What The Silent Storytelling principle is

“The silent storytelling principle is where you unravel the story of the game through your actions rather than someone explain it to you.”

In today’s episode of Good Game Design we’ll look at the silent storytelling principle. Most games have a story of some sort but there are different ways for a game to tell it. Some do this through cut scenes or dialogue boxes, while others take a more organic approach through gameplay. The silent storytelling principle is where you unravel the story of the game through your actions rather than someone explain it to you.

A good example that comes to mind is Shadow of the Colossus. The short introduction in this game shows you bringing your dead girlfriend to this ancient temple to try and bring her life to life. Then some omniscient voice that calls itself Dormin tells you it might be possible if you kill a bunch of colossi. That’s it. You don’t get a lot of story in the beginning. Instead the true story of the Colossus story is revealed in the small details. When you kill your first Colossus these creepy black tendrils shoot into Wander’s body. That doesn’t seem normal. Then when you go back to the temple the voice just tells you to go slay more colossi. Eventually you might start speculating why he wants you to kill them in the first place. They don’t seem to be bothering anyone and they don’t even pay attention to you until you start shooting them with arrows or attacking them. “You stop it!” You start to wonder if maybe you’re the bad guys after all you’re just doing the bidding of some villainous identity.

This is amplified by the fact that Wander slowly transforms over the course of the game, turning more pale and evil looking as tendrils continuously enter his body. This isn’t told to you explicitly, you just start to form these thoughts as you destroy Colossus after Colossus. The ending confirms your suspicions. As it turns out you were never able to bring your girlfriend back to life, but instead you’ve made in possible for Dormin to be resurrected using your body as its vessel. It’s surprisingly in depth for what little story is actually told through cut scenes. Most of the story is felt as the player’s uncertainty keeps sneaking up on them while Wander slays innocent beasts.

A more recent game that has blown me away with its silent storytelling is the indie exploration game Gone Home. It’s an extremely story-driven game, so I want to be sure to warn you about spoilers before we proceed. Most of what you’ll learn about the story in Gone Home isn’t stated it’s discovered. You play as Kaitlin Greenbriar returning home from college to your family’s house in Arbor Hill, Oregon in 1995. You find this out by seeing your name on your bags and by the answering machine message that plays at the opening of the game. The first thing you see is a note from your sister Sam on the front door that says not to go looking for answers as to why she was gone. The front door is locked but you can find the key if you search around the front porch area and find it hidden in a duck figurine. This teaches you that you might need to explore each room thoroughly in order to progress and find out what happened to your sister.

Little do you know that you’ll soon discover information on the other members of your family as well by analysis and deduction. One of the first things you’ll see as you enter the house is the family portrait on the wall and the main lobby. You’re a family of 4, mom, dad, Sam, and yourself. As the player you know nothing about these characters but you’ll learn their entire story just by finding things in your house. Let’s start with the mother, Jan. In the front closet you’ll find a name badge that belongs to her from the forestry service saying she’s a senior conservationist. You’ll also find a note near the beginning from a friend of your mom’s wanting to hear about the new house they moved into. You realized they didn’t always live here, this was a recent move.

A more recent game that has blown me away with its silent storytelling is the indie exploration game Gone Home. It’s an extremely story-driven game, so I want to be sure to warn you about spoilers before we proceed. Most of what you’ll learn about the story in Gone Home isn’t stated it’s discovered. You play as Kaitlin Greenbriar returning home from college to your family’s house in Arbor Hill, Oregon in 1995. You find this out by seeing your name on your bags and by the answering machine message that plays at the opening of the game. The first thing you see is a note from your sister Sam on the front door that says not to go looking for answers as to why she was gone. The front door is locked but you can find the key if you search around the front porch area and find it hidden in a duck figurine. This teaches you that you might need to explore each room thoroughly in order to progress and find out what happened to your sister.

Little do you know that you’ll soon discover information on the other members of your family as well by analysis and deduction. One of the first things you’ll see as you enter the house is the family portrait on the wall and the main lobby. You’re a family of 4, mom, dad, Sam, and yourself. As the player you know nothing about these characters but you’ll learn their entire story just by finding things in your house. Let’s start with the mother, Jan. In the front closet you’ll find a name badge that belongs to her from the forestry service saying she’s a senior conservationist. You’ll also find a note near the beginning from a friend of your mom’s wanting to hear about the new house they moved into. You realized they didn’t always live here, this was a recent move.

