Sid Meier's Interesting Decisions

[Music] thanks for coming appreciate it hmm I'm

gonna tell you a little story I think we're starting right okay um a little while ago I was googling myself on the

up on the Internet's and this thing kept popping up over and over again this Sid Meier says games are a series of interesting decisions and some people

felt that was the most brilliant statement ever made in terms of games and some people felt Sid Meier what an idiot that that's totally wrong that

that's nothing and I realized this was based on something I believe I said at a GDC presentation way back in the in the

early the misty day early days of computer games and I had never really thought too much about it but it kind of caught on with people writing books about games and trying to find fun and

things like that and I thought it might be interesting to kind of dig a little deeper into that idea and talk about interesting

decisions and how I think it's a useful way of looking at games and maybe some some ways that might be useful for other game designers and I'm gonna try not to

talk about any specific genre of game or type of game but to talk more about decisions in general and how perhaps we can make them more interesting how we can recognize them and things like that

up until up until today really the only way that I've kind of talked about this idea is by breaking down the statement

to Ceres and I think that that speaks to the idea of pacing the games have a pace to them I think we all recognize when if we look at it but certain games are a fast-paced certain games are slower

paced and that has an impact on the quality that is of the decisions and the nature of the decisions and the other part is the idea of interesting decisions and what makes a decision in

two wristing kind of almost easier to look at it at what is not an interesting decision for example if in a game you're

presented with choice a B and C and the player always chooses a you probably haven't created an interesting decision for the player and the computer should just choose a automatically and move on

again if you present the player with the choice of a B and C and the player kind of randomly just chooses one of those and moves on again you probably haven't provided the player with an interesting

decision so that's just kind of a very first level look at that idea but what we want to do today I think is dig a little deeper into the idea and try and

and and talk about how we can make our decisions more interesting and make our games more fun now I've gotten some

pushback on this idea people who disagree with the idea of that games are in a series of interesting decisions and I'm not really not gonna argue about that today I don't claim this is the

only way of looking at games or applies to every single game I think if you have you know a rhythm game like guitar hero I could make a case that there are

fascinating decisions in there but it's it's more it's it's not a game where interesting decisions are front and center also with puzzle game for example so there may be some types of games for

which the idea of interesting decisions is not a super useful way of looking at them but I think for the majority of games it is useful to look at them in terms of the decisions that the players

presented with and how interesting they are so how do we use this this idea of interesting decisions this is a picture

of my son and I playing a computer game to give you a sense of time he's now a college graduate so this was a little

while ago but it kind of encapsulate for me what we're trying to do here why it is important that we make our games fun that we that we find the fun that we

search for the fun and make them as as fun to play as possible too to generate these moments for the player and I think that thinking about introducing decisions is one way of

finding the fund so when is this idea useful I think it's a useful concept during the design phase one of the

things that that I see often is designs are kind of about putting together pieces of other games you know what if we took a little bit of a shooter and

added some some starcraft to it and then we put in you know maybe some racing or whatever kind of lego game design you know the idea that well these other

games are fun so if like if i take pieces of these games my game is itself gonna be fun unfortunately that that doesn't often that doesn't always work out and i think

it's a it's a more useful way to look at a new game design in terms of what are the decisions that i'm presenting the player with are they are they interesting you know put yourself in the players point of view in the players

chair and imagining what decisions can i create based on this this scenario this design this world that i want to create so i think it's a it's a useful concept

to apply even in the early design stages is to to kind of imagine what are the actual decisions that the player is being asked to to make during the the course of the game i think it can help

you to to kind of crystallize what are the what are the cool parts of this design idea that you have and and what to kind of focus your early prototyping on and i'm sure we all believe in rapid

prototyping that's a whole nother talk the idea of focusing on interesting decisions can be useful during the development phase as you're making a

game how do i make this game more fun one of the key ways to do that is to look at the decisions that the player is making during the game and try to make them more interesting now we'll talk more about what interesting means a

little later but again during the development of the game it's very useful to to look at your decisions and see how the players respond to them and how

interesting interesting they are it's also a useful concept as you're debugging the game the where's the fun we think we've all been near the end of

the project every project of ours has what we called valley of doom about halfway to 2/3 of the way through you're kind of convinced why did we ever make this game this is never going to work

this is not fun enough it's I think focusing again on your decisions and trying to make them as interesting as fun as possible is something that's worth of doing even during the later

stages of the game if you're trying to find the fine and refine those last few ounces of fun I think some of the ideas that we're gonna talk about can be very

useful for doing that so what are the some of the characteristics of of interesting decisions I think a very

