The argument put forward is that when faced with too much choice people will often choose nothing at all rather than go to the effort of objectively weighing up the options and trying to come to a decision. I find this tends to stand up to my daily observations the most recent of which was a trip to the supermarket where my girlfriend asked me to choose some crisps and; faced with an entire aisle of choice, my brain completely shut down and refused to even try.

The book splits the world into two groups: Satisficers and Maximisers. Maximisers want to be sure that their decisions are the best they can possibly make even to the point of comparing them to imagined possbilities that don’t or can’t exist in reality. Satisficers have standards but don’t worry about whether or not they got the best deal just that their most important criteria have been met.

Satisficers tend to live a happier more fulfilled life because they spend less time worrying about things they can’t control while Maximisers tend to be more depressed and filled with buyers remorse.

This is similar to Perfectionism. Perfectionists strive for an unattainable ideal often at the expense of everything else. Perfectionism is in fact very bad for you unless you have some outside force that is willing to intervene when you get carried away.

Duke Nukem Forever suffered immensely from this. In an effort to create a “Perfect” videogame 3D Realms ditched a perfectly good game they believed wasn’t good enough and started over. Ultimately they never released anything. Perfectionists are doomed to be depressed and to hate the very things they help create because they will only ever focus on what is wrong with things. It is in fact a very pessimistic outlook on life and yet for some reason a trait that many claim to desire in the people they hire.

Well I guess that might be true so long as the person doing the hiring and cracking the whip isn’t themselves a perfectionist and has the guts to stand in front of a room full of perfectionists and tell them that what they have made is “Good Enough”  (There is no bigger insult to a perfectionist than being told what you have created is only “good enough”).

I’m a recovering perfectionist. I’m trying to get comfortable with the idea of letting things go in cases where changing them any more isn’t going to result in any significant gain or benefit. This doesn’t mean I won’t make something as good as I can possibly make it but it does mean that I’m more likely to recognise when further work is futile and instead take pride in what I have done rather than dwell on what I haven’t.

This is also by way of apologising for not posting any updates on my game. I had a perfectionist moment and decided to rewrite the entire code base so that it did everything it used to do but in a nicer way that nobody but me will ever care about.

Sorry. That would be the curse of perfectionism right there.

Lets start with the video:

The most notable addition this week is a new enemy called a “Bumble”. Bumbles are so named because they bumble around the arena in a pseudo random fashion bumping into each other and occasionally the player. I wanted an enemy that would be unpredictable and serve to reduce the amount of empty space in the arena which would make it more difficult to just kite the “Grunt” enemies.

The wandering behaviour is based on this article although since I don’t have an infinite playing field to work with I added in some code that pushes the steering force back towards the middle of the arena the closer to the edge they get (although it’s not so strong that they don’t sometimes just bounce off the arena wall).

I’m learning some things about shoot-em-ups that I never realised before but which tie in with Deathmatch style level design.

For example – Power-ups exist not to make the player more powerful but as a way to get the player to move somewhere specific rather than just moving into the space with the least enemies. As enemies often spawn a Power-Up when they die; and this is often in the middle of other enemies, this forces the player to make a risk-reward decision. This is exactly the same as placing Power-up in a Deathmatch level where the best weapons get put in the most exposed and least defensible places.

Finally if you want to read about the more technical work that went on this week (most of my time was spent refactoring code rather than adding new features) then check out this post on the UDK forums where I talk about Actor pools, memory fragmentation and Pawns being overweight.

I promised to post a review of this a very long time ago now. In truth I finished reading it a long time ago I’ve just been far too busy to blog anything until now.

I bought this book as a follow-up to Blink as I wanted to know more about subconcious decision making and instinct. On that front I am not at all disappointed.

Gut Feelings demonstrates alot of the ways that we make decisions subconciously and presents data resulting from many case studies around the world pitting logic and reason against intuition. The Conclusions are very convincing and I finished the book happier in the knowledge that I could apply what I had just learnt not just to my work (more on that in a moment) but to my everyday life.

One of the key principles demonstrated in the book that really stuck with me is the “One Good Reason” heuristic.

The theory is that the majority of decisions are made by focussing on the most important elements one at a time. Once you find a solution or product that matches that element you stop looking. If there is a conflict between 2 or more products you move on to the next most important element until you end up with just one.