In the next room over, you find out by a newspaper clipping that the house actually belong to your great uncle who passed away, but your family inherited it and moved in while Kaitlin was away at college. You can see by the postcard she sends home that she thinks it’s weird writing a new address for her family. Eventually you’ll find a memo about a promotion for your mother as well as an invitation to a concert from her new male coworker. Another letter by the same friend from earlier urges Jan to spill the juicy details about her new boyfriend. While it turns out it was fairly innocent there are clues that an affair may have crossed her mind at some point, but before you jump to any conclusions about the mom lets talk about Terry, the father.

By entering the library you can see Terry’s workstation, he’s a writer. There’s a cork board full of ideas and ramblings about JFK and conspiracy theories. At first I thought he was just nutty, but it turns out he wrote a successful book about the subject and is working on the sequel. Some of the notes in the middle imply he wasn’t happy with the results of his work saying he could do better. Other letters in the library explained that the company he was writing for wanted to drop him because of his shoddy workmanship he submitted recently. To pay the bills he does small reviews of electronics for a magazine, evident by the letters and receipt for the TV in the living room. It would seem he is spinning his wheel, not sure how to get his career off the ground. Near the end of the game you discover a letter in the basement from his father reflecting on his book saying he could do better, the same quote that’s on the cork board. This sort of ties the piece together. He overworked himself in an attempt to please his father, but this lead to writer’s block which in turn lead to an unhappy marriage as he was consumed with his work.

Again, this is all deduced by items you pick up around the house, it was never told to you plainly. Finally, let’s talk about the sister, Sam. I haven’t mentioned yet that this game actually does have narration. When you find special items in the house and pick them up it will trigger various diary entries from Sam written to you, Kaitlin. This is regular storytelling but you find out a lot more about Sam just by examining things around the house. For example, Sam’s narration explain that she wasn’t fitting in at school but you actually feel her pain when you read the crinkled up note in the garbage about a kid making fun of her calling her the psycho house girl. Apparently there were some rumors about the house being haunted because of your uncle’s death. He wasn’t seen much outside of his home near the end. Her diary tells you that she finally found the girl who became her friend named Lonnie, but this evidence is clear from the notes and mix-tapes lying around the house.

It’s soon revealed that Lonnie and Sam developed feelings for each other and start a relationship, which is hard for Sam to deal with because of these new feelings but also because of her religious family. At least you can assume they are Christian by finding several bibles on the bookshelf in the main lobby. What I didn’t expect was the supernatural undertones present in Gone Home. The overall game feel is already spooky with the lightning storm outside and the eerie silence and darkness this massive house provides. The creepy theme is first alluded to by a book found in the living room under a pillow fort. You could assume this was Sam and Lonnie’s doing having a sleep over and reading about ghosts and hauntings. Sam tells you through her diary about how they dug into your uncle’s past and thinks he’s haunting the house, but I really understood that when I found the note they made hidden in the wall panel. They used a Ouija board to talk to Oscar and he said he wanted to come back, but they stopped when they got too scared. It gave me chills. I was scared too after that, especially when I saw the attic with glowing red lights locked in the upper hallway.

Perhaps the most disturbing discovery is when you find a sacrificial ceremony in the closet to bring Oscar back to life and the key to the attic. I didn’t want to go up there. Who knows what I would find? If you do have the guts to enter the attic you’ll find the last entry in the diary. It explains that Lonnie was going into the army but couldn’t go through with it and wanted Sam to meet her in Salem so they could run away together. That’s why your sister was gone. It’s a beautiful elaborate story that melds narration and silent storytelling perfectly into a rich tale that just left me sitting there taking it all in afterward as the credits rolled. You don’t interact with any people at all, but you feel the pain of each character as you discover what they were going through.

In most good game design episodes I have the principle I want to talk about first and then try to find examples in a video game, but when I played Gone Home, it inspired this whole episode. That being said I’m sure there are a lot of games out there that do a good job telling you details about a story silently.

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Good games teach without teaching

Do you like education games? No, of course not! Nobody does. No one like learning things while you’re playing a game. I’m kidding, of course. Some people enjoy them, but very few people enjoy a game withholding the fun from them while it tries to explain itself. You’ve probably been there. The unskippable tutorial that never ends, or text boxes that keep going and going and going. That’s why it’s such good design when a game can teach you about its mechanics without telling you a single thing. Thus for today’s episode of Good Game Design, we’re going to talk about the teaching without teaching principle.

