, and augmentation from computer-based components. “The trick,” says Steve, “is to distinguish the dimensions of human participation and engagement from technological capabilities, and then to design systems that use each appropriately.”
In the immortal words Alan Kay, “Great! Let’s do it!”
Interactivity Today and Tomorrow
A new category of interactivity is emerging which demands less, in some ways, of both the system and the user. I used to believe that, as designers, our choices were inevitably going to boil down to building incredibly complex branching trees or employing serious AI to allow users and systems to “co-create” rich, super-satisfying experiences. But the class of experiences which might be described as “constrained fooling around” demands neither technique. And it may be that it is just these less demanding, often less intense, and less interactive experiences would be just the ticket for the 85% of the market which has no use for today's computer games.
Taken together, the examples above are different from creativity applications (like draw, paint, and music) programs in that the user is more constrained in the kinds of choices he can (and must) make—the user has fewer degrees of freedom (although it is not yet well understood, there seems to be a mild inverse relationship between degrees of freedom and the satisfying exercise of creativity [see May, 1975]). The examples are also different from games in which the user is required to think, strategize, and solve problems in a highly constrained way. They are different from the twitch games that emphasize adrenalin. Most of them employ constraints (i.e., rules for interacting) which are drawn from who we already are and what we already know how to do—wander, navigate, notice, communicate, dress up, play cowboys and Indians.
What works at any given moment is all balled up with the culture. These are zipless, one-button times—sad, perhaps, but true. People don't want equal bandwidth in and out. They want their minds blown—and that usually means little tiny bandwidth in and big fat bandwidth out. They don't want to be humped up over the keyboard, they want to sit back and occasionally point or push a button. Americans in the eighties are bludgeoned by information, worried and hurried and exhausted by a disturbed and disturbing world. If we do it right, we can offer gentler, easier stuff that rekindles some of the more delicate human qualities—wondering, wandering, playing around, noticing.
Moving away from old models of “rich interactivity” is not all bad. It gives us a chance to focus on other areas like graphics, style, or interface design. It leads us to rediscover simplicity. It encourages us to make products that are more accessible to more people, and can be good for business as well as for the culture. Working toward models which require less interactivity will help to prepare us for the new and different strengths and limitations of interactive video and multimedia environments.
I'm not abandoning my baroque model, of course—just working on it circuitously. Like Sophocles' Greece or Elizabethan England, there are robust times in the life of a culture which will support more demanding disciplines—and entertainments—of mind and spirit. They are characterized by relatively free, well-educated people who believe that they are making progress in solving the problems of their world. Such times will come again, and we'll rise to the occasion.
Dave Bunnell. “Neuromancing the PC.” Macorld , April 1987, pp. 21-24.
Chris Crawford. “The Interaction Circuit.” The Journal of Computer Game Design (June-July 1987), pp. 6-7.
Brenda Laurel. “Interface as Mimesis,” in User-Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction. D. A. Norman and S. Draper, Eds. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986.
Rollo May. The Courage to Create. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1975.
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Call For ArticlesYes, once again I am begging for your contributions to the Journal. Surely you can note with satisfaction the growing role played by other people in this Journal, and the inhibiting effect this is having on my past tendencies to hog the pages of this Journal. Join the movement to keep Chris Crawford in his place! Write an article for the Journal!
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Pictographs in Computer Game Interfaces
Frank Boosman
[Frank is a project manager at Silicon Beach Software; he recently completed the design of a 3-D helicopter combat game to be released later this year. He was formerly the Macintosh columnist for Computer Gaming World.]
What is a pictograph?
In Notes on Graphic Design and Visual Communication, author Gregg Berryman defines pictographs as “symbols which refer to an object, an action, a process, or a concept.” In the computer world, pictographs are most commonly referred to as icons: small areas of graphics which are usually clicked on or dragged around the screen to specify some action to the computer.
With the rise of graphics-oriented computer systems such as the Apple Macintosh, Atari ST and Commodore Amiga (all of which provide extensive system software support for graphics), pictographs have become more and more common in both games and applications. This article presents some thoughts on pictographs and how to use them in designing computer games.
What do pictographs represent well?
Pictographs are good at representing concrete objects. For example, the trash can icon of Apple’s Finder is readily recognizable as the object it represents. Nearly all users recognize it as such without any prompting. And many people deduce on their own that it is a ‘place’ for files that are to be ‘trashed’. As a concrete and familiar object, the common trash can is an ideal subject to represent using graphics.
