Because it indicates validity of your ideas.
Youâve just massively validated my approach. Thanks.
This model (letâs call it APC for Adherence/Presence/Coherence) is created with respect to gaming market and very simple epistemological truths regarding fun in a metaphysical framework. Completely detached from any cultural definition of fun, and detached from what is traditionally considered as fun in games.
I didnât want to pull this out because it was mostly irrelevant, but Lazzaro-Bartle is eerily similar in the conclusions it draws, though there is a dangerous misconception lurking beneath that shiny package. Of course I know about it, every game designer in the world knows about it.
But, both Bartleâs taxonomy and Lazzaroâs emotional theory were made by analyzing playersâ feedback, which is a horrible mess that anybody, given enough resources, could come up with. They basically try to categorize the behavior already on the table, which is admirable in its own right, but Iâm extrapolating beyond what is already observable.
Itâs important to remind you that I didnât categorize players based on the games alone, or based on my personal anecdotal evidence. It only started like that. I used the tried archetypes and established dimensions in the field of cognitive psychology and defined cognitive profiles until they were able to explain what we can observe on the market.
I can predict motions and cognitive preferences that are not yet tapped into. Namely the left and top part of the diagram. Also the center seem to be that slippery sweet spot that many try to capture, but fail horribly. The whole industry revolves around a formula to grasp the center. While games on the left and top are considered as irrelevant toys by the industry, slowly precipitating only after some random indie manages to secure a financial success.
Sure, you can look at all games through these Lazzaro-Bartle prisms, and youâll learn a lot (if you knew very little to begin with), but critically, Bartleâs taxonomy cannot even explain a game such as Minecraft, or a game such as Dwarf Fortress (or Prison Architect and recently Rimworld). What is the prime mover in such examples?
Rimworld author has a theory on his own, there is a talk on YouTube, where heâs practically pissing on both Bartle and Lazzaro by presenting something entirely else. Namely his mental centerpiece is a story-generating simulacrum, in which things happen without having to cater to any other established playing âneedsâ.
You cannot explain these games entirely by slapping Explorers, Achievers, Socializers or Killers. Itâs none of these things, yet itâs all of them. It knows nothing about the massive impact of roguelikes on replayability. (Both things were known since the 80âs, itâs nothing new, which means theyâre simply parroting what is already popular with the cash cow industry.)
In fact they wouldnât include Socializers at all, hadnât MMORPGs already established themselves as lucrative. So is it a good model, if we simply feed it with new trends as they come along? What does it predict? What does it show? Paying attention to them means wasting brain capacity, and then thinking how times are surely changing, this is why they donât hold.
It gives nothing about the emotional spectrum of peril, scare, survival, and does not consider takeaways, nor impressionability of a game. There is no notion of being âin the zoneâ or being on the opposite end, and offers no reasoning why this is so.
Killers? Are you sure about this? Your players are killers? Not survivors? We donât consider that players kill only because theyâre explicitly funneled into killing in order to win? Even though this is very obvious (and such devs always quote that the act of killing is a popular stress-relief mechanics). And what about the recent surge of stealthy games and killing games in which you donât have to kill? Is it for Explorers only? Or Achievers? Iâd argue that killing is just a mere solution for the natural centerpiece in such games.
In other words, killing is just an in-game freedom, employed by having a shooting mini-game, which has to feel satisfying (because hey, players who play it, find guns amusing; itâs a problem-ending instant solution, so instantly gratifying).
After a while, people started addressing the lack of other freedoms within killing games, and this is implying two things: 1) that their cognitive affinities are suited for more than just killing, 2) that their goals appear to be somewhere else, and are not limited to killing alone.
So how exactly are they Killers? That just explains what they do in a game made about killing, and not exactly why are they playing it. Yes there is a strong correlation, but not everybody who plays a killing game should automatically deserve a Killer label.
In fact, hereâs an anecdote for you: I like to kill in games such as BF and COD not because I kill, stop, and remove other people, but because I thrive in quick-burst tactical situations that require a massive dose of split-second guessing, bluffing, and execution, in order to outsmart an opponent or several of them.
When these games stop working for me, is when someone does actually play solely for the win, or for the kill. And we all know that âcampingâ guy, or that âcheaterâ guy. Do you need more arguments against it? Killing almost comes as a necessary evil. You could just as well say that Killers are the same thing as Achievers. Oh let me find this quote, from Lazzaroâs work
Is it from a Killer mentality, or Achiever one?
In both models, games are observed as facultative emotion-inducing market commodities that are simply consumed. They do exactly what I consider the greatest fallacy in todayâs industry. Games have their own anthropological meaning, they are not just a consequence of a decadent population, and fun is not what you get when nobodyâs watching. Thank god for that, otherwise âInstagram happinessâ would be a real thing, and not a synthetic illusion akin to Second Life.
Not a single model is brave enough to define what fun is in metaphysical constraints.
Lazzaro also went to an extent to implicitly split emotions into âfunâ and ânot so funâ ones. Also âhardâ and âeasyâ fun, whatever that means â I think that heâs silently nodding in the direction of âListen, these are just made up terms to explain some of the behaviors.â Easy fun in this work is what is truly generating feelings of joy and aspiration, but itâs not clear cut.
Some of the fun emotions in his arsenal are âFeeling better about myself,â âAvoiding boredom,â and âI want an excuse to invite my friends overâ. These are not emotions, and do not necessarily have anything to do with fun. These are coping mechanisms that have to do with the sense of belonging, sense of self-respect, sense of self-worth, and more often than not can lead to social escapism and addictive behaviors, while some are indicative of weak, addictive, and traumatized personalities, or personalities with a development disorder (aka fixation).
You know what else is fun in this terms? Porn. Itâs de facto âentertainmentâ.
Now do I really have to back this argument up? Why donât they tackle that subject as well?
And let me tell you something about difficulty. Difficulty challenge has nothing to do with games. Itâs a side-product of an attempt to prolong the productâs shelf-life, and, in GD terms, offers an elastic approach to attract and cater to a greater population.
Difficulty was and always will be a point of great contention among game designers, because it invalidates the takeaway, and makes the centerpiece very hard to implement and balance. A harder difficulty will always alienate the more casual among the players (I generously give you Dark Souls and gitgud mentality), while a game thatâs too easy wonât have a desired impressionability and will mostly feel as a roller-coaster.