There are lots of games out there that do a good job of this, but most recently, I’ve been astonished at how well Shovel Knight executed this principle. If you somehow still haven’t played Shovel Knight, what’s wrong with you? Seriously, this game is great. It’s gorgeous, has awesome music, and the game play is out of this world. The game is really good at taking an over-done level trope and keeping it fresh with something new. This is a standard lava level, but it’s also the green, bouncy goo level. Here’s a typical snow level, except it’s also the rainbow, pukey bridge level. The true beauty in Shovel Knight’s design, however, lies in the very first stage, the plains. Everything you need to know about Shovel Knight is presented to you in this intro level, and it’s done through game play, instead of text or cut-scenes. It starts basic, showing you a pile of treasure to dig up, followed by an enemy to dispatch by the same method. Your path is blocked by a wall of dirt, so you learn that you have to dig it away to continue. The next screen is a stroke of genius. You can’t dig dirt below you by striking to the side, but you need to break through to progress. Obviously, you need to down-strike the dirt by pressing down in the air, but let’s say you have no idea that that’s an ability you have.

The developers at Yacht Club Games made a super-smart design choice to have our hero lock into a down-strike, even if you just briefly press down on the joystick. This way, if the player had no idea what to do, and in frustration did this, Shovel Knight would eventually lock into the down-strike position and break the dirt below him. This also makes the motion of your character so much easier to control. You can just barely press down in the air to bounce on something, then keep moving in a direction because they included this locking ability. The very next screen teaches you that you can bounce on things to reach new heights by having you ricochet off this bubble that reappears if you miss. Next to introduce is mini-bosses to you. The entire background goes black, which aesthetically makes sense, because it looks like you’re entering a cave, but it also makes sure nothing else distracts you from this new foe you have to take down. All the bigger baddies look beautiful, by the way. This might be the first time the game makes your jaw drop with how good it looks.

“No dialogue, no menus. There’s not even a pause screen. You just press start and it goes from there.”

Next up, it teaches you about hidden walls. You have to break through this wall to proceed, so it teaches you that walls with certain markings can be destructible, an then up above it shows you that some of these hidden walls will have enemies hidden inside them. What’s on the very next screen? Your first secret wall that you can spot pretty easily. It rewards you with a music note if you find it. Later in the level, there’s another hidden wall with a skeleton waiting to pounce on you hidden inside. It introduces an idea, and then lets you test it out in the field yourself. In fact, Shovel Knight is really good at giving you a small taste of something early on that you’ll need to perfect by the end of the game.

I love this section. Check it out. Remember how I said you lock into the down-strike position when you press down? You only break out of this position if you touch solid ground, or if you attack with the shovel in midair. The placement of this gem in the alcove gives you incentive to break the dirt in the wall after you bounce, which teaches you that you stop bouncing when you do this. All the game did was place some gold for you to get, but its position on the screen allowed you to teach yourself without ever even knowing it.

The level finishes off with a difficult boss fight, but its health is lower than other bosses, so it’s not too hard. This sets a precedent for a boss battle at the end of each level.

Shovel Knight is obviously influenced by Mega Man, but they decided to make a simple change from those games that ended up making a huge difference in how this indie gem plays: progressive levels. In Mega Man, you can pick any of the starting eight levels all from the beginning, so each of those levels had to be relatively close in difficulty. Otherwise, the player might quit if they happened to pick the level that was too hard. Instead, Shovel Knight decided to unlock a few levels at a time. This led to better game feel, where the challenge rose as you got better at the game.

For example, this is the opening screen in propeller knight stage. By the time you reach this level, you know that you need to bounce on these jellyfish to reach the ladder, but what if this was the very first level in the game? You might try to whack them with your shovel or jump past them. This made sense as an obstacle for a later level. Take treasure knight stage. This level is one of the hardest in the game, in my opinion. There’s a lot of instant death spikes and treacherous platforming with the underwater mechanics. The hardest part to me though, was this section with the giant angler fish. It’s really easy to get knocked off and die here. Can you imagine if this was a player’s first experience with the game? Most people would quit altogether. I think opening some of the levels at a time was a really good choice by the developers, because it felt like you were progressing on a journey instead of just completing a random set of levels.

What happens when you take this concept of teaching without teaching and take it to its limits? Let’s take a quick look at the game 140. I talk a lot about this game on my channel, but 140 takes simple game play and crafts it into a masterpiece. Even in its game design, this game has stripped away anything that is unimportant. No dialogue, no menus. There’s not even a pause screen. You just press start and it goes from there. As far as game design goes, every single element in the game is taught to you before you’re tested with it. Each node you collect will generally add a new challenge or obstacle to the level and built on the earlier concepts to create a fun and meaningful experience.

