An interesting thing that's been happening with local multiplayer videogames is the exploration of interactions that happen outside of the computer. I wrote a bit about this before when I released O. Wide range of stuff, from J.S. Joust to Fingle. I'm particularly interested in touchscreen multiplayer - devices like the ipad are ideal for playing games together, being portable enough to take places but large enough for more than one player to comfortably interact at the same time.
The key idea is that the software doesn't know whose finger is whose. This rules out some possible games you might want to make; often we would like to be able to tell. If you're to do a single-screen genre-RTS with each player dragging to move their own units, you're probably going to want to network it - if not you'll be getting in each other's way and interfering with each other's controls (whether by accident or intent). (Possibly you could constrain the design to work with each player only touching one side of the screen while sending units over to the other side, Shot Shot Shoot-style, but in this case beware of the "wandering hands" effect.) But we can embrace this interference in our designs, it enables a new type of game.
Now, I suspect the natural response of many game developers to this is to view it as a "gimmick", a cute but shallow feature. I believe that it's not a gimmick. Several fundamentally different games have already been made using this concept, and I suspect that more possibilities exist. This is a potentially rich vein of design to explore further.
Chicanery is one of the simplest possible games to use this concept. The digital side of the game offers no way to win, only a way to lose: letting go of your button. So players must somehow persuade their opponents to let go. I'm honestly pretty scared of playing it.
A lot of potential designs in this space end up feeling like "essentially the same game as Chicanery": the game is decided by a physical wrestling match, and victory in the digital realm is purely a formality. I would like to avoid this for the simple reason that we already have Chicanery.
Finger Battle doesn't explicitly use this concept. Each player presses their side of the screen as many times as possible; whoever presses the most times wins. There's no overlap in inputs, no benefit in touching your opponent's side of the screen - but of course you can convert it into Chicanery by trying to prevent your opponent touching the screen while still pressing yours. Again this is a design sink - a lot of potential games essentially reduce to "press stuff as fast as possible"; let's try to avoid it.
Ready Steady Bang also doesn't use this concept, but is worth mentioning because its idea shows up later as a component of larger systems. It's a quick-draw western-themed game; players compete to be the first to touch the screen after a signal "ready, steady, bang!". The important difference here is that it demands attention; players must react to something that happens on the screen in a way that they didn't in the previous two examples. What this means is that if you Chicanerise it there's still a chance that the physically weaker player can win - by paying closer attention and managing to sneak through and press at the right time despite their opponent restraining them. This is a significant enough effect that most players will not attempt to wrestle at all.
Next in the complexity hierarchy is a hypothetical game that I don't believe anyone has released (though I briefly prototyped it during O's development). Call it "Touchscreen Snap". Pieces appear on the screen (demanding attention), and players compete to be the first to touch them (indicated by dragging them to their side of the screen, since the program doesn't know who owns a finger). This results in some physical conflict, because even if players don't actively fight each other their hands will often collide as they race to grab the same pieces. Essentially this is Ready Steady Bang with overlapping input domains.
In Circulets, pieces appear in each player's colour on their side of the screen, and players compete to collect them as fast as possible (by dragging). It is mostly a variation on Finger Battle, with a small amount of extra attention required to drag pieces from random positions rather than blindly pressing. Additionally, an occasional green piece appears in the centre which is valuable to either player - like a momentary round of Touchscreen Snap.
(There appears to have been some attempt to deepen it by making pieces worth -1 point when collected by the wrong player, but since this is an effective loss of one point for both sides there is no incentive for either player to ever do it. I'm not sure what the intent here was, but it seems poorly thought out.)
Bloop is similar to Circulets, with each player tapping pieces of their own colour. Since pieces are colour-coded it's sufficient to just touch them - no need to drag to tell the program who you are. It's greatly enriched over Circulets by the pieces being randomly intermingled across the screen rather than reliably sorted on each side: significant attention is required to touch as much of your own colour as possible while avoiding touching the others. (Note that Bloop preceded Circulets chronologically; I've just ordered them here to suit my exposition.)
Bam fu is kind of a variation on Bloop, with each player pressing pieces of a particular colour across the screen. But rather than appearing randomly, the pieces are fixed in place and just change colour when pressed according to a predictable cyclic sequence. This makes the attention element much deeper - you can predict where your colour will show up by watching for when other players press theirs. It really comes into its own with more than two players, subtly strategising to manipulate the flow of colours towards you while preventing anyone else from winning.
O has the attention element of collecting randomly-appearing coloured pieces. But rather than the colours matching the players, they feed into a set-collection scoring system: each piece of the same colour you collect in sequence is worth an extra point. Collecting a different colour breaks your sequence, which demands extra attention and avoids some of the weaknesses of Touchscreen Snap, and also creates an incentive for your opponent to sometimes force pieces onto your side of the screen. O also gains some depth from basic physics - flinging balls across the screen, bouncing them off each other, holding them in place to block others.
Slamjet Stadium has a ball that both players want to collect, but avoids Touchscreen Snap-style hand-collisions by making that something you can only indirectly interact with. There's a second kind of piece which you fling at the ball to push it around, and very rarely do you have a first-order desire to touch the same piece, because you want to push the ball from opposite sides (there may be a second-order desire to prevent your opponent doing what they want, but that's a lesser effect).
Greedy Bankers starts with an already-complex single-player game and encourages just a bit of cross-screen interaction by valuing pieces higher if they've been moved across the centre of the screen.
Centrifeud has separated inputs most of the time, but is occasionally spiced up with a powerup asking players to touch their piece - like a momentary round of Bloop.
A Bastard (touchscreen version currently unreleased) has players navigating a maze with tank controls that creep across the screen and sometimes overlap - encouraging players to press their opponent's buttons as well as their own. It feels a lot like Glitch Tank (which was an inspiration) in that you must strike a balance between planning carefully and acting quickly - but your plans may involve moving your opponent as well as yourself.
I played an unreleased prototype by @grapefrukt of a game where players tap Pipe Mania-style tiles to rotate them, attempting to join up a network of pipes in a way advantageous to them and disrupt their opponent's network. Feels very different to any of these other games.
(Fingle deserves a mention too though it's not competitive. Physical interactions obstruct digital goals; the challenge comes from your fingers getting in each other's way. The game intentionally provokes physical contact.)