On analysing my life I did relise that I do make most of my decisions using this heuristic. Logic and reason would suggest that I weigh all the variables equally and use some highly complex formula to come up with the correct result.

Fact is though that system only works for hindsight when all of the relevent variables are available. With limited knowledge in a highly unpredictable world the simpler “One Reason” heuristic has been proven to operate at much better than chance (Even when predicting the stock market).

This has made me less worried about writing lists and comparing them in order to make my decisions. I’m much happier with decisions I’ve made on instinct than ones I’ve poured over for days. I trust my subconcious alot more than I used to.

As far as how this can be applied to Games Design though I think this is a must-read for anybody working with Artificial Inteligence.

While designing Wheelmans OnFoot enemy AI we developed lots of very complex formulas to weight cover locations and targets. These formulas would get more and more complex as more and more exceptions and edge cases were found. In the end they were largely useless and the AI still behaved erratically.

Looking back at it I think applying a decision tree that only looks at one element at a time would produce much more predictable and sensible results. An added bonus is that such a heuristic is far faster and inherently more optimised than a complex formula that tries to account for all possible variables at the same time.

For more general Games Design I think understanding the different heuristics we use often can help you understand how your players will try to solve a problem and generally play your game. 80% of people playing your game will be operating entirely subconciously and be unaware of any complex decision making process (Heck I manage to play Civilization 4 that way – I suck at it but that isn’t the point).

Recognising how the subconcious is evaluating your game, world and the systems that make it up will help you evaluate the player experience and play to the strengths of the subconcious.

In conclusion: Buy this book. If you’ve read Blink then you can probably skip alot of the early parts as they mostly just give you a grounding in the topics that book covers. I would also say that there is no reason to buy Blink in order to read this book as it is incredibly easy to read and is written in a very entertaining and conversational tone.

I rate this book: Yes out of ten.

It’s a belief that often causes debate amongst Designers because the phrase is usually reinterpreted to mean “The player must never fail.” and this couldn’t be more wrong. Failure does not equal Punishment and in fact Failure is an intrinsic feature of all games and forms of play.

One of the biggest problems is that failure is thought of as being a negative thing. If you fail the mission then it’s Game Over. This is only a correlative relationship however in that Punishment (which is almost always negative) often follows Failure (which can be positive). “Cum hoc ergo propter hoc” as somebody who understands Latin might say (I don’t I just stole it from Wikipedia to look clever).

Failure is a Positive experience when it is possible for us to learn from it. This may sound a bit like a line from a self-help book but it’s something that is worth emphasising.

When most gamers buy a new game the first thing they do not do is read the manual. Instead they will load the game up and immediately jump in and start trying things out to see what happens. When something works they add it to their mental model of how the game works and start applying that knowledge to future interactions. The same is true when something doesn’t work. With every interaction the Player is refining their mental model and making it more accurate.

Valve found that Play-testers for Team Fortress 2 weren’t as upset when they died if they were shown who killed them (and the surrounding context) and told how they had improved. By providing Players with this feedback on why they just died they were helping the Players learn from their mistakes and reinforcing their own progress. They had managed to turn dying from something that was relatively punishing into something that was beneficial. By dying you were learning.

Take a racing game for example. You step into a car you’ve never driven before and you start out by driving it in a similar way to the last car you drove. Using this base experience you start to develop a mental model of how to drive this new car (and I should point out that it is very rare that the player is actually aware of this information). Both success and failure help you refine this model. You start to take corners faster and faster and with each success confidence in your model grows and similarly if you spin out or hit a wall the failure helps establish the limits of that model. Failure because of over-confidence in your own mental model is a positive gain. The failure is your own and fits within your model. Both Successes and Failures that contradict your mental model result in dissonance and confusion.

Key to this learning process is that once you have failed you are able to test out your new model quickly. If you cannot affirm what you have just learnt then it is very likely that the experience will be forgotten and the failure repeated later.  Respawning in TF2 is often very swift and you can nail that corner on the next lap.

This somewhat matches something Clint Hocking said at GDC

In contrast, the consequences for getting kicked out of the execution phase in Chaos Theory has a huge impact — the game is so reliant on the player executing his careful plan, and the game is so slow-paced, that it makes more sense simply to reload a saved game. But in Far Cry 2, that disruption ends up being part of the game, and there is such a level of chaos to begin with that players did not end up feeling the need to reload every time something went wrong; rather, they would adapt to the new factors.

