John Harper made a point on twitter the other day that speaks directly to something that bothers me in a lot of game designs, especially ones I’ve had a hand in. The problems is that a lot of games pick up inertia with quick rules and a strong premise, then grind to a halt when it comes time to pick stunts, powers or whatever other specific fiddly bits provide the exceptions the the baseline rules. Things grind to a halt as players flip through the book, reading and reviewing their options before making decisions that they’re really worried will be the wrong ones.

This is a problematic way to start a game, and a number of strategies have been established to address it, such as setting up quick-picks and packages, or simply preparing characters in advance of the game. These can work, but they’re ultimately duct tape and a band aid sort of solutions.

Video games handle this much better, especially more modern video games, since they are designed with an assumption that the manual will barely be glanced at. Players learn how to play by doing it. There are numerous strategies that support this, including familiar control schemes, but the most basic is to start the player with a smaller set of capabilities and options than they will eventually have in play. Historically, this was the domain of “tutorial levels”, segments of play that were outside of the regular scope of play, where you’d be walked through the various details of rules and interface.

More modern games have made that tutorial a part of play design. The initial situation of play is usually constrained in some way: you might have only one weapon, one spell, or control only one type of unit. You will play a level under that constraint, and then the next level (or after soem other benchmark) you will expand your capabilities. You’ll pick up another weapon, learn a new spell, add more units and so on. If situations require special rules, you’ll get the chance to discover that as it comes up (rather than going back to the book). The net result is that you learn to play the game by playing the game, which is pretty slick.

Obviously, different games handle this to differing degrees. For many first person shooters, the ramp up is very small, while some real time strategy games use the entirety of their single player campaign as a ramp up. From an RPG perspective, the most interesting is probably MMOs.

World of Warcraft, for example, starts a character off in a fairly limited environment (a “newbie zone”) with clear direction (The guy standing in from to you has your first quest) and well-concealed safety bumpers (there are lots of enemies, but they’re the kind who won’t attack you unless you attack them first, so they look more dangerous than they are). Beyond that characters start with the ability to make a basic attack (swing a sword, knife, staff or whatever) and perform one special ability (cast a fire bolt, make a power attack, something like that).

For the first 10-20 levels, new abilities come rapidly, but not so rapidly that you don’t have time to try them out and get the hang of them in play. The speed of advancement levels off at higher levels (especially in terms of new abilities gained), but those early levels give you a chance to get a grasp on the class. But the thing is, while you’re getting that grasp, you’re still doing the same sorts of things that you’ll be doing later on – getting quests and killing stuff. The fact that you are learning does not sacrifice the play experience.

The fact that video games do this well is not, I think, an indication that this is something that ONLY video games can do well. It would be very easy to conceive of a game like, say, 4e being tweaked into a model like this, so players enter play with perhaps a single at will ability, but gain other abilities quickly, perhaps between sessions when the time required to make choices does not detract from play (MMOs address this by offering very few choices – you get X power at Y level, and that’s that. There will be some elements of choice, like WoW’s talent trees, but even those will be fairly constrained).

The main thing this requires is a bit of rethinking of how we handle advancement, particularly that we might want to think about shifting some of the things we think about as normally part of character creation to advancement. Coming back to those stunt/power choices that really bog things down, there might be some real benefit in giving fewer of them at the outset, but make the first ones easier to gain.

There are adjustments that would have to be made. One thing you’d want are strong defaults that reinforce character concepts. For example, if you wanted to do this for Leverage, the GM might just pick on talent for each role and just give it to the player at the end of chargen, then let them add another talent at the end of the next two or three sessions. This constrains things slightly (so that, for example, all Hitters are ass kickers and all Hackers have “DO you have that thing I gave you?”) but the trade off of quickly entering play really seems to more than make up for it to my mind.

Anyway, something on my mind.

So, my good friend Ryan Macklin had a great interview over at the Jennisodes about establishing an Internet presence. It’s well worth a listen if you’re curious about such things, and as my first exposure to the Jennisodes, it left me curious to go check out the archives.

What inspired today’s post is a bit towards the end, where Ryan was given free reign to voice a concern, and he spoke about his hatred for the rewarding of mediocrity. His thesis, in my words, is that too many products which might excel in one category but utterly half-ass it in others are given a free pass and even praised as if only the excelling category mattered. An example might include an RPG with excellent rules, but which has not been edited and has been very poorly laid out, but his objection is not limited to RPGS.