I hope it's clear from these examples that very different games already exist using the "players interact on the same screen" concept, and that there's likely to be room for more that we haven't found yet. They share some common challenges and constraints - in particular, a need for a strong attention cost if they're not to degenerate into Chicanery - and many of them share some common ideas, but they have very different characters. But even the most complex of these are very minimal: what happens if you try to build a more intricate strategic game along these lines? Possibly the inherent messiness puts an upper bound on complexity, but it's worth finding out.
Saturday, 15 June 2013
Friday, 7 June 2013
non-linear costs
Following on from last post I'm thinking about the relationship between the numeric cost of an object and how difficult it is to actually acquire in practise. Double the cost of something, does that make it exactly twice as hard to pay? In real life you'd want the answer to be close to yes (though it isn't really; we have feedback effects) for convenience, but games don't need to be convenient - a large part of what games provide is unnecessary obstacles and obscurity. It's easier to intuitively think about linear relationships: if the difficulty of paying costs is non-linear that makes things harder to evaluate, interesting.
Okay first concept is feedback loops. If you can spend resources to increase the rate at which you gain resources (positive feedback), then buying sufficiently expensive things is going to have sub-linear difficulty. Usually games that do this balance it out with an incentive to buy things early - e.g. rushing in an RTS vs. building your economy - because otherwise getting the steepest growth curve will eventually dominate everything else pretty easily. Similarly negative feedback loops make it harder to buy expensive things. In Settlers of Catan when a 7 is rolled any player with more than 7 cards must discard half of them, so there's a risk to accumulating lots: on average your effective wealth ends up slightly less than your apparent wealth.
In Magic you can play one land per turn, a linear constraint. But in practise this is sub-linear, because you can't rely on always having a land card to play. This gives a fuzzy threshold at which spells become harder to cast - you're very likely to be able to cast a 2-mana spell by turn 2, less likely to cast a 4-cost spell by turn 4, and quite unlikely to cast an 8-cost by turn 8 (ignoring mana-acceleration powers).
However since lands in play can be reused each turn, the total amount you can pay grows triangularly - by turn 4 you can have paid a total of 1+2+3+4=10 mana if the individual costs are small enough. (Note that cards are a resource too, which is linearly constrained in turns, so casting one 4-cost spell is cheaper than 2 2-cost because it saves a card.)
Dominion's price structure is quite complex. Because your hand is limited to five cards each turn, buying things that cost more than 5 is disproportionately hard as it requires not just more money but money in larger denominations (or a way to draw more at once). Also what you're able to buy on the first two turns is significant: you can definitely buy something costing ≤4 on the first or second turn, something costing 5 you have a 1/6 chance of being able to buy, and ≥6 is impossible (without a few specific expansion cards).
Also there's a default limit of buying one card per turn, which means with 4 money you can't buy two 2-costs - unless you've played a card that allows extra buys. So a lot of the time the actual numeric cost doesn't matter if it's below the threshold of 5; it only makes a difference if you're somehow very short on money or you have extra buys. This is the reasoning for the Chapel costing only 2 even though it's one of the most powerful cards in the game - it's not something you generally want multiple copies of so its power is not significantly increased by being so cheap.
@ostroffj mentioned that the alert costs (the number of enemies spawned when you siphon a wall tile) in 868whatever behave a bit like Dominion's acquisition costs. It's hard to evaluate because the cost of a number of enemies is eventually converted into the currencies of turns/hp/energy/credits but the exact rates depend on which enemy types spawn and where, the layout of walls, how you choose to deal with them, and other random elements. But in general below 5 you can usually handle unharmed (4 is on the edge) while more than that will usually demand a real cost. And then, like Dominion, you have a limited ability to acquire things and the the distinctions between prices matter if you try to take more than one at a time; 2+2 stays comfortably sub-threshold but 4+4 is highly dangerous.
Mmm still trying to think of examples with more fundamentally different ways of complicating costs.
Okay first concept is feedback loops. If you can spend resources to increase the rate at which you gain resources (positive feedback), then buying sufficiently expensive things is going to have sub-linear difficulty. Usually games that do this balance it out with an incentive to buy things early - e.g. rushing in an RTS vs. building your economy - because otherwise getting the steepest growth curve will eventually dominate everything else pretty easily. Similarly negative feedback loops make it harder to buy expensive things. In Settlers of Catan when a 7 is rolled any player with more than 7 cards must discard half of them, so there's a risk to accumulating lots: on average your effective wealth ends up slightly less than your apparent wealth.
In Magic you can play one land per turn, a linear constraint. But in practise this is sub-linear, because you can't rely on always having a land card to play. This gives a fuzzy threshold at which spells become harder to cast - you're very likely to be able to cast a 2-mana spell by turn 2, less likely to cast a 4-cost spell by turn 4, and quite unlikely to cast an 8-cost by turn 8 (ignoring mana-acceleration powers).
However since lands in play can be reused each turn, the total amount you can pay grows triangularly - by turn 4 you can have paid a total of 1+2+3+4=10 mana if the individual costs are small enough. (Note that cards are a resource too, which is linearly constrained in turns, so casting one 4-cost spell is cheaper than 2 2-cost because it saves a card.)
Dominion's price structure is quite complex. Because your hand is limited to five cards each turn, buying things that cost more than 5 is disproportionately hard as it requires not just more money but money in larger denominations (or a way to draw more at once). Also what you're able to buy on the first two turns is significant: you can definitely buy something costing ≤4 on the first or second turn, something costing 5 you have a 1/6 chance of being able to buy, and ≥6 is impossible (without a few specific expansion cards).
Also there's a default limit of buying one card per turn, which means with 4 money you can't buy two 2-costs - unless you've played a card that allows extra buys. So a lot of the time the actual numeric cost doesn't matter if it's below the threshold of 5; it only makes a difference if you're somehow very short on money or you have extra buys. This is the reasoning for the Chapel costing only 2 even though it's one of the most powerful cards in the game - it's not something you generally want multiple copies of so its power is not significantly increased by being so cheap.
@ostroffj mentioned that the alert costs (the number of enemies spawned when you siphon a wall tile) in 868whatever behave a bit like Dominion's acquisition costs. It's hard to evaluate because the cost of a number of enemies is eventually converted into the currencies of turns/hp/energy/credits but the exact rates depend on which enemy types spawn and where, the layout of walls, how you choose to deal with them, and other random elements. But in general below 5 you can usually handle unharmed (4 is on the edge) while more than that will usually demand a real cost. And then, like Dominion, you have a limited ability to acquire things and the the distinctions between prices matter if you try to take more than one at a time; 2+2 stays comfortably sub-threshold but 4+4 is highly dangerous.