There is a social component hidden in there as well. Game design, or in fact, level design, is all about finding the sweet spot between the peaks of contrasting emotional content, the idea of a narrow escape, high risk, and perilous situations, humans are naturally built to respond with such situations by excreting hormones that provide the necessary feelings of power, self-aggrandizement, self-worth, peer reception, and feelings of being alive in general.
This is what difficulty and balance should really mean, not ramping up from 10 enemies to 40 enemies. And in many designs, such scaling does not yield a desirable effect anyway, making a game more costly to produce for dubious reasons. If theyâve picked a quality natural centerpiece that intrinsically scales with the intelligence of the player, they wouldnât have to balance it out.
But many times they are caught in the middle ground, and thus they have to appeal to the slowest in the crowd, holding their hand, making sure that they pay attention, making sure they donât have to remember anything. Tutorials arenât just boring, like killing they are this necessary evil that helps not receive backlash from any of the ends on the IQ spectrum. For many people this completely destroys any takeaway, and theyâre in just for the story and production value (âand will go through it even if they have to watch walkthroughsâ â Lazzaroâs words). And I have a theory how exactly this leads to piracy as well, but thatâs another topic.
Lazzaroâs definition of âwhy we play gamesâ is valid only partially and is heavily contextual, as it relates to the late 20th century Western hemisphere. Games have existed since the dawn of humanity, children and adults played games during all that time. Only the technology of the gaming changed. Did they also seek relief from every-day worries? There is no deeper meaning behind such an activity. Also there is nothing decadent about games, this isnât some weird activity that suddenly gained traction in the last couple of centuries, itâs as fundamental to social, emotional and intellectual growth as imagination and usage of tools themselves, many animals have been observed capable of play and tool-using as well, and not just in youth but throughout their lives.
They all repeat what theyâve heard from the players, about what is their perception of fun. You can also look at their diagrams, and check exactly whatâs missing and what is ill-defined. Itâs also all over the place, almost without any sort of continuum, or logical connections between the activities.
They also donât include in their models a possibility of many players being victims of social conformity. This has been well studied, where large portions of population will always subconsciously imitate the crowd behavior only to fit into a catered group, shaping their tastes and perceptions of fun along the way. Sticking to these corny ways of thinking, where all you have to do is âask the players about what is fun to them,â is exactly why we still donât have a productive theory of game design.
But what bothers me the most about these models, is that they inspect the games on separate grounds, as if there was some sort of a wall between a human being and a human player. They split the need of expressing self within the game from any need of expressing self outside the game, which basically excludes the human nature.
The point of an avatar is really just a process of cross-identifying one self. This avatar I have on this forum is simply just an aspect of my intellectual reality (and to an extent, physical as well). There are no invisible walls, Iâm free to pass any information from my real self, to this domain, where Iâm some anonymous post-giver whoâs having a hard time shaking the status quo among the random denizens.
If you asked this orionsyndrome âWell what do you feel when youâre typing this and thisâ youâd surely get a non-sequitur; the important questions is why am I engaging with this forum through this persona in the first place. What I am trying to achieve, and what are my goals. And this completely transcends the forum per se, itâs just some medium through which Iâm expressing. Clearly with some meta goals in mind, or even subconsciously. It doesnât matter what I feel while Iâm typing anything.
I probably just feel whatever goddamn people feel on goddamn forums: Most of it is probably shame, rage, ego stomping, and pathological satisfaction of being ârightâ.
Thanks for bringing these up, so that I can provide some additional rationale behind APC.
This is definitely a congruent model, however I dislike the overall message, and the biases it introduces.
Right off the bat they separate the cognitive behavior into positive and negative. You wonât see that in my model. Every cognitive profile is out there for a reason that we should not attempt to tailor to our needs. Any time there is a dichotomy between a positive and negative, you need to ask yourself âWho is judging exactly?â
The other thing is the point of origin. This also doesnât touch the subject of fun, but continues the lineage of Maslowâs hieararchy of needs and ERG theory (existence, relatedness, growth) and collates axiomatic truths that speak of the inherent qualities in humans to try and make the best of themselves. I donât readily disagree with any of it, but itâs immediately egocentric and wildly misses the finer points.
But in the end, it overlaps so heavily with APC (at least dimension-wise) that it makes one wonder what exactly seems to be the problem? At this point I need to politely ask you how exactly does this invalidate my work, and how does it make unworthy of closer examination?
Because youâve certainly managed to do the opposite.
Thanks!
Iâve read most of it, and I agree with the most of the things you said, bar the slight misnomers regarding the usage of the word fun, as Iâve already tried to summarize before.
It is mostly true what you said about accomplishments, in my humble opinion, your mind is in the right place.
Youâve also noticed how crescendos need to be exponential, not linear, and that mid game tends to become a slog, even in games that are as open-ended as Minecraft. There is also some fine talk on minimalistic game design as well, something I enjoyed very much.
Though you missed to notice some of the very important aspects of Cookie Clicker, you assumed that Cookie Clickerâs simple unlock minigame is not comparable with the Cooperâs Little Adventureâs simple narrative. In fact, for most accomplishment-oriented people CC nails that sweet spot better. They want all those little animations and nifty little features that bake their cookies, without having to read anything! In turn that Unlock mechanism IS Cookie Clickerâs narrative.
But (admit you knew the long post was coming 
), I have to make a clear distinction between our approaches in theoretical modelling. My approach is philosophical and more abstract, while yours is concrete and already directed toward a specific demography without you even knowing.
And I get an impression that most of you (well maybe not you personally) do want to simply hoard simple psy-tricks to fool the player, which is a shame. The aim of good design is not to fool the player, it is to understand what a foul design is.
Let me try and describe it this way, with simple logical truths
(we can talk about them if necessary, but I wouldnât defend them at all, this is just really contrived/blunt example):
- Lemmings can be either very smart or very stupid, and there is a normal distribution between these two extremes
- Lemmings that are smart will very rarely suddenly become stupid on their own, and vice versa
- all Lemmings play games
Now letâs ignore what happens when they play, but what happens after
- Lemmings criticize the games that are as smart as they are, feeling invited to do so
- Lemmings praise and support the games that are slightly above their level of intelligence, being inspired by them
- Lemmings loudly hate the games that are slightly beneath their level of intelligence, affecting the other Lemmings
- Lemmings ignore the games that they cannot comprehend, as the games are either too stupid or too smart
Now if you try to make your game to have the following reception:
- The majority of Lemmings should give praise and support â this is always our goal
- Some Lemmings should criticize it â well someone has to
- A few Lemmings should hate it â we donât want this behavior
- The rest should mostly just ignore it
Now the question is, what are your options and your strategies?