common one is they involve some sort of a trade-off that you can buy a big sword

but it costs you 500 gold I can use I'm playing a racing game I can choose this car which is very fast but it doesn't have great handling or I can choose this

other car has great handling but it's not quite as as fast in a civilization game I can build a defensive unit and

defend my city but then I'm not generating more gold or I can build a building that will help my civilization

advance or again there's all these most interesting decisions I don't say all of them involve some sort of a trade-off and it's just important to recognize

what that trade-off is when you look at your decisions and good good decisions I think our situational I think is a very

key idea that when the when the decision is presented to the player ideally it interacts in some very interesting way with the game situation for example we

talked about the car the fast car versus the car with good handling well that is going to interact with what the next race is what does that track look like

what are your particular skills as a driver what are you trying to accomplish in this race if you're playing a shooter a trade-off might be

between sneaking around and hiding behind cover or or rushing forward in in SIV I think is there are many many decisions that are that are really

situational I haven't explored much of the map yet so I want a fast unit I want to scout unit to run around and see what's out there I'm just about to be attacked by Genghis Khan and his horde

of Mongols so I need defensive units I just discovered a new territory I want to plant a city over there I need to build some settlers so it's one decision

that the players face what do I do I build next but it ties very directly into the game situation and that's how you really add interest and variety to a

lot of decisions is by making them very situational very very dependent on the current game situation some decisions

can be personal in other words tied to your gaming style perhaps you are cautious turtle you enjoy the turtle

strategy and so you would build defensive units who would build very very secure base from which you can then expand perhaps you're aggressive you would build a whole different set of

units you'd have a whole different strategy and again the decision this interesting decision would allow you to express your personal play style

decisions have persistence they interesting decisions have persistence they affect the game for a certain amount of time maybe it's a long period of time maybe it's a short period of

time but you really want to be aware of what the persistence of a decision is if it's a long-term decision you really need to give the player enough information to feel comfortable making that decision there's nothing worse than

playing a game doing something very early on but you didn't quite understand that totally messes up your play experience for the rest of the game so it's important to understand what the

persistence of your decisions are and and present them in a way appropriate to that if it's a decision has a short persistence it only affects the game for the next minute or two you can be a

little more take more chances maybe provide a lot of interesting options where the player realizes I'm just kind of going to try this out it's not going to mess up my

game forever but I might try this new strategy or something different so consider the the persistence of the decisions when presenting them to the

player here are some some types of decisions often you might be looking at your game and saying I need more decisions you know I need to put some more stuff in there it just doesn't feel

like there's enough going on I'm not giving the player enough stuff to do so here's some of the types of decisions you might look at see if they're opportunities to include these in your

game one of the classic decision types is risk versus reward in a game like civilization it would be do I defend my

first city with a couple phalanxes and then be kind of cautiously explore or am I going to just kind of build a couple Scouts and just check everything out and

hopefully the barbarians won't show up but if they do darn might be choosing the fast car in a racing game you know

I'm going to go as fast as I can and just hope I can make it around those curves you know so often there there are decisions that involve this idea of risk versus reward I can take a greater risk

with the potential of a greater reward but if it doesn't work out then the penalties are larger so this is one type of decision you might want to look at in your game is there an opportunity for

finding some some risk versus reward decisions I think in in almost any kind of game that you'll find these kind of opportunities for for these decisions

short-term versus long-term is another category of decision that you probably can find in your game design in civilization again building a wonder

which is something it's going to take a long time but in the long term it's gonna do something wonderful for your civilization versus building a chariot which is going to be cool right away

it's gonna be a lot of fun but it might not have the same long-term impact on on your game you know in a racing game you know perhaps buying that new

car it's gonna take you a while to to tune it up to maximum capacity but in the long term it's gonna be a good investment for your racing career short term decision might be to add some new

tires or a bigger engine to your current car which is going to help you in the short term but a longer term you have to

have to drive that same car so look for opportunities to include short versus

long term decisions in your game again the idea of accommodating the players play style what we found in development is you

really can't do enough of this it's very tempting as a designer to imagine that everybody plays a game the same way that you do and it's very tempting as it as a

design and development group to kind of feel that you represent all players but there's a there's an incredible range of players out there and it's actually it's

increasing as becames games become more and more popular and more more widespread so try and include as many varieties of a play style as you can

into in the decisions that you provide the players we're now I think seven difficulty levels in civilization to

accommodate an incredibly wide range of play players the begin defensive versus offensive aggressive versus cautious all

these different play styles are things that you want to provide opportunities for the player to express as they play

that your game think about at what level your decisions are I I'm sorry as I keep coming back to civilization but it's a

