[OCTOBER] Characteristics of Games by George Skaff Elias, Richard Garfield, and K. Robert Gutschera

[Liz England]

Our October reading is Characteristics of Games by George Skaff Elias, Richard Garfield, and K. Robert Gutschera

Overview:

Characteristics of Games offers a new way to understand games: by focusing on certain traits—including number of players, rules, degrees of luck and skill needed, and reward/effort ratio—and using these characteristics as basic points of comparison and analysis. These issues are often discussed by game players and designers but seldom written about in any formal way. This book fills that gap. By emphasizing these player-centric basic concepts, the book provides a framework for game analysis from the viewpoint of a game designer. The book shows what all genres of games—board games, card games, computer games, and sports—have to teach each other. Today’s game designers may find solutions to design problems when they look at classic games that have evolved over years of playing.

(https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/characteristics-games)

I don't know much about it except it's relatively new (2012) and written by game designers and for game designers, so while the book sounds theoretical I suspect it'll remain pretty relevant to practicing gamedevs.

[Miodrag Kovacevic]

I've gotten through the first chapter of the book today and I am enjoying its approach so far. The authors' definitions don't seem as arbitrary or absolute. I'm kind of doing my own exercise while reading and thinking of how systemic VS agential characteristics and heuristics apply to fighting games. Like how Japan usually having the best players is a agential thing because of their arcades, or the difference between "annoying powerful" and "actually powerful" moves/characters to make the games more accommodating to new players without breaking balance. 

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Miodrag Kovačević
Lead F2P Game Designer

Eipix Entertainment 
Creative / Game Design
Branch Office F2P, Novi Sad, Serbia

miodrag....@eipix.com 
www.eipix.com
      

[Liz England]

Same experience here. I am surprised how much I like this book. I was a little apprehensive since it starts out introducing it as a textbook written from a course the authors taught, and other course textbooks are usually too introductory for me (Challenges for Game Designers, Art of Game Design, etc.). But I really like how characteristics are presented, and the focus on multiplayer is great for someone like me, who largely works/plays in the singleplayer space. I also adore the systemic/agential axis they presented early on - just having a single term to describe how players affect the game (play length, house rules, conventions) is useful to me.

I got started with this reading really late and I am only a couple chapters in, so I'll probably keep reading this into next month and commenting more then. If anyone's on the fence about whether to pick it up, so far it's one of my favorites. More academic than Game Feel, but the organization and analysis of different characteristics in games is really excellent.

NEXT MONTH-

I am super busy the next couple months, as I expect others will be with the holiday season coming up. I've been looking at really short books, which has led me some games criticism essay collections (Shooter, How To Do Things With Videogames). If anyone really wants to avoid/veto games criticism, send me an email and I'll skip those. If you have a suggestion for a short book, also give me a heads up so I can put it on the ballot in a few days.

[Matthew Gallant]

Shorter books for the holidays sounds like a keen idea to me!

[Catalin Zima-Zegreanu]

Short books sound great. As do game criticism essays.

It just so happens that Shooter is also now available as part of a Video Game bundle on StoryBundle ( https://storybundle.com/games ) together with a few other video-game related books.

[Christian Selbrede]

I read through the first chapter and found some interesting material.

casual players like to play quickly, more serious players prefer to spend more time on their moves, and thus informal conventions arise within different play groups as to how long a game is "supposed" to take to complete.

Excellent point that I've rarely seen addressed elsewhere. 

in simulation games a short atom may simply be unacceptable for appropriate suspension of disbelief.

Very true. When I was playing Shenmue, an atom for me ended up being an entire game day. You wake up, see what you can accomplish for that day, and when it's bedtime again, you save and quit, or else play through the next day. I'd also consider Chapters or Missions in games like Call of Duty to be "atoms", i.e. "logical stopping points". A game's atom length approaching that of a movie's doesn't bother me, and it shouldn't any designer who hopes to simulate anything comparable to a movie or novel. 

a game with multiple difficulty levels, which amounts to making several games, with players choosing how often they'd like to win by choosing among them 

I like this description of difficulty levels.

A great deal of enjoyment in a game, especially for more serious players, comes from the process of "climbing the heuristics tree": learning successively better and more sophisticated heuristics for a given game. 