Consider that image and try to be brutally honest about it.
Yes, there is really just one strategy:
a) You intentionally make a thing one standard deviation above the mediocrity line and cull off the smart population.
Now if you consider that you canât actually measure the Lemmings IQ this perfectly nor you can tailor your game that precisely, what you end up with is known as âregression to the meanâ, simply because your game will end wherever, based on many criteria, most of which could be just as well sheer luck.
And at this point Iâm not trying to criticize you at all, but am merely trying to illustrate what can happen if your goals are too concrete and too down-to-earth. Were you unethical in your decision? Were you greedy? Were you dishonest? No, no, and no. Itâs just the way things work. Maybe your game will float back to where it belongs, maybe itâll sink to the depths of gaming oblivionâŠ
But given that you couldnât predict the actual outcome, did you provide the best possible outcome for the population or was it the best possible outcome for yourself? Think about this question a little. Itâs a tricky one.
Now you could be like âBut I donât careâ however you are affected by this feedback that you introduced in the system. First of all, by satisfying the greatest population youâre immediately going to garner the most praise and support. If youâre successful many will come and imitate you until the local competition outgrows you both in terms of investments and marketing aggression. Second of all, you donât understand the rules of this market very clearly. What works on this population doesnât work on you personally. They are gullible to primitive techniques and cheap tricks, and youâre all competing against each other over whoâs able to attract more Lemmings with blunt devices, having to resort to gambling and features of kitsch in the long run. In the meanwhile, the smarter population is growing restless, dissatisfied, and cynical toward all of your products. Because no one is catering to them they are throwing all kinds of wrenches into the system, likely by pirating, by giving bad reviews, by playing niche games that fall completely off the radar, and finally by making their own games that will eventually ruin your business.
What in fact shouldâve happened is completely irrational from the ordinary business perspective. You essentially can cultivate a smarter population, by shooting beyond the 2nd standard deviation (for the Moon right?). Donât forget, games can have serious takeways, and people can seriously invest themselves in chasing their cognitive dreams. Not a single player in the world (mostly children) seemed to have a problem with the early Minecraft being tough to configure and launch properly. You were expected to install JVM, and configure it via command line according to your local specs, in order to make it run. (Donât get me started about launching a proper standalone server.) Iâve never seen a single bad review telling this to anyone. Admittedly, for most people it just worked, but for the others it was like you were given a chest full of gold, and whatâs a little lock for such a prize? If a game has intrinsic value, you donât care for the bad mouths, the population will rise to meet your standard, you will invent your own arena which is incredibly hard to imitate (and this is essentially still true for Minecraft ten years into the future). Many of your fans will also defend you in the open. Because theyâre not essentially defending you, but their own escalation of commitment, and their own personal investment. Essentially by making them earn their access to your world, youâre making them value you even more, because they learn the price of admission by having to do it. This admission price is the real psy-trick, I will come back to it once more.
There are many RL examples, itâs not just Minecraft, but let me get back to the crux of the issue.
The sense of accomplishment is not universal among the people. What you were describing is an effect that is obvious to you only if you are deeply immersed in the right-hand-side population, where the most games normally live. Itâs the populistic tendency, and observing this is again, a regression to the mean fallacy. There is nothing to learn about the humanity at large at that side of things. Youâre all tempted to repeat same tried recipes and tricks, but it gets stale too quickly, because that population is oversaturated and everybody caters to them already.
You can read my post above where I mention Rimworld as an example of a game that was made specifically to tailor to non-killing non-exploring non-achieving non-socializing players. Itâs been a smashing (though silent) hit so far. Stardew Valley also serves as a fine example, though it was deliberately framed with true farming in mind and the simple narrative of making the world a better and less stressful place. But this is exactly the sort of takeaway Iâm talking about.
You could say that a gameâs takeaway is what youâre left with after youâve paid an admission price. The whole game up to that point is the price you pay, itâs not just entertainment (edit: I forgot to back this up with the first thing that crossed my mind â Bastion, a highly praised game with incredibly simple, even tedious gameplay, but the one that manages to make people cry in the end â think about that crescendo for a moment, was it just a random fluke?). And to argue against this is to argue against the entire microtransaction industry.
This is exactly why people were so riled up with the ending of the Mass Effect trilogy. They got nothing worth of remembering. For many people it was utterly meaningless, after they have already invested themselves to the neck. The story was just a soap opera, and it died before it had a chance to give people anything of value. Same thing is going on with the recent Star Wars movies.
Yadda yadda, I know itâs a lot of text, Iâm sorry, but I canât get this point across any shorter.
The point is that your techniques work only for âthe minglersâ or âthe dwellersâ or âthe extravertsâ. Or whatever youâd like to call them. They are hooked to simply flipping the games, because this is what they do, they consume. The chance that they will even notice a serious takeaway is very small, so games made for them donât need to include any. If you consider what theyâre doing, it becomes obvious that theyâre simply trying to accomplish something, without any rationale. But I urge you to not stop there, try to get to the bottom of why are they doing it. Youâll get wild responses, but soon enough youâll realize that accomplishing is all they do all the time, it just never occurred to you.
They hear about something or get told to accomplish something, and they go and accomplish it, obviously if theyâre able to. They will turn you down immediately if they canât, itâs not a problem for them. There are no deeper conundrums, whether they enjoy it, or where does it lead them, no, itâs a simple thing â a âfarmerâ mentality crossing the deliberation of a âsoldierâ â you have a task, you simply organize your energy to get it done and through the door. And thatâs a good thing right? However â they rarely do anything truly efficiently or creatively. They thrive in doing the same things over and over, and are hooked when the feedback is some sort of exponential growth. Itâs a cognitive bias, but absolutely natural.
I mean you can always try and imagine your mediocre twitch tv streamer playing Limbo or Inside. Screaming right? Yelling âwhatâs this shit, whatâs going on, this is crazyâ and so on. Does he get the deeper allegoric messages? The chances are really small. And itâs not just a measure of his/her IQ, itâs a matter of attentiveness.
I had a coworker that was hardcore hooked on Cookie Clicker, he would set up a rig that would click in his place, when he was afk, at his workplace! It was incredibly hard for me to reason with that guy, even though he was incredibly responsible and artistic person, physically active and even quite handsome. He was a cuckoo clicker for me.
