My experience playing a lot of strategy games and reading designer notes has lead me to the conclusion that too few strategy game designers think about what they are doing in an analytical way. I’d like to do what I can to remedy this and since many heads give multiple perspectives I thought it would be a good subject for discussion. Here’s my take. The basic questions are what (are we doing), why (are we doing it) and how (can it be facilitated)? =So; what is a game? In this case a strategy game. The textbook definition, which I find no fault with is; "any systematic activity carried on for sport". So a game has a system and it’s carried on for sport (enjoyment). =What is a system? In this case a set of rule and/or mechanisms for manipulating the action and information. =What is enjoyment, or more to the point, what do we enjoy about strategy games? Why do we play them? To compete and win (status) To solve problems (mental exercise) To experience the novel (stimulation} To relive inspiring events or roles (imaginative identification} To explore social roles (camaraderie or anti-camaraderie) What all these enjoyable activities have in common is that they employ capabilities of the mind, so they are all mind-work of a sort, the next questions then are; "what sort of work does a mind do" and, "what can a computer do to challenge these capabilities"? A few types of work a mind does: analyze calculate monitor remember imagine prioritize estimate perceive identify (emotionally) What a computer can do: calculate present information hide information Now comes the biggest category of all, how can we use the computer to construct a system to utilize mental capabilities towards the types of enjoyment? The question is complicated by the need to avoid frustrating one goal in pursuing another. Generally some goals must be given up to pursue others effectively, also it is important that a game continues to be enjoyable, that it’s value will not be "used up" by mastery or familiarity. I don’t know if this analysis will strike people as trivial or useful so I’ll leave it there to see what you think. As I said the next step is large and this is enough for one post.

Interesting breakdown, although it''s pretty abstract. This applies to all games, not just strategy. You left out a few of the important things that computers can do, receive information (through keyboards, mice, controllers, scanners, etc.) store information (on CDs, floppies, harddrives, etc.)

The abstraction is part of the point, I think far too many designers start at the wrong end of game design, with an enthusiasm. "Lets make a game about flesh-eating robots!", instead of let’s make a game that uses recognition and estimation skills. The reason I single out strategy games is partly because they need the most help, there are lots of very good RPG games and action games but only a handful of really good strategy ones. The other reason is the focus of design is narrower in action or RPG, the first is more of a sport and the second is primarily a narrative.

Yes, I should have added, "store information" and "accept input" an excellent illustration of how the obvious gets overlooked, even by me ; )

Some interesting thoughts. However, I''m having trouble exactly trying to pinpoint what you are finding is not systematic or analytical enough in today''s games. While I agree that most strategy games today stress the wrong kinds of thinking and analysis (i.e. not truly strategic) they do nonetheless require that the player have some kind of organized forethought to his actions.

What is troublesome is that while forethought, planning and "mindwork" is required by players, I believe that the gameplay in strategy games is so quagmired in a clumsy interface that the player does not have time to act out what he has in his mind to actually implement it. Plus, and probably more damning, in my view strategy games do not offer what I feel is the crux of strategy..."generalship".

It is the greek origin of the word "strategy", and I believe virtually no game in the mainstream does it quite right (games from www.battlefront.com being exceptions). While I agree that the computer is an excellent stimulus and cohort of mental capacity, I wish that games could go beyond this.

To me, a mental stimulation is not enough...there must be an experiential component to it as well. You mentioned some social/emotional aspects, and while this is necessary to achieve a more "entertaining" experience, I believe there is one more "ingredient" to the mix. Namely it is action and experience itself. What I mean by that is that the player has to take from the game something and actually live it. Does this mean that if we play FPS that we should go around shooting people? Of course not...but there should be something in the game (not the gameplay) that we can take as lessons.

Take a sport for example. What makes sports important is not the gameplay and the winning or losing, but rather what we can learn from it and make a part of us. The ethic of practicing hard, the moral of trying your best even if you lose, or the value of watching people gain confidence and skill. The actual gameplay is secondary to these aspects. So for me, gameplay is simply a means...not the end itself. Gameplay ensures that people will want to play, but there must be something within the game that the player can take and make a part of himself.

