Make Things Worse- Enabling Setbacks for

Consequential Play
0:06
Hi, everybody.

0:08
Thanks for coming down.

0:09
I'm Patrick Redding.

0:10
Before I launch into this, I'm supposed to inform all of you like at 5:00 on day three that you're
supposed to turn your mobile devices off.

0:18
At this point.

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I assume most of you've already done that.

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No, no videotaping or recording of this.

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That's a prerogative reserve for the folks at GDC who are going to be doing that.

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And I think other than that, if you have questions at the end, there are microphones that are set up in
the aisles, so you're encouraged to use those.

0:36
OK.

0:37
So I want to talk about a problem we have with lost time.

0:44
And to be clear, I'm not talking about this kind of lost time this only Wednesday, maybe by Friday this
will be kind of more relevant.

0:52
I'm actually, I'm talking about the players time.
0:55
And OK, in the spirit of this, I'm going to back up a bit.

0:58
So when a developer, you know, has put on a few years and has maybe shipped a few mass market
games, they will at some point invariably have some version of this conversation.

1:09
Why do we have the genres that we have?

1:13
You know, why have mass market games kind of settled into this particular landscape?

1:17
And the answer to that is some variation on this.

1:20
It's to maximize the production values and constrain the design space.

1:25
OK.

1:26
So AAA games, which also need to be legitimately interactive, are expected to meet kind of steadily
escalating expectations in terms of sensory immersion, in terms of accessibility, in terms of visual
quality and the like.

1:41
Designers also need to be able to limit the range of the game's outputs and minimize the amount of
energy they spend dealing with edge cases, You know, dealing with the player colliding with the
edges of the simulation.

1:54
And so there are only really kind of a few sort of games that meet both those criteria.

1:59
But to be fair, there are also plenty of games and quite a few developers, including I imagine, a few in
this room, who are, who've managed to challenge that point.

2:09
Challenge the first point, kind of say that the Triple AAA Emperor is wearing no clothes, etcetera.

2:13
But what about that second point?

2:15
So if you haven't seen it in the sort of critical path segment of many kinds of combat, Alex Hutchinson
talks about the fact that, you know, one of the reasons why game franchise genres have settled into
the kind of preoccupation that they have with combat and life and death struggles is because we can't
underestimate the value in taking people out of play and taking people off the board.

2:38
When we When you let the losing guy stick around, it generates this kind of cascading series of
problems that you then have to manage like, well, then what happens after that?

2:46
What happens next, You know, whereas when we we go with kind of existential conflicts, we're able to
really limit and constrain the scale of that problem and and and give the give us, the designers but
also the player kind of a reset button.

3:00
There's another facet to it.

3:02
This is Jasper Yul, who who wrote a book called The Art of Failure and has spoken extensively about
this.

3:06
And he points out that, you know, over the years we've also kind of trained up a generation of players
for whom this is fun, right?

3:13
Like dashing yourself at the kind of Groundhog Day cycle of of of trial and error is is a kind of fun as
long as the refractory.

3:23
Is short enough, right?

3:24
And so we're at the stage now where we're even starting to make games that are offering a
commentary about the fact that people find that sort of thing fun.

3:36
So this is the prevailing model of failure that we have right now.

3:41
I'd like to tell you that this is some kind of elegant step function, but actually this is just a Cliff.

3:46
You fall off the the failure Cliff, right?

3:49
And and it's it's a frictionless, unclimbable Cliff, and the game state collapses into something that the
player isn't capable of reversing.

3:59
Alright, so so let's say that this weird shape represents the kind of sum total of the possible states
supported by the game simulation, right?

4:08
This isn't really a very rigorous or scientific model, so but it's simple Every time.

4:12
Every enough time passes and the player will eventually cross the magic threshold that tells the game
that it should return a failed state.

4:19
So there's an interrupt, the game resets itself and the player and the and the player respawns.

4:25
Now what's interesting about that is that that big orange dot that you see over there on the far left
sits outside of that state space, right?

4:34
Why is that interesting?

4:35
Well, because what it means is that ultimately the cost of failure is external to the game, right?

4:41
Think about that.

4:42
I'm going to be willing to bet that most of the people in this room put some kind of premium on the
consistency of the player experience.

4:48
But what we're saying is that this one very critical recurring aspect of the player experience, namely
failure, incurs a cost that can't possibly be measured because the value of a person's time is
completely dependent on who they are and the kind of life that they live, right?

5:04
It depends on a number of things.

5:08
But it's safe to say that even if they're playing the same game, that the cost for this guy is going to be
different from the cost for this guy.
5:15
All right, well, that's what we have right now.

5:18
And implicit in that is a kind of bargain that exists between the player and the game, right?

5:22
Which says that in return for submitting themselves to this binary failure model, players have an
expectation that they can evaluate the risks associated with the actions that they're about to take.

5:35
And also that they have enough of an understanding of the game state that they can kind of manage
its complexity, they can plan for it.

5:41
In other words, the player says to the, you know, the game says to the player, I'm winnable.

5:47
Now, we also have to acknowledge, and this is great, right, that in recent years there's been a shift.

5:52
You know, we've seen new games all the time that are challenging the established assumption about
what happens when a failure, a player fails.

6:00
But we can think of these as approaches that are trying to kind of sweeten the deal for the player,
right?

6:06
They're still dealing with the currency of player time, but doing it in a way of that's kind of it's because
it's a way of offloading the problem.

6:13
So they're trying to apply some multiplier to the failures effects on the game and make sure that it's
worth more than just lost time and also at the same time start to bring back some of those
consequences into the game state.

6:27
So what are some examples of that?

6:29
So we see in kind of persistent world games and in Mmos this kind of commitment to the idea that
you know your resources are recoverable, you know your stuff has a persistence in the game, and that
generates it's own kind of tension.

6:42
You respond and it immediately turns into a race to try to recover what you may have dropped before
it slips into the lava, as it were.

6:48
Right.