Figure 1. Apple’s Finder trash can icon
What do pictographs represent poorly?
In contrast to objects, graphic depictions of concepts are often far less successful. V.I.P., a graphical programming language and environment for the Macintosh, uses icons to represent programming structures. Unfortunately, some of the icons are less than obvious. Figure 2 shows three icons representing programming structures and commands from V.I.P. I will leave it as a reader exercise to determine their meanings. If selected and executed poorly, pictographs can decrease comprehension of your game rather than increase it. Use pictographs representing concepts with caution: they are extremely difficult to execute well.
Figure 2. Symbols from V.I.P.
Guidelines for using pictographs
Use good graphic design! This is easy enough to command, difficult to describe, and more difficult yet to do. The fundamentals of good graphic design are far beyond the scope of this small article, but the basic idea to keep in mind is gestalt—the whole of an image that is, as Berryman says, “different from and greather than the sum of its parts.” A good pictograph is simple and subtle, yet at the same time almost radiates an idea. Put your pictographs away for a few days and then look at them anew. Keep track of your initial reactions to them. Are they sparse and tasteful in execution? Do they quickly convey the ideas you want them to express? What do they say to you? Ask testers to evaluate them as well. If your pictographs aren’t saying the right things, try again.
Pictographs are often implemented as small icons which, when clicked on with a mouse or joystick, invoke some action. This is probably how you will use pictographs in your games. If you do so, ensure that you provide feedback when your players click on icons. A good way to do this is to invert the icon as the mouse or joystick button is held down over it, then draw the icon normally again when the button is released. If the button is released over the icon, take the action the icon indicates; if not, don’t take any action at all.
Pitfalls in using pictographs
There is a danger in using pictographs to represent objects: you must try to emulate the behavior of the object you are depicting as closely as possible, or your users may become confused. For example, the trash can icon of at least one computer system’s Finder-like program is more like a shredder: anything placed in it is immediately deleted. Real trash cans do not behave this way; people empty their trash only occasionally, and the garbage truck—after which an object is usually irretrievable—comes but once a week. Apple’s trash can icon mentioned above does not behave in perfect accordance with the real world, but it is close enough for the analogy to fit. Ensure that your on-screen objects behave similarly to their real-world counterparts.
A good way to waste screen space is to use pictographs and use text to describe them. This often happens when the designer feels that the icons themselves are not clear enough to visually convey their meaning. This may be the case, but there are better solutions: rework the pictographs to make them clearer, or delete the pictographs altogether and use text alone. Don’t use both; it looks amateurish.
Conclusion
Pictographs will continue to grow in popularity as an integral part of computer game interfaces. You can make yours better by using good graphic design and providing good feedback when your pictographs are invoked. Be careful in using pictographs to describe objects, and beware of using pictographs and text on-screen at the same time. For more information on graphic design, consult the Berryman book.
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Three Levels of Interaction
Chris Crawford
For many years I have yammered about one of my favorite themes — “process intensity versus data intensity”. I have argued that computer programs — not just games — derive their value from their emphasis on processing of data rather than the data itself. The conclusion I draw from this is that game designers should focus their energies on creating process-intensive designs.Lately I have modified and extended this thesis. I now claim that the intensity of interaction provided in a game can be assessed on a spectrum that is marked with three milestones. The lowest level of interaction is interaction with data. Most adventure games fall in this region of interactivity. The data consists of the design of the maze and the positions and capabilities of the objects populating the maze. This is not very rich or interesting interaction.The middle level of interaction is interaction with process. A game in this category would be my old nuclear power plant simulation, Scram. The player interacts with the various thermal processes in the plant, trying to maximize performance without melting down the plant. Most resource-management games fall in this category, and a goodly portion of all the games on the market have strong components of process-interaction.The highest level of interaction is interaction with free will. One might argue that free will is a special capability that only humans possess, and that the attempts at free will that we see in computer games are really just elaborate processes, but I would argue that processes that model free will, if executed properly, constitute a higher and richer form of interaction than conventional process-interaction. Only free will can shoot back at the player in an interesting and deeply interactive manner. If our designs are truly going to interact with our players, then we must be able to contest with them on more nearly equal terms. Modelling free will is, of course, a difficult task. But the richness of interaction that it offers our games makes it a prime target for designers on the cutting edge of the field.