game that I'm somewhat familiar with I think one of the one of the strengths of civilization is that it has things happening at various levels there are

things happening that are short-term you're attacking a city that's close to you you're defending this other city against the barbarians you're exploring the coastline to see what's happening

there you have some medium-term things going on you've decided that you're going to go for a military strategy so your decisions are in the medium-term

are geared to conquering exploring expanding your territory your long-term strategy your long-term goal is to is to

win the game your so your medium-term strategy might not work out you might need to change your strategy halfway through the game or whatever long term

you have the idea of winning the game you might be going for a high score you might be you have a goal that extends even outside of the of this particular

game that you're playing and a lot of game styles types you really need to include metagaming in your long-term decision-making in other words am I

trying to get a high ranking am i playing a multiplayer game where by my clan is really counting on me or there are things that are happening even outside of one play game that are our

goals that the player has and a game that has decisions at these various level I think has it's kind of one of the keys to the the one more turn

quality of a game like civilization or any game that is really draws a player in is going to have things happening at various levels so there's a never a point where you're kind of all done with

everything that you're trying to do you might achieve one of your short-term goals but you're in the middle of one of your medium-term goals and your long-term goal is still out there and as you develop a new short-term goal maybe

you achieve your medium term goal but there's always something that you're looking forward to something that is is coming up that that's important to you as a player and the more you can get the

player kind of thinking into the future thinking about what am I going to do next what am i what are my plans I think that's what what's compelling that with what creates the one more turn or the

one more race or the one more battle or whatever one more of whatever you have in your game you want the player to kind of always be looking forward to that

to that one more another type of decision that might not sound like it falls into the same category as some of these other ones but it's actually pretty important to the player is the

idea of customizing investing the player if you're playing a racing game for example he's picking the color of your car it seems fairly straightforward but

that gives the player an investment in they made a decision that invests them in the game in civilization you can name your cities it doesn't really affect the play of the game but it's a decision

that the player makes that that makes them more connected to this particular game that they're playing in a role-playing game you might be able to choose the gender of your hero or different characteristics dress them in

different ways whatever think about ways of investing the player in your game by inviting them to make decisions that let them express

their personality or their their their gaming style so those are some different

types of decisions that I think it's worth looking at your game and trying to find ways to include in them now when you present these decisions it's really important how how they're presented in

how you or how you respond to them and we'll talk about that for just a second what information does the player have as they're about to make a decision and

it's very easy for us as designers who played the game hundreds of times to assume the player knows everything that we know when we get to this point and that's a very dangerous that's very

dangerous or something probably one of the most common problems I see with games in development is that you assume the player knows this or that or

whatever and you you give the player this decision where they feel kind of totally lost and there they make it and then they feel very uncomfortable about

making it and then they keep you know it's it's a kind of a gnaws at you you know if you if you made a decision and you're not really sure why whether it's the right one or

you know what the impact of it is it kind of really hurts your game playing experience so I think it's it's worth almost erring on the side of presenting

the player with with too much information or at least enough that they feel that they're they're comfortable with with understanding what the what the choice is that you're that you're

giving the player we have found that you want to manage the number of decisions I think early on in some of our Civ designs you were faced with choosing from among seven or nine or twelve

different technologies you could research and we really found that players have a tolerance for a smaller number of the you know I think three

five is a kind of a comfortable number to choose from but just be be aware that it's pretty easy to overwhelm players at this point so especially early in the

game you want them to feel that they're kind of going down if they choose the default or they choose what the advisor is recommending it's probably not such a such a bad decision so be sure there's

enough information there when the decision is presented to the to the player another thing to be really aware of is that there's a learning curve to

playing your games that ties into how much information the player needs to be presented early on and as the players get better as you get better in your

playing the game your expectations for what you need to know to make an informed decision will change so what we do almost from the beginning of our

development is trying to introduce our game to new new players and understand what the game feels like at the very early part of the of the of the learning

curve we have some friends in terms of kind of making players comfortable and and enjoying our decisions and we call them genre conventions in other words

things that you know from having played other games in this genre very helpful in terms of interface conventions for example if you're playing a shooter you understand which button does what and

what when you move the joystick this way this is what's supposed to happen by for goodness sake use those gender conventions there's nothing more

disconcerting than having the wrong thing happened when you you press a button that in every other game does those acts but just satisfying the genre

conventions is not really enough to make a new game so that's why I suggest you take advantage of all those conventions out there to make the game very comfortable to your player but then do

more add add something new a new button that does something cool a new feature but be sure and take advantage of these conventions because they will make the player feel very very

