How to design fun games | James Ernest

More is not better, yeah, you know, I think people make their own complicated

games

, I think, and sometimes in an attempt to differentiate them, which I think is not a good

design

pillar, mainly because that's what they know how to do. and, although it is always better. It is often more difficult to remove one rule than to add another. If something doesn't work, you have two possibilities: you can add a rule or remove one, and you know. I think there's a fear that if you take away too many rules, I'll end up with nothing, but I've never actually seen that happen, okay James, so I contacted you recently to help me with this book I've been working on. called "Find the Fun" and it's really a book about how to go from idea to marketable product and one of the main things we need to think about if we're new game

design

ers, especially, is creating something that's fun because a lot of times Designers make something that works, you know, they play with it, they test it and you say nothing's broken, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's fun or that it's going to be a good product on the market that other people want to play with, so when you think of the word fun in the context of the board.

games

, what does that mean?

Do you have a certain definition or a certain angle? What do you think? Yes, it is a complicated word and there are many definitions for it. I think my personal opinion is always to try to think about the product from the beginning. player perspective and specifically from the new player perspective because a game inventor will do it and damn this happened to me yesterday. I'm working with a team of people for whom a game is a list of features and they're looking at a bunch of other games in the space and they're comparing their feature set to the feature sets of other games and they're saying, "We have a game because "We have this feature of this game and this feature." of this game and I play it and it's not fun, but that doesn't enter into your thinking.

I think when you're making a game it's easy to get caught up in a mentality of The game must exist and this is how you make one and you forget that someone else has to come to it fresh and understand it and play it, so yeah, it's always thought in the product from the player's perspective, which sounds trite, but that's how I. It surprises me how few people actually do it. RAF Coster has a book called Fun Theory for Game Design. Hopefully you read it, uh, in preparation for writing your own and it talks about oh, humans are programmed to learn things and And as long as you get something from your interaction with the system that's like a natural response, that's why People like to play because they don't learn enough things in their daily lives, and my version of that is that fun is poking around in a system and predicting what's going to happen and usually, but not always, being right, that is what we're doing, we're playing with this podcast software and expecting it to do what we want and it's entertaining because we think we've got it figured out, but it keeps surprising us now on that, yeah, and that's an interesting point, though, what?

Where does Surprise Play come into that? So you said you know you're messing with a system and then most of the time you get what you think is going to happen, but even though sometimes you don't get it right, sometimes the dice well, it's science, right? you make a prediction, you do an experiment, you get the right result, that's the scientific method and if you can't make any prediction it's not fun because it's confusing this is koster's bracketing system if something is so confusing that you can't predict any results It's not fun because no matter what you try you don't know what's going to happen and at the other end of the scale it's boring if every prediction you make is correct like no one needs to test you know I'm not going to come up with a random theory but No, you know things that we all know, no one needs to have more experience. experiments to find out if apples fall from trees, right, we know, um, and that's the boring end of the spectrum and somewhere in the middle is this gray area where you can touch a thing and see what happens, but make predictions . about it and I'm usually right or sometimes I'm right, you know, as long as it's never and you're always in the groove and what people find funny about games is that people are different because because I might be playing poker because I've never played poker before.

I had seen five cards and that's interesting and I'm going to hope to hit this meat and maybe I will and maybe I won't and I know what's going to happen, but someone at the same time The table is poking around at people and seeing how they react and seeing if they can make them play badly by getting in their heads and that's two different systems working in the same game and those people have two completely different flavors of fun, yes that's really Good point and think well, who is the target audience of your game? What types of fun do they enjoy and then how can you lean into that as much as possible?

So when you're designing a game, do you think about that properly? At the beginning, Ground Zero, before you even get into the design space or before you even start working on a game, I mean, yeah, I don't know, I don't know what you should think about first, but I know that what you should always do What I have in mind is the user experience. I've been working with a lot of teams and individuals who know they want to make a game and they know what features a game comprises, but I don't really know what experience they're trying to deliver, so they hand over a bag full of parts and it's not a game and they don't know. because.

I always try to think of a game as the player in which the players experiment. The first player experience and the players you know also play 100, but it's all about what they get out of it and it doesn't matter what I put into it, no one cares as much about the details of your game as you do, that's your job to make it invisible, they care about your experience and as you unpack it and learn all the nuances of what the game can do, it should be an experience of discovery and not just running through a set of rules.

I think that's a fine line for new designers, they come in like I was saying before and say, hey, this works, it's like, but it's not fun, so how do you do that? How do you go from a bag of parts to something that's almost magical? like, oh this is really funny, it's really hard to get involved in a project halfway and again I'm talking about some current experience that I'm having right now, but my first reaction is to throw away all those parts like it's okay, I know . I've got all these tools right and we did some mechanics and that's cool, but let's start over and figure out what we're really trying to do because from the player's perspective it's hard to see things from the player's perspective.