They are an extremely massive and relatively loud population that is responsible for the most of consuming. You know, in the consumerâs market? And when I say they, itâs really diluted, there is no clear cut between people, someone is only 20% mingler, someone else is 90%. If there is anything to learn from my chart itâs that you, being a game designer, ALREADY do not belong there, you obviously know a lot more than them, and are aware of individual psychology and psychology of the masses. And donât get me wrong, itâs not about the quantity of your knowledge, itâs about your interests first and foremost. You want to know a lot more than most of other people, more likely. This is your cognitive profile. Itâs easy. And yes, game design is a lot easier than it looks. You just have to frame the proper burning desire inside you, right? To be someone else. For many people this is hard. Most people lack the mental capacity to detect bad design at all. Or to be someone else, just for a moment. I donât know why is this the case, but this is all we really care about.
These score manipulations are all just simple techniques to get the desired mental response. You can measure them on your self and tweak them on the fly. They are absolutely true and they work, most of the time anyway (they rarely work on me, for example). But itâs not a theory of fun. Fun is something else. Fun is what we inexplicably do for ourselves, regardless of whether someone is watching or not. Fun is what you subconsciously think about when you donât have to. Fun is what you catch yourself thinking or doing on a vacation, instead of thinking or doing nothing. We rarely talk about it, in fact. We just âlove toâ [insert your favorite activity] because [insert your favorite excuse], but in fact itâs because it brings us one step closer to what we truly deem as fun, with our whole selves, not just with our father selves, or husband selves, or boy selves (let me throw in a little TA for a good measure).
Sadly, weâre conditioned into hiding this truth from ourselves, and many people have miserable jobs and lives as a result. Games serve as an outlet of sorts. And the industry is largely predatory.
Instead of trying to shift your games into having appeal for a mentality you naturally know very little about (and have obviously devoted so much energy just to understand), maybe itâs better to step back, and do that one game that really pushes the envelope? Go away from that crowd, go make a game for the builders instead. Contrary to popular belief, such games arenât toys. They actually tend to disrupt the gaming scenery from time to time. If you can, do it.
I wish I could do more to make people see more in that chart, but I guess that old adage still holds: beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
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Wait. Youâve already commited several arguments of passion, a straw man, repetitio ad nauseam, and ad hominem. And thatâs all you contributed so far. But now you insist on committing an argument from authority as well? Man, youâre like a human machine gun of informal fallacies. Seriously you probably have a great time on YouTube comment section.
And here we are, talking about perception of fun.
Besides, you have your answer already:
- Itâs either that Iâm an underdog, having absolutely nothing to back me up, just barking at the Moon.
- Or Iâm a top dog, locked down in a quarantine, having nothing better to do atm, fiddling my thumbs.
Place your bets, and stop being annoying.
Actually sounds a lot like Space Rangers 2 though it wasnât a typical 3rd-person protagonist RPG, more like a top-down spaceship RPG, but the invasion was done brilliantly. An impending doom, slowly spreading through the pretty big sector of space, with factions, intrigues, technologies, planets and their background stories. And the game was perfectly designed around it, giving you a chance to invest yourself as a player and feel and see the futility of resisting the dreaded Dominators. At some point the tides obviously change, you get better, you form alliances, you pit the Dominators against each other etc. Though Iâve never finished it (I rarely do, never been the accomplisher sadly).
It also featured quite interesting minigames, including a textual adventure mode, I remember being imprisoned and training a racing cockroach for months, stealing food and building my muscles in order to survive.
Crazy Russians. Design and graphics were brilliant for its time.
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If we take the high road and ignore your personality, extracting only the ideas from your largely incoherent tomes, we find a few nuggets of wisdom, but I canât personally point to one that shines a light on any darkness. Many of your ideas which take paragraphs to reach fruition are so banal i would consider it an insult to explain to grown adults.
Iâm sure somebody out there is getting something worthwhile from it, and others some entertainment value. To me, your myriad of foregone conclusions based on anti-science indicate not intelligence but the opposite.
For somebody who thinks they can define and categorize entire humans from reading a couple of post, Iâd expect better communication skills. But I think youâve summed something important up yourself: â(I rarely do, never been the accomplisher sadly).â
Typically I donât care much about the person, only the ideas. But in the case of a person who thinks they have all the ideas, then I want to know, okay what can this person accomplish with all that knowledge?
You donât seem to understand how a discussion works. If you want to put all of your ideas out there in one swoop without any of them being challenged, you can write a book. If you do actually want to discuss, share ideas, and pick up something new, then the obvious thing to do is work with the people you are talking to. I.e, stick to one thing at a time, and make sure you are being clearly understood.
What you are doing is the opposite. I seriously doubt anybody besides me is even attempting to read your post. And nobody besides you will understand most of it. You are off topic from the purpose of the thread, and youâve suggested that you are just âworking your fingersâ because you are bored. Well, thatâs a bit selfish isnât it? The rest of us were actually having a discussion.
Well you arenât the type thatâs here to listen or learn so I wonât annoy you any more, but hereâs a parting tip: Smart people use public forums to challenge their own ideas and learn from the community. Other people, seeking attention or validation, find the process of peer review to be âannoying.â
the same thing
This is just the reality of creative productions. Itâs a cycle of having ideas, wanting to make something creative, needing money, repeat. The founders wanted to make a passion project, they succeeded, this grew into a business, they need money for their next projects/ideas so they make some less-inspired cash grabs, then later another hit, etc. Itâs a cycle. You see it in music too. Those companies have to have money to survive, so 99% of what they put out is just typical stuff. Every once in awhile somebody actually has something to say, and that sticks. We call those âclassics.â
@orionsyndrome everything youâve laid out is brilliant, especially from a psychology standpoint. I think if you shared any of this with Dr. Peterson, or on a subreddit for JBP or Jung, youâd be their new hero.
This may be a pearls before swine kind of moment. Donât let it discourage you, because everything youâve researched and written is absolutely brilliant.
Similarly to the archetypes youâve laid out, some will not understand it or appreciate it, but thatâs not really a bad thing. People are just different
@tylerguitar75 , the thing is, this isnât a dissertation of research. Iâm not saying itâs without value and there isnât some golden nuggets in there, but donât let the guise of cleverness fool you.