comfortable in your world and again start thinking in the future about what they want to do as opposed to thinking about the president and and how does

this game actually actually work it's one of the reasons that a lot of our games involve historical topics is because the player can bring to a historical topic a lot of information

that they kind of already know and it's important to reinforce that information for the player if they run into Genghis Khan in the Civilization game he's going

to be kind of angry and aggressive you know I think that that makes the player feel I kind of get where he's coming from you know you have to explain it in

a massive civil pedia or Gandhi you know he's got his own personality so or if you're building a game about railroads or pirates there's there's a lot that

the player can bring to a topic like that to that they already know and all you need to do really design-wise is to kind of reinforce a little bit of that and you know there's

an evil Spaniard and a beautiful governor's daughter and a few things like that you you understand that this is the world that's being created for you and you can kind of go forward

that's not only true of historical games but we have a world where sci-fi games have their own set of conventions and it's it's important that you understand them and make the player feel

comfortable in that world now if you want to break a few or or change it up a little bit you know that's fine but make sure the player understands where that you're doing that

and and that this is the cool part of your game but this doesn't destroy you know make all the other decisions in the game ones where they don't they kind of have to figure out on their own with

what the world is like it's one of the reasons I love zombies is they're very clear zombies the motivation of zombies

is clear very little explanation has to happen to the player you know zombies have have their problems and it's very clear how you need to solve those

problems so it's kind of an example of I just suit you know a decision that doesn't have to you don't have add a lot of information to the player they pretty

much know what to do and so it's very clear setting up a decision like that it's very clear on the other hand once the players made a decision it is very

very important how you respond to that to this decision and it's another place where a lot of times we've we've kind of fall down we I mean then the worst thing

you can do is basically just move on there's nothing more paranoia inducing than having made a decision and and then the game just kind of goes on and you

you know at least give a sound effect or something to indicate that yes I heard what you said and I'm gonna do it you

know ideally the more you can respond the better we found in in some revolution that players were just so

happy to get this feedback from a lot of times you'd be talking to a leader of another civilization and you'd be negotiating about war peace or trading things and but they would make these kind of a side comments like you know I

noticed you moved your phalanx next to my city over there or you know what Saul what's up with that or that unit you have is won five battles that you know in a row that's

very cool or they really started to interact with you as a player and give you most more feedback than necessary but it's very important that you respond

to the player as they make a decision you know in a way that one they understand that you heard them and and and you're moving on

but you can actually build on that to suggest different things like okay you know you chose that option and that could work but you know if you've done

this maybe this might have happened or fine you know attack me you know but you could have we could have been friends and I would have given you some technology or whatever so you can

introduce into your response to the player some ideas about other courses of action that they could have take or what they might do the next time they play the game so responding to the players

decision is that there's a time to really think about how you do that and make it a kind of a rewarding experience

it kind of comes down to the does anybody know I'm here factor basically if you're playing a single-player game

you are imagining yourself as the leader of a great civilization or super duper racecar driver or science fiction

fantasy hero with huge bulging muscles and but you're really just sitting there in front of your computer in your lonely room with the glow of

glow from the monitor on your face and it it's really important to let the player know that you know that they're there that you know that they're playing but that you're you're a partner with

them you're you're right there next to them all the way and you yes you are the leader of a great civilization or yes you are a fantastic race car driver or

yes your muscles are super bulging and that and the response that you give to the players decisions is really the tool that you have to you have to do that

whether it's a sound text visual or graphic you know think of the tools that you have to kind of really reinforce what the player the fantasy that the

player is trading in their mind and really allow them to to enjoy that so

what I'm hope is part of your design process is what I'm calling it a decision feedback loop in other words that you're constantly iterating on your

design and those ideas that you get from your players etc are being tried out and I mean it's really can't recommend

enough the idea of having a tight iteration loop on your game design and having as many people play it as possible and try and feed that be that information back into design the more

times you can go around that loop I think the better your better your game is going to be so it's really I think important to try and structure your your technology or design process to allow

that kind of iteration so hopefully you're listening to a lot of players and getting a lot of feedback obviously you can't do everything some ideas might be good or bad but the more ideas that you

are able to kind of process I think the better the better your game will be it is useful to kind of understand the

different kinds of players that you will be dealing with and talking to as you kind of expose your game to your play testers and your friends and your your Co co-workers or whoever you are able to

to get to test your game you're gonna get a lot of different kinds of response and it's really up to you as a designer to filter that and decide what is really going to help my game what its gonna

make it better or what is going what you know what's an interesting idea but it doesn't doesn't fit this game or is is is not gonna work so it's kind of useful to know a little