A few examples: You pick up this triangle, but what does it do? Oh, it triggers a laser shot before you get a chance to start the boss fight, so you know what you have to do first. Oh, okay, it looks like these squares are going to try and kill me and I didn’t even have to move to find that out. Now it shows me that the top squares will go first, followed by the bottom squares. Then it gives me a few challenges with this new knowledge. There’s a checkpoint after every obstacle, so the goal of the game isn’t to beat it all in one life. It’s like the game is saying, “Good job. Now try this next challenge.” The end of every level will have some final exam that combines all the pieces of the level together into a really hard section. It all feels fluid and like you’re teaching yourself.

Whether it’s Shovel Knight’s platforming design, or 140’s formation of obstacles, games have the power to tell us their goals through experience rather than hearing or reading them. Maybe you’ve played a game where it does a good job of teaching you through game-play rather than explanation. If you can think of one, tell me about it in the comments below. I’d like to hear it. That wraps it up for this episode of Good Game Design. I’m Snoman, and I hope you enjoyed this quick look at how some games operate.

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What the Isolation Principle is

I’ve been inspired lately to talk about game design by several Youtubers; Vised shows, Sunder, and Eagle Raptor. Before, when I played games, I really only paid attention to how the game looked or maybe if it had good music or not. I never really paid attention to the obstacles I had to overcome in front of me. Now, after learning from people talking about it, it’s made me watch out for good design in games as I’m playing them. Now, I realize how important good game design is.

Game design is how you determine what the game’s goals are. It’s how you determine how much thought went into the game you’re playing. How much the developers care about your experience. I was thinking of doing a series where we look at different games that have good design. For lack of a better term, I’ve come up with some principles that have stuck out to me in games that, in my opinion, have good design. Without further ado, welcome to the first episode of Good Game Design.

The first principle we’ll look at is the Isolation Principle. Eagle Raptor talked about this principle in his Mega Man X video. Go check it out, by the way. It’s awesome. He mentioned how Mega Man did this really well. It would introduce you to a new enemy in a controlled environment. Then, put you into a more heroine situation after you’ve learned about its pattern. This is so important. Otherwise, there would be no progression or increase of difficulty as you play. If you throw the player into a ridiculously hard situation right off the bat, it’s going to deter players away because they think they can’t beat the game, or at least that section.

Volgarr the Viking encapsulates this principle really well. You see, in Volgarr, each level has three difficulties of enemies designated by their color. Green is the easiest, blue is in between, and red is the hardest. It will always introduce the enemies to you in this order.

“Volgarr the Viking encapsulates this principle really well. Each level has three difficulties of enemies designated by color. Green is easy, then blue, and red is the hardest. It will always introduce the enemies in this order.”

In the first level, it just shows you these green guys who you can dispatch in one hit. Then, it will throw in the blue guy. If you don’t know the difference you’ll know after you try to kill him the same way as the others. You don’t really lose any progress if you die. This is right at the beginning.

Then, when you see a red guy down the road, you know to look out and learn his patterns because you know that the colors mean they’re different. This is the case in every level. It slowly amps up the difficulty after you’ve learned some things about each level.

There’s also a bigger enemy in every level that takes multiple hits and some clever tactics to take down. Each one you see one of these for the first times, it’s always in an isolated situation where you can focus on just this one guy. Learn his patterns and take him down. This is an awesome part in level 4. Check this out. You could see this really buff dude with a sword below you. Looks super menacing and tough to beat, right? You’re scared to go down there because you don’t know how he moves yet. When you jump down, he sees you, runs toward you and dies in this lake of fire. Now, you’ve learned his pattern, and it was in a situation with no threat.

At least yet. Oh, man. A similar things happens in level 2. You see the red frog guy down below and you don’t know his patterns yet but you know that he’s the hardest version of this enemy. The thing is, he’s so far back in his owl cove that if you drop down, you have enough time to react when you see him slide across the floor. It gives you an environment where you can succeed instead of fail. Even in the last bonus level. It’s still teaching you about your obstacles. When you go down this rope and drop down, it triggers this down slash, because you were still pressing down when you let go. They wanted you to do this because then, you hit this glowing ball and you learn that it bounces you up when you down strike it. You didn’t have to start this level by going down a rope, but they did it intentionally to show you what you’re supposed to use these balls for. In the final level, after you’ve learned about all these different enemies and how to kill them.