You know, um, it's hard to also know if your game is fun unless you're honest about the feedback you get, so when you put a game in front of someone else, people are reluctant to do it well. People who come to game design from In other disciplines, I think they think they need to finish the painting before they can hang it and game design is unique in the sense that no, you actually have to show them the blank canvas and say : I'm going to put a duck here. you think and you like, literally, that's very hard to do, uh, if you're not used to it, but if you don't see what people expect or you don't hear from them what they think is going to happen in your game, you can go very far. . walk into the weeds and then build something that you're too attached to to throw away, yeah absolutely one of my favorite quotes is that you can't read the label from the inside of the bottle and as game designers we're right there. inside and we are looking as hard as we can at that label, but we don't know, we can't see it from the other side and I can tell you this from personal experience over and over again.

I've designed a game that you know isn't complete, but I've gotten to a point where it works and I'm doing different things and mechanics that combine with each other in combos and stuff like that and I sit there and think to myself, I think this it's fun like I'm having fun, I'm enjoying it, but not until I sit down and watch someone else play it and then they have that reaction, I mean, okay, okay or, okay, huh, but it really requires me to do it. put Getting it out there not only requires you to get it in front of people, but it also requires you to shed your ego, because if you're not receptive to the real feedback you're getting, you can't improve the product if you don't.

I can't tell you the number of times a designer has shown me something. I have had problems with its operation and response. Well, maybe this isn't your kind of game and I think. no man, that's not how you handle this this way, this is your only chance to get feedback from this player, listen to him you know, don't write me off just because I'm not in your target group, that's not helpful even if I'm not in your target group. group, comments are still useful, so anyway, yes, you have to be receptive to them and like you said, you can't read the label if someone puts that label in front of someone who can't read. then you won't get a lot of good feedback, but you'll still get more than you can't from inside the 100 bottle and you'll also like it just because someone isn't your target audience or whatever they can, they still should.

I have moments where I'm like oh, that's fun, like I'm not the kind of gamer that I want to sit down and play a three-hour European experience or an eight-hour Twilight Imperium, that's not my deal, but I've done the ones that I've done. I've played those games in the past, you know, doing favors for friends and stuff like that, and there are moments in the game where I think, oh, that's good, that's fun, that's something interesting to think about or a decision space interesting, and although I'm not the demographic. I can still, you know, if that was a prototype, I could still go.

I'm not your person, but this right here, oh, that's so much fun, so to just dismiss someone who you are again you're letting ego creep in. and you will miss some of the best parts of the comments and you will probably never like the best experience of the game, yes, absolutely, and you know as a designer you learn to take the love and not the advice uh you know, take the candy but You don't have to swallow it. What I'm saying is I think Neil Gaiman says this, uh, that if someone tells you there's something wrong with your job, they're right and if they tell you how to fix it they're wrong, you have to understand that you can watch someone not have fun and that's enormously valuable, you can see someone get frustrated, get stuck, confused, bored, all these things that are enormously valuable, it's a good mark if you then have a conversation with them and they start riffing and telling you how to improve it.

You can't take that advice at face value. You can still read what's below and that's valuable, but their suggestions are going to be terrible. Okay, let them. Make the suggestions, but understand that what is really happening is that there is something wrong with the game that they don't understand what it is, especially they don't know how to fix it. Yeah, I was talking to Rob W about this a while ago. and something he said that I thought was a little nugget of wisdom very similar to what you're saying is that game testers tend to be able to tell when something is wrong but have no idea how to fix it.

And so as a designer, the way that you can level up in your design and something that you just grow with experience and in your skill set is to read between the lines and you know the player says hey, I felt like I had nothing to do. . I felt this way and that, but reading between the lines you say, oh, I just need to give you more gold at the beginning of the game. I give you five. I need to give you 15. And then you'll feel like the decision space opens up reading between the lines, like really figuring out, what are they really saying?

So have you found that to be the case in your Journey design? Yes, absolutely, I mean, it certainly depends on who is playing, but yes, newbie game testers like you want them to be regular players and gamers don't know how to make games. In fact, I made the mistake quite early in my career of receiving a lot of very detailed feedback from essentially a critic that I was. He's not an inventor, but he was a reviewer, what he did was write about games and his advice on how to fix things was totally useless, but I took it because I thought, well, you play a lot of games, you should know that, so when I play with regular players Yes, I saw them play.

I understand the experience they're having, but I don't try to go too deep into the methodology, implementation or fixes because that's not the language they speak, but if I play with designers I have a regular designer group, um, that meets every other weeks in Seattle and those guys watch The Matrix, they know the nuts and bolts, so when they have suggestions, I say, okay, let's draw the line on this, what problem does this solve? How? I solve this as I can, I can do it, but it has to be someone who is in that same space and has done that design work, yes, 100, so when you look at play testers, what do you look for?