bit about the types of players that you probably start to get some feedback from the first player is mr. kick butt here

and you may I'm not gonna ask you to raise your hand but some of you may recognize yourself in this in this player this is the player who only cares

about winning the game there only if they won the game it's great it's awesome it's the best game ever if they lost if they didn't win then your game stinks and and really you know you

should try something else so this players input is useful in terms of especially maybe tuning some of the higher levels the more advanced

difficulty levels of the game and getting a sense of kind of those issues but but you kind of need to be careful because a lot of times tuning of

difficulty levels and things like that really doesn't come together till late in the game and it can be kind of discouraging to hear from mr. kick kick but that your game was too easy or too

hard or just you know so be aware that some players you know their focus is really on on winning the game and and their input just have to be kind of

filtered that way um there's miss Jinora that's another type of player that that you may get some input from and again

can be very useful this is a player that loves this specific genre whether it's a first-person shooter or a real-time

strategy a role-playing and if your game fits exactly in that genre this player will love it because it's like the games that they love if there's any deviations

from the conventions or the standards of your genre they will complain it's you know it's in in World of Warcraft they did this and you're doing that that's

not right again that's useful for understanding whether your your you're using the genre conventions but hopefully you're trying to a few new

things and MS John we're here is not going to be too happy if you if you if you stretch outside of the other John

rec conventions we have mister min/max this is another kind of player again and maybe a few of you out there I don't know we'll have some intervention

sessions after to kind of help you break out of this mold but mister min/max is basically someone who really needs to understand every algorithm and how to

squeeze every last decimal point of advantage out of everything that can be done in the game again a very useful

point of view but not the way everybody plays so kind of filter this input very useful way to maybe understand whether

some of your algorithms are not balanced etc but mister min Max is out there kind of really trying to unravel reverse-engineer your game and figure

out exactly what's happening and and use that to to his advantage we have MS

paranoid this is a player you've probably run into them that is convinced that the computer is cheating on them knows exactly what they're trying to do

and is that foiling them at every opportunity if there's a random number die role in the game it always goes

against them and just kind of has this paranoid approach to to your game I spoke a little bit and one of my other

talks about a sieve revolution and how we actually ended up adjusting some of the die rolls and making sure that too bad things didn't happen in a row for

example and things that would kind of trigger the paranoid response in ms paranoid so it's a word again it these are all viewpoints that are worth listening to

but in each case probably can't use all of all of these players ideas but it's kind of useful to understand where these players are coming from and what their

reactions might be to your cure game there's mr. history mr. history is going to tell you wait a minute you know the the 24th Michigan didn't arrive on the

ballot of the battlefield at Gettysburg until 1030 you know you've got them coming in at 10:15 or this didn't really

happen or this didn't again interesting useful input but maybe not what you're basing the most important thing to your game

so mr. history's going to give you some some good background etc but not every player out there is going to be mr. history so you want you really want to

appeal to somewhat a broader audience there's mr. mr. bubble boy this is a player that will remember the one moment

in your game when something bad happened to them they can be having a wonderful experience but if something just at one point they had a setback or something

unfortunate happened that's really what that was their game experience for them and I think it's really you need to

present setbacks in in a in a very sensitive way where the play understands why it happened what they can do next time to prevent it from happening or go

in a different direction but you may have some players where 1x1 incident in your game kind of colors their entire

experience oh and again these are things that you'll fix that you'll tune out that as you develop that that will get fixed but if this players input to you

is is totally derived from that one experience then you kind of have to filter that out and then there's mr. designer this is another kind of player

that you'll get feedback from is basically they have another game in mind which they wish you were making and all

of their input is kind of like why your game isn't their game or why your game isn't like the game that they are wanting you to make so let's you know there could begin some valuable input

maybe you want to use a little bit of their idea but just be be aware that they're kind of trying to get you to design their game and not not thinking

that you're that you're making okay so we've got a game that we're working on and it's cool it's pretty good it's fun

kind of fun but how do we make it better how do we take the decisions that we have and make them even more interesting the first thing that we look at I think

is often just the balance of the decisions a lot of times just simply fixing the balance is going to help your decisions to be make your decisions a lot more interesting we talked at the

very beginning about how most decisions have all some sort of trade-off you know I'm gonna buy a sword but it's gonna cost me 300 gold you may find that nobody's buying that sword well that might be an indication that it should

cost 200 gold or you may find that everybody is walking around with one of these 300 our swords maybe it's maybe should be $500 so the one of the early

