The Shifting Revel

Aside from my Achievement addiction, I have a profound love of Magic: The Gathering.  Over the years I have abandoned the game, stayed away for several years, and then come back to it, each time harder than before.  The last time I seriously got into playing Magic was during the Odyssey block, back in 2001.  I played reasonably seriously, going to tournaments occasionally and spending hundreds of dollars on pieces of cardboard.  Just before I began University, I gave up the game, and I haven’t played it since.  Most of my friends at the time sold their collections and bailed out for good, perhaps keeping a couple of really well built decks for posterity.

Last week, a bunch of us got together and decided to do a booster draft - a game where everyone buys three $4.00 packs of 15 cards, and the cards are cycled around in a systematic way so that it’s possible to build a functional (although not very good) deck with a small investment, and play using only those cards.  This has had much the same effect as a bunch of coke addicts deciding to do a line for old time’s sake.  The game is so addictive that with that one brief exposure, most of us are considering getting back into the game, and building real decks once again.

Scott Lynch, in his extremely excellent The Lies of Locke Lamora describes a scene he calls The Shifting Revel.  In order to defray tempers and choke off any uprising before it can gain traction, the Duke of Camor underwrites a giant festival which takes place at regular intervals in the local bay.  It’s called the shifting revel because the festival takes place in the form of hundreds of boats - those of the attendees and local merchants - who lash themselves together in the bay.  The attendance changes from revel to revel, as does the specifics of the entertainment - but there are always keystone features which remain the same and give the revel a grounding.

Magic is a Shifting Revel, and I think this is one of the reasons it’s both so addictive, and that it’s remained so popular over the years when nearly every other collectible card game has sputtered and failed.  There is no specific strategy in Magic that is predominant - there are several major strategies, none of which is better than any other in general.  The game is simple enough that the basics can be grasped in ten minutes, but complex enough that the building of a good deck requires knowledge of statistics.  There are endless combinations of cards that can put together to make a deck, and no two players will use even the same deck in exactly the same way.  The game is very well balanced, but this isn’t what makes it a shifting revel.

Most people who play magic at the tournament level play with what is referred to as “Standard Edition” rules.  Essentially standard play limits the cards you’re allowed to use to the two most recently released blocks of cards, each block containing three sets.  New sets are introduced every roughly 2 to 3 months.  The effect this has on gameplay is profound.  With any given set of cards, in a matter of weeks, tournament play solidifies around several ‘types’ of decks, based around the cards that are legal in the last two blocks.  Each type of deck will revolve around a particular strategy for winning and involve several major strategic cards from these blocks.

The trick is that every time a new block is begun, an old block of cards will no longer be legal in standard tournaments.   This typically has the effect of crippling all deck ‘types’ that are currently used in tournaments - and the scene shifts.  New deck types emerge as players explore the possible combinations of cards from what is left, along with the new cards being slowly filtered in every two months as the new sets emerge - in fact, as each of the new sets in the block emerge, new possibilities emerge as well.  These possibilities are not as severe as the shakeup when a block rotates out of use, but are enough that a fury of new deck styles must be explored.

The business potential of this strategy is huge.  Games are fundamentally about exploring a possibility space, and when that space has been explored to its limit, the game ceases to be interesting.  In Magic this possibility space is expanded at a rate that gives people time to master the space, but not long enough that it becomes uninteresting, and then is grown.  On a yearly basis (or so) the entire space is turned upside down, things you used to know no longer apply, and there are new details to take into account.  This is a shifting revel, and it allows the old to become new again, and again and again.

This is much to the profit of Wizards of the Coast, who have managed to create a game so popular that many pieces of cardboard sell for 500% of the price of a booster pack in the secondary market - some particularly useful cards can go for many times that.  That’s a lot of money for a card that won’t be legal in standard play two years from now.  The thing I find particularly interesting about this is that it hasn’t been done in online play (other than in the online version of MTG of course) for any other game that I know of.