How do you know it's a game? it's funeven before they tell you what kind of things you notice. I don't know, it's very difficult to generalize, but if you want to play it again, it's pretty good. You know, I think there's a level of conversation about the rules. that means they don't know the game very well yet and then there can be a level of conversation about strategies that shows they're actually having fun if they're thinking about how to win instead of how to play. that means they're actually having fun with the game if they start talking about good expansion cards or cool things they could do to add things to the game, as if it's not because it's not good enough, but because it is something like that. make your brain like to be creative and think about the game again.

I think of really good campaign games as destinations and a destination is a place that you enjoy three times, you enjoy it before you go, you enjoy it while you're there and you enjoy it after you get home, you plan your trip to Disneyland, you figure out what it is what you're going to wear and when the weather will be and you think about it before you're there and Of course it's fun while you're there, that's almost a given and then you have stories to tell in the photographs at the end when you're engaged in a game like Magic The Gathering, which is what I grew up with. all of these things are true and that game has a single player deck building experience that is kind of a prep work for the two player experience of the game things to talk about things to remember becomes a lifestyle if so that's that's that's beyond fun that's fascinating that's addictive right but um but on a micro level if you have play testers saying hey, do you have that London thing again?

I want to play that again that's huge right that's that's a huge sign that they want to do it, that they've been thinking about it when they're not playing, yeah, absolutely fine, as far as the feedback during real time at the end of the game, First of all, do you do that? You sit? Do you listen to people? Because Eric Lang came to a place where he didn't even hear anything. He gathers all the data he needs to observe and then doesn't even like to ask questions at the end. alright, thank you all for playing, have a great day and you guys are having those conversations too and if so, what are the questions that you're asking to try to focus on this?

Yeah, I mean again, it depends on depends on many. right factors who the group is, what the game is and what stage it's at, so in the early stages I'm brainstorming ideas. I'm saying, hey, could you play a game in the old west about an Undertaker who's trying to keep a big you know, big box, uh, morgue, to move in and kill all the townspeople, would you play that game? ? I don't have a mechanic, I have a theme, so that's all after the conversation because I proposed the idea to you and I'll talk. about what you expect and you know the game goes through phases at a certain point, you're pretty sure you're not going to make fundamental changes to the mechanics anymore and now you're wondering if this card made sense.

These rules say what they're supposed to say and you can, yes, once the game is a known entity, you can probably learn most of what you need to know during playtesting, strictly by observation, but I. I would say the last time I did a big playtest I was at Rincón in Tucson a couple of weeks ago and I had a game called Tomb of the Ancients, which is an archeology game and yeah, I would talk about that a little bit beforehand. I was watching people play and talking about it a little bit afterwards, you know, just a question to make sure they brought out what I thought was there, so I want to go back to something you're talking about earlier with the idea of ​​surprise, so people go into a game of the type you're talking about like they have the pre and then the Deering and then the post and we're going to play surprise on that and how do you know what the levers are? pulling which knobs are you turning to increase the surprise or decrease the surprise increase you know, things that happen like oh man, I wasn't expecting that, tell me how does all that factor into the design, well, I think I'll send you a link to a video, but there is a video of goats on a sheet of metal.

I don't know if you've seen this, but there's a picture of a big sheet of metal that's standing in an arch and little kids are jumping and hitting each other and they're playing with this thing and it's bouncing and they're playing, this is fun. , TRUE? and the old goat is sitting in the back watching it happen. I, uh, whatever I've been there. That's a video of what fun is and I try to think of that as a metaphor for how people interact with my game, if they are delighted with it because it can surprise them, they are enjoying it and if they feel that it is not for them they have seen before or whatever, or your bones are too old to climb that thing, whatever the reason, there will be people sitting on the side and they won't be impressed.

I think the way you provide surprise is not by just defeating random people with unexpected results, but, um, but by giving them, I guess a little more agency or a little more you have to go for chaos, does that make sense? If the throw hits you randomly, then it's painful, but if you can say, "it's okay." I know there are five dots here on this platform and I know that within this box there are three to seven dots. I choose the correct painting. The story I tell about this at design conferences is about the 520 bridge in Seattle.

One day driving home I saw a sign that said in 15 minutes the bridge will be closed for half an hour, whatever they are repairing something, whatever the sign says, okay you have 15 minutes to get to the bridge and If you're late, I'll be stuck there for half an hour, so my options are to take the long way or risk the bridge, but I know I have that choice, so when I got to the bridge and crossed, I was delighted, right, but I I imagine the person in the car next to me who hadn't seen the sign had two very different possible outcomes.