Then, it puts you through several floors of all the enemies put together. It tests your memory and reflexes in a big cauldron full of your past experiences. I think it’s a nice touch even though it is a bit long. Then, when you reach the final boss, it gives you all the power ups for free. This lulls you into a false sense of security thinking it will be a breeze, but you need those power ups because this boss is tough. After braving your way through treacherous levels and dying over and over again, this is the final exam in this ridiculously hard game. It ends on a high note making you feel really accomplished, until you see that this isn’t the true end of the game. After you beat the game, it gives you this coded message through pictures about how to continue your journey. You have to play exceptionally well to see these hard bonus levels.

These are called the Valcory levels. They’re basically restructured harder versions of the levels you’ve gone through. Now, from the very beginning, it doesn’t mess around with isolation. It throws you directly into a level chock full of enemies and death. It’s okay because you’ve already learned about these enemies and know how they behave. It’s just a true test of your skill, nothing more. I thought this hard mode of the game would be impossible because you have a certain amount of lives this time around. If you use them all, you have to go back to the regular game and start over. With a lot of patience and determination, I did finally make it to the secret level at the end and beat the true final boss. You’re rewarded for your skill. I’ve only felt that sense of accomplishment in a few other games.

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good games satisfy your need to feel accomplished

Why do you play games? For some people, it’s to escape from reality. For others, it’s to experience an in-depth story and interact with characters within that story. A big reason for me is to feel a sense of accomplishment like I bested something worth conquering. I have a friend who told me he loves feeling accomplished, and he gets that by doing something physically aggressive whether it’s hiking up a mountain or winning a game of Ultimate Frisbee. I laughed to myself when he told me this because I thought about what makes me feel accomplished and the first thing that came to my mind was beating a hard game or a really difficult boss that I’d been struggling with. Today in Good Game Design, we’re going to look at the Accomplishment Principle.

I’ve definitely felt accomplishment from games before, and some give you this feeling more than others. When I beat Ornstein and Smough in Dark Souls for the first time, ooh, it was like the heavens opened up. But when I beat Kirby’s Epic Yarn, a game where you literally can’t die, I was like, All right, there it is. No, I’m not saying games like this are bad. They just have different goals. Enter Super Mario 64. To truly understand this game, we need to travel back to 1996 when it was released, so put on your Alanis Morissette CD and jump in this warp pipe with me.

This was a lot of people’s first experience with a 3D game ever. Let alone taking our favorite plumber into this extra dimension, it truly was a landmark for gaming, and we’ve only enhanced how 3D games operate since then. This game brought a ton of non-gamers into the interactive medium for the first time, and even for the experienced gamers, this was a new kind of adventure. We need to look at this game through the lens of a first-time player to understand what this game has to do with accomplishment.

“This led to one of the most triumphant feelings I’ve ever had from a game before.”

When you first pop into this world, it gives you this wide, open area to test out what the buttons do on this crazy new three-pronged do-dad. Instead of a tutorial level or something, this is a fully interactive hub world, something fairly new at the time. Other than telling you about the camera controls because this was also new for the time, they needed some explaining. It just lets you roam around and test out what this whole 3D experience has to offer. There are no other instructions or button control screen. They expect you to mess around and figure it out on your own. This is important to the whole feeling accomplished thing, so remember that.

There’s basically no threat of danger here, so you can run around until you feel comfortable enough to enter the castle. Now, being one of the first 3D games ever, they assumed people are going to want to explore these expansive worlds, and that’s why the first level is so important. It starts you off in another big, open area, but this time, with enemies to put your skills to the test. You feel small in this giant new map, and a lot of what you see on your screen might seem foreign to you, so they start you off with things that are familiar.

The first enemy you see is a Goomba, all in his 3D glory and uglier than ever. You know what to do. This is the first enemy you see in Super Mario Bros. You jump on his head. After seeing another familiar enemy, the Bob-omb up next is a bigger, much scarier enemy, albeit, another familiar one, a Chain Chomp. Luckily, this one is tied down, so it’s not too much of a threat. You can run by this scary thing without being in much danger. Keep in mind, no one is telling you this. You’re intuitively figuring out how to get past these hurdles.

Then, when you cross this bridge, you see it, your next obstacle, a huge mountain. Remember earlier how I said my friend feels accomplished when he climbs a mountain? Well, the devs must have thought the same thing because your first real test in this new 3D space is to hike all the way to the top of this thing. Symbolically and literally, this is the first mountain you must overcome. After dodging some bubble bombs, you reach your first real fork in the road. You can go right, and try and, dodge these huge boulders, or you can go left and try to climb this steep hill.