6:49
Some games give the player a mechanic for managing the cost of their own potential failure while still
staying within the kind of narrative logic of the game or the metaphor of the game and then tweak it
to make sure it doesn't become an exploit, you know, And we've seen an an interesting evolution of
that.

7:03
You saw that between Bioshock One and Bioshock 2, something happens with the Vita chambers, you
know?

7:09
So when you use them, there's this kind of reset factor to what's going on with the rest of the world.

7:14
And it becomes a way of of preventing the kind of grind of of going up against big Daddies in these
sort of boss like moments in sports games where you have an ongoing dynasty mode or in any squad
game where the player is managing and investing in a rotating roster of player characters.

7:32
There's this interesting effect where as a particular character gets better and better and becomes
more of an asset to the larger goal, the player's own sense of investment causes them to second
guess their use right.

7:44
So it's that problem of, you know, you should become overly protective of the one guy that can make
a difference in the battle.

7:49
You know you don't want them to get killed, you don't want them to end up on the injured list or
dead.

7:52
It's a very strange, very strange phenomenon with that.

8:01
I think it's also interesting.

8:02
We have games which are very transparent about the fact that when the player fails, it's kicking off a
completely new mode of play, right?
8:10
It's basically, you know, if you're playing Max Payne 3 or you're playing Borderlands for example, and
you get killed under certain circumstances, The game simply stops everything and presents you with a
mini game of trying to track down the person responsible for your death and and take them out in
order to kind of recover the right to continue with the game.

8:26
And a game like SSX or Forza, there's a rewind feature which you know, becomes increasingly valuable
the further into the into the session you are and potentially allows you to recover that loss about
having to completely restart everything.

8:39
And then still other games establish an entire resource practically around failure, right?

8:43
The idea that as you're grinding your way through things, you experience this kind of specific loss, loss
of humanity and Dark Souls, for example.

8:51
And of course, we're seeing games like Rogue Legacy, which kind of bring combinations of these
strategies together, right?

8:57
This sort of recoverable resources linked with the the kind of upgrade loss in the form of your heirs
who inherit some combination of these things in a modified way is kind of the very essence of that
game.

9:12
But these are all strategies ultimately for keeping the player from running away with the game, right?

9:18
Keeping them from colliding with the limits of the simulation, you know?

9:21
But hard failure conditions, no matter how you slice it, are kind of inelegant.

9:24
I mean, there's specific circumstances which they just flat out don't feel that great.

9:28
Like for example in multiplayer games, the session must go on.

9:31
It's not going to stop just because one person dies.
9:34
So guess what, You're going to have to deal with that.

9:37
So that's why we would like to look at how to bring that player mitigation back into the fold of the
core game experience.

9:48
We want to expose the player to survivable changes in their immediate situation, from which they can
then find their way back to something stronger or something more sustainable.

9:59
OK, so think about why a player spins out in the middle of a race.

10:05
It's because they're doing the thing they're supposed to be doing.

10:08
They're driving fast.

10:10
They're driving as fast as they possibly can.

10:11
They're driving too fast, which is really what they should be doing.

10:15
And and what they're doing is they're going so fast that they're exceeding the performance envelope
of the vehicle that they're driving or their own skills, you know, And so depending on some other
related driving skills, that might be fine.

10:27
That might be the opportunity for them to kind of rest control back of the vehicle and get things back
on track with a minimal loss of momentum.

10:36
Sure, some players, depending on what their motivations are trying to beat their best time, they're
going to, they're going to stop and reload and go back to the beginning of that.

10:42
But for for a certain core group of players, the important thing is that they've maintained the
continuity of that experience and this this is the function of a set back.

10:52
So when we talk about setbacks, just to be clear, you know, these are arising out of the game's low
level mechanics.
11:01
It's not something we design into the map, right?

11:05
We're talking about something that is not a forced mode change.

11:10
It's not an exotic gameplay sequence.

11:11
It's not a scripted moment where Nathan Drake is tossed out of the back of a cargo plane in mid air.

11:16
Even though that obviously fits the narrative definition of a set back.

11:19
That's not what we mean.

11:23
We're talking about a prolonged period of game play, and it arises from the same systems that the
players using the rest of the time.

11:31
It's preventing runaway behaviour, but it's still allowing play to continue survivably and it's perceptibly
altering the state of the game in some meaningful way.

11:42
It's interesting.

11:45
So this experience, if we want to think of it aesthetically, is directly analogous actually to going
through a reversal in the kind of traditional narrative sense it yields.

11:56
That water cooler, anecdote moment that's completely the player's own.

12:00
So there I was.

12:03
But dynamically, what it means is that the system defined by the player and the game interacting at
runtime is able to absorb serious shocks and recover without interruption.

12:15
It's resilient in the way that economists typically use the term.
12:19
So what we want to do is we want to replace the failure Cliff with something a little softer and a little
more reversible, all right?

12:26
Something that follows a bit more of the kind of stimulus response curve.

12:30
And that kind of behaviour emerges from having a feedback system that prevents the player from
progressing unimpeded into meaningless degenerate end state, while at the same time plucking them
out of that, kicking them back into a more volatile game condition, and which success is by no means
insured, but without driving them to the point where they rage quit.

12:52
Now this isn't my idea.

12:55
This isn't new.

12:56
It was established by a lot of different people, including notably Clint Hawking in his 2009 talk on
improvisational play, which was entitled, appropriately enough, fault tolerance.

13:04
And in describing the players experience on Far Cry 2 for example, which was, you know, this kind of
friction generated by systems like malaria, Max is laughing at me, weapons jamming, you know, fire,
probably getting fire, all these various other functions.

13:19
You know, the player is, is getting hit with these kind of small inputs and they rarely die from these
events, but it's unpredictable, right?

13:28
It forces them to adapt and it's exactly because they are small and unpredictable that the player
doesn't feel this kind of compulsion to to quit and reload.