I could have been delighted that I made it to the bridge on time or been okay with what I missed and checked. my email on my phone for half an hour and that would have been fine too because I saw the sign and the guy who didn't see the sign was going to cross the bridge like he expected to cross the bridge or was he going to be surprised and angry because it was closed and no one told him okay and that's a metaphor and that's explaining your rules and explaining what the rules are inside that box helps people decide if they want to take the risk or not instead of just like. hit them with that, yeah I love it, what would be your best advice in that regard in the rules, making the options clear, like you said, do you have five points on the deck or do you have between three and seven possibilities here?

Make that clear to players coming in so they don't get unexpectedly surprised in a way that isn't very fun. I mean, that's the challenge of any game, any system like that. I think, generally speaking, it's always better to express. a loss as a cost rather than a direct loss, in other words, I paid this to have this outcome rather than the game taking it away from me, but yeah, it's one of the things that, sorry, it's impossible to generalize, I think. that the game is a good example of a subscription cost, so here are games that are stripped down to their absolute fundamentals, they are accessible to everyone, many real gamers find them incredibly boring, but it's fascinating to me because it's obviously a very successful games to win a lot of money gambling in general craps slot machines blackjack poker all of these things are incredibly simple and in terms of craps, which is probably the simplest, well, or a roulette wheel, something like that, people go for that option , do you know when?

When you place a bet on roulette, you know that your options will probably be to lose five dollars or possibly lose two, three, five or 30 times. You know what you bet depending on what you placed there and you know that you know it. In the long run you'll probably lose, but no one really cares, you know they're there to entertain themselves with the risk and, uh, most players have a bankroll they're willing to lose, but anyway, I'm free of weeds here , But but. That's clear, the correct roulette is clear that people are bad at math. I get it, but people know what the possible outcomes are.

Or I'm going to guess a number that's on the block I'm betting on or not, and the results. are clear, it's not like there's another wheel that the first wheel leads to that has results that, you know, are unpredictable, that wouldn't make it more fun, those games don't succeed, they're just too difficult to understand. I understand that it's very difficult. to predict. I guess if I were to say that slot machines are something like that, slot machines have evolved to a point where they're incredibly complicated and no one can really explain what's going on, but I think the proposition is still the same, like putting coins, take out coins, sometimes less, sometimes more, repeat like this, it's still pretty simple, yes, yes, I agree and I think you're saying it's simple, but even the complicated games I've played in the past. really good, twilight empires of the world that take forever to play, even the systems within the game, like each individual one, were pretty simple to understand, there may be a lot of them and now you're trying to figure out, how do they work ? stacking and doing different things, but individually they're not that challenging, you know, you don't have to get out your calculator and think you can do it, okay, here are my two options, here are some two options, two or three options, there are two. or three there and now together there's a lot to think about, but or you could just take it individually and say I want to do three and I want to do blue, let's see what happens and so the players can get into that and just start figuring things out and one thing What I love about your games is the simplicity, the rules are usually not very long, very easy to understand.

I can play them with my children. I was telling you this before we started recording my daughter. The three favorite games of all time are Kill Doctor Lucky. You know, I told her I was going to interview James Earnest and she said, "Who cares. I don't know who he is and I was like, Oh, he designed the code. Dr. Lucky and her." It was literally like I lost my mind and she was like oh wow and now she thinks I'm someone because I'm talking to you so I appreciate you you know pushing me higher in her eyes but she loves that game and she was literally talking.

You know, it took me three or four minutes to show her how to play and then we were playing, so let's talk about killing Doctor Lucky mainly so I can tell her about it and then she'll think I'm even cooler, but tell me what your design process was like for that game. The experience of creating things that you cut out gave me the big picture to turn that idea into something that was really fun. Well, I grew up playing traditional hobby games and I've always tried to, I mean, in most cases I tried to make a game where the potential for strategy is enormous compared to the complexity of the rules.

I want to play the game. I don't want to spend my experience learning the game. Are we talking about nose time? How much time does someone spend with their nose in the rule book? You know, let's keep this as short as possible so you know, Dr. Lucky aside. I grew up playing Scrabble and Pitch and you know Yahtzee and those. incredibly simple and easy family games where, in some cases, a lot happens under the surface, so Kill Dr Lucky was originally a title. The design process started with the notion of what was a mystery style game based on a murder mystery event where everyone in the house wanted to commit the murder and this is familiar from literature and the clue game is something like that. everyone has a reason.

I did a short story in college where everyone wanted to kill the same guy and in that The story that the lights just go out and everyone builds a gallows in 30 seconds and everyone holds it together, but in this game, okay, kill the doctor Lucky is funny because we will all try and we will all fail because he is lucky. final point, that's how it was from the theme to the story of the game, we're going to try a lot and we're going to fail a lot and the way to win is to do it mechanically, that's a little complicated because you can't necessarily reach that conclusion, it's a boolean event that you're going to try and try and try and every time you try and fail you'll be back where you started and it actually took us years even after the initial release. from that game to find a way to build strength through failure, you know, in the current version of Kill Dr Lucky, when you try to kill him and fail, you get a permanent bonus to your strength, so try again and again .Make it easier and easier: you're leveling up, you're getting experience points, which is not something that was in the original version.

