I’ll write about hidden object games, because I have been playing those a lot during the last year. Before that, I actually thought of them as irrelevant games in a larger perspective. Sure, they were popular and all, but did they bring our medium forward? No way, I thought - maybe even backwards. They were like dumped down adventure games. Adventure games without puzzles - and without hours of walking around not being able to figure out what to do, until you finally get that big eureka moment when you solve the problem. Instead you are mindlessly staring at pictures looking for hidden objects, which are actually quite easy to find if you have just a little patience. But I have started to realize that these games are not irrelevant at all. They are slowly teaching a new generation of gamers how to play adventure games. These days, there are hidden object games with inventories and puzzles similar to those in adventure games (combine these, use this, turn that etc.), and the stories are often just as important as in an adventure game. I don’t think it will be long before the last missing ingredient - the “walking around between scenes with your avatar” element is added to a hidden object game, and when that happens we are really close to a big time revival of the adventure game genre.

Click the image to see it in high resolution. It is my latest Lego creation. I figured I might as well start taking pictures of these.

For those who don’t know about the game, it’s a Japanese RPG of the tactical kind. A rather linear structure brings the player through an amazing story and lots of perfectly designed and varied turn-based battles. What I found beautiful about the game, was not only the tear inducing story, the likable characters and the original battle mechanics, but also the way the themes of the story are woven into the reward systems in the game. The most clear example being that mercy is rewarded. The player is encouraged to have sympathy for the enemy foot soldiers through the story sequences, and in the battles shooting at them sounds harsh and hurting. Initially the player might accept this, and as in any other game attempt to simply shoot them all. When the battle ends though, there is no reward for the merciless - instead higher rewards comes from finishing fast. Winning the battle with as little bloodshed as possible becomes a goal, and is rewarded. To me this is a beautiful twist to a game about a war.

Playful interactions require effort and reward it with growth of the brain patterns (cognitive structures, mental models, schemas etc.) associated with the applied dexterous, mental and social skills.

Playful interactions are sources of emotion potentially making the user feel, for example, stimulated, challenged, curious, proud, frustrated, confused or sad.

I split the concept into three main categories that can be applied to different parts of a game:

Playful selection (adding game mechanics or extra activities to menus) trains player’s skill in using the game’s game mechanics, inspires curiosity and prevents boredom.

Playful activation (mini-games and control challenges) removes trivial interactions at a low level and enriches the game with new game mechanics or new uses of existing mechanics. Also keeps the player attention high.

Playful guidance (providing help through discovery and challenge) provides help when and where it is needed and lets the player figure it out herself. Also, instructions are received when in a positive mood.

The main goal of playful interaction is simply to strengthen the user experience by doing things a little differently. The enjoyment and pleasure of playing a game comes from the way in which it slowly grows the patterns in our mind, and adding little mental, dexterous or social challenges to the parts of the game that is usually not very game-like (like menus, activation actions and guidance sequences) can expand this pleasure to new parts of the game. The central game mechanics might be the most important, but the rest of the package need not be boring either.

My own current design approach is to create a list of intended emotional effects and try to build my design around that. More on this later.

But Elefunk is no fun, and as I see it, this is due to one big mistake: The player has limited access to the building elements that make up the bridge. This effectively negates the freedom offered by the physics engine and creates puzzles with only one solution (roughly). This was obviously done to create difficult puzzles, because with unlimited supplies of building elements the game would have been really easy. I believe there is a much better way to control the difficulty level though. What the designer should have done, is to increase the weight of the elephant and to add more elephants. This would make the bridges harder to build in the limited space available, even when the player has unlimited access to the building elements. Also, the game would still have the time challenge if one wishes to optimize the score and building process.

Lesson learned? Don’t add a physics engine if you don’t intend to use the freedom it will offer.

Next I attended a session on designing games for children using either an existing or original IP. The difference did not seem to be that big. Both presenters agreed that children games should not be learning games. Learning is just a nice side effect - I completely agree, and finds that thought applicable to any game. Overtly trying to teach about a traditional school subject is pretty boring, but all games should teach the player something - even if that something is only usable in the game world.