For every nugget of knowledge there is a great number of wild, outlandish conclusions that are unverifiable and couldnât be based on anything other than speculation.
The validity of an idea is measured by itâs ability to produce accurate, predictable results. Retrospective analysis of other peoples work is nice and all and a great way to learn, but being the best armchair general isnât worth 1/1000th of being an average real life grunt, right?
So right off the bat I am seeing a lot of foregone conclusions from orion, all of which are incorrect. What would this indicate to you?
Being wrong about something is no crime. And if we are all just happily BSâing thatâs cool too. But our friend barges in here, first announcing that Joe is wrong, game dev isnât hard, then writes a tome with the worlds most complicated graph full of mostly nonsense to illustrate how easy it all is, and uses every opportunity to sneak in a very transparent pat on his own back. âIâm not hear to to discuss how brilliant I am, but I am extremely brilliant.â
Okay. Prove it. Ideas without action are worth squat. Donât tell me you are smart and then try to tire us all out with words. Show us the fruits of your big brain in action.
Anyway, Iâm just procrastinating. I welcome orion and would love to hear his opinions on things but it would be great if he could participate in a discussion by considering other peoples opinions, not just use people disrescpectfully as stepping stones to launch of into lengthy tangents because he is bored and wants to enlighten us all with his vast brain power.
@orionsyndrome
You are making some very outlandish rhetorical shortcut that invalidate most of your post.
- The Bartle Lazzaro model isnât the only model presented, so you already lost by not addressing the other complementary model. For example the very Old Caillois model.
- You misunderstand fundamentally the model, first itâs a spectrum there is no boundaries, second it show tendency, and third itâs not a classification of games or players, just a map of player behavior, that is a single player can move around the map in a single play, with some player preferring to stay inside a corner and not spread.
- How does it validate your model, then you explain itâs useless?
- Itâs based on observable evidence, not on conjoncture based on theory. @BIGTIMEMASTER is right to point itâs just speculation, and itâs too vague to be pragmatique.
- You used minecraft as an example, and failed to realized the model comes from MUD (multi user dungeon) which has gameplay on par with minecraft (highly interactive worlds with multi user interaction).
If you want a proper in depth exploration of theory and pratice of old game design model Iâll advise you to read Rules of play from Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
Itâs as dense as your wall of text, and already explore everything you think you stumble onto.
There is many more stuff to read, but thatâs a good intro.
For actual practical modeling of game design, I recommend Advanced game design from Joris Dormans and Ernst Adams
Both books still deal with abstraction irrespective of game genre or publics, yet they can give you straight to point model to actually make any games for any aesthetics, mechanics or publics.
Itâs important to realize that while perception of game design in video games can seem small due to the over reliance on genre, board game are older and more mature, and break convention and genre boundaries more often than video games, a lot of design insight comes from board games, and many author above are well rounded designer who crossed career in both sector.
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@neoshaman
1.
What Caillois does is a very roundabout way to explain to the audience that the notion of having (unprovoked) fun has been undoubtedly observed, letting him define a sociological framework that enables him to consider games and playing as an activity worth of discussion. As I said for Bartle and Lazzaro, itâs admirable, especially for its time, but weâve moved past it.
Although Iâm not the only one able to describe why people do any of it â obviously this topic is a lot older than me â you seem to politically ignore that I am definitely the only one describing, or attempting to describe, why are there any differences between different profiles, and where these differences live, without having to refer to their pastimes, their everyday worries, how itâs been done in their language and/or culture traditionally⊠Yet Iâm still arriving at the same conclusions as the aforementioned sociologists, with all their time, credibility, and industrial and academic backing.
I have satisfactorily explained the observed fascination with agon, alea, mimicry and ilinx. With what I had in mind while describing it, and I did this with a mere paragraph (though it couldâve been elaborated as well), one could as well consider Caillois conclusions as fundamentally naĂŻve.
To use a pharmacological analogy, this is very similar to being able to comprehend only the symptoms of a disease and treating that, instead of understanding the underlying causes of the illness. In this sense it is a perfect analogy, as this does not only carry the risk of misrepresentation, but can also be very dangerous for the social health, with society being a by-product of human nature, and not entirely man-made. Treating the wrong thing can in many cases kill the patient, and is worse than letting the patient heal by itself. So this state of affairs is man-made.
And now when I think about it, maybe this is the main difference that you seem to highlight, as you simply wish my theory away â even though it coincides with the output of SDT, and to an extent with Bartle-Lazzaro as well â only to let you stay in control over your ambitions, your taste, and your sense of fun. All of a sudden, and without going into an ad hominem territory, I can discern with a generous prospect that both you and BIGTIMEMASTER are simply adorned in this life with a deep and uncanny desire for greater command over psychological and emotional matters, which tells a lot about your cognitive priorities. After all, skepticism in moderate doses can be a healthy thing.
To answer (3) these significant overlaps are exactly what validates it, because if APC was just gibberish, it shouldâve exhibited errors that are shockingly divergent. So far there is not a shred of evidence that what Iâve laid out misses any point, if we are to stick to any established sociology of play.
I got the model perfectly the first time, and that was a while ago. I know there are axes involved and what they represent. Their chart itself has a sort of seamless continuum, itâs not what I criticized. Iâve criticized the obviousness of their domain separation. It is clearly PVP vs PVE / ARC vs RPG (Iâve abbreviated Arcade to highlight the irony). There is no explanation for how exactly a player develops an affinity for either quadrant nor how they can smoothly move from one to another.
They have clearly taken the games on their face market value and switched the words like this
- PVP â Players
- PVE â World
- Arcade â Acting
- RPG â Interacting
Once the quadrants emerged, Bartle slapped the most obvious of labels with regards to games that conveniently represent each quadrant the best, creatively reusing the playing card symbols for some cute mnemonic. Sadly, it works mostly only in English. In German clubs would be crosses, and diamonds would be squares?
Players + Acting â KILLERS 
Players + Interacting â SOCIALIZERS 
World + Acting â ACHIEVERS 
World + Interacting â EXPLORERS 
What this does is simply a categorization of what we already know about games. Itâs cute but grossly insufficient. You canât extrapolate a new dimension from this. For example where do I put crosswords? Where is chess supposed to be, is it âPlayersâ or âWorldâ? (Why not World if one considers playing chess like it was PVE? Its world has a meaningful state with perfect information.) Also is it âActingâ or âInteractingâ? Well, thatâs a tough one.