Dauntless,

quote: gameplay is simply a means...not the end itself

please extend this idea to another example, I still don''t grasp exactly what you''re saying.

TMeier, I like where you''re going with this, but as has been said, your foundations may be overly abstract and the level of interaction provided by computers is somewhat more extensive than you''ve suggested. Also, you should read up on some of what opponents of regularized IQ testing have written, you''ll find that there are numerous aspects of our minds which have nothing to do with structured thought, rendering your listing incomplete.

Of course it could be the scope of your definition that you only want to deal with structured thought.

Sorry this was so negative a post, I''ll try to be more constructive after my shower...


struct {person "George D. Filiotis";} Symphonic;
Are you in support of the ban of Dihydrogen Monoxide? You should be!

Symphonic-
The best way I can think of it is like being with friends. Sometimes you get a bunch of friends together to go see a movie or maybe go eating. But what''s really important often isn''t so much the movie or the restaurant, but the simple camraderie and enjoyment of the experience itself. So replace "going to movie" or "eating out" with gameplay, and that''s what I mean. Gameplay is simply a means....not necessarily the actual reason you do what you do.

Gameplay is the hook or bait. It gets the player interested enough for the other elements to come into play. What other elements? Maybe it''s online interaction with other people, maybe it''s the challenge of improving your skills, or maybe it is simply something to occupy your time. But fun does not solely have to come from Gameplay, and indeed, I think the greatest enjoyment comes from things that are external and not intrinsic to the gameplay itself.

Like I said in my example with sports, maybe football is fun to some people. But I think the truly great moments come from what you take from sports....like challenging yourself to be better, of learning the value of practicing hard, or maybe learning how not give up. Gameplay facilitates these things, but it is merely an ends to these experiences. In other words, you don''t play to play, you play to get something out of it.

Most people play to win. Winning makes them feel good. But I tend to have a problem with competitive notions like that. I think it''s not a coincidence that "to beat" someone has more than one connotation. It''s why I''ve always loved martial arts, because in martial arts, you learn not to be better than someone else, but to be better than yourself.

Of course minds do many unstructured things that’s why I limit myself to strategy games (those most demanding of structured thought) and why I noted my list of mind-work was incomplete.

The route I’m trying to follow with this abstract construction is to induce the basic principles of games from observation then abstract them and use them to construct games from basic elements outwards.

From the impression one gets reading design notes most designers start with a colorful idea or bring a new technique or mechanism to an old design. They say, "let’s make a game about the Seven Years War", or "We’ll make a game just like ‘Blob’ except with 3-D graphics and opposable thumbs". This is the equivalent of designing a shoe from the outside in and hoping a foot will fit in it when you’re done. Decorations, like theme and effects, should be the last consideration in a strategy game, you should start with a skeleton of function and to do that you have to keep in mind what a game is and what it does.

There is a ‘dark side’ to all of this which I don’t really like to think about; if you weren’t designing a game to be played but only to be sold then it would make more sense to design from the outside in, since appearance is primary to marketing if you already have market-share. In fact it would be against your interest to make a game too playable as it would keep people from switching to the latest offering. Smaller companies fighting for share would, however, still be interested in playability.

I’ll go into a bit more depth to show where this is leading, the subject is very large so I’ll choose only a very small portion. Let’s say you want to design a game purely for competition with no other considerations. Calculation will be the only mind work called on (this is a very simple game), the only ‘arena’ of play.

Because we are designing from the inside out we must first understand our terms. What is competition and why do we enjoy it. Competition is where people measure or test their capabilities against each other the aim is to gain status. So our game must allow for play against other persons (including perhaps computer entities) or for some way of comparing performance. If our aim is to be fulfilled we must somehow allow as many of the players as possible to feel they have gained status.

This is where designing from fundamentals shows it’s superiority. If I had asked you to design a competitive calculating game how many would have made making as many people as possible feel they have gained status their design priority? Yet it’s obvious that unless people feel this way they are not going to play your game since their motivation will not be fulfilled.