Now, you may be different, but the first time I played, I opted to go up this hill on the left. This is important because it teaches you that you have choices and it’s completely up to you which direction you decide to go in this journey. 3D is much less limiting than 2D, and they created this level to really make you feel and understand that. If you’re especially explorative, you might find this hidden teleportation wall that takes you up the rest of this mountain. You’re rewarded for finding this shortcut in the second star of this level, but we’ll get to that in a second.

You reached the top, and this huge bomb dude is waiting for you. He gives you a little hint and says you need to grab him from behind to throw him. Even if you didn’t read the text, he picks you up if you get too close, so you can assume you have to do the same to him. This is a good time to practice your new abilities running around trying to chuck him. Three times, and you did it. The first goal in this game is a fully fledged boss fight, and you took him down. Granted he’s an easy boss, but you need this experience to fight Bowser later on.

After you’ve gotten one star, your very next challenge is to do the exact same thing, but faster by racing Koopa the Quick up the mountain. They’re teaching you how to use the same abilities you’ve just learned, but under pressure. This helps you grow as a player, and like I said before, you’re rewarded for exploring if you found the shortcut, so you get a few more stars, and the game tells you it’s time to fight Bowser. Already? I just started.

This level is much more linear, so it definitely feels like you’re leading up to something epic. Then, when you finally reach him, Bowser looks huge and scary. Again, you have to think of this through the eyes of someone who’s never seen this before. He’s faster than King Bob-omb, but you’ve learned all the skills you need to take him down from your first fight. You swing around and grab him by the tail.

Now, assuming you have no idea what to do at this point, the game allows you to mess around a bit by not letting Bowser break free after a certain amount of time, so you start moving around the control stick, and whoa, you can swing Bowser around. This is so cool. You’ve never done anything like this in a Mario game before. Normally, you can’t touch Bowser at all. You have to throw stuff at him or pull the bridge out from under him. You don’t know what those spiky things do, but if you hit one with Bowser, you’ll definitely understand. Man, it just felt so good when you did that for the first time. So accomplished. Now, obviously, Bowser isn’t dead for good, but it’s now taught you everything you need to know about Bowser for the rest of the game.

As you progress in the game, new levels unlock after you beat a Bowser fight, and these levels increase in difficulty as you go, but the ones that are unlocked in groups are about the same difficulty, which I think is nice because you could pick any of them and feel like you can succeed. It slowly amps up the challenge as you grow as a player until finally, you’ve reached the last Bowser level. By this point, you’re a master of this new 3D platforming stuff. You can jump and dive better than, well, you could earlier in the game.

In this last level, it really tests your skill and pulls out all the stops. Unlike the other Bowser levels, this one builds on top of itself, so if you fall off, sometimes you’ll get a chance to keep going. Well, sometimes, but after besting this entire game, you have one final bout standing in your way. Bowser looks meaner than ever, and this fight is nothing to mess around about. It really feels like a final boss. Bowser has some new moves, you have to hit him three times instead of one, and the whole platform starts falling apart after a while.

I remember watching my dad beat Bowser for the first time and watching him have that sense of accomplishment I strive for so bad, I knew I had to complete this task as well, and I did. After a heart-pounding, sweat-inducing, long, long fight, I finally lined up my throw enough to launch Bowser into that final bomb. I jumped and danced around the room for the entire ending. I had never felt more accomplished at my young point in life.

You see, this game lets you discover what methods worked best for you and grow your own ability as you play through these memorable levels. There wasn’t a perfect way to play. You figured out all the secrets and tricks on your own. This led to one of the most triumphant feelings I’ve ever had from a game before. It laid out the challenge right away by giving you a taste of Bowser early on and kept you striving to reach him again until you bested this foe.

Part of this could have been the fact that I was so young or that the graphics were so revolutionary, but Super Mario 64 has a special place in my heart because it’s really the first time I think I truly fell in love with video games. I wasn’t particularly amazing at anything else at the time. This was how I could feel accomplishment with something. Maybe you’ve had an experience like this before as well. Have you ever beaten a game or part of a game and felt such overwhelming accomplishment you just felt your heart wanting to leap out of your chest? Tell me about it in the comments below. I want to hear it.

Now, assuming you have no idea what to do at this point, the game allows you to mess around a bit by not letting Bowser break free after a certain amount of time, so you start moving around the control stick, and whoa, you can swing Bowser around. This is so cool. You’ve never done anything like this in a Mario game before. Normally, you can’t touch Bowser at all. You have to throw stuff at him or pull the bridge out from under him. You don’t know what those spiky things do, but if you hit one with Bowser, you’ll definitely understand. Man, it just felt so good when you did that for the first time. So accomplished. Now, obviously, Bowser isn’t dead for good, but it’s now taught you everything you need to know about Bowser for the rest of the game.