The next session was the highlight of the conference. ICO designer Fumito Ueda and Forbidden Siren designer Keiichiro Toyama had joined a session on disruptive design. They did not talk much about that subject, but we all knew about their innovations anyway. The interesting bits was about their backgrounds. Fumito Ueda showed his early art exhibition design, and told that his first computer was an Amiga. He was thrilled to see the high amount of hands raised when he asked how many (former) Amiga users there were - in Japan no one knew the Amiga. His design philosophy was to affect people’s life, and he went about doing it by working on the visual side first. He also showed an early PS1 prototype of ICO, and an early multiplayer version of Shadow of The Colossus - three horse riders were battling a colossus together. Very nice and too bad it was left out of the final version! I was quite impressed with how much of the games Ueda himself had created - design and story are obvious, but he even did some of the character models and animation. Keiichiro Toyama talked about the new Forbidden Siren (New Translation) game, and how the sight jacking system had been improved using a split-screen setup. He also told the audience that he and Ueda was the only two designers within Sony who were allowed to do what ever they wanted. The last interesting bit from that session, was about Another World - apparently that game is an all time favorite and a great inspirational source to many Japanese game designers. Kind of strange that a western game has that position.

The conference ended with the usual panel discussion on the current state of Nordic game development. Apparently, the biggest problem is to get enough talent from outside our region. Peter Zetterberg from Microsoft also feared that Nordic developers would not reach their full potential unless they became more cocky and aggressive with their pitches. He could easily be talking about the phone conversation I had with him last year when he was with Codemasters…

All in all, it was a nice conference. Much better keynotes than last year, but the other sessions were not as good as last year I think - or maybe I just went to the wrong sessions.

The first keynote was with TT Games and about Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones. Their entrance scene was epic - Darth Vader, stormtroopers and dramatic lighting - never seen better. They talked about the company culture at TT Games; meeting free and surrounded by Lego they play their way to success. The main design philosophy behind their games seemed to be rich presentation above deep mechanics.

Next I was at a panel session on social MMO design. Legendary Richard Bartle was among the panelists, and brought along his deep historic insight and knowledge about what players do in a virtual world without games and content (they create it themselves). He also encouraged developers to not try to addict and imprison players - that way they will never return when they manage to take a break. The panelists seemed to agree that MMO-games should be a hero’s journey with your friends.

Then I went through a session showcasing impressive character art from the Furi Furi company, Heavenly Sword and a bunch of scrapped Rare-games - and some old and not that impressive art from Jet Set Radio.

Avalanche then revealed their pitch strategy and how they manage ideas internally. They had a small pitch group which worked to crystalize concepts that any employe could submit via a standard concept submission form. The best pitches was then taken to publishers - no demo was made before doing so, because they neither had the time nor the money to do so. Their strong internal technology was enough to convince publishers about their abilities.

Finally, the first day ended with an absolutely brilliant talk by Ste Curran. The essence was, that the best stories in games are the stories we tell about those stories. So he told some himself, and brought in people to tell other. I guess you would have to be there to understand how great and different it was. Maybe there is a video somewhere?

The next speaker had created a list of heuristics for game usability evaluation. I like expert evaluation, but I’m just not sure heuristics are really needed for an expert to evaluate. Also, after the speak Rolf Molich commented, that evaluators do not actually use heuristics the way they are intended to be used. They spot problems, and then try to match the problem with a heuristic - it is meant to be the other way around. I also liked the comment from Florian “Floyd” Müller, that heuristics are better used by designers than evaluators. I agree with that.

The final paper was about social gaming on the Nintendo DS. The information from the study did not seem new to me though, so I found it kind of boring. There was one good idea though; provide a spectator mode for Nintendo DS games. That would be really cool, and it might actually be doable using the wireless connection to stream the action to the Wii.

Another session presented further fancy cursor techniques. The most promising seemed to be pie cursors, which utilized mouse movement direction for making selections on a pie shaped cursor - quite a clever way to remove regular selection menus and tool palettes. Autodesk is currently implementing it in some of their applications, so it should work for huge command sets.

I also joined a special interest group on the field of user experience (UX), discussing how a shared definition is missing. Unsurprisingly, no shared definition was reached. The preliminary result of a survey was promising though, and might provide some consensus once it is finished. The practitioners’ view on UX differed wildly from the researchers’ view - something which is also apparent at the conference exhibition, where UX looks like a big business dealing with very different things. Somehow the practitioners get user-centered design mixed up with user experience. At least that is my impression.