Now we have to find mechanisms which will bring about our aim. We could use some sort of random element so that people who aren’t quite so good at calculation can sometimes get the better of those who usually beat them (we rely here on the players having a selective memory, we remember the few times we beat Big Bob not the many times he beat us, he of course does the opposite). If we were allowing other sorts of competition we would have a host of possible ways to modify our calculating game with multiplayer interaction, pattern recognition et. but always with the goal of allowing as many players as possible to feel they have gained status.

This is the proper scope for inventiveness in game design, finding the right mechanisms and balance to achieve our result.

Finally we decide what sort of ‘skin’ the game will have, how about dueling wizards who’s ‘spells’ are really calculations, or maybe a skyscraper building game where the better you calculate the higher & faster you can build. It doesn’t matter much really from the game design point of view, though it can be an important marketing decision.

I notice you''re a new poster to the forums, and it reminded me of one of my very first posts I made here as well. Unfortunately the search function is not working, but basically I said that people designed things backwardly as you suggest.

They consider the micro elements first, and then try to fit everything into a macro concept. I also feel that many designs are concept-led rather than strategy-led. And I also agree with you in that I feel that this is due to marketing pressures. I personally feel that many RTS games are designed around the units, and gameplay adapts to the units. Also, almost every RTS out there, has followed the same gameplay paradigm (with a few notable exceptions) of Gather resources/Build Military Infrastructure/Build Military Forces/Calculate what force beats what force/Destroy or capture other side''s infrastructure - or destroy other side''s armed forces.

That''s why in my game, though I had a background in mind, I really looked at many abstract features of strategy gaming that could apply to a wide set of backgrounds. For example, I looked at how militaries are organized, and I realized that the concept of a singular unit without any form of military hierarchy (i.e. Armies, Corps, Divisions....Cohorts, Centuries, Legions....etc. etc) are already missing the mark in terms of military thought. I also looked at how the player interacts with the game world by clicking on units (which have no organization other than random hot key assignments) and realized that here too, this is a game construct of "God-like" gaming that has a serious impact on gameplay. So I envisioned the concept of having AI Commander objects that received Order objects from a physical representation of the Player himself (represented in the game by an avatar). More importantly, these AI Commander objects don''t control single instances (for example 1 tank) but instead logical groupings of units. So if you wanted an entire division to do something, you give an order to the Commander of the Division to do it, and if you want a tank platoon to attack a position, then you order the Commander of the platoon to do that.

I also looked at how resourcing forces the player to be both a general and a political leader at the same time....and other than Napoleon and Caesar, couldn''t think of good examples in real life of generals who could do both. I also realized that the resourcing model (build factories, and order units dynamically depending on your wealth and your need) was also a crutch. This one element makes players consider their armed forces as cannon fodder, and does not go far enough in making the player feel like his troops are valuable commodities. Also the modeling of resourcing does not adequately reflect how real reinforcements/resupply is done....mainly because there is no true military organizational structure in place.

I''ve also thought about elements like communication, morale, and logistics to name a few. I tried to find things that are common in all warfare to make a strategy game engine if you will. From there, I will take my own game background and make more concrete settings. So my game design started with a simple question..."what does a battlefield commander have to worry about when he fights?". That''s why I consider my game to be more like a warfare simulator than a game if anything. I even questioned the merits of real time and turn based. Many feel that real time is more realistic or more fun simply because it''s real time. Unfortunately, real time games have such limited AI that it forces the player to do a level of micromanagement that does not happen in the real world. This micromanagement is neither real (I don''t think you have to order an infantry company to retreat when it is faced with a Heavy Lancer regiment) nor is it fun when I have to scatter my attention in so many places that I no longer have time to think about grand plans. I therefore thought that a hybrid system like the Total War series had to be far superior.

I do wish that designers thought about the macro elements first...how everything fits together holistically first, without centering on the flash or the immediately obvious, and then bolting things on to make it all fit.

damnit! I wrote this long post last night and then clicked the button and turned off the monitor only to discover it''s not here this morning!

FRUSTRATION

I''ll try to remember what I said...


struct {person "George D. Filiotis";} Symphonic;
Are you in support of the ban of Dihydrogen Monoxide? You should be!