Mmm still trying to think of examples with more fundamentally different ways of complicating costs.
Thursday, 6 June 2013
non-trivial currencies
A lot of game actions involve exchanging some currency for some other currency or resource. Or, okay, depending on how reductive you want to be you could say that every action is a currency exchange, but sometimes the currencies are complex difficult-to-evaluate concepts like "a good position". But often they're just numbers of a thing - gold, credits, sheep, beans, whatever.
Thinking about different ways in which currencies can operate in real life might give some ideas for ways to make these exchanges more complex. (You don't necessarily want to add complexity everywhere, this is just something to consider).
OK first, look at international currency exchanges. Relative values change over time, which is already interesting to play with: decision-making under uncertainty to try to get the best deal. Shopping around for deals - different money-changers may offer different rates. Maybe there's a fixed fee per transaction so there's an incentive to change a large sum in one go. Obvious complexity.
More subtle is the complexity that can arise within a single currency. Typically we like to imagine you have just one number and bigger is better, but there are different conveniences. Cash vs. EFTPOS: some places won't accept cards; carrying cash is riskier; possible transaction fees. Different denominations of cash; buses which don't give change so you'll overpay if you don't have the exact amount.. basically these are like different currencies that are cheap to change between (but not free, because time has value).
Or someone sends me a cheque and it's such a hassle to actually get around to banking it (plus if I'm in Germany what am I even supposed to do with this they don't use these here anymore).
And since these things are instantiated as physical objects there are different values based on physical properties. Notes or cards weigh less than a bunch of coins, so they're easier to carry but harder to bludgeon with. The raw materials composing them have a value - if the value of a coin's metal ever exceeds the face value of the coin there's an incentive to melt it down and reuse it. Or there can be particular value in specific units - like the giant robot vending machine that only takes quarters (so we traded with a beggar; notes more valuable to him for coins more valuable to us).
Also collectors - someone might value a particular coin more highly because it completes a set for them, by denomination or year.
And hey there's complexity even in directly comparable numeric values, looking at how much relative difference they make. When you're broke finding a note lying in the street affects your situation way more than if you're doing okay; once you can afford everything you need increasing that number further just becomes a way of keeping score.
Some of these situations might be useful to think about when designing games? These types of consideration are used in board games sometimes but rarely in videogames - putting things on a computer makes it easy to treat everything as a number and think no more about it. Just something to think about using maybe I don't know!
Thinking about different ways in which currencies can operate in real life might give some ideas for ways to make these exchanges more complex. (You don't necessarily want to add complexity everywhere, this is just something to consider).
OK first, look at international currency exchanges. Relative values change over time, which is already interesting to play with: decision-making under uncertainty to try to get the best deal. Shopping around for deals - different money-changers may offer different rates. Maybe there's a fixed fee per transaction so there's an incentive to change a large sum in one go. Obvious complexity.
More subtle is the complexity that can arise within a single currency. Typically we like to imagine you have just one number and bigger is better, but there are different conveniences. Cash vs. EFTPOS: some places won't accept cards; carrying cash is riskier; possible transaction fees. Different denominations of cash; buses which don't give change so you'll overpay if you don't have the exact amount.. basically these are like different currencies that are cheap to change between (but not free, because time has value).
Or someone sends me a cheque and it's such a hassle to actually get around to banking it (plus if I'm in Germany what am I even supposed to do with this they don't use these here anymore).
And since these things are instantiated as physical objects there are different values based on physical properties. Notes or cards weigh less than a bunch of coins, so they're easier to carry but harder to bludgeon with. The raw materials composing them have a value - if the value of a coin's metal ever exceeds the face value of the coin there's an incentive to melt it down and reuse it. Or there can be particular value in specific units - like the giant robot vending machine that only takes quarters (so we traded with a beggar; notes more valuable to him for coins more valuable to us).
Also collectors - someone might value a particular coin more highly because it completes a set for them, by denomination or year.
And hey there's complexity even in directly comparable numeric values, looking at how much relative difference they make. When you're broke finding a note lying in the street affects your situation way more than if you're doing okay; once you can afford everything you need increasing that number further just becomes a way of keeping score.
Some of these situations might be useful to think about when designing games? These types of consideration are used in board games sometimes but rarely in videogames - putting things on a computer makes it easy to treat everything as a number and think no more about it. Just something to think about using maybe I don't know!
Monday, 20 May 2013
Uniform Activations
There's this common structure a lot of games have: a list of different abilities the players choose from. Comes in a lot of different shapes - equipment, magic spells, shop purchases, research upgrades, starseeds.. sometimes they're randomly distributed, often there's an opportunity cost such that choices between them are somehow exclusive, whatever. The point is they're a collection of modular parts that do different things; removing one or adding a new one doesn't drastically change the nature of the game. It's a useful structure both for players and designers because independent pieces are easy to think about, can be introduced one at a time, can be replaced individually without much hassle, and the process of gradually understanding how disparate parts fit together can be wonderful.
(Its weakness is that a design composed of replaceable pieces lacks the particular beauty of elegant minimalism, of a pure holistic design that appears to be the only possible way it could be.)
Now, a lot of games that use this structure have these abilities behave in a variety of different ways. Classic roguelikes (just for example; other genres are similar) have collectable items that are consumed once, activated repeatedly consuming a finite number of charges, activated repeatedly consuming an energy resource, exclusively equipped to give a passive effect, non-exclusively equipped to give a passive effect, exclusively or non-exclusively equipped to give an ability that can be activated repeatedly.. as well as similar effects gained by leveling up killing monsters doing quests eating food praying to the gods. And when abilities are activated, they might require input to select a direction or an enemy or a friend or a location, and they might take effect instantly or after a delay or last for a particular duration or until deactivated. It can be a right mess.
More often than not this variety is a crutch for the designer. Pretty much any idea you come up with can be stuck into a game design without putting in any effort to ensure it behaves in a predictable way - but this offloads work onto the players to learn and keep track of the myriad different behaviours; and in a videogame it offloads work onto the programmer to implement interfaces for all these different behaviours. Here's an advantage to being both designer and programmer: if a small amount of extra design work saves you a large amount of programming work you're going to do it, and if you run into an unpleasant and unnecessary programming task you can go back and design with the grain - often making the game better by doing so.