things to look at is just is it simply a balance issue that my decision would be more interesting with it with a different about sort of balance attached to it again it can apply to any if you're if you have a racing game those

those cool tires are too expensive or too too cheap etc another way of making your decisions more interesting I think is to make them more important again

we're kind of talking in a very kind of abstract terms but your game is about something it's about something cool it's about something neat make the decision

time more directly and coolly into what your game is about make it more significant make the sword shiny and

have a sharpie edge made out of titanium or something you know find ways to bring the your game honesty back into the decisions to make

them feel more important again in civilization talking to the the other leaders gives the decisions that you make there or the interaction that you have feel more important I mean those

could be simple checkboxes you know but having the other leader they're animated and talking to you gives those kind of decisions of feeling of greater importance whatever your game is about

feedmore that directly into your decision-making and I think it'll feel more important and have more more more

character control the the amount of information that the player has when they're making the decisions again coming back to civilization we have a

system where the world is gradually revealed and that really tie affects a lot of the decisions that the player makes imagine a sieve cam where the

entire map was revealed at the very beginning I mean that would be a very different game experience and so by by managing the amount of information that the player has you can make your

decisions more interesting in other situations giving the player more information might be the the way of making that decision more more interesting if they knew more what was

going on in the rest of the world they might feel better and find the decisions to be more interesting so look at the amount of information that the player has as they as they look at the

decisions and see if either given them more information or less information would be a way to make that particular decision more more interesting the

number of choices you give the player as designers you know we we think we get paid by the decision by that by the choice you know the more choices we give the player the more the better designers

we are and the more we got to get paid be careful of that philosophy because the player is easy to easily overwhelmed

and you may find that by managing the number of choices that you give the player you actually make the decision more interesting often by by kind of cutting them down maybe combining two or

three together things like that look at the number of decisions that you're providing the player to see if it might not be more interesting if you did it a

little differently making them more flavorful this is really a presentation issue you know a lot of times designers

we think we can we could design a game text only with programmer graphics and it would be totally cool well that's that's fine but take advantage of those

artists those writers those sound guys those all those other people that are working on your project to add more flavor and interest and excitement to

your to your decisions again coming back to civilization interacting directly with the great leaders in a racing game you know as you add stuff to your car it

rotates around and light shines on it and cool stuff happens with your hero you see the the new equipment being put on them and they smile and you find ways

to just add that kind of game flavor to your decisions and that's another way of of making them more interesting look at

how much time you're giving the player to make a decision it's I think it's it's really key to understand that the

most John Rosario stew find by the amount of time you give the player it may seem like a minor issue but if you change the amount of time that you give the player to make decisions you're

almost stepping into a new genre if you're playing civilization which is turn-based you make it real time all sudden you're playing a game like Age of

Empires an RTS if you're playing a shooter and it's moving very quickly and you slow down the timeframe all sudden you're playing us sneaking around game

and a whole whole different feeling so by looking at the amount of time you're giving the player to make decisions you're almost defining what genre you're in and do you want to slide your game a

little more in one direction genre direction or or another there's also a basically an inverse relationship between how long you give the player to make a decision and how deep and complex

that decision is gonna be you have to be careful to manage that that balance if you're playing a game with very complicated decisions that come at you

one after the other the players basically to feel overwhelmed and out of control not never having a chance to look forward and anticipate what they're going to do next but always trying to

figure out what's going on right now on the other hand if you play it give the player some very simple decisions at a very slow pace they're kind of bored

there well that's that's a boring game I won't mention any names but and the last way to make a decision we're interesting

is to get rid of it if you've tried all these things and they don't work maybe the decision it just is not one that should you should take out of your game

it'd be be ruthless in terms of cutting things out generally we find that probably a third of the things that we try if not more eventually end up getting taken out of the game because

they they just aren't fun and interesting enough so again it's desires we don't get paid by the decision we get paid by how good our games at the end of

the day and it may be the best decision to to get rid of your whatever is not working so we've talked about kind of in theoretical terms all these different

ways of looking at your decisions perhaps making them more interesting finding finding ways to kind of maximize the the the decision making process of

your game but really I don't want to I don't want to forget that your game is more than just decisions I think once you've got the game working and you've

got all these cool decisions in there and the players are you've really kind of tuned that part of the game you need

to to remiss defy your game really make it about the fantasy that you're trying to create for the player it's it's the combination of this wonderful fantasy world that you create and the

interesting decisions that the player gets to make in that in that world that really is the sum total of the quality of your game so we want you to

maximize the awesomeness of your of your game world of the graphics of the way that you present it these are all very important tools that augment these