What about poker? Thatâs clearly for Socializers right? HA, wrong. There is clearly no meaningful interaction between the players whatsoever, apart from bluffing (which isnât technically interaction, and can be read and delivered unilaterally; I think Joe mentioned somewhere intermittent reinforcement, this is all there is to poker bluffing, along with the social component of intimidation, gamblerâs fallacy, and counter-conditioning; also, there was an article on Gamasutra on something called Yoma, which is some magical deduction body-reading whatever ability, I just think people overthink this stuff to much). So if itâs about acting players, then it has to be Killers? Thatâs wrong on so many levels, just wait until I tell you about luck below.
(Consequently, and due to many criticisms, Bartle introduced a third axis of implicit/explicit, and hereâs one other critic who elaborates on what exactly I meant when I pointed to the lack of any continuum.)
Luck
Let me tell you about poker. All that talk about what is luck and what luck means for the games and play, but you wonât see it being that much prominent in my work. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that people who exhibit a greater desire for control, tend to avoid systems based on luck.
Look, luck is just a simple mechanic, a measure of probability, that you simply ought not consider if your target audience constitutes of pathological controllers conditioned to win. Thatâs all there is to it. People write essays, articles and books on the subject. No, the important thing about luck is not luck per se, but why we have pathological controllers out there, who appear to feel incredibly uncomfortable if their life throws lemons and knives at them. Which is what life inevitably does all the time, so what is it that they really do with their lives? How do they hope to survive such a harsh reality?
Letâs investigate that instead. How are people coping in general if their games need to be absolutely predictable?
And I bet you 100 bucks they pick their jobs, their cars, their wives, their dogs, and their shower accessories to be 100% predictable, so this speaks a lot about their nominal affinities, not about the games they want to play.
Of course, even if their lives arenât 100% predictable (that would be wishful thinking anyway), their decision-making process has to be. This is what they find relaxing, or subconsciously fun.
When theyâre playing their games, they want to be absolutely sure there are no external and unreliable factors. Meaning that their cognitive system is a) not suited for stochastic improvisation (argument from planned deliberation), is b) not humble enough to calmly accept the fate of defeat (argument from self-importance), and c) cannot turn personal defeat into a sacrifice for many (argument from selfish ego).
All pointing out to the mentality of âsoldierâ, a dominantly masculine profile.
Anecdotally, Quill18, a relatively known YouTuber, once humorously pointed out that Settlers of Catan (a popular board game that massively hinges on luck) is banned from his house, because he couldnât handle the rage, and called it âa thing that destroys friendships.â
Such deep conclusions you wonât find in Bartleâs and Lazzaroâs work. But this is a legit observation worthy of pondering. In any case, itâs something every game designer in the world should consider bluntly without having to endlessly contemplate about tastes and emergent flocking behavior, conformity, having to analyze focus group feedback, and perpetual QA cycles. No, if youâre making a game for the âsoldierâ population, chances are they will be very angry with any feature that removes control from them. On the other hand, if youâre making a game for the âpatronâ population, they respect luck in a moderation, and in fact, Sim City and Cities: Skylines give you tools to bring ad-hoc destruction and doom upon your world!
You want more? Who promotes âlosing is funâ? Is it a âsoldiersâ game?
With APC you can see already how exactly it crystallizes on the market. But can you do it with Bartleâs?
Where is luck and can you see how well received it is? Itâs a simple question.
If you investigate a little, youâll find almost no mention of luck in any of these works (Bartle or Lazzaro).
Now itâs not exactly the most important thing in the world, but at the same time it shouldnât be entirely irrelevant. At this point, if my work is naĂŻve, these works have to be kidâs play.
I have nothing to say against this premise and I definitely agree, except that every scientific theory has to start from a conjecture at some point.
Intuition has nothing to do with scientific method, except that every fruitful scientific experiment was developed from intuition alone and refined up to scientific standard.
Speculation has nothing to do with scientific knowledge, except when it turns out to be indicative of further investigation, by introducing a massive contradiction or by showing how an established theory could be erroneous in unexpected ways.
Science is full of paradoxes like that. This is because there is scientific rhetoric, and there is scientific practice. We cannot just stop moving forward, because someone decided there is nothing more to add.
With all that, I have to say Iâve passed the point of a mere hypothesis, but APC is still just an unconfirmed and pretty loose theoretical model grounded in philosophy and sociology, with pretty axiomatic basis, the core of which is very likely non-testable (but this is not atypical for any kind of work verging on metaphysical, The Big Bang Theory, for example, is quite similar in its premise, also having an axiomatic core, though Iâm really not trying to compare a hobby with something of that scale), unless we can come up with some unexpected ways to test the universal reason for life to exist.
I need quality feedback, and I need to see if there is anyone capable of comprehending this at all.
But for what itâs worth, pursuing this argument any further would mean that you really want to go down the path of courtierâs reply and appeal to tradition. I really donât need to be a doctor of ludology, professor of gamasutra, or CBE game designer exquisitĂ© just to have you all pay attention to some obvious neglects in the body of work presented to us so far.
No I havenât failed to notice that. Iâve been closely monitoring the world of games for 37 years now. Itâs been my life. Yet Iâm not your typical gamer, I was immediately a developer, not losing time, rolling my own stuff on computers lost to history, until I learned about any technique, language, and expression I could learn about. (I havenât learned it all, mind you, thatâs just impossible.)
This was particularly hard to do in pre-internet times. But Iâve managed to register every tiny motion or tendency before and after the video games industry went big, and before and after the video games industry turned indie (again). I have successfully predicted success and failure in 90 of 100 games so far. Including my own. If someone is capable of writing a book about Minecraft and its predecessors I would be on that short list.
Youâre right about the post-release Minecraft and youâre not right about it. Initially, it wasnât a multiplayer game. This was clearly on a TODO list, because the potential was there and huge, but it had itâs own very particular style and delivery that had nothing to do with the games it allegedly borrows from. Namely Dwarf Fortress and the long ancestral line of ASCII dungeon crawlers.
In Minecraft you were intentionally alone. And yes, intentionally, it was hard for Notch to resist adding on top of this loneliness. In a vast world that was as interesting as any naturally occurring fractal. This was its core masterpiece, letting you examine the wonders of another world, while standing alone against this illusion, and he managed to reinforce this solipsistic dream with a peculiar choice of music and ambient, telling us something in the process, perhaps about himself, perhaps about something in general.