Magic: the Gathering is probably the most egregious example of this. Seven different card types, in five different colours (and multicolour, hybrid, colourless), which depending on their type are played either by spending mana or a limited number of times per turn, and either have a one-off effect (which might target any number of different objects with any number of constraints) or create a permanent object (which might have effects later under any number of different conditions). There are no straightforward consistent rules governing how they behave - any pattern has an exception somewhere.
But there's a reason for this: they're trying to create the illusion of a "Calvinball" game where anything could happen, where every rule can be broken - but at the same time keep it constrained and balanced. (And of course sustain their business model by churning out vast numbers of new cards each year.) They're making a compromise for a particular effect. There are always compromises in design - even if not from external resource constraints there are internal tensions - and this is totally okay. The important thing is to ensure that when you're learning from the good parts that you don't copy the compromises as well if you don't have to - unfortunately when something is successful every part tends to get copied indiscriminately.
(David Sirlin wrote recently of how dropping an awkward timing system his game had inherited from Magic improved it.)
A few examples from things I've made of how I prefer for this to be done:
- All of Zaga-33's items are single-use instant-effect untargeted abilities that take one turn to use. Most of the effects are borrowed from other roguelikes but "fire a beam in a straight line" required some adaptation to avoid needing extra interface to choose a direction: the solution was to select all the directions simultaneously (other methods would have been to pick one at random, or intelligently choose the one with the most/nearest enemies).
- Early on during 86856527's design some of the abilities I wanted to include were passive effects (granting the ability to see invisible things, increasing attack damage) and some were active (blow something up right now). Converting the passive effects to active ones (durations lasting until the end of each sector) not only made things more consistent and elegant, but also made them more interesting: you have the choice each level whether to spend resources maintaining the effect. So I ended up with all abilities being multiple-use instant-effect untargeted, costing resources, not taking a turn to use. Many of these effects target specific enemies or areas but without requiring specific player input - they take a random one, or the nearest, or all of a particular type (and 868-HACK will display more methods).
- Exuberant Struggle and Vertex Dispenser both squeeze something of the base-building and army-constructing of RTS into games where you're directly controlling a single unit and activating abilities with a single key press: abilities that create units or buildings just place them at your current location, and the units go off and act automatically.
- Glitch Tank pushes unification to an extreme, with basic movement actions being shuffled in with weapon and army building cards, all activated instantly by a single button press - unlike these other examples where moving (and sometimes attacking) are a separate type of ability.
Now, there can be good reason to have different interfaces and behaviour types, this isn't a firm rule - just a suggestion. If you gain something worthwhile from this variety then by all means do it: just consider whether this could still be expressed in a cleaner system. I mentioned Magic, where they're partially justified in having a messy design to give the particular impression they want. Sometimes you can convey meaning through different behaviours. Consider Starcraft - the Zerg create units in a completely different way to the other races, rather than training them at dedicated buildings they grow larvae into different types: this reinforces their character as a weird biohorror race that mutates and evolves on the fly. But this actually argues in favour of keeping abilities consistent most of the time: you need to set up a pattern in order to break it. Keep the mundane consistent so that the magical can be magical.
(Its weakness is that a design composed of replaceable pieces lacks the particular beauty of elegant minimalism, of a pure holistic design that appears to be the only possible way it could be.)
Now, a lot of games that use this structure have these abilities behave in a variety of different ways. Classic roguelikes (just for example; other genres are similar) have collectable items that are consumed once, activated repeatedly consuming a finite number of charges, activated repeatedly consuming an energy resource, exclusively equipped to give a passive effect, non-exclusively equipped to give a passive effect, exclusively or non-exclusively equipped to give an ability that can be activated repeatedly.. as well as similar effects gained by leveling up killing monsters doing quests eating food praying to the gods. And when abilities are activated, they might require input to select a direction or an enemy or a friend or a location, and they might take effect instantly or after a delay or last for a particular duration or until deactivated. It can be a right mess.
More often than not this variety is a crutch for the designer. Pretty much any idea you come up with can be stuck into a game design without putting in any effort to ensure it behaves in a predictable way - but this offloads work onto the players to learn and keep track of the myriad different behaviours; and in a videogame it offloads work onto the programmer to implement interfaces for all these different behaviours. Here's an advantage to being both designer and programmer: if a small amount of extra design work saves you a large amount of programming work you're going to do it, and if you run into an unpleasant and unnecessary programming task you can go back and design with the grain - often making the game better by doing so.
Magic: the Gathering is probably the most egregious example of this. Seven different card types, in five different colours (and multicolour, hybrid, colourless), which depending on their type are played either by spending mana or a limited number of times per turn, and either have a one-off effect (which might target any number of different objects with any number of constraints) or create a permanent object (which might have effects later under any number of different conditions). There are no straightforward consistent rules governing how they behave - any pattern has an exception somewhere.
But there's a reason for this: they're trying to create the illusion of a "Calvinball" game where anything could happen, where every rule can be broken - but at the same time keep it constrained and balanced. (And of course sustain their business model by churning out vast numbers of new cards each year.) They're making a compromise for a particular effect. There are always compromises in design - even if not from external resource constraints there are internal tensions - and this is totally okay. The important thing is to ensure that when you're learning from the good parts that you don't copy the compromises as well if you don't have to - unfortunately when something is successful every part tends to get copied indiscriminately.
(David Sirlin wrote recently of how dropping an awkward timing system his game had inherited from Magic improved it.)
A few examples from things I've made of how I prefer for this to be done:
- All of Zaga-33's items are single-use instant-effect untargeted abilities that take one turn to use. Most of the effects are borrowed from other roguelikes but "fire a beam in a straight line" required some adaptation to avoid needing extra interface to choose a direction: the solution was to select all the directions simultaneously (other methods would have been to pick one at random, or intelligently choose the one with the most/nearest enemies).
- Early on during 86856527's design some of the abilities I wanted to include were passive effects (granting the ability to see invisible things, increasing attack damage) and some were active (blow something up right now). Converting the passive effects to active ones (durations lasting until the end of each sector) not only made things more consistent and elegant, but also made them more interesting: you have the choice each level whether to spend resources maintaining the effect. So I ended up with all abilities being multiple-use instant-effect untargeted, costing resources, not taking a turn to use. Many of these effects target specific enemies or areas but without requiring specific player input - they take a random one, or the nearest, or all of a particular type (and 868-HACK will display more methods).
- Exuberant Struggle and Vertex Dispenser both squeeze something of the base-building and army-constructing of RTS into games where you're directly controlling a single unit and activating abilities with a single key press: abilities that create units or buildings just place them at your current location, and the units go off and act automatically.