Totally agree with this. This means discovering the heuristics for oneself, and actively avoiding the heuristic advice, i.e. metagame, of others, no matter how powerful it may be. It's simply not enjoyable for me to have a heuristic dropped in my lap and losing out on enjoyment that comes from playing the game. 

Heuristics exist at all levels, from beginner to advanced. Players should be able to improve at the game by acquiring increasingly sophisticated heuristics.

And of course, in the ideal game, as hinted at here, there is no top to that "heuristics tree".   

[Duncan Keller]

Where does the time go? I'd say I'm about 75% of the way through it at the moment. A short book sounds good, I'm liking this one a lot so I'd actually like to finish it before I start the next one.

I find this book is putting a lot of vocabulary to things I was sort of vaguely aware of, which is cool! It give me a better grasp on the concepts, and helps me consider them more deeply. I also think the house rules angle is very cool. I have a tendency to get into my own head too much and not consider the way players' relationships towards each other will shape the way things play out.

I might post in this thread again if I have any insights when I finish it.

On Friday, October 2, 2015 at 3:37:30 PM UTC-5, Liz England wrote:

[Christoffer Lundberg]

Hello, I still have not read the entire book, but I have a lot of notes I have been planning to summarize, for awhile now.

I will start with Heuristics/rule of thumb, which I think is a very powerful concept. I have been thinking about it before, like what can I do to play this game better (don't use creature enchantments in magic), as a player, but never as a designer; how will players think or perceive whats the good way to play the game. And how is it possible to design a game to be interesting to learn and play on different skill levels. Some concepts connected to heuristics:

Potential heuristic(p.30) – when you play or look at other people playing the game, can you tell whos going to win? A good example is go where a lot of newer players continue to play the game because they can't see that they have already lost the game. I also want to mention starcraft where its very hard to follow a games depending on knowldge and the commentary, I like to watch Starcraft but a lot of times I end up understanings almost nothing of the game. Starcraft have a extra problem that you have to scroll around the map to actually see what is happening

Zero level heuristics(p.35) – ex having bad cards in tcg, so new players can make a choice that improve their game.

Zugswang(p.33) – When the player perceive all choices as equally bad, and don't want to take any of the actions. Makes unsatisfied beginner heuristics. I have no good examples, maybe some games I have tried to make, when its feels like its doesn't matter what I choose. Yes one example is Race for the Galaxy. Most of the time when people plays it for the first time they are confused the and lose the game, because you have no heuristics and there are so much different cards. It usually goes better the second time. I have no real experience of a game with ”Zugswang” on higher level, maybe chess like they mentions in the text.

First Order Optimal Strategy – I also want to mention FOO (first order optimal) stretegy(ExtraCredits - Balancing for Skill - The Link from Optimal Power to Strategy). I did not think of it before but I wolud say that its a sign of a broken ”ladder”/heuristic tree. They are talking more about player skill and in game power. Heuristics are more about how powerful the player thinks something is, making a distinction of understanding of the game and skill/execution. I would say that a ”first order heuristic” in ex a RPG (say Diablo) would be comparing the armor value, the higher the better, ignoring any magic find percent, resistance etc (tbh Diablo color the text on higher rarity so items with a lot of gold text looks more powerful). First order optimal would be a heuristic that is so good that players will have problems transitioning from that strategy/heuristic to others because it demands a big jump/ steep learning curve in understanding, to overcome.

Christian Selbrede

A great deal of enjoyment in a game, especially for more serious players, comes from the process of "climbing the heuristics tree": learning successively better and more sophisticated heuristics for a given game. 

Totally agree with this. This means discovering the heuristics for oneself, and actively avoiding the heuristic advice, i.e. metagame, of others, no matter how powerful it may be. It's simply not enjoyable for me to have a heuristic dropped in my lap and losing out on enjoyment that comes from playing the game.

I agree that its not fun to be told a heuristic. I think one of the powerful things about games are that you get the opportunity to experiment and find your own way of playing. I have heard that a lot of students have problems transferring from the “learning” mentality to ”science” mentality in higher education, because people are used to ”just” learn the information, that already exists. Games might be a solution to get experience of trying out diffrent things(and yet another reason for more games in schools... :) ).

It can also happen that someone tell you a heuristic that is ”true” on one skill level and not another (a good example of this is tier lists in super smash bros, melee etc, a ranking list of how good characters are, they are made for a high level of play and are different on a casual level when they got quoted a lot).