Today, Minecraft is a mere shadow of what it was initially, though it has rich features, biome varieties, things to do, etc, itâs just an amusement park for the hordes of reckless, mindless, inattentive children to bounce upon like some sort of rubber castle. Itâs a Microsoftâs cash cow, and nothing else. To look at it now and try to appreciate its anthropocentric message, would be the same as going to Rome, and trying to imagine what being an ancient Roman was like, while waiting in a line for Basilica di San Giovanni and eating gelato.
I could seriously write a book about it, because there are some really important artifacts Iâve noticed while playing it, whether solo or in multiplayer. For example, the process of getting familiar with oneâs surroundings, and the process of securing the space for oneself (sadly I have never found papers on the latter, and I wish we could speak more of it), both of which are innate cognitive aptitudes we all perform like insects, completely unaware of it. But I donât want to get lost in the details, maybe some other time, or in some other topic.
Maybe if someone is interested, there is a fascinating body of work on how humans build spatial mental models (Tverskyâs Three spaces of spatial cognition and Spatial mental models), and itâs either that they canât see it or donât want to talk about it, but there is a tangible measure of joy emanating from this activity alone (Explorers right?).
In fact, Notch has stated several times, during the early days of Minecraft, how much he sees Doom in what he does, and that he plans for an adventure mode that is Doom-like more than anything else, and this serves as a reminder of the types of spatial freedom that he had felt and discovered, that are, yeah, kind of similar to dungeon crawlers, but Doom had a clear spirit of emancipation and immersion, ushering a new era of threedimensionality in games. Crawlers do not engage with the mind in a way that demands âThree spaces of spatial cognitionâ.
I will quote the final summary in the first linked paper
Iâd also argue that spatial cognition in itself is unbalanced from profile to profile, and that different profiles have different prospects of finding joy in it, lending their abilities further down to choosing their paths, having a preferred camera, mobility, and types and cardinalities of desired freedom. We all know that some people are clumsy or that some get easily lost (in the woods or other repetitive environments devoid of stationary landmarks), and this is especially important in the context of games. This is one huge universal discrepancy between dungeon crawlers and games such as Doom. They satiate wildly opposite cognitive affinities when it comes to solving a natural problem of navigation and space. Not to mention that in dungeon crawlers the concept of body is completely abstract by design, and that most of the physical interaction happens in the mind of the player, and requires no skill.
On top of this, Minecraft offered a very specific feeling of agoraphobia, for the first time in games, you could belong to a truly open world, unlike any dungeon game out there including Doom, yet nobody quotes this Doom reference nowadays. I guess it would be bad for business right? Id Software would be all over it, maybe even suing.
So Notch instead opted to bless Dwarf Fortress and Zachtronic instead.
Regarding the literature, I think Iâve read the latter, but Iâll consider both of them. Thanks!
What will help people comprehend is it you make a point and focus on it. Itâs extremely hard to follow you anywhere when you jump from one subject to another, and use vague labels that only somebody who has the exact same references as you will know.
It reads like one long wild, unfocused tangent where you jump from some analysis of one thing to another. What is the point? What are you trying to say?
All this, for instance. Itâs a swamp to get through this, and the only useful thing Iâm left with is something obvious to anybody who has a shred of emotional intelligence.
Is that all this is? An an extremely dense analysis of basic human behavior from the type of person who has to memorize facial expressions, but cannot intuitively understand them?
I guess we all have our own way of understanding things and communicating, but typically the people I find who are real experts can usually make the difficult seem easy. From you I am seeing the opposite. Hundreds and hundreds of words to say something very simple most people understand instinctively.
Anyway, what are you trying to say here? Is there a fundamental point to all of this? And please donât keep trying to define me, theyâve all been pretty far off so far, so thatâs not helping me believe you are as clever as you say you are.
and to be clear here, this is not a lack of understanding because concepts are going over the head. Iâve read most of this very carefully, itâs just way to tedious to pick at one part out of the whole. The only real take away is a long, long way of saying, âknow your audience and be a bit smarter than them.â
Beyond that we have some dabbling into âwhatâs the meaning of lifeâ which I canât see anything useful coming from, other than entertainment.
In general, I find people who get too far into metaphysical stuff like that usually donât know much about prehistory, which is the most important thing to study IMO if you want to understand why people act how they act. And honestly, most of these âmodelsâ can be easily observed if you spend any time at all observing dogs. I recognize that you do need labels to describe and communicate things, but I think there is also a fundamental flaw and even arrogance with how flippantly a lot of these are used.
Thereâs got to be some sort of cognitive bias here at play. Something like, âif I can recognize a little part of a complex thing and I can attribute a label that I know to it, then I understand it.â But thatâs the arrogance. The reason is upsets me is because itâs the same arrogance that, when the stakes are real, gets people killed and fucks shit up. Always jumping to conclusions too soon. I can tell you with certainty from long experience, the most dangerous people are the ones who are so certain of their cleverness that they will say so outright.
Wisdom is present when the person stops seeing themselves as the teacher and starts trying to find the teacher in everything they observe. It doesnât mean you have to take a vow of silence or donât share what you know with the team, but it definitely listens as much as it speaks.
Well, we donât have to worry about orion getting anybody here killed I donât think, so nevermind that. But Is there more than that? Knowing the audience? In general, we should have the capacity to manipulate and persuade others? And to what end? So that every game we make sells big time? Am I missing something? Can you explain with more lucidity, and without diverging so much? If there is one thing you had to leave for the children, what is it?
You are encouraging people to be creative and try to put some real important messages in their work. Thatâs cool. But suppose nobody has anything profound to say? Suppose we are all just dumb monkeys trying to get a banana? Any practical advice to that end?
And Iâll say one more thing â another reason this kind of wanna-be clever talk rubs me the wrong way. Itâs that the focus is wrong. Success in life is not a matter of attaining the right knowledge. Itâs not about being more clever than others or manipulating people. That might be the way to make some money, but it has nothing to do with any metric of human happiness. The world definitely doesnât need more divisive figures who manipulate others to get ahead. It needs leaders who bring people together so we can relearn the joy of being human.
Itâs not that I donât condone the pursuit of knowledge, but the main issue I see preventing both small timers and big shots from enjoying consistent success is not a lack of scientific knowledge, but a lack of basic, fundamental personal and interpersonal skills. The kind of skills youâd have if you grew up in a small village, doing manual work outside, but you donât get if you grow up in a disconnected society. Issues with self-confidence, ability to communicate, stuff like that. These are simple things everybody will do better to improve.