The fact that failure didn’t mean the game ended or that you had lost a lot of time preparing and were now unable to continue meant that Players are much happier with trying something new and potentially failing. The short turn-around on being able to integrate changes into their model meant that failure was a Positive force which helped the player learn.

System’s like Far Cry 2’s malaria and weapon jamming, which introduce randomness, ended up having much more influence over the final experience of the game than was expected with the initial design. What happened was then that they were the triggers that kick the player out of the execution phase back into the composition phase, leading to the rapid back-and-forth of those two phases.

Failure or a sudden change in circumstance is often a trigger for improvisation. When your plan fails you have to call on that mental model of the game again and respond.  Part of the feedback loop that makes games so entertaining. A perfectly executed plan has it’s own rewards but success in the face of failure can be even more rewarding. Being able to adapt quickly and effectively requires many more skills than just solving a static puzzle.

Take Reset by roBurky.

A game that lasts about 3 minutes and never punishes the player for Failure. A game that is very challenging despite not actually having any formal win or lose conditions. You will always reach the end of the game but along the way you will have been subject to both success and failure. At no point does this make the game any less enjoyable as either an experience or a game.

It’s worth noting that I ended up playing the game 5 times just now before remembering to take a screenshot.

Here every time you hit an asteroid or a missile it is a failure. The ships controls alter as you take damage with it favouring either the left or the right which forces you to adapt your model as you play. Each new element is introduced carefully allowing you to experiment with them in relative safety letting you build a model of how the element works and how best to deal with it. Then as all of the elements combine together you are forced to improvise and adapt using what you have learnt.

This game is a perfect example of how Failure isn’t always a negative experience.

• The game is consistent throughout allowing us to learn from each failure and adapt our mental model of the game.
• We are able to put our adapted model into practice quickly because in a few moments there is a new opportunity for us to try it out.
• Failure forces you to improvise and adapt to the situation calling on your full understanding of the game.

You don’t need to be able to lose for a game to be enjoyable or challenging. You just need to be able to fail.

This managed to pass me by when it first appeared but Andreas Zecher made a series of Flash Games called Understanding Games which try to explain the fundamentals of Game Design via Game Play. It is to Games as Understanding Comics is to Comics.

The games clearly take alot from Raph’s Theory of Fun and is a cool grounding for anybody unfamiliar with the medium (and could probably stand to re-iterate the basic principles veteran games designers might forget in the white hot forges of crunch).

For a fun Friday morning exercise try and identify some Design Principles he’s used but not explained. That’ll be that unconscious mind at work again I suspect.

So in the interests of trying to aggregate the genuinely useful links I find I shall be trying to keep this post up to date with what I find.

Single-Player

• Level Design Pre-Production - Dating back to 2003 this article goes over the practical aspects of actually designing a level layout before you start building it.
• Using Loop Layouts - From the Valve Community Wiki. This is a concise and to the point explanation of using looping layouts in single Player Levels with several case-studies from Valve Games.
• Bouncing or Back-Tracking – Also from the Valve Wiki another concise page detailing effective use of Back-Tracking or “Bounces” in Level Layouts. Again lots of excellent case-studies.
• Color Theory – Another page from the Valve Wiki! This page ties-in with what I describe in Continuity Level Design about contrast and composition but also covers more general color theory.

Multiplayer

• Competitive Level Design – Dating all the way back to Quake 3 this page is an excellent grounding in the tactical and strategic considerations required by designing competitive maps.
• Level Design Patterns – (Warning PDF Alert!) Skip to Page 10 for the useful stuff. A Good grounding with Case Studies on common Patterns in Level Design. The Principles can be applied to other genres than FPS games quite easily.
• Making de_dust – Proof that it’s better to be lucky than smart the creator of the worlds most played Level takes you through the creation of de_dust.

I am currently reading Gut Feelings: Short Cuts to Better Decision Making by Gerd Gigerenzer. If you’ve ever Read Blink (or even if you haven’t) then I recommend this book as it deals with the concept of intuition, instinct and the unconscious in a much more detailed way. I’d argue that you can completely bypass Blink altogether and go straight for this  as it is a much more useful book and very easy to read.