13:38
So just to quickly illustrate the difference between what a failure is and a set back is if you're flying in
a helicopter and your main rotor goes out, that's a fail.

13:47
If you're flying in a helicopter and your tail rotor goes out, that's a set back.

13:51
So basically you now need to look for a place to land as soon as possible.
13:54
You need to modify the way you're using the helicopter to sort of rely on auto rotation, and you need
to somehow get the thing down without loss of craft or crew.

14:04
OK, well that's cute, but we need a more formal definition than that.

14:07
So a set back needs to disrupt the players focus on their current low level activity.

14:14
It also needs to revise the player's awareness of the game's state or context.

14:22
In other words, a set back can be defined as that moment when the player's immediate goal changes
unexpectedly.

14:33
That says that setbacks are built out of the switching off between what the player thought they were
going to be doing and a new priority that's absolutely critical to the continuation of play.

14:44
So if we can work with that definition right away, we can start to understand the scope of potential
setbacks in terms of the broader system of player goals.

14:53
So luckily there's a lot of work out there that establishes general taxonomies of player goals.

14:59
And the good news is they're mostly pretty finite.

15:01
Lots of people are already familiar with Bjork and Halpen's patterns and game design, so I've kind of
adapted the list that they use.

15:07
There's thirteen goals that they talk about.

15:09
This is them.

15:10
Yeah, There they come.

15:13
Return them a little bit to put them in verb form.
15:15
But out of these 13, what's interesting is if you just start with the transitions that go from a single goal
A to a single goal B, and from that same goal B back to goal A, because for our purposes, those are
distinct.

15:27
Out of those thirteen goals, you're going to get about 650 unique transitions.

15:31
A little more, a little less.

15:32
I don't know, that's not too many.

15:34
And out of those, we only really care about the subset that's systemic, recoverable, and interesting,
but also the ones that keep the player in the sweet spot between wanting to quit the game and trade
it in or being so inconsequential as to get lost in the noise of moment to moment challenge.

15:53
All right, so that's an interesting model, but it's still too abstract.

15:57
I want to try applying it to the types of games I'm the most familiar with.

16:00
So I want to look at the stealth genre.

16:02
I want to look at failure in stealth games, which typically looks like this.

16:09
So classically, stealth games have relied on kind of four key pillars.

16:13
You've got the fragility of the game state, the fact that you know the game starts the player out
undetected by the game's ecosystems, and the player's challenge is to try to preserve that state
moving forward.

16:25
There's the fact that that ecosystem is a simulation, right?

16:30
It exists independently of the player, it's analogue for the most part.

16:34
So the player needs to use their intuition, their observational skills in order to read the AI, in order to
read the environment and understand the gameplay potential there, and the player is really
incentivised to do that by the fact that they're not very powerful.

16:47
Typically in the kind of classical model the game imposes often survival horror, levels of scarcity in
terms of resources, in terms of ammunition and health and and all of the other resources at the
player's disposal.

16:59
And if they do get into a fight, they're better off running away, typically.

17:05
Now the flip side to that is that if these games are richly systemic, as they often are, they're typically
pretty high agency, right?

17:14
Players are afforded a lot of tools and opportunities for playing with the AI and finding creative
solutions to get through a problem.

17:23
Now, the classical hardship of stealth, though, was always that almost anything the player does
disturbs the system, right?

17:30
And once the player falls off that what's called the detection Cliff, it's hard to support many ways for
them to continue moving forward.

17:37
It forces the player ultimately to be a perfectionist, sometimes literally by returning the game a game
over if an alarm is tripped, or at best forcing the player to to make a run for it.

17:50
So the early solution to that has been to go through some kind of strange contortions to limit the
player's exposure.

17:58
That leads to some sort of arbitrary level design solutions, like resetting the AI after each section, and
that doesn't really encourage experimentation.

18:08
So that model of stealth maps to these kinds of goal transitions.

18:13
So this is this is classical stealth in terms of goal transitions the way I was describing it.

18:17
So from this initial state, the player either needs to explore the world in order to reveal the various
objectives available to them, or maybe because it's on some kind of formal mission structure, they just
need to get from A to B.

18:28
They just need to get into the mission space.

18:30
And then from there they need to align themselves to be able to go through a collection of objectives,
some of which are probably mandatory, some of which may be may be optional.

18:39
And the main disruption occurs when they come into first contact with the enemy and have to get
past them undetected.

18:46
And they need to paint some kind of picture of the state of the game and understand where the
enemy is AT and what they're doing.

18:52
Which leads to usually some fairly trivial goal shifting, either to realign or to maybe get to some kind
of safe haven.

19:01
And this is notable because for much of play in this kind of game, doing nothing is actually a really
good strategy.

19:11
And the player has these kind of extended periods of stimulated planning, not exactly action-packed.

19:17
And when there is a major set back, frankly, it almost collapses the game entirely.

19:20
And assuming that it's not a straight up game over, the players probably booking it.

19:26
OK.

19:27
So what we'd like to do is let the player recover from those kinds of situations and restore the game
to a condition where they're hidden, where they're back to being stealthy and they're doing what they
like to do.

19:38
And we want them to be able to do that systemically.
19:42
So jamming open the detection window by preventing a single instance of the AI from wrecking
everything and from propagating the detection to the rest of the world.

19:51
We want to assume that if you're some kind of elite spy or thief or assassin or hitman, that you have it
in your ability to take out that one stupid guy that's going to sound the alarm and kind of climb your
way back up the detection Cliff in order to get into a state of stealth.

20:08
All right, so.

20:11
For the rest of the talk, what we're going to do is we're going to kind of go through and look at kinds
of gameplay models that are doing what I'm talking about.

20:19
We're going to look at recovery dynamics, and there are a lot of different ways that players try to
modulate their ability.

20:26
Sort of.

20:26
The games try to modulate the player's ability to recover, and when we look at them in terms of goal
transitions, it starts to become clear which strategies do a good job of exposing the player to good
setbacks and which ones don't.