The original version was more about timing and hoping that you would be the person to pick the moment when their luck had run out, but that was a lot of deduction and there wasn't even much scaffolding there to help you make that deduction, really. It was a lot of guesswork, um, so during the time of existenceFrom that game we have achieved it. to make it a better game by saying yes you can slowly move towards this goal. You can level up by doing Korg's behavior, trying to kill him a lot knowing you're going to fail and saving that energy, yeah, and me.

I have played both versions. I played the original years and years and years ago and it was really all about time and really just hope and it was a big surprise when you beat the game, but at the same time, I really prefer it. the newer version because it makes people act much faster, you don't understand that like sitting on G, everyone waiting, oh, who's going to act first? No, it's like I'm going to do this as fast as I can because that's going to build. I get up and I'll have a lot more possibilities later on as the game progresses and here's the kind of crazy thing I was thinking about today a few years ago when I first got into game design just as a hobby, just as something for It's like distracting myself from life and madness.

The first game I created was based on Kill Dr. Lucky. I had played it. I had a lot of fun with it and we joked with my group of friends that my best friend grew up. Dad worked for the power company, he worked for the light department in our little town in Alabama and he was always the guy that would go out after storms and fix things and hang Christmas lights and take down Christmas lights and all kinds of things, so apparently the local paper once every two weeks had a picture of him on the front page doing something and it was just a joke saying: Does anyone else work at this place?

Is he the only one? He's the only one in the spoon truck, so I made this little game based on killing the Dr. Luckily, he was going around town with all these city-like spaces on the board and he was fixing things and hanging Christmas lights, whatever and then you were a photographer for the newspaper and it was your job to take his photo so you would try to land in the same place and have cars and things to take his photo and then who you know took his photo several times like there was a timer anyway, it's rounded up like it's not just taking a photo, so it was quite different where I was like, hey, this isn't exactly just a rethink, but our newspaper was called Outlook and that's why the game was called enter in Outlook and it was about taking a photo of my friend's dad, Johnny and and anyway, it's great to come full circle now, 15 years later or however long it's been, to talk to you about this and tell me more about the process of design.

You talked about what you changed right there. board, you know, was it smaller? Did it get bigger? Tell me anything else that you've evolved, yeah, I mean, I know more about the changes from version one to the current version, so I can remember that initial design, initial design phase. It was probably like three weeks, this is before cheap games existed, this is the year we came up with the cheapest games, so Kill Doctor Lucky existed first as a proposal, someone took the idea to the trade show gamma and presented it to Darwin Bromley as an aside and he said he would buy that game and then I heard about it from my friend who went and I said, well then I should probably do that game and then at the end of that year I knew that I wanted to make a cheap ass. games and I knew that Dr lucky was the best of the several games that were in development, so it became kind of our main title and all that, I think the original game had a lot of crazy surprises because at that time I was willing to believe that games like that are like that and sometimes you just get hurt and like me I didn't have any testers to talk me out of that and it was like they got frustrated from time to time. how this game played out and we were all just shaking our heads and saying, well, the games would be like this and that was the end of it, right?

And you know, now I would know more than that and I know that games don't. actually be that way and it's fun to have chaos and randomness and you know these things help level the playing field and all this like there are still different ways to implement that chaos that are less and less conducive to a good experience. I don't want to spend an entire game building a perfect corridor, you know, and then have it crash as soon as I walk out the door because games are like that. I want to know if I wanted to fail before I built it if that makes any sense or once I build it I wanted to make that investment pay off um and so yeah my games aren't like that anymore we just remade them biting heads I don't know if you know that game um Biden off heads is a dinosaur chasing game, it's a silly game that rolls Dyson and attacks each other and sends itself back to the beginning like in perpetuity, um it was cool and it was popular so We never bothered to change it. but it's been 25 years now and I'm a much better game designer, so I took that thing to the lab and made a much better version, along with other things, so you can imagine in a game that I can land on you. and send you back to the beginning, the game may never end and due to specific rules in that game, it was possible for players to commit suicide to gain access to spaces where they could shoot the people in front and knock them back to the beginning. start. start and the game would literally never end, as long as people were willing not to try to win themselves, but only to prevent others from winning.