As you progress in the game, new levels unlock after you beat a Bowser fight, and these levels increase in difficulty as you go, but the ones that are unlocked in groups are about the same difficulty, which I think is nice because you could pick any of them and feel like you can succeed. It slowly amps up the challenge as you grow as a player until finally, you’ve reached the last Bowser level. By this point, you’re a master of this new 3D platforming stuff. You can jump and dive better than, well, you could earlier in the game.

In this last level, it really tests your skill and pulls out all the stops. Unlike the other Bowser levels, this one builds on top of itself, so if you fall off, sometimes you’ll get a chance to keep going. Well, sometimes, but after besting this entire game, you have one final bout standing in your way. Bowser looks meaner than ever, and this fight is nothing to mess around about. It really feels like a final boss. Bowser has some new moves, you have to hit him three times instead of one, and the whole platform starts falling apart after a while.

I remember watching my dad beat Bowser for the first time and watching him have that sense of accomplishment I strive for so bad, I knew I had to complete this task as well, and I did. After a heart-pounding, sweat-inducing, long, long fight, I finally lined up my throw enough to launch Bowser into that final bomb. I jumped and danced around the room for the entire ending. I had never felt more accomplished at my young point in life.

You see, this game lets you discover what methods worked best for you and grow your own ability as you play through these memorable levels. There wasn’t a perfect way to play. You figured out all the secrets and tricks on your own. This led to one of the most triumphant feelings I’ve ever had from a game before. It laid out the challenge right away by giving you a taste of Bowser early on and kept you striving to reach him again until you bested this foe.

Part of this could have been the fact that I was so young or that the graphics were so revolutionary, but Super Mario 64 has a special place in my heart because it’s really the first time I think I truly fell in love with video games. I wasn’t particularly amazing at anything else at the time. This was how I could feel accomplishment with something. Maybe you’ve had an experience like this before as well. Have you ever beaten a game or part of a game and felt such overwhelming accomplishment you just felt your heart wanting to leap out of your chest? Tell me about it in the comments below. I want to hear it.

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free to play games can make money

I know we’ve talked a lot about Free2Play in the last year but as it becomes clearer and clearer that it’s going to be one of the predominant ways that we pay for games in the next decade, it becomes increasingly important that we, both as designers and as consumers, explore the ins and outs of this model. Unfortunately, something like 85% of the Free2Play games we see out there are just doing it wrong. Now 85% may sound hyperbolic, a wildly high estimate, but anyone who’s seen our other episodes on Free2Play games knows that we fundamentally believe in the model. Done right, we think it’s better for everyone, developers and consumers alike. We have no desire to throw the Free2Play industry under the bus here but after looking at all the Free2Play games he’d played or worked on in the last year, James concluded that the vast majority were approaching Free2Play in a way that is detrimental for the player and the company alike. It all stems from one place; a complete lack of underlying design philosophy.

You see, too many Free2Play companies still conceptualize paying for a game and experiencing the game as 2 fundamentally different things when instead they should see monetizing as part of the experience. So often, very little high-level thought is devoted to how the monetization experience feels to the player. It may sound silly, it made sound simple, but very often one of the first things James has to do when working with Free2Play companies is have them set an underlying design philosophy that’ll help them guide all decisions around monetization. The philosophy he goes with is this. The player has to enjoy spending money on your game. This seems so basic and yet the vast majority of Free2Play games currently on the market fall rather into one of 2 completely opposed camps. They are either a) games were it’s actually far more enjoyable not to spend the money on the game or b) games that try to force the player to pay money rather than giving them a reason to want to.

“For most of our history, human technology consisted of our brains, fire, and sharp sticks.”

Let’s talk a little about each of those. First, games where it’s actually way more interesting to not spend money on the game. You’ve all probably played one. You know, games where the most interesting challenge is to see how far you can get without paying money. Games where it’s way more compelling to figure out all the ways you can get the fancy gear or compete with the paying players without spending a cent. Games where all the challenge disappears when you pay, where a system that was before a crafty puzzle that you felt clever for solving just becomes dull and routine because you bought a fast track to the finish line. These types of games fail not because they aren’t good for the player but because the player, by definition, won’t enjoy spending money on the game. Why would they want to? Working around the pay system is often actually a more engaging challenge than the core game plan of these games and so the player never has a reason to monetize. In fact, it’s in their best interest not to.