20:41
So the save anywhere model is going to be familiar to anybody who's been playing a lot of Skyrim on
PC, right?

20:47
You've been writing the quick save, quick load buttons.

20:50
You know, this can be satisfying.

20:52
I mean, it's in it's own way, but make no mistake, it degenerates the game, right?

20:56
In terms of our model.

20:57
It effectively reduces any situation in the game to incremental experimentation, and that is a valid way
to play that game.

21:06
But it does quickly hollow out whatever sense of context the player has over time, and it renders it
mostly inconsequential in the context of the game.

21:16
Unfortunately, the the console friendly flip side of that doesn't fare a whole lot better, right?

21:23
In this case, the player in a corridor shooter simply has to endure the designer's intentions and reach
the next trigger volume.

21:32
In fact, they might not actually have to do anything else.

21:34
They might not have to fire a shot Again.

21:38
That act of traversal to get from point A to point B effectively collapses the game into a challenge of
OF that totally undermines the mechanical tension.

21:53
So another solution is for games to deliver what's really kind of 1000 foot view on the game world and
accompanied by kind of a rich information layer.

22:02
If you compare Clay's Mark of the Ninja with, for example, Dishonoured 2 games that share several
core mechanics, the side scrolling format means that players can see exactly what part of the world
they can disturb, and they have a lot of UI tools for monitoring the state of AI, even when they're
obscured, when they're hidden behind a wall or a door, And when something does happen that
disrupts the player's intentions, it slips the game back into a goal of alignment.

22:32
And so this has a kind of interesting effect.

22:34
It it sort of having such a complete tactical picture of the world around you effectively turns the game
into kind of a strategy game.

22:41
Even though it's, you know, it's this 2D side scrolling platforming stealth experience.

22:45
And you know, Mark of the Ninja is a hugely satisfying game.
22:48
It just it happens to rely on a different mechanism in order to deliver that sense of set back.

22:54
It's not coming from necessarily a lack of information the way it would in in a more immersive style of
stealth game and plus which because of the format that it uses, there is a more rapid turn around
when you fail and need to reload.

23:06
So it isn't, it isn't punishing in that respect.

23:12
You know, we talked earlier about how we put a premium on the consistency of the player experience,
but some games will change the rules on the fly as a hedge against players selling short when the
chips are down.

23:23
And so they basically stated that that consistency is not as important as trying to keep the player in
the game, and that's a valid choice.

23:30
You can sort of see the carrot version of this with fighting games that feature damage scaling or or
some kind of desperation mode.

23:36
And ultimately you know what that what happens is the player learns over time that they're that the
trick is to absorb punishment until the game delivers them the means of recovery, right?

23:48
And the effect of that is again to reduce the sense of consequence to the game.

23:54
Now a stick version of that can be seen in games that use some kind of token based damage system,
so the players that are in an otherwise skill based game can end up suffering certain kinds of setbacks
deterministically, right?

24:06
So to use the stealth example, AI enemies in the Batman Arkham games who will start targeting
destructible gargoyles and challenge them as a way of interfering with the player's ability to
manoeuvre and use the kind of Batman swinging around, Right?

24:20
Well, the mechanism is the same, but actually the players perception, perception of it is the polar
opposite because in their view the game has taken something away from them and now it takes them
time to get it back.
24:29
So in that case the perception is that it's a it is that it's pushing against them, it's it's it's frustrating or
foiling their attempts to do the thing that they want to do.

24:40
So those kinds of tweaks need to be applied conservatively.

24:42
So I want to talk for a second about the example of Dungeons of the Endless.

24:47
This is interesting, right?

24:48
We have this sort of rogue like experience where the players need to manage limited resources in
order to get to the exit if you will of the of the current section that they're in.

24:56
That's pretty straightforward.

24:57
What what spices it up is the fact that then we have these additional rooms that are kind of these
mystery boxes and the and the the risk reward trade off is by opening some of them up you can
potentially add to your resource pool but you can also unleash additional horrors on top of the ones
that are already standing in your path, right?

25:15
And so this generates a a a fair amount of tension in a very simple way.

25:18
Now what's interesting is the simplest kind of tension Economy is really just in a sports game.

25:23
It's when you have two teams that are both scoring points at the same time.

25:29
So this type of approach applies to a number of different games, and it's very interesting to see that it
crosses a lot of genre genre boundaries.

25:36
That kind of simple Red Queen scenario with a kind of moving goal posts is forces or sort of pressures
the player to switch goals when the point deficit between them and the other side gets too big, right?

25:47
So that would be what we'd call like a single axis tension economy.
25:51
The points can go up, the point spread can go down, but whether I have four points or 12 points
matters only in terms of how many points the other side has, right?

25:59
And so that sets the context for the game.

26:03
What that means in terms of goal transitions is that it forces the player to abandon the kind of luxury
objectives.

26:09
You know, the collection of of objectives you kind of see on the far left over there in favour of the
most expedient goals such as taking the opposing force out of play, are going all in on the main prize.

26:20
Now you get a more nuanced output intention economies.

26:24
When you add a second economy that just consists of time, that's slowly chipping away.

26:30
Right?

26:30
So you can take a game like Rim Capsule, which is real time.

26:33
The player has to watch the clock.

26:34
They're frantically completing all of these critical tasks, you know, building their bases, scanning their
monoliths, all the stuff that they've got to get done within 45 minutes and and then just waiting for
that exact moment to like pull back to defensive positions because the next big wave, increasingly
large wave of enemies is going to come in and try to mitigate the effects of that.

26:54
It it works in a turn based game as well.

26:56
So you could take Invisible Ink, the game formerly known as Incognita.

27:00
And every time the player's little team of spies makes a move, it's depleting 1 little tick from this kind
of finite pool of time that's available to them to complete the mission.
27:10
And so when it hits zero, the whole map goes into alert, you know and suddenly the reinforcements
show up hot on your on your heels.