TMeier, thanks for bringing this up. It''s nice to step back and look under the hood once in a while.

3 good places to start exploring this are the developer''s goals, disccecting the finished product, and identifying our desires in an efficient way.

Developers of RTS games (i guess/expect) deliberatly create rock-paper-scissors units to increase the strategy potential of their game. the rock, paper and scissor''s can''t be all equally good or resource allocation would be too easy, we get things like "Rock beats scissors by 8%"
There are more than three units so we end up with a chaotic "A beats B, B beats C and D, C beats D, D beats A" where A, B etc have different effectivenesses (is that a word?) depending on their opponent.
of course modern strategy titles get criticised for not making terrain useful so we have "A beats B by 32% travelling up a hill...".
Then unit cooperation makes things even worse...
In order to make the game worth playing from more than one side, these effectivenesses have to be carefully weighted. getting it right probably takes a long time tweaking, trying to avoid domino effects.
By the time the game ships, I don''t expect anyone who made it actually understands the mechanics properly.
The original rock-paper-scissors elegance is largely corrupt.

To examine a finished commercial game, it is almost impossible (without anal-retentive testing) to be able to say things like "the infantry have a 20% advantage over grenediers at medium range" etc ie it is impossible to identify the exact rock-paper-scissors structure.
This must make RTS games difficult to criticize, since no one understands the problem enough to say anything more descriptive than "the tanks just rush in".
Worse still, the problem can''t ever get fixed without making the game simple.

This suggests a fundamental weakness in RTS design.

Let''s look at it from an abstract point of view, considering what WE WANT to do in the game.
TMeier''s list of things we like to do can be compressed to one blindingly obvious point:
We like to play (Duh)

In the spirit of those lists, let''s define "play":
for the sake of games, let''s define play as "imaginatively interacting with a responsive experiment"

A case study springs to mind: in Black and White, there was a lot of hype about the attention to detail, "if you plant this type of tree here, it will ..." and so on. Great. We get to toy around with the game world (which sure as hell is responsive) and discovering those things counts as fun.
The trouble is those discoverys were static, they could''t be modified (save a few common sense combinations) and they are actually small in number.
The game makes it look more complicated than it is because it''s smart enough to ABSTRACT the behaviour (such that it''s responses are appropiate) and any of an infinity of object/action combinations would do SOMETHING relevant to the world.
But the building blocks of this behaviour are actually very primitive.

It is nice for the player to find each and every action in the game is logically interchangeable (eg if i can throw one thing I can throw anything, if i can burn one thing...)

I suggest a gameplay architecture heavily based on Lego (anyone who doesn''t LOVE Lego has no business in a games industry).
ie the instruments of strategy (archers beat unarmoured units, especially with a height advantage) should be abstracted and freely combineable.
Some games approach unit combination totally wrong: the engine detects legal combinations and presents a new predefined unit.

In the context of RTS, each unit could be highly specialised. There are a few simple rules for each unit on how to interact with each enemy and allied unit type. From this we should have emergant behaviour.
Shogun-esque example: riflemen form lines when grouped. the front line fires, then ducks and reload as the line behind fires etc.
Example continued: when riflemen move to attack with other types, they take the front position and fire early. When freindly units charge, they retreat down the sides (making room to avoid freindly fire)
Example continued: if the charging units retreat, the riflemen open fire on the enemy no longer mingled with freindly units

This could work well in practice if the primitive units formed logical cooperative SIMPLE groups and were a little autonomous, taking the initiative (perhaps the player could give them a set of strategies prior to battle, each strategy defined as a sequenecf of primitive actions eg "flank", "retreat", "if losing goto strategy D, E or F", "group with X" etc)

The ultimate objective of this game is for the player to devise a set of strategies and unit combinations to create an organic, highly flexible autonomous army. Imagine unit groups assuming each other''s roles if one group is destroyed, two half-defeated groups combining to make one stronger one, letting the enemy penetrate a little before surrounding them on all sides and consuming them.

If the player is given a set of primitive actions which can be combined in any way, they can potentially create their own game in their own image.

********


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