So, before I lay down some disagreeing beats, let me make some key statements about what I am pretty sure he’s _not_ saying.

First, he is not saying you need to break the bank on these things. Yes, in an ideal world you have the budget to pay for top notch illustrations, editing and layout for your game, but the reality is that it’s expensive enough to just get a game printed in the first place, and people are under no obligation to put themselves in debt for a labor of love. Rather, he is just asking that each of the elements of production be given your thoughtful attention and genuine effort. To use layout as an example: the difference between a bad layout and a good layout is profound, but it is very rarely a difference of cost. It is, however, a difference in time and effort. It takes more time to read a few good websites on layout and fonts or to really go through your file to check how it looks than it is to dump it all into word and apply a few headings. Yes, great layout is something else entirely, but a good, solid, readable layout is something that is within everyone’s grasp if they want it to be. Other design elements are similar – professional editors are nice, but just being willing to have your game be read by a non-gamer and, most importantly, being willing to fix it based on the feedback, can work wonders[1]. Printing can be expensive, but there are less expensive options. The point is, it’s not about cost, it’s about how invested the creator is in every element of his creation.

Second, he is not discounting learning experiences. He comes out and says as much, but I want to re-underscore it because it’s such a critical point. There is a difference between not doing something well because you don’t know any better and because you half-assed it. Ultimately, the only one who can truly judge how sincerely you tried is you, but that truth won’t keep people from drawing conclusions.

And that, there, is where I shift gears into objection.

See, first and foremost, a lot of this is very easy for Ryan Macklin to say. He’s blessed with the gift of hindsight and a range of experience that gives him a very clear understanding of how a committed creator could address any or all of the mediocrity concerns. And more, were you to ask him, he would be more than happy to share these insights, because he’s a generous spirit. But that also means he suffers from the curse of perceived difficulty. The solutions to these issues are so clear and obvious to him that it’s difficult to differentiate between the person who didn’t try and the person who saw this as insurmountable, and just did what they could.

Now, I call Ryan out for this, but the reality is that I know of literally no one (myself included) who does not fall into this trap. Once we perceive things as easy, it is really, really hard for us to understand the perspective that it seems impossible. This is not an argument in favor of mediocrity so much as an assertion that it’s not always as easy to spot as you might like.

Now, this, here, is the actual defense of mediocrity.

Do you know what makes something mediocre? By and large, it’s a result of something that’s not good, but which is close enough to good that the viewer can clearly see how it could go from point a to point b. It’s the “Billy has so much _potential_” reaction, and it makes us crazy. When things are genuinely bad, we’re usually much more tolerant of it because the reasons are usually clear – the person just didn’t know how, but they tried, so we’re sympathetic. We’ve all been there. We get it.

But when they get close, we can’t explain it so easily. We see that they got 75% of the way, we cannot so easily dismiss it. If they could get that far, we ask, why couldn’t they have just tried a little bit harder and gone all the way? It’s not rational, but it’s a strong, instinctive response.

And that’s the problem. The very fact that we’re more tolerant of the actively bad than we are of the mediocre is totally illogical while still being very emotionally true, and that’s a problem because we want people to suck more.

Ok, that’s not technically true. We want people to be awesome all the time. But in the absence of that, we want them to be willing to take risks – to be willing to suck – in pursuit of their passion. And by and large, we’re pretty good at it, especially when these brave individuals truly do suck. But for them, the danger is that they’ll work hard, do better than merely sucking, but not do well enough to excel, and end up in that band of mediocrity.

That would not be so bad in its own right. If you end up in the zone of mediocrity then yes, you want to get out of it, but that depends on two things: first, you need to recognize it (which is hard, especially if you really put 100% into it) and second, you may well need as much support (or more!) as you could hope for if you had totally sucked out. So the danger of our emotional response to mediocrity is that we might end up shooting down these projects at just the point when we, as a community, are in the best position to help.

Anyway, all that said, I should add that, like many of Ryan’s broad statements, there’s a core to it that I agree with. There _are_ people out there who decide that these other things (layout, editing, production values, whatever) are unimportant, and commit less effort to them. In and of itself, this is totally reasonable – it is entirely normal to prioritize things and put more effort into the things you think are important. But for all that, I do agree there’s some baseline good-faith effort that one can expect from the products we’re expected to buy and play. Where the line for that effort can be drawn is, I fully admit, almost entirely a matter of personal taste. This makes it hard to really draw any broader generalizations from it beyond “I know it when I see it” (which, as I’ve noted, is a pretty bad metric because we suck at seeing it).