27:16
And and so this puts an interesting counter pressure on the player where they have to decide how
greedy they want to be, right?

27:22
They have to decide how many of these juicy optional objectives that are available to them they want
to try to go after.

27:27
And and of course they're willing to overextend themselves a little bit each time when they know that
the SWAT guys are coming in through the through the main doors and are going to chase them down
to the exit.

27:38
And so with the addition of that second economy it kind of brings the dynamics of the game more
fully in into view.

27:43
And and it's what you're seeing is that it adds this layer of suspense to the players decision making
because it's no longer feasible for the player to succeed just through simple attrition.

27:55
Alright, well that's interesting, that's interesting.

27:56
So let's look at games that offer a kind of level playing field and symmetry between opposing sides.

28:02
This applies to everything from head to head fighting games to sports games to some Moba's.

28:07
And what we can say is that table turning, as we're going to call it here, becomes enabled when the
sort of mid level, kind of minute to minute play between the two sides consisted of them being
engaged in a symmetric back and forth contest of control over territory.

28:22
And then that's driven or enabled by this low level or second to second game play.

28:27
It's basically kind of like rock paper scissors contest between individual units but it's perturbed or
spiked by short term power ups, right.
28:35
So that's what's kind of driving this And so and what comes out of that is that the player's immediate
focus, both the player and also his opposition was kind of a mirror image of him is is shifting back and
forth between goals and counter goals.

28:48
You know goals and the goals that are designed to block those goals and and the opposition is doing
the same thing.

28:54
And this is relevant in talking about stealth games because it powers this kind of ongoing role reversal
that you get between the hunter and the haunted.

29:03
Particularly in games with the AI is operating with a a fairly strong enough perception model.

29:08
And you know the same conditions that allow the player to break line of sight with the AI and state
and remain hidden are also depriving the player of a full picture of the game state of the of the game
world.

29:20
And it's making it risky for them to move out of hiding because the wrong move could bring them
into immediate close quarters contact with an enemy and and alert the entire space and cause the
situation to flip itself.

29:34
You get interesting setbacks emerging when the game dynamically plays with the amount of space
that's actually available to the player on the fly.

29:44
So in GTA, this happens because the verbs available to the player when they're driving anyway are all
really designed to increase the localised amount of chaos in the world, the amount of destruction that
they're putting into the world.

29:58
And that becomes a magnet for this sort of aggressive law enforcement response.

30:02
And we all know what how that ends up right that you get this cop, cop, card, dog pile that results in
clogged roads, and the roads are already hard enough to drive through.

30:11
It triggers this immediate goal transition where the player, you know has to switch from paying
attention to all of the various mission objectives they may have had active at that point, to realigning
themselves around just, you know, stealth and hiding the car and eliminating enemies and and and
trying to overcome the kind of amassing numbers of vehicles that are getting in their way.
30:30
And it's forcing all these snap decisions and maneuvers until things are getting progressively more
claustrophobic and clogged and clogged and clogged.

30:37
At which point the player of their own volition entirely elects, usually to make a mode switch.

30:42
They abandoned their car and they take off on foot just like in real life.

30:50
By leaning heavily on the destructibility of cover, Battlefield 4, for example, can set up conditions
where these where the players who are taking the smartest tactical decisions right they're moving into
buildings that afford them a a a good line of sight on their enemies and creating excellent fire
positions for them.

31:09
And so doing are of course becoming huge magnets then for return fire, which necessarily creates this
disproportionate effect when the entire building comes crashing down.

31:19
So.

31:19
So through that small action, that seemingly intelligent move from a tactical point of view, that player
has set off a chain of events that results in this kind of massive re reformatting or restructuring the
Battlefield space.

31:33
When we look at stealth games, we can see that this approach approves interesting setbacks just by
flipping the dynamic lighting state of the game.

31:39
So in other words, you leave a dead body lying around, the AI gets disturbed, the next thing you
know, the lights come on.

31:45
So what's interesting about that is that area denial does not have to rely on literally physically
blocking the player.

31:51
It can just simply be taking an area that was dark and now making it light, and now it's not opportune
for the player to move through that space anymore.

32:02
So with Civilization 5 and the transition to Civ Five, there were four key rule changes that that helped
to power some very specific kinds of set back situations.

32:14
1.

32:15
Unit production became limited, became curtailed to the point where individual units became rather
precious.

32:23
The second was that it became possible for an individual unit to lose a skirmish, to kind of suffer a
defeat without actually being eliminated, you know, and and need to kind of retreat and rest up and
recover in in order to remain in play.

32:36
There were also there was also the introduction of the new hex grid, which created increase the
number of adjacent playable spaces in the map, and also the restriction of of a single unit per hex.

32:50
So what those four rule changes ultimately did is combined to put a powerful increase in emphasis on
laying siege as the primary mechanism of eliminating enemies on the map.

33:01
Now, as in real life, laying Siege is dependent on all of the elements of the siege holding the line, and
that is jeopardized when a single unit is damaged and the player finds themselves tempted to
withdraw that unit because it's so precious to a safe distance in order to be able to recover.

33:19
So the player needs to decide they need to go through this goal transition choice as to whether they
are going to focus on a collection of goals that are guaranteed to try to increase the survivability of
the individual unit, or a collection of goals that are focused on the success of the larger strategic
action very much consistent with the fantasy of of playing strategically.

33:44
And it's worth noting that those kinds of sacrifices at a granular level are can also matched in some
games by supporting the player having to take much larger sacrifices.

33:52
In other words, being willing to lose large swaths of territory ultimately in order to to win the larger
war.

34:01
Now, I mentioned before in Clint's fault tolerance to talk how exposure to potential setbacks was a
characteristic of improvisational games.

34:12
You know, the player is kind of constantly moving back and forth between cooking up plans for their
next action and then executing those plans.

34:21
And the game features features lots of small sources of friction that combine in order to kick the
player out of that execution phase and quickly back into planning and response.