decisions that you have to make the make the game maximally awesome and we

encourage you to make it make it epic again this is we're inviting the player to step into your designed world and

become some awesome character and we're fulfilling this fantasy for us to kind of step out of our humdrum lives and

become great heroes and so I don't want to by focusing on all the kind of minutiae of making decisions and how to make them better lose sight of the the

story that you're telling the world that you're inviting the player to step into and and the the ways that you can really tie your decisions to to reinforcing

that world creating that world in the players mind I think that's the the best of all worlds is where you've imagined this incredible world that's gonna be a great place to to inhabit and live and

explore and then by the way you present decisions to the player you've got them toad you've got their imagination totally hooked into that world and they're there thinking about all the possibilities and what they're gonna do

next and what's going to happen as they as they wander through your world so the two really reinforce each other I think if you present a really awesome

fantasy to the player they're gonna jump in there and once they get in there if they've got the cool things to do cool decisions to make and in ways that they that they think about replayability

I'm next time I play this game I'm gonna do this different ways to win different paths through the game if you can present that all those things to them in terms of decisions that they make you've

really got a huge win there by by combining this awesome world that you've created with these great decisions that the player makes while they're in there

so that concludes this dissertation on interesting decisions I appreciate your indulgence we do

we do have a little time for questions if there there are any questions yes

a Pirates fan oh I guess we're gonna line up at the microphones so on those lines what was the key decision in making it or never offering a

multiplayer experience for the multiplayer experience in Pirates multiplayer is actually tough I think the the thing that we look at first is

is symmetry versus asymmetry in a game like civilization or Age of Empires or many others there are multiple similar actors in the game and those kind of

games are easy to make into multiplayer in a single-player the AI takes over some of those actors in multiplayer everybody takes over one in a game like

pirates so many others there's kind of one hero and the world revolves around what that one hero does and that's a difficult situation too you know there's

only room in this world for one hero and so that it would require just a very significant game redesign to make

pirates a multiplayer game for example okay thanks my question is one thing I

know snow off strategy games is that an interesting decision over time can become mundane or monotonous like like building of your units in one city like

in the first few turns is interesting but when you're like 200-300 turns in and you've got 12 different cities troll therefore nubra delicate structures just becomes mundane is there a way to combat

that or is it just an eventual ality with decisions I think there's definitely a way to come about that I mean you have to you're basically dealing with a problem which you have in many games is you you want the player to

feel that they're advancing and moving forward and things are getting bigger and larger and whatever without getting more complicated or more micromanage II

or etc so I think there are a couple of tools that you can use one that we will use sometimes a civilization is making as your capability to build things grows

the things that you build get bigger and more expensive but cooler you know in exchange for that so that your your building as your your capability to build grows you're you're

exposed to things that are more expensive but more cool so that the total number of things that you're working on our building kind of stays somewhat constant as the world grows you

get units that move quicker so again it takes the same relative amount of time to get from one side of the world to the other I think there it's definitely an issue but I think their design techniques that you can use to to

address some of those concerns thank you yes hi I found economic theory to be quite interesting when when I'm designing

decisions you know stuff like opportunity cost and I was wondering if that's something that that you've looked

at or dicky use I think yes in terms of in general in a general sense economics is probably a very interesting way to look at almost any game situation in

terms of the trade-offs involved and the costs we don't have an economist on staff that kind of makes sure we've got everything exactly right I think it's

one of those situations where with some kind of basic concepts you can get things feeling right but but the idea of trade-offs and opportunity costs and you know investing for the future I think

those are all kind of fundamental ideas that are that are pretty intuitive to players I think that's the other thing that we want to use those economic concepts that are intuitive to players

not try and you know require you to be a PhD and I cannot likes to play the games but most of us understand that the idea of costs and getting a good deal and and

that it's showing a short-term versus long-term kind of things Thanks yeah great talk really appreciate it my part my questions kind of two parts one what

processes our tools do you use to measure games like say if you have a lot of people playing they make a lot of decisions what do you use to measure the feedback and how you change your game based on that and do you ever tailor

your do you tailor for the player the number of decisions you present to them so a support player doesn't like the massive overwhelming number of decisions but a min/max player would probably love

that so do you look at the personality types try to figure out who they are and tailor it experience for them you know answer the first part for the second purpose there are ways to address

different player types I mean sieve the the most obvious ones are difficulty levels and the size of the map I mean you can buy by changing the size on that if you can control you know do I have a

super long complicated game or the simpler game and in terms of the feedback that we get from players a lot

of it and a is just us playing but we as the game gets more playable and kind of more fleshed out we expand that circle to bring as many players in as we can