Digital Distribution systems provide a very smooth way of rolling this out.  Any game that contained the addictive hooks of MTG and based around shifting revel - potentially fueled by micro-transactions - that rotated on appropriate basis in line with the exploration curve of the possibility space…  Well my friend, that would a license to print money.  Systems like Xbox Live provide even further hooks such as Achievements (Imagine getting badges for beating someone using only direct damage, by milling their library to depletion, by using only creatures, for using a particular combination of cards, etc.), and if it was done well, might even outstrip the fanfare that Wizards of the Coast has been raking in for nearly the past two decades.  This would allow for a game that is not only highly addictive, but extremely interesting ludologically as well.  In any given year, MTG is recognizable enough as MTG - there are certain rules that never change - but the dynamics of the gameplay are totally different, if you’re willing to pay the price to keep up.  There are very few games that evolve so organically over such a long period of time, and I think it’s time we had another one.

Anatomy of Addiction

I’ve recently introduced my girlfriend to a little game called Civilization 4. Having sunk countless hours into both it and its predeccesors over the years, I’d put the game down in favor of more recent fare. While the game is not really new, I’ve been thinking more about design than I was when I first picked it up, so I thought I’d walk through some of the thoughts I’ve had in the last couple of weeks.

Civ4 has what you might consider to be a rather steep learning curve. There are a lot of concepts to grasp: How combat works, the rules governing production, finances, research, health, and culture, trading, exploration, terrain effects, religion, corporations, great people, resources; The list continues on and on. This list of concepts adds a significant level of complexity to the game.

Sid Meier once defined fun as ‘a series of interesting choices’, and that’s reflected greatly in his most famous series of games.  While the strategic complexity of Civilization 4 is high, the game is broken down piecemeal into a series of reasonably intuitive choices.  When your turn begins, the game will cycle through all the cities that need attention because whatever they were building has completed, and it will ask you what the city should build next (while recommending some of the best choices for that particular city’s current conditions).  Once that’s done with, the game cycles through all the units you control that are awaiting orders, the scope of which are reasonably straightforward, move to a different location, or perform an action, or even simply ‘automate my activity’.  If you’ve finished researching a new technology, the game will ask you what technology you want to work on next, or show you the tree that demonstrates what the impacts of each choice will be.

This series of simple, but interesting decisions form an emergent gameplay which is highly sophisticated.  When you add in the dynamics of interacting with other players, the result is a highly entertaining game.  This is why the Civilization series is a GOOD game, but not why it is addictive.  Those roots lie in a fundamental result of these simple choices.

Anyone who’s played a Civ game is certainly aware of the “One More Turn” phenomena.   These games are impossible to put down.  There’s no clock in the game, because time is piecemeal, so by the time you manage to exert some form of self-control, you look up from your computer, bleary-eyed, and find that it’s now 3:45am and you’ve just been game-locked for the past 6 hours.  I loved Bioshock and Portal, but they don’t give me the itch the way Civilization does, because those games don’t have a pound of pure psychological crack built into their framework.

The key to the addiction in Civ is I believe delayed gratification.  As I’ve discussed before, addiction comes from giving the player food-pellets (which are rewards of some kind) at frequent, but not regular, intervals.  There is something about the irregularity of the pellet reception that triggers certain psychological mechanisms that rhythmic reward does not.  In Civ there are several types of rewards going on, and there are a myriad of factors that go into the determination of the time between requesting the reward (beginning the production process) and the reception of said reward.

Because you have several cities, each producing something to bequeathed at a later time all at once, your subconscious brain is not able to grasp a pattern behind the frequency of reward, even though you can clearly see how many turns it will be until you get a pellet.  This is compounded by the fact that you have a lot of things to do each turn, so there is a significant amount of time that occurs (usually minutes) between movements of the clock forward.  The amount of real-time that occurs between turns is not consistent however, which again adds to the irregularity of the pattern.

Every time something completes, you can literally feel a small jolt of excitement, at which point, like a drug addict who’s becoming resistant to his favorite hit, you immediately request your next jolt, but you’ve got to wait for it.  Not too long mind you, just a few turns, but with so many of these activities going on at once, you’re going to get another hit in just one more turn, until it’s 3:45am and your cat is yelling at you to get out of his chair so he can go to bed.

More Gaming Crack

In the previous post I discussed the fact that addiction and enjoyment are not the same thing, and I cited several games who have the addiction (if not also the enjoyment) down square.  What I did not talk about is how exactly you go about making that happen.