However this post isn’t about the book (I’ll save that for when I’ve finished it and filled it full of post-its). It’s actually about what I’m doing on this site.

When I write a blog post I am not so much telling the world things or laying out facts. This is part of my learning process. By writing about the things I discover or have learnt I’m helping to improve my understanding of them. I actually use this blog as a mnemonic device. By the act of writing about a topic I am ushering that information into my unconscious and hopefully helping it to become intuitive.

In short I’m writing this for me and not you. If you find it helpful than I’m glad. But be aware that what you see on these pages is rarely ever backed up by anything resembling evidence or research. It’s either all cribbed from books I’ve read or lessons I’ve learnt so take it with a pinch of salt.

Like a lot of Designers I tend to operate on my gut instincts a lot. When generating a new design or mechanic I tend to operate on automatic, letting my instincts rule the creative process. I believe that in the early stages of Design when you are roughing out what you want this is the best way to operate. By Instinct. Our unconscious mind is powerful as anybody who does anything remotely Creative will attest. Companies pay a lot of money for people with good instincts.

There comes a point however when Instinct isn’t enough. When your design that you felt in your gut was perfect turns out to be exactly the opposite. For whatever reason nobody is having fun playing your game and you don’t know why.

This is why I feel that a good Designer never stops learning. A good Designer doesn’t copy what other games have done without first trying to understand why it’s worth copying.

There have been several movements within Games Design to try and create a lexicon or identify good mechanics and while I find this very honourable and interesting I often feel like a it is only focusing on “What or How” and not “Why”.

“Why” is a word that drills down to the core of a subject. It’s the basis of the Scientific Method and Philosophy. By continually asking “Why?” we might eventually get at the truth of things.

“Why?” is all about Critical Analysis.

I am reminded of my GCSE History lessons, I had a Teacher who was something of an inspiration to me (one of very few) who I believe taught me not just about dates and wars but taught me how to think about things critically. To try and seek the truth behind things. The importance of continuing to ask the question: “Why?”

It is in order to help me answer this question that I am teaching myself as much as I can about Cognitive Psychology. In this I am not alone. Just as I know Designers who are comfortable never understanding “Why” I know of those that strive to understand and have also inspired me along this path.

We have reached a point in the Games Industry where Play-testing and Usability studies have spawned an entire industry purely devoted to providing a Designer with feedback on their work long before their game ships. This information is incredibly useful in identifying what does and doesn’t work but rarely ever gives you the reasons. For this we must turn to Critical Analysis. This is where our instincts begin to fail us.

Faced with a problem in a Game Design and with no clear understanding as to what may cause it we typically resort to trial and error. A costly process which can take several failures before you hit upon a solution. Even if you do find a solution you still may be none the wiser as to why it worked when previous attempts failed. You may have added a technique or mechanic to your arsenal but you are no closer to a real understanding of the problem or the solution.

This is not inherently a bad thing. Clearly we’ve managed to make some amazing videogames this way. I wouldn’t be able to tell you which ones but I’d be willing to bet it’s a large number.

However speaking personally I find these victories to be hollow. I’m not satisfied having just solved the problem. I want to understand why it was a problem and why the solution worked. I believe that by understanding this I will add that knowledge to my unconscious and refine my instincts meaning I will intuitively avoid or identify those problems in the future. This is the point of Critical Analysis, to help make the concious unconcious.

The ability to think critically about your work though is hindered by your own knowledge. So I push myself to learn and understand more outside of videogames. I don’t believe that everything we can know about videogames can be taught by them. The realm of interactive entertainment didn’t pop into existence with the microchip. People have been playing and interacting with each other since… well since I don’t  know when. The medium may be new and unique but the principles are not, Philosophers and Psychologists have been striving at the nature of enjoyment, fun and imagination for centuries.

So I write this blog and try to understand what it is they can teach me. And I pray that I never understand everything because then I would have nothing left to learn.

Prompted by this article over at Bit-Tech on How AI in Games works it made me want to blog about some of the ways you can make your enemy AI appear smarter without having to re-write your AI back end or invest in expensive middleware.

SCRIPTING

A huge amount of what convinces us a game has good AI is often completely scripted. Nothing ruins the illusion of AI like the Level Designers treating them purely like cardboard cutouts or filler. What the AI is doing before they start fighting is just as important as what happens during the fight. 