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Computer Fantasy Games
David “Dr. Cat” Shapiro
[David is a long-time game player who saw the implications of computers for games long ago — he bought a Commodore PET with 8K of RAM in 1978. He taught himself programming and published his first game, The Caverns of Freitag, with Muse Software, in the early 1980s. He has done work with Penguin Software and Angelsoft, and is currently employed by Origin Systems.]
Copyright © 1987 by David Shapiro
Early History
Most people are aware that the Fortran program called Adventure was the first major computer fantasy game. Indeed, its name has become a generic term for that type of game. It quickly became one of the most ubiquitous of games, along with the multitude of Star Trek programs. Many mainframes had versions that local programmers had extended. Apple included a copy of Apple Adventure as part of their “family system” for a while, and there was a CP/M version that used text compression to fit the entire thing into 64k of memory, so it could run without pausing to access the disk. It also spawned a legion of imitators, from little 8K BASIC programs all the way up to the original mainframe version of Zork, which was the most sophisticated adventure of its time. All of these programs shared the same basic structure, with players entering one- or two- word commands (some games would allow entire sentences), and getting back descriptions of their surroundings and the results of their actions entirely in text.
When home computers with color graphics started to become widespread, a variant arose, in which each of the distinct locations, perhaps a few dozen in a typical game, would have an illustration associated with it. One of the early publishers of such games, Sierra On-line, developed a series of adventures that uses graphics and animation much more, and deemphasizes the typed commands. The next evolutionary step was made by ICOM Simulations with their innovative series of graphics adventures (Deja Vu, Uninvited, Shadowgate). In these games, the graphics elements are active and may be directly manipulated by the player. If a player sees an object on the screen, he can point to the object and click the mouse to designate it, then choosing the action he proposes to take from a simple menu.
The Plato system
Another important chapter in the history of fantasy games, however, is less widely known. The Plato mainframe, based at the University of Illinois and having terminals at colleges all over the country, was a real hotbed of computer game design in the late seventies, especially in the areas of multiplayer games and fantasy games. The system had very innovative hardware for its time, with high resolution, high speed graphics terminals (1200 baud was fast back then), a powerful mainframe with lots of expensive but fast memory, and sophisticated, easy to use system software. Though the system was intended for the development of educational software, the easy-to-use programming language, excellent graphics, and large supply of bright, energetic young programmers led to the development of a huge library of games. Once a fair number of games had been written, they drew in even more people.
The amount of game development decreased sharply in the early eighties, as many sites started to restrict the hours during which games could be played, or to forbid games altogether. Would-be gamers had to contend with a bulldog program called “the enforcer”, which would constantly scan through all the terminals on the system to see if they were running programs that were forbidden to users at that site, and would kick them out to the main system prompt with a nasty message when it caught one.
Still, some of the best games on Plato have yet to be equaled anywhere. I believe it to be the birthplace of the other major type of computer fantasy games.
The fantasy games on Plato were originally inspired by the classic paper game, Dungeons and Dragons, and tended to have not only different mechanics than the adventure games (they were graphically oriented, and the player controlled them through a set of clearly defined movement and command keys), but a different emphasis. While the adventure games tended to concentrate more on building up descriptions of the environment the player would explore and its inhabitants, the Plato games gave the player a number of characteristics and abilities, and provided combat and magic systems much more detailed than adventure games. This encouraged players to identify more closely with their imaginary characters, and introduced tactical considerations that weren’t present before. Because of the smaller amount of information needed to define each game element (you didn’t need to write a sentence or paragraph to describe everything), they also had larger areas to explore, and a wider variety of monsters, treasures, and spells. Many of them allowed players at different terminals to interact — either cooperatively or antagonistically. In this area, I think the games on Plato are still ahead of their time, as multiplayer games for home computers aren’t yet economically viable.
Digression: Nomenclature
Some discussion of nomenclature is in order here. While the meaning of the term “adventure game” is generally well understood, some take it to mean any computer fantasy game. I would apply this term only to games in which the emphasize is placed on navigating through a maze of rooms, collecting objects necessary to solve puzzles. Such games also de-emphasize interactions with other characters. I subdivide this category into two major sub-categories. “Text adventures” use text alone for both input and output, whereas games that include graphics are “graphic adventures”.
The other games, the “Plato-descendants”, don’t have as clear a set of terms to use. What does seem to be becoming the most widely accepted terms are “role playing games” (RPGs) or “fantasy role playing games” (FRPs).