- Glitch Tank pushes unification to an extreme, with basic movement actions being shuffled in with weapon and army building cards, all activated instantly by a single button press - unlike these other examples where moving (and sometimes attacking) are a separate type of ability.
Now, there can be good reason to have different interfaces and behaviour types, this isn't a firm rule - just a suggestion. If you gain something worthwhile from this variety then by all means do it: just consider whether this could still be expressed in a cleaner system. I mentioned Magic, where they're partially justified in having a messy design to give the particular impression they want. Sometimes you can convey meaning through different behaviours. Consider Starcraft - the Zerg create units in a completely different way to the other races, rather than training them at dedicated buildings they grow larvae into different types: this reinforces their character as a weird biohorror race that mutates and evolves on the fly. But this actually argues in favour of keeping abilities consistent most of the time: you need to set up a pattern in order to break it. Keep the mundane consistent so that the magical can be magical.
Thursday, 16 May 2013
Re pulling up the ladder
response to "Pulling up the ladder" by Rami Ismail
Rami makes a good point that it's not necessarily healthy for successful "indie" developers to be curating newcomers, because there's a problem of self-interest, they're putting their own hard-earned reputations on the line, making them less likely to recommend risky new things. I'm not sure how large a problem this is - though I'm not personally in such a position, I'll happily recommend anything I like any time regardless of weirdness or inaccessibility.
..which reveals another problem with this: it's based on what the people doing the recommending like, so it tends to reinforce the same set of tastes.
I've made things in a bunch of different genres and styles so I may be better positioned to see this than most. It's very clear to me that whenever I make a new game, those who are keenest to pick up on it are those who make similar games themselves. When I make a roguelike, it's lifted up by the roguelike crowd. When I make a fairly conventional puzzle game with a cute twist, people who make puzzle-games-with-twists talk about it. When I make a slow ambient exploration thing without much conventional "gameplay", it's those who make that kind of thing who promote it. But when I make something that doesn't already have a strong presence in the indie games scene, it fizzles. And I get the reverse effect sometimes too - people say things like "why are you wasting your time making [style of thing I don't like] when you're good at making [style of thing I do]?".
So here's the deeper problem with putting the responsibility of lifting up newcomers on those who are already successful in the field: even if they're completely willing to take risks on things that might not pay off, they're only interested in things that interest them. The gaps where things are really getting missed you don't even see, because they're not things you personally care about.
There's been more discussion recently of the "just make a great game and the rest will magically work out" fallacy. The thing is - this might work when what you want to make lines up with a wave that's there to catch, but not otherwise. The "indie games scene" acts as a filter; it's very hard for a game to reach the outside world without passing through it, the larger videogame community and the world as a whole trust small cliques to curate what might be of interest to them from the masses of stuff that gets made. But the games that might appeal to people out there but don't conform to the tastes of the successful "indie game" clique just get lost. There's no room for anything truly new if for anything to succeed it has to be liked by someone who likes the old things best.
A challenge for everyone : try to perceive the value in something that's not the kind of thing you usually like, and that also hasn't been authorised as "good" by a friend or public figure.
Rami makes a good point that it's not necessarily healthy for successful "indie" developers to be curating newcomers, because there's a problem of self-interest, they're putting their own hard-earned reputations on the line, making them less likely to recommend risky new things. I'm not sure how large a problem this is - though I'm not personally in such a position, I'll happily recommend anything I like any time regardless of weirdness or inaccessibility.
..which reveals another problem with this: it's based on what the people doing the recommending like, so it tends to reinforce the same set of tastes.
I've made things in a bunch of different genres and styles so I may be better positioned to see this than most. It's very clear to me that whenever I make a new game, those who are keenest to pick up on it are those who make similar games themselves. When I make a roguelike, it's lifted up by the roguelike crowd. When I make a fairly conventional puzzle game with a cute twist, people who make puzzle-games-with-twists talk about it. When I make a slow ambient exploration thing without much conventional "gameplay", it's those who make that kind of thing who promote it. But when I make something that doesn't already have a strong presence in the indie games scene, it fizzles. And I get the reverse effect sometimes too - people say things like "why are you wasting your time making [style of thing I don't like] when you're good at making [style of thing I do]?".
So here's the deeper problem with putting the responsibility of lifting up newcomers on those who are already successful in the field: even if they're completely willing to take risks on things that might not pay off, they're only interested in things that interest them. The gaps where things are really getting missed you don't even see, because they're not things you personally care about.
There's been more discussion recently of the "just make a great game and the rest will magically work out" fallacy. The thing is - this might work when what you want to make lines up with a wave that's there to catch, but not otherwise. The "indie games scene" acts as a filter; it's very hard for a game to reach the outside world without passing through it, the larger videogame community and the world as a whole trust small cliques to curate what might be of interest to them from the masses of stuff that gets made. But the games that might appeal to people out there but don't conform to the tastes of the successful "indie game" clique just get lost. There's no room for anything truly new if for anything to succeed it has to be liked by someone who likes the old things best.
A challenge for everyone : try to perceive the value in something that's not the kind of thing you usually like, and that also hasn't been authorised as "good" by a friend or public figure.
Sunday, 12 May 2013
do something to videogames
Quick (edit: not so quick) response to Darius' piece that's been going around because there's no comment box attached to it so everyone has to write their own post in their own place (which might not be a bad thing hey).
On the whole I agree with what he's saying, some good points. Don't limit yourself to one medium, pick the right tool for the job, find what works for you, be prepared to abandon what doesn't work for you, be careful about being guided by external validation.
Now, slide 2 specifically points out that this message is not for me - expressing myself creatively through videogames works for me - so this response may be off track. I do "struggle" to express myself, but I feel satisfied with the outcomes. But I have struggled with less satisfactory results in other artforms - the written word, music, mathematical proof - so I feel like I have some idea.
Underlying Darius' piece is this idea of "I’m trying to do X, now what can I do to make it happen?", and that maybe the particular grain of videogames makes them unsuitable for doing X. This is a 'top-down' design approach, starting with a concept or message and then trying to express it. And I'm not sure this is quite the right approach to doing creative work - insofar as there can be said to be anything like a 'right' approach.. I guess what I mean is that it's not the only approach, and it's not one that I've found to be very productive for me. I've gotten better results by picking a medium and then working with the grain to see what comes out. Usually I do start with an idea, but as I try to implement it changes, and I've found it better to be open to this than to try to force through my original concept.