My favorite reference for believable AI scripting are the NOLF games. Yes you couldn’t go more than ten yards without stumbling on a pair of AI guards having a conversation but it adds so much to their characters that you become far more forgiving towards them.

The arrival of an enemy is a great opportunity to make them seem smarter than they really are. AI that Rapel down a wall before fighting you or who shout for backup when they see you causing two more enemies to sprint around the corner. These are almost always scripted events but most Players will attribute it all to the AI.

Even just adding Patrol routes or some good ambient animations can make a very simple AI character appear more inteligent.

FEEDBACK

AI that don’t tell the Player what they are going to do before they do it look stupid.

In Half Life the Soldiers would always shout “GRENADE!” before they threw a Grenade at you. When they shouted “Flank Left!” an AI would always run out of cover moments later.

You are making your enemies appear as if they have goals and that they are trying to fulfill them. If the player doesn’t know what the AI was trying to do then alot of their actions won’t make any sense. If a Soldier just ran out of cover then the Player would assume the AI is stupid for leaving cover. By preceeding it with the command “Flank Left!” the enemies behavior is given a context that makes a stupid suicidal manouvre appear inteligent.

Your enemies don’t have to actually Flank anybody. They just need to say that they are before they move somewhere else. The Player will assume the AI is trying to do something very clever when they are really doing something immensely stupid. It’s all about context.

Above all else AI that are talking to each other and the player appear more Human. The Grunts in Halo would have seemed very stupid if they had never said anything. Instead you always knew what was going through their tiny minds as a result of your actions.

ACCURACY

If your enemies carry guns then don’t turn them into Storm Troopers (unless they ARE Storm Troopers in which case it’s OK). While the Player should have an advantage ov er the AI in terms of accuracy making the AI too inaccurate will just result in them looking stupid. If the player realises that they can just stand still in the open while they pick off the bad guys with a single headshot each then their sense of immersion will be completely broken.

Below is a video I made when we were making Wheelman to indicate just how “Stupid” AI can appear when they are inaccurate. The good stuff is at about 1:50.

If you want your AI to miss then put some effort into making them miss believably. If they are using automatic weapons then have them group their shots in a burst and have the entire burst miss. Don’t just spread the shots out in a cone around the player because it’s much more noticable.

If the Player is standing still in the open looking at the enemy then the AI should tear the Player a new one.

LIFETIME

You can have the most inteligent goal-oriented perfect-pathfinding AI enemies in the world but it doesn’t count for anything if the Player is killing them before they get to do any of that clever stuff.

The only difference in Halo between the AI in Easy mode and Legendary mode is that in legendary the AI has more health. This meant they lived longer and as a result did more cool clever things making them appear more inteligent. They were also more accurate and did more damage which supports my previous point.

Adding health isn’t the only way to increase your AI’s Lifetime (and you may not be able to get away with it contextually) but there are other ways to make your enemies live longer.

• Enemies that can Blind-Fire are harder to kill while still presenting a threat to the Player.
• Make the Players weapons less accurate meaning they have to work harder. Too much aim-assist is a bad thing.
• Allow enemies to break-out of Hit-Reactions quickly. If your Hit-Reactions are too long then you often only need to land one hit to neutralise the enemy. The remaining hits are a formality.
• More Enemies at once mean that even though Individuals die quickly the others are showing off in the meantime.

ROBUST

If I had to choose between Very Clever buggy AI and Very Simple Bug-Free AI I will always pick the Simpler choice.

Every time an AI gets a Path wrong or does something slightly unpredictable (in a bad way) is another notch against your AI appearing smart.

Half Life 2’s Combine AI is really simple but also very effective. Their basic behavior is to move towards their target shooting at them if they have line of sight. When they need to Reload they will move to a position where they can break line of sight.

That’s roughly 80% of the Combine AI right there. It’s incredibly simple and copes with just about anything you can throw at it. Because it’s so robust it rarely goes horribly wrong and the Player can build a mental model of that enemies behavior very quickly that is always right.

When the AI behaves how the Player predicts then the AI is perceived as being smart because they have fulfilled the Players expectations of them. When the AI exceeds these expectations it’s even better. However the most important part to nail first is that the AI never falls short of them.