Fantasy comes to home computers
The next major area of development in fantasy games came with the Apple II. It was the first home computer to sell well enough to create a significant market for games, and is still the one that many of the biggest fantasy games are written for first. The field was shaped early on by what are still two of the most commercially succesful games. Wizardry, inspired by some of the most sophisticated Plato games, continued their tradition of centering around a multi-level dungeon where all the action occurs. Ultima, while it evolved out of the authors early dungeon games (Ultima I reused most of the code from the dungeon game Akalabeth, which was itself based on earlier games the author had written on school computers), also contains detailed wilderness areas, cities, and castles to explore. While we are starting to see a few more original games, most of what has been written since is based on one or the other of them.
UNIX games
One last area worth mentioning revolves around a national network of UNIX-using computers called Usenet, which is more loosely tied together than Plato, but much larger. About half a dozen major games have been developed on such systems and spread around the country. Most of them are fantasy games. Rogue, the earliest and best known of these, has been made available for several home computers, and has sired several descendants (most notably Super Rogue and Hack). Requiring only a 24 by 80 terminal with cursor addressing, it certainly couldn’t offer much in the way of graphics, though some were added to the microcomputer translations. It is, however, a remarkably well balanced game. It takes certain key elements of the genre, and combines them brilliantly into a fast moving, addictive whole. You are given barely enough food, strength, and magic to have a chance at winning. This, and the high score list that would allow different players on the same system to compete with each other, kept people at many a university playing over and over, trying to find the elusive amulet and win the game, or at least get a little further than before.
Fantasy games in the future
Today there are many different areas to watch if one wishes to keep up with the continuing development of the computer fantasy game. New titles continue to be developed on home computers. Some of these involve far more man-hours of development than it would have been conceivable to spend developing any game a few years back. There are both variants and entirely new types of games, though as yet no major new categories have emerged.
A number of fantasy games are starting to appear in the arcades this year. Most of these are simple-minded combat games, some with nice graphics, but not very innovative. There’s even a somewhat amusing new variant on Space Invaders with a swords and sorcery theme: Battlantis. On the other hand, Gauntlet from Atari is a significant development. Its variety of situations, resulting from different combinations of the various traps, monsters, and mazes, as well as its multiplayer element, with new people being allowed to join in any time, and each having different abilities, makes for quite an enjoyable game. Interestingly, it is a souped-up version of Dandy, a game for the Atari 800 that was first published in 1982.
Even on the nationwide dial-up systems there are a few things worth looking at, though there’s probably more discussion of home computer games than actual game playing going on. On Compuserve, there’s a multiplayer fantasy game called Islands of Kesmai that’s worth a look, and on Quantumlink a small community of people has sprung up who play the “paper role playing games” over the computer rather than in person.
The appeal of fantasy games
What is it that people enjoy about playing these games? Here’s a list of the factors that contribute to the enjoyment of fantasy games:
Exploring. To me, this is seen in its purest form in games that reveal portions of the map as you explore the territory. Every fantasy game has some sort of simulated world to explore, and in the best of them, the discovery of a new place or item can bring with it an excitement similar to that of opening up a Christmas present.
Fighting. Some people enjoy the various tactical challenges that battles present. Others are lured by the violence. Most games put you in a position in which you are much stronger than any single opponent you will face, and you have to kill hundreds of them to achieve your goal.
Winning. Some games provide an intellectual challenge through riddles, puzzles, traps, and problems of tactics and resource management. (Intellectual challenge could perhaps be considered another category — one in which, I might add, many current games are sadly lacking.) Others merely require perserverance. However, almost all of them provide some clearly defined goal to achieve. Usually you are either automatically brought back to life upon being killed, or allowed to restore the game to some earlier saved state, to ensure that you will eventually win, at which time you will be showered with lavish praise.
Becoming powerful. The combat oriented games generally tend to have a system wherein players become more powerful fighters as the game progresses, better at casting spells, etc. They will also usually acquire powerful artifacts, large quantities of money, and so on. Whether any particular player is more interested in money or power, the whole thing is a sort of microcosm of our capitalist system. But generally it’s one in which success comes much easier and faster than in real life. A few weeks of patient play is enough to make anyone into the equivalent of a millionaire.