I gave a talk at A MAZE in Berlin recently on this topic of 'working with the grain'. Not going to rehash everything I said there because they were videoed so I'll just link that when it's online (edit: link). But the basic points were: a lot of our brainpower is unconscious and is accessed by doing rather than thinking, the underlying structure of a form can carry truth and beauty that's revealed by working in it, it's better to create things by jumping in and creating and being open to unexpected influences than by trying to plan things out before we start.
I feel like videogames have a particularly strong and structured grain, so they might be more resistant to the top-down design approach than some other artforms. Maybe this makes a stronger point than Darius' - maybe if you're struggling to express a concept in videogames it means not only that the concept is unsuited for videogames but that your entire approach to art is unsuited for videogames. This might be related to problems Darius has had expressing himself, I'm not sure - his recent work creating curious bots has been lovely and natural and grain-exploring so I certainly don't want to claim he's taking the 'wrong approach'. But in general I think good things come from listening to the problems that come up so it's better to respond by adapting your concept to take that feedback into account rather than running away to somewhere you don't encounter resistance.
When I make a strategy game, I have particular ideas about which ways to play will be interesting. Sometimes it turns out they aren't - maybe this can be fixed, but not always. Sometimes it turns out they are, but the game discourages them because they're dominated by another strategy which is boring or 'grindy' - to fix this may requires a clever insight into how to remove the boring approach without breaking anything else. They're intricately balanced systems, and tuning them requires finding the correct underlying rules to produce the effects I want.
It's hard to lie with a game. This is an advantage to having a rigid grain, it pushes you to find the truth in what you're trying to express rather than just uncritically broadcasting what you believe. If you want to write a story that communicates "communism is bad" or "the free market is bad" that's easy - just make the villains communists or capitalists and say that's bad. But to make a game that critiques such a system requires simulating the system. If your enemies are capitalists and it turns out your simulation of capitalism makes them more efficient than the communist heroes, that challenges what you're trying to express. Don't get me wrong, you can definitely lie with a game - you don't have to accurately simulate systems, you can cheat in the background, you can use all the non-systemic parts to lie about what the system means. You can avoid simulating the systems you're talking about - games-as-propaganda tend to reskin old games and use only the text/images/sounds to convey their message rather than holistically expressing it through mechanics as well. But fundamentally: any game simulates some system honestly - even if you mislead about how that might correspond to any real-world system. If you want something to happen in a game, you have to write the rules honestly so that it happens - you can't just assume it will happen because that was your authorial intent.
(Games aren't special in this respect; it's even harder to lie with a formal logical proof - though it's easy to mislead with an argument that appears logical or that reasons from false assumptions.)
So if you're struggling to express yourself through games, do consider Darius' points and question why you're set on making games specifically, but also consider whether what you're trying to express might be 'wrong' - whether adapting your concept to avoid the problems you're having might actually make it more beautiful.
On the whole I agree with what he's saying, some good points. Don't limit yourself to one medium, pick the right tool for the job, find what works for you, be prepared to abandon what doesn't work for you, be careful about being guided by external validation.
Now, slide 2 specifically points out that this message is not for me - expressing myself creatively through videogames works for me - so this response may be off track. I do "struggle" to express myself, but I feel satisfied with the outcomes. But I have struggled with less satisfactory results in other artforms - the written word, music, mathematical proof - so I feel like I have some idea.
Underlying Darius' piece is this idea of "I’m trying to do X, now what can I do to make it happen?", and that maybe the particular grain of videogames makes them unsuitable for doing X. This is a 'top-down' design approach, starting with a concept or message and then trying to express it. And I'm not sure this is quite the right approach to doing creative work - insofar as there can be said to be anything like a 'right' approach.. I guess what I mean is that it's not the only approach, and it's not one that I've found to be very productive for me. I've gotten better results by picking a medium and then working with the grain to see what comes out. Usually I do start with an idea, but as I try to implement it changes, and I've found it better to be open to this than to try to force through my original concept.
I gave a talk at A MAZE in Berlin recently on this topic of 'working with the grain'. Not going to rehash everything I said there because they were videoed so I'll just link that when it's online (edit: link). But the basic points were: a lot of our brainpower is unconscious and is accessed by doing rather than thinking, the underlying structure of a form can carry truth and beauty that's revealed by working in it, it's better to create things by jumping in and creating and being open to unexpected influences than by trying to plan things out before we start.
I feel like videogames have a particularly strong and structured grain, so they might be more resistant to the top-down design approach than some other artforms. Maybe this makes a stronger point than Darius' - maybe if you're struggling to express a concept in videogames it means not only that the concept is unsuited for videogames but that your entire approach to art is unsuited for videogames. This might be related to problems Darius has had expressing himself, I'm not sure - his recent work creating curious bots has been lovely and natural and grain-exploring so I certainly don't want to claim he's taking the 'wrong approach'. But in general I think good things come from listening to the problems that come up so it's better to respond by adapting your concept to take that feedback into account rather than running away to somewhere you don't encounter resistance.
When I make a strategy game, I have particular ideas about which ways to play will be interesting. Sometimes it turns out they aren't - maybe this can be fixed, but not always. Sometimes it turns out they are, but the game discourages them because they're dominated by another strategy which is boring or 'grindy' - to fix this may requires a clever insight into how to remove the boring approach without breaking anything else. They're intricately balanced systems, and tuning them requires finding the correct underlying rules to produce the effects I want.
It's hard to lie with a game. This is an advantage to having a rigid grain, it pushes you to find the truth in what you're trying to express rather than just uncritically broadcasting what you believe. If you want to write a story that communicates "communism is bad" or "the free market is bad" that's easy - just make the villains communists or capitalists and say that's bad. But to make a game that critiques such a system requires simulating the system. If your enemies are capitalists and it turns out your simulation of capitalism makes them more efficient than the communist heroes, that challenges what you're trying to express. Don't get me wrong, you can definitely lie with a game - you don't have to accurately simulate systems, you can cheat in the background, you can use all the non-systemic parts to lie about what the system means. You can avoid simulating the systems you're talking about - games-as-propaganda tend to reskin old games and use only the text/images/sounds to convey their message rather than holistically expressing it through mechanics as well. But fundamentally: any game simulates some system honestly - even if you mislead about how that might correspond to any real-world system. If you want something to happen in a game, you have to write the rules honestly so that it happens - you can't just assume it will happen because that was your authorial intent.