34:31
You know, And Far Cry 2 provides an interesting case study on how that unfolds in a stealth game.

34:36
But it was also an explicit part of the design challenges on Splinter Cell Conviction, the creative
director of that game, Max Bland, who's actually sitting in the front row if you guys want to wave it in.

34:49
One of his stated goals was to equip the player with multiple ways out of situations, and that led to
the establishing of the kind of these three gameplay axes with the intention that players can be
impeded on one or maybe even two of these axes and still have at least one Ave.

35:05
left for pulling off a clever escape.

35:07
So there's axes of 3D navigation, infiltration and combat.

35:12
And so when we look at at the outcome of adding that focus on having ways out and offering
multiple axes of both input and output for the player, what that does is it kicks the the player into goal
transitions more frequently.

35:27
And some of those goal transitions exist on top of what we what we would consider to be the classical
stealth loop.

35:33
So that extended loop is when the player gets into trouble with the AI, right?

35:40
The new loop was termed prepare, execute, and vanish.

35:43
And you can see that at each of these stages, prepare, execute and vanish.

35:46
We're talking about a specific set of goal transitions that allow the player to 1st move from an act of
reconnaissance, keeping eyes on where the targets are, where the enemies are, being able to then
take action to deal with them either in an aggressive way or in a more stealth oriented way, and then
ultimately regaining the state of being being stealthy or hidden.

36:08
And the team introduced new mechanics specifically aligned with the PEV game loop, so they let the
player mark enemies in order to keep tabs on them as they moved around the environment, even if
they were obscured.

36:19
It gave them the ability to to eliminate those marks if they earned that token through taking stealth
takedowns.

36:25
And it also let them see their last known position giving them insight into the A is thinking and
planning and creating opportunities for them to lay ambushes or set traps.

36:33
And it's important to note, and I'll I'll talk about this a bit later on as a as an as an important feature of
set back generating that those mechanics were not simply added wholesale, but they were kind of
nuanced expansions of existing features of the game that retained that kind of deep, rich
interconnectedness with the other mechanics of the game.

36:51
So that it wasn't going to undermine the player's ability to use all the various tools of stealth, but was
designed really to be added on to that.

37:00
Now the general lesson from improvisation is that games where setbacks emerge along multiple axes
can also provide players with an opportunity to adapt or adjust their approach along the same axes.

37:14
And we talk about ways to challenge or impede the player along specific axes, and that gets into the
idea of having orthogonalized ingredients in the game.

37:20
And in this case, I'm going to talk specifically about orthogonalized enemies.

37:24
So like Left 4 Dead, for example, uses kind of specific versions of the infected that are designed to
exploit the kind of routine moments of vulnerability that bubble up for individual players, often
creating moments that can draw of jeopardy, that can then drive cooperative support.

37:39
Very much part of the kind of Co-op dynamic of that game.

37:43
But also, Left 4 Dead's AI director creates the right level of unpredictability to the infected hordes and
the appearance of specialized infected.

37:53
You know, in Gears of Wars Horde mode, you can kind of imagine the ideal playthrough for this.

37:58
It's like the players spend just the right amount of time setting up fortifications.

38:02
They spend just the right amount of time, you know, collect, running around collecting ammo and
picking up guns they think are going to be good.

38:07
And they they get back into their defensive positions in just the right amount of time to sort of plan
their strategy and just before the the next wave of enemies attack.

38:15
And the reality is, is that the appearance, surprise, appearance of kind of heavily orthogonalized
enemies into that mix typically has the effect of tipping that apple cart over, right.

38:26
You know, suddenly, OK, our plan didn't account for that particular enemy showing up and burrowing
his way up through our ranks.

38:32
And so now we have to deal with that.

38:33
And then the aftermath of that creates a bunch of knock on effects that the players will then spend
the next several waves trying to recover from.

38:42
So to go back to our stealth example, you know on the follow up to Conviction Splinter Cell Blacklist,
the team continued to build on gameplay axes that were established on Conviction.

38:52
And the design lead Laurent Melville hit on this idea of using specialized archetypes in order to inhibit
the players freedom of action on specific combinations of axes.

39:01
And it's it's interesting, it's uniquely challenging to use this kind of solution on a realistic game like
Splinter Cell because unlike Gears or Left 4 Dead, the differentiation can't be exaggerated to the point
of fantasy.

39:14
You know the variations on the game play abilities of the AI and even even their appearance in their
their silhouette has to remain credible within a real world context.

39:21
So.

39:22
So the specific archetypes that they came up with were, you know, the very armour centric heavy that
would challenge the player on navigation and combat a couple of different units actually that would
inhibit the player in infiltration and combat.

39:34
One of which was a dog, which had some limitations because he was a dog, couldn't really
communicate tactically with the humans and had this kind of imprecise smell mechanic for finding the
player.

39:45
But that was coupled with a corresponding human enemy, the commando that had a little more on
the ball in terms of being able to see in the dark and move quickly.

39:54
A drone operator that would interfere actively with the the the player's technology and with their
goggles and their ability to move around in the dark, as well as delivering autonomous drones that
could challenge the player along with 3D navigational paths.

40:06
And then ultimately, kind of the Super archetype, the sniper, which only appears about halfway
through the game that can actually challenge the player on all three axes.

40:14
So with that in mind, what's interesting then is to go back and revisit that extended progression of
goal transitions that we associate with classical stealth, plus prepare, execute, and vanish.

40:25
And you can kind of see where each of these archetypes motivates the player to switch their focus.

40:31
So with the heavy, you can see where the Heavy is the heaviest focus on navigation and combat is
forcing goal switches there between the kind of exploration and traversal stages and realignment.

40:42
And then later on between in within the execution phase of the of the Prepare, execute, vanish loop,
you can look at the dog and see where the dog still blocking the player on combat is also in addition
also blocking the player on the infiltration level.

40:56
So this is pushing the player to have to move into a Recon phase, trying to understand a bit better
their their lay of the land and their situational awareness to understand where the dog's coming from
and what they're going to be able to do to get away from them.