MANAGE EXPECTATIONS

Human shaped AI are the hardest to get right because as Humans we have very high expectations of their behaviour. We interact with other Humans everyday so Human AI in games needs to fit into an existing Mental Model informed by our life experiences, TV, Films and all sorts of other crap.

Aliens, Animals, Robots. All of these are far easier to make appear inteligent because our Expectations of their behaviour aren’t preconceived or at worst much lower. Nobody knows how a Strider is supposed to act before they start fighting one. You can infer a bit from the way they look and move but they are essentially a blank slate. A Strider can behave however Valve wants them to and so long as they are Robust they will appear inteligent. 

If Halo’s Grunts had been Human shaped then their AI wouldn’t have seemed as clever as they wouldn’t have matched our preconceived expectations of how Humans behave. Don’t underestimate just how much leeway using non-Humans will buy you.

LEVEL DESIGN

Bad Level Design can make good AI look terrible. It is the job of the Level Designers and AI Programmers to ensure that everything in the game is working together to create the best experience possible. If you spend six months crafting cautious cover using AI and all the Levels in your game are empty warehouse deathmatch levels then your AI isn’t going to look good.

Make sure that Levels are playing to the AI’s strengths and vice-versa.

So when I tell you that games are at their most fun when your skills are in equilibrium with the Challenge you face you’ll scoff and claim that it’s just Common Sense.

Well that is the basics behind what is known as “Flow” in Psychology; the state of mind where you are no longer aware of your concious self and become entirely absorbed in what you are doing. Being aware of the concept alone changes how you think about Games Design.

Game Designers are ussually locked into a battle of trying to obtain “Balance” within their game. This is typically a game of tuning numbers, spreadsheets, damage-per-second, damage mitigation and long complex formulas.

Flow changes that. Being focussed on maximising a Players “Optimal Experience” (The other term for Flow) is about moment-to-moment interactions not just raw numbers. It’s all very good if your game is Balanced by the numbers but it doesn’t count for anything if your players are Bored or Frustrated.

Boredom and Frustration tend to occur when Challenge and Skill are greatly out of balance for a considerable period of time. From my own personal experience I find it takes longer to become bored than it does to become Frustrated. This is largely down to the fact that when your skill outweighs the challenge significantly you are being rewarded more frequently and these extrinsic rewards delay the on-set of boredom. However when the Challenge exceeds your Skill you are often only ever punished and as such lack the sugar coating.

One of the problems with trying to balance a Players experience is that it’s incredibly difficult to accurately and objectively grade player skill. It’s not something that is particularly easy to plot on a graph and is generally most useful for abstract thinking. It’s easy to sketch a Flow graph on a whiteboard but very difficult to quantify in a spreadsheet.

One of the things you can plot with at least a semblance of accuracy is how your game is modifying the Players skill.

Above we have an overly simplified example of an MMO’s challenge as the Player progresses through the levels. At each Level the players skill is artifically increased by receiving new abilities or increases in statistics. When you factor in how the Players Skill is increased over time relative to the change in the Challenges faced you might end up with a graph a little bit like the one below…

After each new Level is achieved the Difficulty faced by the Player is actually reduced. This is good for a few reasons:

• It gives the Player an opportunity to learn how to use their new abilities which is itself a Challenge.
• It gives the Player a rewarding period where they feel much more powerful.
• It gives the Player a break within which to reflect on their achievement.

All of these factors are not specifically related to theories on Flow but result from other elements of Psychology and are proven to all improve a Persons experience so it is worthwhile building these into your game.

As the Player progresses through the Level towards their next jump in Skill the Challenges are increased so the Player has to push themselves harder and they become more engaged and re-enter the Flow state.

The above example is drastically simplyfied compared to a real-mmo and is only intended to deomonstrate how Skill and Challenge relate.

Crowd Control in MMO’s is often the most frustrating experience to a Player. I commented on the effect of “Waiting to Die” last week in regard to the effects of The Sandman on Team Fortress 2. Lets look at how removing a Players ability to interact with your game looks on a Flow Graph.

The above graph represents 5 seconds of gameplay. The player is enjoying themselves and the difficulty is shifting around as the game changes. Then at 2 seconds in they get Disabled removing their ability to interact and artificially reducing their Skill to 0. The result? A massive difficulty spike and an associated increase in Frustration knocking the Player out of the Flow state and into reality (Where they throw their mouse accross the room).

