Designing Games for Game Designers

Stone Librande is creative director at EA/Maxis, and on the weekends he teaches students game design. His talk was about how he uses board games, card games, and other non-digital elements to teach game design. He believes that no computers are needed to teach design, and that they actually get in the way. The fundamental concepts can be gotten to more quickly without the distraction and complication of software.

He was inspired by an article from Greg Costikyan (someone in comments will link that article?) but he said it was too hard to get students to read some long thing. Actually, he oftened mention things he's done that didn't engage students enough and how he changed things up to get them interested, and it often involves making a game out of things or tweaking the rules of things, so that's kind of meta-interesting, if you know what I mean. Anyway, he summarized the essay he liked with a very simple diagram. I don't have time to draw, but I can use some boring words for you.

A game is a START CONDITION with an arrow pointing to a GOAL. Inbetween those two things is one or more OBSTACLES. A dotted line around the entire thing represents the RULE SYSTEM that the player interacts with in order to change things in the system, and it lets them make moves from the start condition toward that goal.

I think he taught these concepts very well. By just telling you that, or showing you a digram, you might not fully and deeply understand it. A better way to understand it ("it" being the system described) is to...play a game about it. Playing a game is like the ideal way to understand a system. So has devised many simple games, like dozens and dozens that he uses for this stuff. I don't remember specifics here, but stuff about rolling dice and getting different colored poker chips that let you make different moves or something, and a goal about having X number of points. And the catch is, hey lets change things around now! But we'll only change the start conditions. Then you see how much effect start conditions really have. Ok now let's keep start conditions fixed, and change around the goal. Notice how it makes some of the rules extraneous, like they don't do anything interesting any more, but other rules still work fine. In each case here, we made a very differnet game.

One example of changing start conditions was Backgammon. There is historical evidence that a very long time ago (thousands of years I think), all the black player's pieces started on the black player's first space, while all the white player's pieces started on the white player's first space. So the start conditions were different. This is kind of boring though because it means there are several turns that are just filler, they don't have enough of an impact on the game to be interesting. (Note: this is exactly why I made Flash Duel's board 18 spaces rather than En Garde's 23 spaces.) Anyway, later on in history the start conditions of Backgammon changed and the pieces got to interact even on turn 1, so that's way more fun.

Another excercise he did is present students with a game where each player has a starship that has 4 slots on it where you can put dice. Each player gets two 4-sided dice, one 6 sided die, and one 10-sided die. Two slots are for weapons, one slot for shields, and one for engines. When two ships fight, first you each roll the engine dice. The player with the higher result gets to attack with both weapons, while the player with the lower result only gets to attack with one weapon. The shield roll subracts damage that weapons deal.

He had players configure their starships however they wanted, then they all played each other. This is actually an *excellent* lesson that is very relevant to what we do every single day in development of Sirlin Games, because the whole point of it is balance feedback the players give. Some players very strongly claim that some configuration is the best and "overpowered" or whatever. Why? Because they played like 2 games or something and this anecdotal evidence convinved them. So it's a lesson that if you're that sure about game balance from that little evidence, you just don't know what you're doing. When such a claim comes up, Stone then shows them how to use Excel or something to just compute the expected value of damage of one configuration compared to another. And of course this often shows that the "overpowered" ship is actually weaker than the other guy's. Stone said he didn't know if there is a single best ship, or if there is some rock, paper, scissors set of ships that counter each other, and left it as an exercise to the reader.

Just a quick note on that, it's hard to even type that last line without mentioning what I think is the key concept to both Poker and Yomi: Donkeyspace. Even if you knew how to play Poker or the Yomi card game optimally, playing optimally would not be the most successful strategy in a tournament or ladder. Playing optimally means you are playing in the least exploitable way, which is a pretty sweet. But imagine you played against someone who was playing really terribly, like RPS where they blatantly only ever play rock. You should not play "optimally," you should play to exploit their badness. So even if there was a single best ship in Stone's example, it's entirely possible that playing that ship would not win a tournament, and that someone exploiting other people's bad ships even more would win.

Oh I forgot to mention that from the very beginning, for all these games he says he encourages the students to really try to win. He taunts them and Stone himself plays and doesn't hold back, letting everyone know he will gloat if he wins. This is specifically because