While this may be a lot of fun for the player, at least for a little while, it fails completely as a monetizing strategy and that failure actually ends up having negative consequences for the players too. Without a high conversion rate or a substantial revenue from their users, most of these games tend to fade away or simply stop being supported by the company that built them. Because the game isn’t earning enough to justify the investment, the developers slow down the number of updates or simply cease adding new content all together, just letting the game continue to shuffle on and provide the last few drops of revenue it can until it does. That sucks for developers and players alike and yet it’s the inevitable result of that underlying design philosophy because while many such games are just the result of careless monetization design, many others were designed that way out of fear of being seen as the other type of Free2Play game; the game that feels like it’s extorting you.

We’ve all played that second type too. These are the pay to win games or the games that let you invest 20 hours and then hit you with a pay wall that essentially requires that you pay up to continue. These games stem from a design philosophy that doesn’t really consider you to be a player so much as a source of revenue. It’s game design done by accountants rather than designers and it’s inevitably destructive. It’s the complete divorce of play from pay and the worst thing is at first this type of monetization appears to work. Many of us have, at some point, grit our teeth and paid for some stupid thing we felt like a game was forcing us to pay for and we resented it and that niggling resentment stuck somewhere in the back of our minds and made the whole experience worse until at some point we hit yet another monetization squeeze and just threw up our hands and said screw you guys, I’m done.

This is the worst possible experience but because it forces monetization so hard it will get a comparatively sizable number of players to convert early on and so it will appear to be very successful until a year down the line when it becomes clear how many players it’s forced out of the game and how much it’s segmented its own community. This is the method that zynga went with in many of it’s games and this arc can very clearly be seen in many of its products. Unfortunately, because this method appears at first to work if you’re simply looking at raw numbers and because from a design perspective this doesn’t require a great deal of effort or skill from the team, the extorted version of Free2Play is something that much of the industry decided to emulate and this is what led to the bad reputation that Free2Play has gotten which in turn now drives many customers away from the Free2Play model entirely. That’s bad for everyone.

We have got to find a way past this manipulative strategy as it leaves us with nothing to build on from a business perspective and it’s becoming less and less effective anyway as consumers are getting savvier. How do we avoid the pitfall of making it more engaging for the player to game the Free2Play system than to pay money while at the same time not falling into the trap of making your player feel like the game is extorting money from them at every turn? Well, it’s different for every game but it all comes back to the central philosophy of creating an environment where the player’s happy to spend money on your game. Think about when you back something cool on Kickstarter or even buy something at a regular game store. You’re excited. You’re happy to spend that money for something that you’re just glad exists. Sure you might rather it be free, I mean that’s probably true about everything, but you don’t mind paying for it. In fact, you’re often very happy just to be able to buy that thing.

That’s what a player should feel in a good Free2Play experience. The best of these experiences feel like buying a toy or a model or something to treasure. Something that you want to own just for the sake of owning it and every time you look at it it makes you smile. For any of you who have played Warhammer or maybe even HeroClix, you know how that feels. Games like League of Legends really capitalize on this well. But things to own aren’t the only things we treasure, so are experiences. Sometimes the experiences games can sell us are big things like a new [inaudible 00:05:38] mystery in the Secret World, which I would eagerly buy and then lose myself in like getting a new season of my favorite TV show, but as a developer you can’t always provide that new large-scale adventure or episode so what else can we do?

Well, just as an example that I particularly love, there was an item I saw once in a Korean MMO called the money bomb and it was this item where when you used it it exploded into goodies like a popping pinata. Now, the buyer of the money bomb couldn’t pick up any of the goodies that popped out but everyone else around you could and people loved buying these things because someone would walk into town and throw one of these babies down and it would just turn into a party. The person who bought the money bomb would get tons of love from everyone around them and often other people would announce that they were going to go buy one too. Soon the town square just turned into an impromptu online festival. People loved buying these things. They enjoyed buying them. They didn’t resent the money spent or feel like they had to spend that money and it wasn’t actively more fun to not buy them. Fantastic design.

When building a Free2Play game, don’t think about the money first but build a good game and the money will come. Don’t base your design around fear of being perceived as extorting players either. Instead, build your game around finding joy for the human beings playing your game. What will make each purchase something the players happy to do? What’ll make each dollar spent feel completely worth it? What will make finally spending your money feel like buying that thing you saw in that store window and longed for every day for a year until you finally saved up enough to buy it? That’s where you should root your Free2Play design. That’s what’ll make Free2Play a great model for everyone involved.

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