(Games aren't special in this respect; it's even harder to lie with a formal logical proof - though it's easy to mislead with an argument that appears logical or that reasons from false assumptions.)
So if you're struggling to express yourself through games, do consider Darius' points and question why you're set on making games specifically, but also consider whether what you're trying to express might be 'wrong' - whether adapting your concept to avoid the problems you're having might actually make it more beautiful.
Wednesday, 8 May 2013
Score Conditions
Something I've been thinking about with respect to 868-HACK (yes I'm still working on it, the new version has a new name, I don't know when it will be done) is how players can approach score in a game differently depending on their goals, even when the score system itself is fixed. Some of this comes from conversations with @rocketcatgames and @stiknork.
Zaga-33 had a very minimal score system. The main focus is on the win condition of killing the end-boss; the score essentially measures progress towards achieving that condition (by counting which dungeon level you've reached), with a bonus at the end for how efficiently you achieved it when you do (by counting items remaining in your inventory). I discussed this in a previous post (which also touched on some of the other things I'm writing about here).
Before you've completed the game, playing for score is quite effective: it helps you measure your progress towards the ultimate goal. But it turned out that once you can complete it, playing for score wasn't interesting for very long. Whether you could get a high score depended largely on random factors: whether items and level configurations were favourable. Then once you'd achieved the maximum possible score, there was nothing further to achieve. (This is why I didn't include an online scoreboard, see another post.)
But that wasn't the end of it. @Rocketcatgames found another way to play: trying to get a streak of as many wins as possible in a row. I'd tried to balance the game to almost always be completable, and he put that to the test. So I patched in a streak counter that shows up when you win the game, to keep track of this for him (and anyone else who wanted to try that challenge).
In one of the previous posts I talked about how taking a very coarse measurement for score helps to average out the effects of randomness; here we have the coarsest measurement of all - win or lose - added up over multiple plays, turning out to be the best way to display skill.
The interesting thing that came out of this for me was: playing to get the maximum score and playing to get the longest streak required subtly different priorities - similar skills, but applied differently. To maximise your score requires taking reckless risks and succeeding at them, while streaking requires minimising risk as much as possible. The conservative player uses an unidentified item under controlled conditions, where the consequences won't be too bad if it turns out not to be useful; the risky player gets into a situation where only one item will do and then guesses right - or dies, which is okay because they wouldn't have gotten the top score anyway.
Consider the sequence of scores (or wins/losses) across multiple games, instead of just a single number from one game. One way to interpret that sequence is to just keep the biggest one in it, the "high score", that's fine, but there are other possibilities.
Counting streaks (where there's no win condition, you could look at streaks of scores larger than N).
Average score - Drop7 tracks this, and it affects how it's played (although it's a bit broken because you can cancel a game before the end without it contributing to the average). This is potentially really deep because you have to work out to what extent the higher scores you may get by taking extreme risks balance out the lower scores you get when those chances don't work out. In a game with an exponential score system it might be worth getting nothing most of the time in exchange for the occasional zillion-point game - or it might not.
Also there are different types of average you could take: median, geometric mean, harmonic mean.. or you could look at average streaks, or something weirder - what if the ideal way to display your skill at a game is to lose every seventh time you play and win the rest, or to guarantee that each score is higher than the last - a streak of increasing (or decreasing!) scores?
Measuring streaks of wins is pretty similar to measuring your win percentage - a high proportion of wins implies long streaks; long streaks could come from playing badly but many many times, but are most likely to come from being able to win reliably. So win percentage might be a slightly more accurate way of expressing skill, but I prefer to look at streaks because they feel more exciting - there's a psychological difference. Tension builds as you win multiple games in a row, and you may change your style to be more conservative to try not to break the streak. "I won 30 times in a row" sounds more impressive than "I win 83% of the time". (Also the average becomes hard to change once you've played a lot - though this can be solved by averaging across a rolling window of the last N plays.)
A similar consideration comes up in multiplayer games: are you trying to maximise your chances of being in first place, or maximise your expected position among the players? Often you get situations where anyone could attack the player in the lead to bring them down, but it would cost them their own position and give the game to someone else (a form of kingmaking) - and sparks can fly when players have different implicit ideas about what they should be playing for. And when there's a score, if you're behind do you take risks to try to win or do you aim to maximise your score to lose "by less"? Does the absolute value of your score mean anything at all, or is it just about how it compares to other players? Tournament structures around the game can answer this one way or another - in an elimination tournament you might just want to be first (or to not be last), whereas in Poker you typically only care about your score.
SpaceChem does something interesting with its scores, which the developer spoke about at GDC this year. It offers multiple criteria by which your solution is evaluated, so as well as completing levels you can try to improve your solution along each of these axes. But the criteria aren't independent: improving on one axis will cost you on the others. One really clever side-effect of this he pointed out: optimising for one type of score means you're likely to be below average on others, but all scores are added to all leaderboards regardless of which one the player was aiming at, which means everyone can get to be above average on one of them.
868-HACK, like Zaga-33, has both a score and a binary win condition. And, also like Zaga-33, it's possible to achieve the win condition almost every time with cautious skilled play. But unlike it, your score is not closely tied to the win condition at all. You might get 24 points and then die in the first sector, or get to the end with no points at all. There's often a choice between the two - getting points is risky and reduces your chances of survival; sometimes you can guarantee a higher score if you don't try to get out *ALIVE* as well.
The first thing I did, which is in the 7-day version, was to order the scoreboard so that any winning score - even 0 - is above any losing score. This kind of says that your score means nothing if you're dead. And this is interesting, it's a deeper challenge to figure out how exactly many points you can safely get to the exit with than to just grab the highest numbers you can find.
But over time it became clear that it suffered from a similar problem to Zaga-33: getting the highest scores was largely a matter of luck. I already knew a solution: streaking technology. But since this time scoring and winning are not coupled, the length of a streak alone wasn't enough: instead I'm tracking the cumulative score. It presents a difficult problem: how many points should you get in each game to maximise your score across a streak? This works really well.
The expected sequence of mastery is: trying to get to the end, trying to get a high score, trying to get a high streak score. Note that of course I don't expect all players to be interested in this - I'm perfectly happy if someone stops at an earlier tier. If you just get to the end and are satisfied with that that's completely fine, but if anyone wants to keep on playing then there's a greater challenge to measure themselves against.