Well, the games will be like this, no, not today, um, what I did in the fight reconstruction. heads was that I discovered that my real underlying design goal was to make sure that the heat was always increasing and what I mean by that metaphor is that the player's average distance to finish always gets smaller, so when I throw a rock at you from the starting space in the original game I would push you back to start and here we are where we start again right in the new game I changed places with you and then you went back to the start but I'm right next to the end and therefore the position average player hasn't regressed, which means the game is actually trending towards a conclusion and it sounds silly to talk about it in this context of this game, but overall it's a good game design principle to design by. a tendency to conclude, if the game tends to end, it's better than if the game can go on forever, yeah, that's a very good point and also going back to what you were talking about before and that people hate losing something, right? ?, they would much rather uh, what's the old quote that people hate losing more than they like winning?

True, that negative feeling is greater than any positive feeling and therefore anything as a game designer, that's the difference, but that's how you differentiate loss recontextualized as a cost, yes, because You may hate losing unexpectedly. more than I would like to win, but I am also willing to pay the cost of a risk that I understand and that a lot of that is just a framework, yes, definitely, and when the game takes something away from me. especially out of nowhere you know you turned in an event card and now you lost 10 resources, like why because it turns out I was the one who turned in the card and then my friend turns in a card and gains 10 resources, that's pretty big. swing that's not very fun and maybe he's having a little fun that kind of engineering has been in the DNA of board games for hundreds of years like literally rolling a dice and seeing if you go forward or backward, that's what the games. uh, before Monopoly, you know that Monopoly is a plus and minus random event track game because it was based on a whole family of plus and minus random event track games that also gave rise to Candyland and Shoots and Ladders, and already you know that. variety of games, that's what a game is from the perspective of those designers, that's what a game is and that biased randomness of choosing someone to hate is designed into games is kind of a leveling factor when in You actually don't.

You don't need that at all, you can have randomness that actually serves everyone equally, which is weird to say, but it still balances the results, like, you just have to build it right, yeah, there's definitely a game. I bought it for my son, who is four years old and loves trucks and monster trucks, and I found this game from the '80s called crash Canyon and it's this huge, you know, molded thing, and it's these little monster trucks that they go around the board and it's literally just roll and move, but it also has a die that has a star on it and the star means you can move someone else and you can push them back and the way the game works is like you can literally push it back one space and then that. makes them fall into the canyon and now they're like 20 spaces back like this and it's not fun, especially if I'm playing the game to win like I'm pushing my four year old truck into the canyon, you know, I mean this has to be earned. and I thought that's just not good game design for today, so I changed that rule so that every time you draw the star, that's the one instead of moving one.

It's not much fun, it's exploding, so now you can roll it again, so you got a one, oh, your order, one again, it's two, roll it again, oh, now you roll a six, now you just rolled eight , so one that's fun, a little bit of a surprise, but two. it makes the game over faster because I'm not trying to play a 45 minute game with my four year old, what are we doing? This should be a 10 minute experience and advances the game and just that little bit. The change made the game a lot more fun and I think that's something else that game designers can take away from this conversation: we're not talking about these massive changes, complicated things like a lot of times you can just change the framing, you can change the the wording or you can change a little bit, make a small adjustment and the game will complete sooner, which I don't do very rarely if I played a game and everyone said man it ends too quickly, shorter is always better if it's short. enough, you can play it again.

I totally agree with that, you know, I have games with replay times of less than a minute, so that's where I like to be, and yeah, the monster in the water is not fun. I totally agree, well, die, that. That again, like I said, is in the DNA of game design because it's been around for so long that there's always a chance you'll die. I think I think most of the ways to implement that are pretty bad. I have a game called Holdout where that small chance is always there. Holdout is without explaining it, it is basically poker.

It is a game that plays the role of poker in a fantasy universe and does not have the same betting system as poker. but one thing they do have in common is essentially the river draw when one player is very likely to win but one card will save the other player this particular game goes through that window almost all the time and everyone is okay with it, since I have to get to the end of the game in a good state to win and the other one will always get that tie, but we like to know that and he he goes for the draw, he draws the wrong card, I win most of the time, he He pulls the right card and wins from time to time and we all seem to be okay with that, it's not like the monster in the water because we all know that's how it's going to work, but I think it's an exceptional case.

Normally I think that last minute reversal is a surprise unless the probabilities of it happening are very well understood and the game is short enough to be replayable. uh it's really frustrating when it happens, I remember Sid, was it Sid Jackson who made the civilization video games and he was talking about how do you know he would give percentages to the player? He'd say, "Hey, this has an 80 chance of being successful." and even then there are still 20 chances of failing but the players would get very frustrated because they would say no this is a cheat of the game he is like it really isn't so he had to tell the players 80 but at the end final was really like 92 or something just to match the psychology because players get so frustrated with numbers we can't do exactly that with board games, but it's interesting to think about something psychological, that's interesting, I was burying the odds under a lie that's that because I'm not going to say if that's good or bad, but that's terrible um like uh no.