So I think the takeaway from this should be one of encouragement, not criticism. If you love your game (or whatever) and you want everyone else to love it too, then turn that love into effort. Figure out how to make it work. Push yourself to mediocrity, then find a way to pull yourself up past that. Whether that pull comes from other people, more research or just hard work doesn’t really matter. If you can get to the end and know that there is no part of your work that you let slide because it wasn’t as exciting or interesting to you, then you can rest on a rare but powerful confidence.

↑1 – So, I put great value on editors, and I know how talented many of them are, but over and above their keen eyes and steady hands, they bring something else to the equation – an implicit willingness to change. When you write something you love, and part of it doesn’t work for a test reader, there’s an instinct to blame the reader. We’re all guilty of this to one extent or another, and the real reason you want an editor is because you need someone who won’t let you get away with that.

I’m about halfway through Reality is Broken, a book about applying the principles of (video) game design to improving real life. It’s interesting enough that it will almost certainly merit a full writeup when I finish. So far it is both brilliant and profoundly flawed, and I’m not yet sure what the ultimate ratio will be.

One part that’s been much more good than bad has been talking about the things that video games do well. This is something that’s very useful to think about from a tabletop game perspective because the simple reality is that computer games have eaten a fair amount of our lunch (though don’t feel too bad, they’ve done it to movies and TV too). While a lot of the diminishment of individual product sales can be attributed to the diversification of the market (which is mostly a good thing), the scale of the hobby at large has definitely been impacted by the success of video games. As an example, there are plenty of people who might be a market for, say, D&D, but who have that itch scratched more successfully by World of Warcraft.
Accepting that premise and the paired premise that growing the hobby is a good thing (you’re not obliged to, but I do), there are two obvious responses.

First, you can design games that are more like video games, hoping to capture the interest of that segment of the audience, or even just a portion of it. This has the advantage of catering to a known market (we know the WoW players are out there, and they’re enjoying killing dragons) and of being concretely actionable (there are video game successes and failures that provide clear models). The problem is that there’s no real way to tell how sticky that market is (that is, how likely they are to stick with computers) and, more broadly, there are things that computers can simply do better than people (casually juggling huge numbers, obviously, but there are more subtle things as well).

The other option is to design games towards the things that video games do poorly or not at all. The obvious advantage of this approach is that is plays to the strengths of tabletop play (whatever you may think those are), and it is potentially a blue ocean strategy, pursuing untapped markets where there’s no real competition. However the drawbacks are daunting. First, there’s no real measure of how much of a market exists for such games, and the fear is that what market there is may already be saturated – the blue ocean may simply be a puddle. Second, there’s no clear course of action for design. Without a clear goal (like emulating video games) the overall process is one of throwing things at the market and seeing what sticks.

(There is a third approach which is worth mentioning primarily because of how it impacts discussion, not because I think it’s very valid. That is the idea that further game design is not the solution at all; the best of games already exist and, in many arguments, have existed for a long time and growth can be found in leveraging those existing assets in new ways.)

Obviously, there is a lot of room between these points, and most efforts will come down somewhere between them. For example, I don’t think it’s too outrageous to suggest that 4e was built with a healthy helping of the “more like video games” approach. That is not the same thing as saying that 4e is identical to a video game, but the influences are fairly clear. Now, I don’t mention this as criticism or praise, but rather to point out that someone has already made a very big bet on one approach. However you judge their success or failure in that, this changes the picture somewhat. If the 800 pound gorilla has already headed to the video game buffet, then you’re going to be competing with him for the shrimp cocktail, and unless you have a really compelling idea, then prepare to settle for very little shrimp.

Put most cynically, if 4e’s bet pays off, then you compete directly with WOTC in that space. If it doesn’t, then there’s a good chance it was the wrong bet. That is to say, under most outcomes, pursuing that same strategy of video game emulation is a lose-lose proposition.

Now, assuming you didn’t pack a lunch (taking the traditionalist posture), that leaves you looking at the covered buffet over where games do things computers don’t. There might be a hearty meal under those lids, or there might be spiders and dust. I dunno. But if you want to find out, it will be worth your while to think about what computers can and can’t do, and what tabletop play can and can’t do. Seeing that difference requires admitting that each approach has strengths and weaknesses, and that can be a hard thing to admit, but it’s the starting point of figuring out something really interesting.

More on this later, almost certainly.