Casinos have boiled one technique down to a fine art: high payout at rare intervals.  Now it’s not simply enough to randomly dole out a large reward on an arbitrary basis.  Players need to understand why they’re getting this reward, even if there’s a lot of randomness to it, it must be as a direct result of an action they took.  The reward happens to also provide a fun element, but much as Crack is is much more addictive than its more expensive counterpart Cocaine.  Because the high is so intense, and so short-lived, it triggers an extreme desire to repeat activities that led to the high in the first place.

Examples:

• Any form of Gambling, Poker, Blackjack, Slots causes you to win big only occasionally, which keeps you playing another hand or pulling the lever one more time, just in case you get lucky again.
• Match 3 games implement this by having a normal scenario be the matching of three items causing a chain of new blocks to drop.  Occasionally the blocks that drop will cause a further match, and a cascade effect may occur giving the player massive point multipliers.  This is random to a certain extent because the player is unaware of what blocks will drop next.
• Diablo/World of Warcraft acts through rare item drops.  Players will do a raid dungeon over and over again on the pure hope that an extremely powerful and rare item will drop that they may be able to obtain.  Even if a usable item does drop, there is not a guarantee that the individual player will be the one to roll for it.
• Crack Cocaine works by releasing massive amounts of Dopamine into the brain.  This high only lasts a short time, and repeated hits will not achieve the same level of euphoria as the first round did.
• In experiments with mice, a mouse will spend proporionally more time pushing a button which dispenses food at random intervals than with a button that dispenses food at regular intervals (say every ten pushes of the button).  This effect is so pronounced that a mouse will spend the majority of their life tapping away at the button given the opportunity.  If the reward is of higher value than food (a non-narcotic drug), the effect magnifies).

Good vs Addictive

Here’s a fun experiment that you can all do at home.  Get a small rodent and a degree in Neurophysiology.  Then pop the rodent’s head open and put a few cuts on the ventromedial hypothalmus.  If you haven’t botched the job and killed the poor thing, what you will discover is that the rodent will binge and binge, continually eating whatever food is available, regardless of how full it gets. 

There are other similar experiments you can do such as getting your younger siblings addicted to cocaine, but they all illustrate a rather fundamental neurological principal: Craving something and enjoying something are not the same thing, they are related, but more or less independant, in so far as anything is in that mush of cerebral goo upstairs.

The reason I bring this up is that it has ramifications for games.  While not necessarly as direct as chemical or physical intervention, it is possible to trigger the same pathways that twitchy crack addicts get to live with every day in a more mild manner using behavioral stimuli.  What drug dealers and Daniel Cook have figured out is that it is extremely profitable to do so, if you can get the formula right.  Where Danc and I disagree is that I don’t think all games are drugs, only the ones who have the addiction tricks down proper. 

There are companies who specialize in this unique blend of addiction.  Blizzard has a strong history of getting this right with games like Diablo and its larger, more voractious soul-sucking older brother World of Warcraft.  Blizzard is, in fact, so good at this, that the only thing that seems to limit their ability to create maniacly addictive games is the amount of time they have to develop them - not something most can say.  Casual Gaming generally falls into this category as well.  The more popular games in this genre such as the oft quoted Bejeweled are not a particularly thrilling experience.  Nobody is deriving actual pleasure from playing Solitaire.  People play these games because they kill time and they’re innovative only in the sense that they’ve got the addcition formula down to a fine art, a formula which can be easily cloned from clone to dreary clone.

Blizzard is in a relatively unique position of making games which are highly addictive and at the same time very enjoyable to play.  Most game designers are generally aiming for the latter.  From a business perspective, there’s not much real advantage to aiming for the addiction formula if you’re selling premium retail games - by the time they’re addicted they’ve already purchased the title.  In cases where you have an opportunity to give them the first hit for free - and to tell them to come back to get more - the addiction is key to the survival of the business model. 

This doesn’t mean you have an excuse for making shitty games.  An enjoyable and addictive game is always going to win out over an addictive game, all other things being equal.  It’s notable that companies like Infinite Interactive have attempted to take the highly successful match 3 formula and inject it with some real enjoyment by adding RPG elements (and somehow making gamer crack all the more potent at the same time).

The point I’m rambling slowly towards here is that games that are popular are not the same that games that are good.  The philosophy that large groups of people can’t be wrong has never been even remotely true, and it’s certainly not here.  If casual games are going to be a hallmark industry in the future, we need to start seeing more of an approach that takes both of these into consideration.