I've worked with many game designers who get into gotcha systems in online games. and they try to play the odds because they want them to play out the way the players expect. It's strange because you start by introducing a system that will be really punitive and then you modify it so that it's not like that. To begin with, you present it as, for example, why don't you do something else well? That's a good question and I don't know if he was too into the design process where he was like, ah, he'll send it, it'll be fine, he'll just modify the numbers on the back and you know, that was a few years ago, but it's interesting to think about something else I want Go back to where you're talking about your game with the Dinosaurs, where there's a constant loop justwhere people can enter.

I'll tell you what man my friend Brad would love that game every time he plays Super Smash Brothers. Are you familiar with Smash? Brothers, it's okay, he was always Donkey Kong because Donkey Kong has the ability to grab people and then he can walk and what Brad would do is grab you and then he would jump off the edge and kill you both because he didn't do it. He didn't want to win, he just wanted you to lose and that's how he played the game, so you know, if you have a game that has the potential for a loop, there are people out there saying we're playing. this for the next six hours and whatever, yeah, well, I guess I think knowing that there are various types of afflicted players means that you have to design games to survive, either to appeal to that and attract only that type of player or exclude them. somehow or just to survive his behavior, you know, if you have that kind of spoiler in your game, if the game is solid enough, he can do his thing and lose without really hurting either the group or Worse than a individual with that right, but that is a question of engineering.

I was lucky enough to start playing Magic the Gathering and once you've written the rules and cards for a ccg, everything else is easy, yes, when you understand it. that players can basically build their own game from the parts that you're giving them, um, everything else is a better structure, certainly, okay, so another thing I want to ask you about is the level of abstraction, so give an example to For the last few years I've been working on this college football game and I remember one time I played with some evaluators and someone said, well hey, there are no penalties in the game, why are there no penalties? ?

I thought, well, that's like. The least fun part of football like no one has ever done, unless it's at the end of the game and your team loses, but there's a flag on the plate, like that's the only time anyone is really excited about a game. flag, so no, I abstracted it. there are no penalties, we'll just assume it's a fair game all the time and since that's fun it's more fun for me so tell me your opinion on abstracting things, if this was a simulation it would have to be there because it is. part of reality, but I'm trying to make something fun, make it a game, so when you're thinking about this, okay, here's the thing, this is what I'm trying to do, what do you think about abstracting certain parts and leave certain parts? parts to try to achieve the most fun.

I think specifically in the soccer example I would only include penalties if it was the type of thing players could decide to do; In other words, I'm going to foul here because he's going to cheat on purpose. I'm going to be right, I'm going to break the rules and I'm just going to see if the referee notices or something. It's interesting, but if the flags happen randomly , what is good? I think that, generally speaking, life is not always fun and therefore you have no obligation to simulate the reality of your car in your game. On the other hand, if your game more or less represents real-life systems, as it's supposed to, it's easier. so that people learn how to play it so that people know what to expect as an economic game, you know, if you're only allowed to have a certain amount of money, how is that a game about economics if money can't be exchanged for other money, what is that money like?

I'm everything. I'm often confused by metaphors in particular games that don't seem to care about the issue where they were, they told me what one thing was and then they behaved differently and did It's worse than if they didn't tell me anything, but like I said, the reality It's often not fun. We had a Deadwood expansion game. Deadwood is a game about making movies in a back lot, and the expansion included several small locations that you had to travel to. the bus to get from one place to another and the bus, the bus mechanic was extremely realistic, you sat at a bus stop and you rolled three dice and if you rolled one of the places you wanted to go.

You could go there and if you didn't you had to keep waiting. It's like waiting for the bus. Is it absolutely fun? Not as a designer. I thought this is a great mechanic. It's like waiting for the bus. But as a player. Why are you doing this to me? This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Yes, I have a similar system in a game I'm working on now. It's an open world where you can go, you know, everywhere and it has a bus system where, as long as you've been to a place once, you can get back there easily and for free and originally there was a mechanic, a little minigame that you had You have to play to get from A to B, but I was like this is not fun and it's blocking players from doing what they really want to do, where the fun is they want to turn the page, they want to go to the next area. in which they were already there and now.

You're like putting a barrier between them and it's fun, we'll get rid of that and the testers have gone well, it doesn't make as much sense that players can just go there like there's no cost. I was like, yeah. but that's what you say, besides bad feedback, traveling by bus is not fun, right? I think there is no way to make an effective simulation of reality; there will be an abstraction at some level, so all you have to do is decide. where people don't have representations of reality in their heads, that's not the point of any of this, so yeah, games give us the luxury of only copying the parts that are good, yeah, exactly, oh and I think that that's good.

Sound bite there as a game designer it's our job to copy Parts about life that are good that's right James what else are there other things to think about are things you've learned personally or things you share with other designers of games what you know when it comes to fun, well that's an open question, it doesn't remind you of anything, uh, what's something you wish you'd known years ago and maybe learned? You know it while designing. There are more and more games that you say, oh, okay, here's a faster way to find them, here's an easier way to do it, here's a way to crop things.