but one thing I didn't mention but I think it is important that not everybody can play kind of a half fix half working half broken game and kind of imagine

what it might feel like when it's actually working and those are the those are the testers those are the people those are the people who generate feedback that are really the most useful that we can kind of say well you know this was broken but I can imagine when

it's working this would have been cool or I was able to get around that you know if some of your testers will be able to do that and they're gonna give you some very valuable input earlier in the in the process at the end you kind

of want people who are welcome play about everything because you your game needs to be perfect at that point of view so you want you want to bring those cranky people back again and sit them down in front of your game saying now

play it and you know is there anything that's bugging you about this yes sometimes especially in some specific genres they have to balance actual

decisions versus the illusion of decisions how do I achieve that balance illusion is your friend in game design

the games are essentially an illusion so I think that I mean we talked a little bit about making them flavorful or the more of your game world that you can

bring into the decision-making process and I think you kind of just stay in character a lot of times in game design and yes you are the king of a great civilization or this incredible super

hero or you know I think that that it's important for the game to stay in character to help the player retain that suspension of disbelief and allow them

to continue to believe that they're there in there and and I think that the idea of illusion we're constantly amazed by what people think is in the game

that's not not really there but you know if you present a consistent game world with some interesting decisions the players imagination will fill in you know I know I know Genghis Khan doesn't

like that you know I think he's probably talking to those other leaders about me when I'm not you know I'm not there or or you know whatever it is I think if you provide enough hooks for the player to jump into your world

they'll fill in a lot more with their with their own imagination yeah I wanted to know how many iterations you actually

do when when you're making the decisions because some of the decisions you presented you make really early in the stages of development and later changing

them it's getting really difficult so either it's only your own team or do you get a special interest group to do the

early testing we're pretty brutal about ripping out decisions and putting in in different ones there's a classic story with game called colonization which we

did in the 90s I guess we're about two weeks before we shipped it we changed the radius of cities from two hexes to one two squares to one square which is

kind of a totally radical change but it just had to be done so we're not we try not to get wedded to decisions that we things that we put in early on and are

pretty pretty brutal about ripping them out and trying something different on the other hand you know a lot of times it's kind of intuition or hopefully you make a lot of the lot of right guesses

early on that'll help your game and the other thing we do is we actually don't make games I mean if we're halfway through the game you know the classic story is our dinosaur game we tried and

tried and tried to make that game just wasn't working and so I'm making it so you know I think it doesn't always work out and I think you have to be kind of painfully honest

about what's happening in your game and be willing to change it up or even have to you have to move on to something else okay thanks when you're making a game

that is very long like several hours for a particular game how do you deal with getting fast iteration if you're making a change really late in the tech tree or

somewhere that you really have to play through like five hours to even you know be able to test if there's not only if it it is a good game design but if it

even works how do you set up so that you get a reasonable iteration time for problems like that well you won you spend a lot of time playing I think yeah

and when I'm developing I'm probably spending over half my time just playing the game and getting my own personal feedback save games are very very useful you know if you can save the game

halfway through or three-quarters of the way through and pick it up at a later time one of the things that we build into our prototypes is constant auto saves so that we can always go back if

something happens we can always go back to a previous time or if we want to you know try to look at a change and see how it effects the game we can find a save where we kind of get very quickly to

that so it's kind of about building your methodology around the idea of rapid prototyping and and that kind of thing a good time maybe for one more question so

I was going to ask you a question about well it's not really a trend I just notice more games they've decided to try to consolidate actions together so that what you do one thing it does like two

different things at once or I'll stay try to limit the number of actions you can do per turn like I think skulls of the Shogun and here what can we kind of does that and I was really glad to see that that was

actually one of the things you pointed out in the interesting decision slide so it's I was glad to see that was something that so have you played any do

you know of any games that kind of use that really well I think maybe it might be a good example do you have any other community modern games well

I'm not sure directly ties to what you're you know the idea that you're talking about but it's a lot of times it is good we just signed it good to consolidate or simplify and there's a

couple of examples the original civilization had a map that was twice as big and it actually had a secondary tech tree where other things

were happening and we just found that by taking a lot of those things out and consolidating them simplifying the tech tree and things like that the game became more interesting because something is interesting you do once

doesn't mean it's interesting you do ten times and I think you have to kind of recognize that as a as a designer you that that the player is really expecting

variety forward motion and the game to progress and change in a way that's pretty apparent to them so you need to make sure that if you got something that's cool it might be cool to deal

once but it might not be cool to do it six times and just kind of recognize those kinds of things I think we're out of time thank you very much for coming I

appreciate the coffee make great games you