41:08
And then ultimately the sniper hitting them on all three.

41:10
So you can see where the problem potentially lies with that particular archetype.

41:14
All right, So that's, that's them on paper.

41:16
I mean, you don't typically deal with them in a vacuum.

41:21
They're almost always presented in combination with kind of the, the generic grunt AI.

41:25
So it's interesting to look at what happens in the kind of more typical scenario, representative,
representative scenario.

41:31
You know, the player enters the sort of kind of sniff radius, the olfactory radius of the dog the dog
raises, raises a bit of a fuss.

41:39
The human AI treat that as a bit of a disturbance, same as like a broken light bulb or a door that
shouldn't have been left open.

41:45
And eventually the dog begin under begins undertaking a kind of random walk that will
deterministically lead him to the player if the player doesn't do something about it.

41:53
And so the kind of robust move in this case is to take advantage of the fact that the dog isn't really
challenging the player on 3D navigation and use that as the tool for staging an escape.

42:02
But sometimes it doesn't work out and the dog pulls the player out from cover and and the entire
map gets alerted and they find themselves exposed.

42:12
Now in the case of the sniper, you have an archetype that can engage the player at about 150% the
distance of the other AI and is able to see in the dark using the laser on their rifle.

42:24
And so that can create immediate problems for the player if they're relying solely on darkness as a as
a way of staying hidden.

42:30
It can also create problems with the players relying on using their 3D navigation in order to try to stay
away from the usual prying eyes of the AI, because the sniper's usually in a position to see them.

42:41
And often if the player just simply gets involved in a normal run-of-the-mill altercation with one of the
other AI, then the sniper's in a position to put fire on them very effectively right away.

42:50
OK, so that's you can start to see right away where that becomes a pretty substantial force multiplier.

42:55
So here's the really scary prospect dog time sniper.

43:03
And so in this scenario, the worst case scenario is that the dog pulls the player out from cover and the
player gets shot in the head.

43:12
But just as likely to happen is that the player, aware of the fact that there's a dog around and knowing
that they need to move quickly in order to avoid that scenario, simply runs around the corner and
gets shot in the head.

43:24
So there's an important lesson there.

43:27
And so I'm going to, I'm going to try to wrap things up by talking about the insights that come out of
that.

43:32
Out of all of the things that we've just talked about the 1st is that when we use orthogonalization and
these kind of defined game axes as a tool for both putting friction on the player but also providing
the player with channels for surviving and recovering from the set back.

43:49
It's very important that those axes be agnostic to all of the various scenarios and and specialization
forces that we normally inflict on the player, right.

43:58
It doesn't do you any good to have three axes if the player is only ever interested in using one of
them at any given time, or if the level design of the game blocks the player from using all but one of
them at any given time.
44:12
That's not going to yield a set back.

44:13
That's just going to yield frustration.

44:15
So it was important that, you know, it's important that in a stealth game, 3D navigation, infiltration,
combat, however you want to define those axes are of interest to a player regardless of whether
they're a hyper traditional stealth player or somebody who's a little more action oriented.

44:32
The other thing lesson, which should have been fairly evident from the example that I used,
admittedly it's a data point of one, but I think it's fairly compelling, is that second order combinations
of set back ingredients can often generate frustration very, very quickly and so they have to be used
with a great deal of care.

44:51
I think 1 interesting observation that we made was that ultimately, if you take a classical stealth model
and then give the player tools for surviving altercations and continuing play and being able to extend
that experience into other areas, there is a general tendency for the game to push very, very quickly
into kind of arranged encounters with the AI.

45:15
And if that's not what you want, if you don't want the game, if you know the game to be telling the
player, great, you're playing a shooter now, then there needs to be some specific design around how
to prevent that.

45:26
And I have some thoughts on it, which I'll get to in a second.

45:29
And then ultimately, there's the danger of additional breadth, right?

45:32
We talked about the idea that you need to have mechanics that will help support these extended
loops of play, so that players feel like they have tools in order to help take advantage of the
opportunities afforded to them by the setbacks and be able to feel clever and use those opportunities
to come up with a more successful outcome.

45:49
But all of those features you still need to be richly interconnected with all of the other mechanics the
players using the rest of the time.

45:57
Otherwise you end up with a shallow mess that the player somehow has to learn and then interpret
and decide how to use instead of a real opportunity to develop ongoing mastery in the game.
46:07
So it's important that those features be be be applied judiciously and not and not in a giant mess of
new new GAC.

46:18
OK, I haven't had a visual for a while.

46:21
My favorite moment in Far Cry 3 was when I'd get harassed by cassowaries.

46:28
Cassowaries suck.

46:31
And actually, it doesn't matter if it was a cassowary or a cow or, you know, actually getting attacked by
a tiger isn't like the most exciting thing that happens to you in Far Krithi.

46:38
It's it's when you're in the middle of, like, lining up a target through your sniper scope.

46:42
You're about to take out an outpost and all of a sudden you *** **** butted by a cow until you fall off
a Cliff cliffs again.

46:48
It's a theme.

46:49
I guess so, But there's a very important lesson to be learned there, right?

46:54
Like for most of the rest of the game, you're getting into long range altercations with enemies that fall
back behind cover, take out a gun and shoot at you.

47:02
I have never been shot at in my entire life, Knock on wood, right?

47:06
I have, however, been chased by a dog, menaced by a schoolyard bully, had a drunk take a swing at
me in a bar.

47:13
Like, I know what it feels like to be to be menaced by somebody who's coming after me at close
quarters with intent to do bodily harm, right.
47:21
Most of us know that feeling, unfortunately.

47:25
And the reality is, is that it's super visceral.

47:27
It's hard wired into our system.

47:29
We respond in a really, in a really emphatic, atavistic kind of way when we're menaced in that fashion
because it's part of our wiring.