The answer to that question is 400 pages long and I'm supposed to lay it out this week. I'm not kidding, like it's a tough question. My joke was that we did the cheap games retrospective book a few years ago that had the rules in it. and some example components from each game in the cheap catalog, it was kind of like the Line in the Sand that says I'm done with this, I'm doing something else right now, and that book starts with this is the book I want. I'd had it when I started my games, yeah I'm in the same place in this book I'm working on, it's like I wish someone had handed me something like this 15 years ago that I wouldn't have had to fall into. so many holes and I hit my head on so many walls it's just those, it's just those things and again they're little things, they're little adjustments to your design process, so I guess to close things out, what would be, I don't know, the best advice? you know, the number one three things, whatever is right, whatever you can think of to leave the listeners with that will help them level up a little bit in their game design.

I don't know, design at the simplest end. on the spectrum for sure and I think that's the game designer's job to do the math so that players don't like that there's nothing fun about learning how to play a game and I know there's disagreement in the community about that. I see a lot of games that are essentially procedural and once someone has figured out how to get to the end, they basically feel like they've played it and I feel like I'm just getting started when I realize that. I want to know how to get to the end, it's obvious, now how I get to the end with the most points is how I want to think about games, so yeah, it's more fun to think about winning than trying to remember the rules.

Yes, that is a very good point. I think one thing that helped me as a game designer was what you're saying to realize that players already know how to play a certain amount of games, they could just open the box and start playing and do well. to fun versus having to open the box in my game and learn it and then how do I overcome that barrier? How can I make the E? The rules are easier to learn, easier to explain and faster. How do I eliminate edge cases so that players don't have to put the cognitive load of all this extra stuff in there, abstract some things away, get to the fun as quickly as possible and even one thing I love about games today.

Many of them are like teaching you how to play while you play, so you don't have to learn 10 pages of rules. First the 20 page rules. You can learn two pages of rules. Now you're playing almost like a little demo round or turn and now we get into the fun quicker and I think. That's another thing, for people, just think about how they can access the phone so quickly. I don't think it took me long to learn this, but I've been telling people this for 30 years and it's that more, more isn't better, yeah. I know, I think people complicate their own games, I think, and sometimes in an attempt to differentiate them, which I think is not a good design pillar, mainly because that's what they know how to do and it's always better, although it's often more difficult, adopt a rule. further than adding another one if something doesn't work, you have two possibilities: you can add a rule or you can remove one and you know, I think there is a fear that if you remove too many rules you will end up with nothing. but I've never seen that happen, that's a good point, but I think it's something else for new desires to realize that it's harder to cut than to add and you really learn that the more you do this, because it comes to a challenge. design and okay, I can add four more rules to solve this problem.

I can keep adding edge cases and flashcards and things like that, but that will probably decrease the overall fun because there's more to think about, more to learn about. Less less pleasant surprise like now, it's a surprise because however you just read the rule book for an extra five or ten minutes and realize that you can actually do what you really wanted to do, that's not very fun, again There are things to think about, but James. this has been great do you have anything you're talking about? you're saying you're working on a book right now if you want to tell people something about that or I've been working on this book for years so it was the course notes for a game called design class that I taught 10 years ago.

I haven't managed to put it together into a book yet so I can't promise, but I can say that my design lectures and a lot of new products are at Crab Fragment Labs, that's my new design studio, we also host a lot of the old PDF files from cheap games there, but there are new and good things every day, including games I'm working on right now to put off work on my book. I understand that struggle 110, but I'll put links to everything in the show notes and the description on YouTube and all that so people can find it and James really appreciates your time, thank you for everything you've contributed. to Hobby over the years, my daughter wants me to thank you too for creating it, well thanks for enjoying the game and of course I'll be like the comedian in the parking lot who says: did you see six o'clock? show or the 7 30 what what uh what is it what edition of Kill Doctor do you play at home oh, it's the newest one, I bought it Target or Walmart Oh, very good, yes, well, that's the best one for the viewers, of course , the last one is Two and a half years ago, I bought it because we were doing this Mission thing at church and we knew we were going to have a group of people and I thought, oh, let's kill ourselves after we get lucky because you can play with a lot people and it's actually more fun with more people and my daughter was with that group and we sat down and played it and she said let's play it again immediately and then yeah, yeah, good feedback and we played it like five or five. six times over the course of two days and then when we got home, you know she said, hey, let's play again like honey, it's not much of a game with two players like me.

I don't think you know, so you know she's been kind. of frustration and trying to get her brothers to learn and, oh, that's great, she loves it. The man James really appreciates your time. Thank you very much for coming to the program. Yes, thanks for inviting me.