When putting a score in a game, don't just say "try to get the biggest number" and be done with it. Consider whether it's a score that makes sense to compare against other people, or if it's (like Zaga-33's) better just as a measure of personal progress. Consider the context around the score, how different goals across the sequence of repeated plays can shape how players approach each individual play. And when you find the most interesting goal to aim for, consider how to present it to players. Show people a number and someone will care about it and try to make it bigger. Be open to players inventing their own approaches, a game can accommodate different styles of play driven by different goals.
Zaga-33 had a very minimal score system. The main focus is on the win condition of killing the end-boss; the score essentially measures progress towards achieving that condition (by counting which dungeon level you've reached), with a bonus at the end for how efficiently you achieved it when you do (by counting items remaining in your inventory). I discussed this in a previous post (which also touched on some of the other things I'm writing about here).
Before you've completed the game, playing for score is quite effective: it helps you measure your progress towards the ultimate goal. But it turned out that once you can complete it, playing for score wasn't interesting for very long. Whether you could get a high score depended largely on random factors: whether items and level configurations were favourable. Then once you'd achieved the maximum possible score, there was nothing further to achieve. (This is why I didn't include an online scoreboard, see another post.)
But that wasn't the end of it. @Rocketcatgames found another way to play: trying to get a streak of as many wins as possible in a row. I'd tried to balance the game to almost always be completable, and he put that to the test. So I patched in a streak counter that shows up when you win the game, to keep track of this for him (and anyone else who wanted to try that challenge).
In one of the previous posts I talked about how taking a very coarse measurement for score helps to average out the effects of randomness; here we have the coarsest measurement of all - win or lose - added up over multiple plays, turning out to be the best way to display skill.
The interesting thing that came out of this for me was: playing to get the maximum score and playing to get the longest streak required subtly different priorities - similar skills, but applied differently. To maximise your score requires taking reckless risks and succeeding at them, while streaking requires minimising risk as much as possible. The conservative player uses an unidentified item under controlled conditions, where the consequences won't be too bad if it turns out not to be useful; the risky player gets into a situation where only one item will do and then guesses right - or dies, which is okay because they wouldn't have gotten the top score anyway.
Consider the sequence of scores (or wins/losses) across multiple games, instead of just a single number from one game. One way to interpret that sequence is to just keep the biggest one in it, the "high score", that's fine, but there are other possibilities.
Counting streaks (where there's no win condition, you could look at streaks of scores larger than N).
Average score - Drop7 tracks this, and it affects how it's played (although it's a bit broken because you can cancel a game before the end without it contributing to the average). This is potentially really deep because you have to work out to what extent the higher scores you may get by taking extreme risks balance out the lower scores you get when those chances don't work out. In a game with an exponential score system it might be worth getting nothing most of the time in exchange for the occasional zillion-point game - or it might not.
Also there are different types of average you could take: median, geometric mean, harmonic mean.. or you could look at average streaks, or something weirder - what if the ideal way to display your skill at a game is to lose every seventh time you play and win the rest, or to guarantee that each score is higher than the last - a streak of increasing (or decreasing!) scores?
Measuring streaks of wins is pretty similar to measuring your win percentage - a high proportion of wins implies long streaks; long streaks could come from playing badly but many many times, but are most likely to come from being able to win reliably. So win percentage might be a slightly more accurate way of expressing skill, but I prefer to look at streaks because they feel more exciting - there's a psychological difference. Tension builds as you win multiple games in a row, and you may change your style to be more conservative to try not to break the streak. "I won 30 times in a row" sounds more impressive than "I win 83% of the time". (Also the average becomes hard to change once you've played a lot - though this can be solved by averaging across a rolling window of the last N plays.)
A similar consideration comes up in multiplayer games: are you trying to maximise your chances of being in first place, or maximise your expected position among the players? Often you get situations where anyone could attack the player in the lead to bring them down, but it would cost them their own position and give the game to someone else (a form of kingmaking) - and sparks can fly when players have different implicit ideas about what they should be playing for. And when there's a score, if you're behind do you take risks to try to win or do you aim to maximise your score to lose "by less"? Does the absolute value of your score mean anything at all, or is it just about how it compares to other players? Tournament structures around the game can answer this one way or another - in an elimination tournament you might just want to be first (or to not be last), whereas in Poker you typically only care about your score.
SpaceChem does something interesting with its scores, which the developer spoke about at GDC this year. It offers multiple criteria by which your solution is evaluated, so as well as completing levels you can try to improve your solution along each of these axes. But the criteria aren't independent: improving on one axis will cost you on the others. One really clever side-effect of this he pointed out: optimising for one type of score means you're likely to be below average on others, but all scores are added to all leaderboards regardless of which one the player was aiming at, which means everyone can get to be above average on one of them.
868-HACK, like Zaga-33, has both a score and a binary win condition. And, also like Zaga-33, it's possible to achieve the win condition almost every time with cautious skilled play. But unlike it, your score is not closely tied to the win condition at all. You might get 24 points and then die in the first sector, or get to the end with no points at all. There's often a choice between the two - getting points is risky and reduces your chances of survival; sometimes you can guarantee a higher score if you don't try to get out *ALIVE* as well.
The first thing I did, which is in the 7-day version, was to order the scoreboard so that any winning score - even 0 - is above any losing score. This kind of says that your score means nothing if you're dead. And this is interesting, it's a deeper challenge to figure out how exactly many points you can safely get to the exit with than to just grab the highest numbers you can find.
But over time it became clear that it suffered from a similar problem to Zaga-33: getting the highest scores was largely a matter of luck. I already knew a solution: streaking technology. But since this time scoring and winning are not coupled, the length of a streak alone wasn't enough: instead I'm tracking the cumulative score. It presents a difficult problem: how many points should you get in each game to maximise your score across a streak? This works really well.
The expected sequence of mastery is: trying to get to the end, trying to get a high score, trying to get a high streak score. Note that of course I don't expect all players to be interested in this - I'm perfectly happy if someone stops at an earlier tier. If you just get to the end and are satisfied with that that's completely fine, but if anyone wants to keep on playing then there's a greater challenge to measure themselves against.
When putting a score in a game, don't just say "try to get the biggest number" and be done with it. Consider whether it's a score that makes sense to compare against other people, or if it's (like Zaga-33's) better just as a measure of personal progress. Consider the context around the score, how different goals across the sequence of repeated plays can shape how players approach each individual play. And when you find the most interesting goal to aim for, consider how to present it to players. Show people a number and someone will care about it and try to make it bigger. Be open to players inventing their own approaches, a game can accommodate different styles of play driven by different goals.
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