47:36
And I think what's interesting and it's an interesting challenge and it's something that I have not seen
executed especially well in games, but I think it's it, it it's a clue that points to the way forward,
particularly with stealth games.

47:47
If we want to try to support greater setbacks and richer setbacks is to try to encourage encounters
that are like that.

47:55
Try to encourage, you know, try to invest in AI and invest in enemies that want to move in for close
quarter encounters with the player and menaces in that fashion, you know.

48:04
But that means being willing to step away from the model that we use all the time when we're making
kind of like modern day sort of geopolitical military style games, which is the guy pulls out a gun and
shoots at you because you know everybody's got a gun.

48:16
So I think I think that's an interesting, it raises an interesting question and it's an interesting
opportunity that I'd like to see more people take advantage of.

48:23
So as a quick recap, I only have two points.

48:26
The 1st is you want setbacks in your game.

48:30
You need to figure out how to describe your game in terms of goal transitions, and it doesn't matter
what taxonomy of goals you like or choose to use what flavor you want to go with.

48:38
You just need to have a set and you need to be able to look at your game and kind of objectively
evaluate what's going on in the game that way.

48:46
And the other part of it is, once you've started doing that, you're looking for specific setbacks that are
going to keep the player in the sweet spot.

48:53
They can't just be little bumps in the road that they're not going to even notice, and they're also not
going to make them want to rage quit.

48:58
And that's it.

49:00
That's how it works.

49:11
We have a lot of time for questions.

49:12
If anybody wants to ask any.

49:17
Yo, Hi.

49:19
Very interesting talk and it's great.

49:21
A lot of it seems to relate very strongly to strategy games which I work on as well, which is it's very
interesting to see the correlations.

49:28
I I think, I think strategy games probably have been have been supporting and dealing with setbacks
as a as a thing, as a dynamic longer than anybody else has.

49:38
So it's it's it's not surprising.

49:41
I think there's still lessons to be learned from, from looking at a lot of strategy games.

49:44
So one thing I'm curious about though is you started out describing sort of the danger or the the fall,
the bad part about having binary fail conditions in that you're basically costing your players time,
which isn't intrinsic to the game.
50:01
So it's kind of a frustration point.

50:04
The setbacks you described are all super interesting, but they seem to all just be steps along the way
to a still binary fail condition.

50:12
So you're still going to.

50:13
Yeah.

50:13
So I'm curious as to whether you have any insight into how you can get those setbacks to expand
beyond that into maybe player motivations that exist outside of just straight up failure so that you can
set your player back without the set back just being a step towards fail and then reset, right.

50:30
So I I think I it's a super good question and and to be honest, I mean one of the things I'm acutely
aware of and and I became aware of it as soon as I started looking at the fact that there was this
spectrum between or dynamic range between rage quit and I didn't even notice anything happened.

50:48
And the problem is as soon as as soon as those are the things that are bracketing the output of the
game, the reality is, is that you you are probably at the end of the day going to have to fall back on
some kind of binary failure state as in order to have any kind of stakes.

51:03
Now that's that's looking at it through the lens of someone who's been working on probably AAA
games that are like you know you shoot at people and they shoot back at you and you die etcetera.

51:11
So I I fully acknowledge that you know probably a a more 5 dimensional thinking about that would
yield something that can stay completely within the game state and preserve the game state forever
and allow you to continue you know on Infinity and without ever having to get popped out of it.

51:25
And I think there's lots of examples of games out there that do it.

51:28
I'm just not summoning them in the middle of this talk very well.

51:31
But yeah, you're you're absolutely correct.
51:33
At the end of the day, this is it's it's a buffer.

51:36
It's a kind of a kind of a firewall against the the ultimate reality which is at some point the player's
going to interrupt what they're doing and have to reload and lose some time.

51:46
We're just trying to make make that happen less often and less easily and not as early, I guess.

51:52
Cool.

51:53
Awesome.

51:53
Thanks.

51:53
Thanks.

51:55
You mentioned a couple consequences for failure, such as like you just go to a loading screen, come
back and then all the enemies are the same or you kind of go, it makes you do like a mini game or
something.

52:12
That just reminded me of Prey.

52:14
I don't know if you ever read that, that game is actually quite an inspiration for me because I I firmly
believe that going into a loading screen is very destructive to the players immersion.

52:26
And so I was, but I know some people complain about Prey in particular that it it didn't provide
enough of a consequence or failure that it didn't feel like they were failing and therefore wasn't
satisfying.

52:41
What are your thoughts on that?

52:42
Yeah.
52:42
I mean it's funny Prey.

52:44
Prey was actually one of the examples that I that I had in when I was originally working on this talk for
for looking at the the kind of sort of Max Payne 3, Borderlands, SSX, Forza style model where you're
kind of introducing a mode change or kind of an alternate reality mode to the game that kicks in.

53:07
I mean Prey literally does that.

53:09
I mean it says literally you're going into another universe as a result of failure and you get through
that and come out the other side of it.

53:14
I mean I think it's interesting, but I think I think maybe that also provides a little bit of a hint to why
some people grappled with it.

53:22
It's like modifying the context of the game so radically that it changes the fundamental reality of the
fundamental metaphor of what you're going through is is sometimes a risky thing to do, you know?

53:32
And it's not like it's not like praise sort of initial premise was was particularly accessible in the 1st
place.

53:40
I mean you, you were abducted by aliens in the first like 5 minutes of the game, right.

53:44
So And you're and you're in occupying A spacecraft that has portals that let you jump through, you
know.

53:49
So it's there's a lot of strange things going on in the normal reality of that game and then kind of
layering on this additional sort of spirit world on top of that.

53:56
I think it was just a hard thing for some people to wrap their heads around.

53:58
But I don't think the concept is intrinsically flawed.

54:01
I just think that there's there's ways of establishing context for it that probably would have made it
easier for people to read and understand.

54:07
OK.

54:07
Thanks.

54:09
Anybody else, It's so easy.

54:13
Thank you everybody.

54:14
Thanks for coming.