If you got ten people on the team and one person lacks the good upbringing to make them feel confident and secure in expressing themselves, that will manifest much more detriment to the teams ability to make a winning product than any pseudo-science. It is a much more pressing issue than anything else. People need to know how to form stronger teams, and how to maintain morale over long projects. They need to know how to take care of themselves, and how to understand others so they can take care of them. Itâs all basic stuff - a lot of it is instinctive but repressed by various cultural pressures. People need to know how to prevent conflicts, and how to keep the ship on course when there are conflicts. They need standard operating procedures for crystal clear, error free communication. They donât need to pontificate over player models which have little practical use, or get some wild idea that making a video game is somehow tied to the very root of their existence in the universe.
Yes, thatâs fun shit to ponder over sometimes, but itâs not an indication that you are clever because you like to think big boy thoughts. Itâs just an interest some personalities take - it doesnât mean you are deep or vast or more useful than a guy who drives a truck and drinks beer every night of the week.
Oh my, that is so poetic. So there is a vocabulary buried inside you after all.
And I presume weâre comparing my nuggets against your Lantern of Godly Rays?
Sounds unfair but I will accept it.
Youâre pulling things ridiculously out of context. Thatâs not what construes a dialog.
Hey, Iâve actually answered to all your questions that had some merit in them. And youâve largely ignored my answers, and Iâve wasted a good hour on at least one of them. But youâre pursuing instead your own rhetorical drama, downplaying and placating me personally, insulting me, then calling me a god with a dose of irony, uploading that image of an obvious GENIUS which Iâm not, insinuating that I have an illusion of authority, asking intimate questions about my financial and career status. None of which has anything to do with the ideas I presented.
Iâm unsure if youâre just in a state of chronic disorder or paid to behave like this, but I have more reasons to feel angry then you. And nowhere you can see that Iâm biting your trouser legs, looking to wear you out, and bring you down to my level. This isnât a competition after all. Or am I wrong? Because some of you behave like you have something to lose, which is very odd.
Iâm not taking anything away from anyone. Why all the hate, the desperation?
Itâs a light and fun topic, weâre all friends here. It should be at least somewhat interesting.
Do you really waste your time with every comment you donât agree with or look down upon?
Or do you just pass by?
If this is nothing to you, if itâs completely preposterous and pretentious, why are you reading it?
I havenât addressed you personally, you were just vocal for the whole time.
Yes youâre right, the stage isnât mine, and Iâm sorry if thatâs the impression that Iâve made with my long-ish posts, but if the stage isnât mine then you seriously need to stop behaving like a heckler.
After all Iâve said so far, I havenât seen any proper comment from you. Like calling out anything Iâve said on proper merits. Stating a proper criticism, giving me something that would debunk any or all of my ideas, or trying to analyze what was laid before you, and construct a counterargument. You call that a discussion and sharing of ideas? Where are your ideas as opposed to mine? I will immediately go and read them, and tell you what I think. Isnât that how it should work?
If you want to be listened, Iâm here, listening. I wanted an opinion, and I only write two posts maximum, a day.
This is a forum, I canât silence you or outvoice you even if I wanted. But if you want me to agree with you based on nothing but informal fallacies, threats of excommunication and appeals to guilt, I will not succumb. Thatâs not how any debate works. If you have something that can sway my opinions after 10 years of mature thinking, oh maybe Iâm not ready for it, but I will accept it if itâs sound.
Go ahead, persuade me, whatever it is that you believe in.
Right. So your new tactic will be a forum-favorite: DROWN EVERYTHING in angry gibberish, so that newcomers wonât bother with reading anything at all. Do it, see if I care. Itâs just another mark of validation, if you ask me.
read the post above ^^^
I guess you donât realize how condescending your post are in general. Thatâs my initial issue. Instead of trying to argue everything and fire all shots at once like you did, I waited to figure out what I wanted to say exactly.
Before I wrote my long reply I reread yours carefully to make sure I was making sense. You should do the same.
In fact you are, you are too caught up in yourself to realize.
I think I made it clear already â I donât care about your ideas. To me personally, they donât seem useful or teach me anything I didnât already know. Thatâs fine. I think there is good stuff in there plenty of people can use. I donât think they are dumb ideas, just a bit arrogant and misguided. Iâm not arguing against them individually because thatâs pointless, especially when itâs the type of person who specifically wants to show how much they know.
The issue is really simple: You implied you were smarter than other people, and then said a bunch of stuff I found pretty trite. The delivery was pretentious, adding to how annoying it all was.
Add to the that the fact that I think you set a wrong example about what people should focus on, and I feel like I got to call it out.
Add on top of all of that the extremely arrogant way you dismiss others with a quick, dumb, and incorrect psychoanalysis about who they are and what they do in their freetime (which only indicates how you fill the hours of your life), and somebody has to say something, donât they?
You put on a facade like you are above all petty human emotions, like you are only here to discuss objective reality and anything else is beneath you. But every paragraph almost you are congratulating yourself with how clever you are. You are even saying that you are here to teach - if only there was a pupil clever enough to understand. What an act!
To someone who talks like this, what possible response can there be but, âso what have you done?â You are talking a really big talk, so then where is the walk?
Thank you, I appreciate your time and support.
It reminds me of something I tweeted to Notch at some point, before he founded Mojang, so quite some time ago. I donât know if he ever saw it, as he never replied (but was quick to reply when I wrongly transcribed his Swedish name for some in-joke, some time after).
It was âIf everybody loves you, youâre doing it wrong.â
And so he did, in the end.
The worst thing that can happen to an idea is indifference.
Good ideas will always polarize heavily, so Iâve already come half-equipped to deal with that.
But the worst possible outcome would be to burn out because of irrational fears of rejection.
Donât worry and thanks again.
You are truly incredible.
âYou implied you were smarter than other peopleâ
No, you did Youâre doing it ever since I got here
I have already confirmed very calmly that yes, I am smart, but that doesnât mean that anyone else is dumb, including you. To which youâve replied with a picture of that young polymath.
Here, itâs worth preserving anyway
Are you competing with me? Are you out of ammo?
Is that all?
Let me just add Tone policing to a long list of your ad hominem attacks.
Hope you donât mind.