“Escapism”. I put this in quotes because it implies an effort to hide from reality, while what I really mean here is “indulging the healthy human tendency to fantasize”. While the previous category, wealth and power, fills the fantasies of many, others prefer to dream of winged horses drifting through the air, of castles towering on remote peaks, with ancient secrets hidden within, of powerful wizards performing elaborate, arcane rituals, dark, mysterious underground catacombs, heroes whose deeds are celebrated in song, demons and dragons, swords and sorcerers, and so on. I know I do. I think this area is the least developed in computer fantasy games so far.
Areas of potential development
Now let’s look at the possibilities these games offer the designer, and what my personal opinions are on a few design issues.
The adventure game has thus far been the medium that allows the most detailed worlds of fantasy to be created. They contain far more text than any form of game. Professional writers have generally ended up creating adventure games on the handful of occasions when they have ventured into computer games.
However, there is a great difficulty in providing depth of interaction in an adventure. While in most other types of games, the results of a player’s actions are determined mainly by a set of algorithms, adventure games are driven mostly by data. The designer is required to think out every combination of possible actions and circumstances, and provide for them in advance. Not only does this make it harder to do an adventure well, but it means you can’t do as much with an adventure. The richness of a game like Lode Runner or The Sword of Kadash arises from the fact that a good set of rules can interact to produce a wide variety of situations with only a small amount of new data for each one. In an FRP, where some elements of the various situations that arise are randomly determined, you can keep people entertained for a long time indeed. Most adventures tend to have fewer options and potential outcomes, and tend to concentrate on various kinds of puzzles.
Certainly a lot of well-written prose in a game is a good thing, and one could write an adventure that kept most of the basic elements of the form, but had an algorithmic structure underlying it, rather than the kind of database that is currently the norm. However, I don’t think there’s any reason to sacrifice the graphic potential of the computer by doing this. Even the graphic adventures fall short of the potential of the medium — they are more like an book with pictures than a movie. What I do consider worthwhile is to take other types of fantasy games and add a lot more prose to them in a manner that doesn’t disturb the integrity of their structures. Certainly any number of types of game events can serve as a trigger for printing a descriptive paragraph in a message area or pop up window.
The adventure game is a narrowly defined area, somewhat analagous to conventional fiction. The FRP, however, covers a much wider range of possible approaches. At one extreme, you can write a game that requires so much strategy it could almost be categorized as a fantasy board game. Or you can concentrate more on the storytelling aspects of the game. Most games have some of both, and this probably can allow for the most absorbing gaming experience. There are as yet, however, no games where both the strategic and storytelling elements are implemented well.
Another important consideration is display format. While there’s a wide range in techniques of implementation, with increasingly sophisticated approaches appearing all the time, there are still two basic formats: the overhead cutaway view, or the 3D view that shows corridors from the perspective of someone standing inside looking straight ahead. I prefer the former, for one simple reason. Showing a two dimensional section of a map provides a “board” upon which various tactical situations can be played out. Imagine how difficult it would be to play chess well if you had to do view the board from the kings perspective! With the addition of walls blocking your view of most of the other pieces, it becomes impossible. Even the simple but effective game element of chasing or being chased by monsters doesn’t work nearly as well in a 3D game - indeed, many of them don’t bother moving the monsters around on the map, but merely have appear directly in front of the player at random intervals as he wanders around.
Elements of an FRP such as how to the graphics are implemented, how many different monsters there are, how many spells, items, how big are the maps, all have one thing in common. You have to trade off how much memory and/or disk space you allocate to a particular element against how much is left for all the other stuff. Current machines don’t have the resources to allow all of the different possibilities to be covered in depth, and in many current games, these decisions are the main things that determine the character of the finished product. What one should make sure of, in my opinion, is that the basic elements work well. Draw maps of places that are interesting to explore, and fill them with things that are fun to do, and objects that are exciting to find and use. The only way to know how to do this is to have played a lot of them and have a desire to create something even better. You should play non-computer board games and role playing games, and read a lot. A little luck doesn’t hurt either.
What of some of the more radical new directions the field is branching out into? Gauntlet is starting to inspire a few home computer games, more so in Europe than here. Rogue and The Sword of Kadash, both equally significant innovations in my view, are less well known, and rarely emulated. Totally new forms are appearing more often now, such as Dark Castle or Defender of the Crown... It’s too early to tell which of them will arise as major new styles in the genre. I think one of the next major breakthroughs to watch for will come when telecommunications becomes cheap enough to provide economically viable multiplayer games. I think games on big systems will provide the opportunity for fascinating new hybrids that blend the best elements of current FRPs with some of the advantages of the paper role playing games.