Originally I had a theory that reducing the Players Skill to 0 effectively increases the Difficulty to Infinity as it is impossible for them to respond to the game. This sounded good in my head (it makes a good soundbite) but when I plotted the graph I realised that it’s not strictly true. A model that fits better with my own experiences is that if the Difficulty faced is very low (IE your skill exceeds the Challenge significantly) then being Disabled is not quite as frustrating. If however you are in a Flow State (IE The Challenge is roughly equal to your own Skill) the Frustration is significantly greater.

You may be wondering why I’ve taken the time to point out something that appears so obvious and Common Sense. I ask you this in return…

If it’s so Obvious why do Games Designers still do it?

However research papers are often very dull and you ussually need to have a dictionary on hand to make sense of them. So here are ten books that aren’t about Games Design but will make you a better Games Designer…

Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

This is something of a Bible among games designers and is always the first book I reccommend to people. While it’s marketted as a feel-good self help type book it really isn’t so don’t let the subtitle fool you.

The book is very easy to read and explains the concept of “Flow” – A state of conciousness where a person loses the concept of self and becomes entirely involved in what they are doing.

The Design of Everyday Things – Donald Norman

Ever wonder why you sometimes try to push a pull door? Or why some TV remotes are easier to use than others? Don is here to explain all of this and more.

All the lessons in this book are easily transferred to Videogames and may change the way you look at the things you use everyday.

How to Lead – Jo Owen

A common mistake new Designers make is thinking that the most important part of being a Designer is “Designing”. It isn’t.

The most improtant part of a being a Designer is being a good Leader. 

Designers are required to interact with everybody else on the team all the time. We are the people who have ideas and are then responsibile for convincing everybody else to follow us in developing them into a reality.

Every Designer has to be a Leader so better make sure you’re a good one.

Writers’s Journey – Christopher Vogler

I choose this version of the classic Heroes Journey because for me it was the easier one to read. It’s stuffed full of modern film references so you don’t need to know anything about mythology.

The Heroes Journey as a concept is important not just for story writing but story telling. Understanding what makes a good story helps you design a game that will give the player good stories of their own whether you’re making a narative heavy adventure game or a hardcore online shooter.

Universal Principles of Design

This is something of a guilty secret of mine. Every so often somebody would trot out a phrase like “Ockhams Razor” or “Hick’s Law” and I didn’t actually know what they meant.

This book includes 100 of the most basic Design Principles and concepts that every Designer should be aware of (but probably isn’t). 

If you want to find ways to improve your documentation then this book is for you.

The Laws of Simplicity – J Maeda

As a Designer you can quickly get caught up in details and end up in a spiral of constantly adding to something.

At only 127 pages the book itself follows it’s own rules and keeps the topic of Simplicity… simple.

If you ever felt overwhelmed by the complexity of your own creations then you can learn to deal with it from this book.

Freakonomics – Levitt & Dubner

Learn to look at the world differently and find the true cause of something rather than the obvious one.

How did Legalising Abortion reduce the Crime Rate? Why is your boss more likely to steal a Bagel than you?

In a time when focus tests and usability studies are more and more common in games it’s important that you learn to look at Statistics from all angles.

Emotional Design – Donald Norman

Back with another great book Emotional Design examines how we relate to things emotionally.

Being able to identify the Visceral, Behavioural and Reflective elements of a Design and understanding the relationship between the box something came in and how people treat that thing can change how you think about your game.

More up to date than Everyday Things this book actually has an entire chapter on Videogames.

Creativity – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Creativity is a fairly nebulous concept. In the game industry you can be an artist without being remotely Creative.

Understanding what Creativity is and how to idenitify and nurture it is the difference between resigning yourself to working on boring licensed crud and celebrating the opportunities an established license gives you to revolutionise a genre.

In a Creative atmosphere with Creative people whatever you do will be Creative.

Hows and Whys of Level Design – Sjoerd De Jong

OK I lied. The tenth book is actually about Game Design.

However I have good reasons. There is very little printed on the art of Level Design and Hourence has managed to distill alot of concepts into a very easy to read PDF.

There is far more to Level Design than alot of people think and I feel that alot of the knowledge of Level Designers has been trivialised in the name of “making shit look cool”.

Level Design does not stop at Sketch-Up.  It is merely the start.