Category: game design

When I first started to make games back in the middle ages, there was very little in the way of academic discussion regarding how to do it. All existing games were designed by people who were pioneers, just ‘winging it’ and putting stuff into a game because it was ‘cool’. That child-like excitement and enthusiasm lasted a long time, but eventually the video games industry got large enough that companies needed more design staff, and people had to start teaching game design in schools, colleges and universities.

Academia has its own language, and its own way of doing things. Personally, I hate academic language. I often find that reading academic papers on a topic is 5% information and 95% display of how clever the author wants people to think they are. There is a lot of inherent snobbery in language, where people think that discussing concepts in an academic tone makes them appear cleverer than they are.

This is backwards.

It takes skill to explain a complex topic in simple language. Its also way, way more helpful. Its 2023 now, and we live in a hyper-connected world, and very much a multilingual one. A non trivial percentage of people reading this bog post will not have English as their first language. If I try and show off my vocabulary, I would impress hardly anyone, and infuriate almost everyone. Simple language is good.

I think a lot of modern game design discussion is over academic. It gets obsessed with ‘player verbs’ and ‘tight loops’ and ‘core design pillars’. That sort of language looks good in a game design document that you can show to your boss at a performance review to make them pay you more. I’m sure it has its place. However, I think this obsession with the academic analysis of video games is often destructive as it actually kills off the freewheeling experimental ‘lets just try this’ attitude which often leads to the most interesting game designs.

My most famous game is the Democracy series, of which Democracy 4 is the latest incarnation. Its a political strategy game where the player runs the country. Its 2D and icon-based, and looks like a giant super-complex and uber-connected infographic that the player navigates. The main UI screen for the game is a symphony of information-overload and looks like this:

I suspect anyone who was submitting this screenshot as a mock-up in a game design course at a university would get a D minus. Its clearly overcomplex. It puts too much burden on the player to identify whats important. Its messy, its confusing, it has too much data in one place. Try harder next time.

Except…that is the whole point. Overcomplexity is a feature, not a bug in Democracy 4. This is something that a few reviewers, and a few players do not get, and I understand why. Modern game design has been sanitized and simplified to the extreme. The player is treated often like an idiot, with the information-processing capability of a puppy. We never give the player too much choice, or too much information at any point. That would be BAD game design, that needs ‘reworking to streamline the UX’.

God I hate ‘streamlining’.

Whenever big tech companies like google or Microsoft talk about how their new UI is ‘more streamlined’. it inevitably means ‘its way worse, but it looks simpler’. Whoever thought that we should start hiding scrollbars until you go hunting for them should be sentenced to life imprisonment. There seems to be some belief among UX designers that options and information are things that cause infectious disease, and need to be hidden away whenever possible.

Anyway… thats not actually my point.

Sometimes, a game is deliberately BAD by a conventional metric, because its trying to create an atmosphere. Thats intentional. Thats something all forms of entertainment or art does, at least if the creator has a vision for what they are doing. The Omaha beach level in the original ‘Medal of Honor’ game was catastrophically hard. Like mega-hard. Insane hard. You try at least a dozen times before you even make it to the first ditch hard. THATS THE POINT. If your game is representing something incredibly difficult, it needs to BE difficult. Being scared of triggering any ‘negative’ emotion in the audience makes for incredibly sanitized, tedious, unchallenging, and unrewarding art.

Running an entire country is nightmareishly complicated. Being President or Prime Minister is shockingly complex. Just imagine how many different topics you need to be familiar with in order to make the right decisions to run an entire country. Its insane. There is good reason that being US President seems to create accelerated aging. The amount of information presented to a President in just an hour is ridiculous, in 4 years its nuts. And ALL of it is absolutely vital. You don’t get to put a document in front of a US president unless its absolutely important and probably urgent.

The best thing you can do with any game design, or any book, or movie, or music is to generate emotion. If we want information, we will read/watch non-fiction. We open ourselves up to entertainment because we want to be moved emotionally into some state. That might be fear, in a horror game, or a sense of calm flow in a factory game, or a sense of excitement and adrenaline in an FPS. This is the ‘core design pillar’ if you must use such a term. The game must generate some feeling in the player.

I know some people dislike Democracy 4 because the icon-based gameplay is not what they expect. They expect to have a 3D avatar of the president (These tend to be US players who only want to be the USA…) that walks around a 3D oval office and see animated soldiers saluting to them etc… But to me, thats not what being a president is about.

Ultimately the only thing that makes a president good or bad, is what decisions did they take? and did they make the country better? Speeches are great, having charisma is nice, being good at shaking hands or tweeting is all good, but what really matters is what did they do. Given the situation, how did they act? and why?

This is what I try to convey in Democracy 4. You are the president and you have a LOT of things to pay attention to, and YES it s overwhelming, and NO you do not have enough time/bandwidth to process all this, and you need to actually go with your gut and make emotional rather than analytical decisions very often because there simply is TOO MUCH data, so you have to play the game in a different way to most strategy games you have played. There are just too many variables, and too many equations and too much data. Thats the WHOLE POINT.

With anything interesting, you are going to lose some part of the audience. I definitely lose players, and generate refunds among some, because they find the game ‘not fun’ and ‘over-complex’. Thats to be expected. I suspect I gain more players than I lose, because this experience is not on offer anywhere else. Other game designers would simplify, or streamline the game. They would try and ‘guide the player gradually through a tightly constrained path of easy decisions’. I will not do that, because its not the vision I have for the game.

You can make your game too hard, or too fast, or too weird, or confusing. Its all ok. As long as you have a vision for what you want the player to feel, and you deliver on the promise and generate that feeling then everything is cool. Sometimes its ok for the player to feel overwhelmed, or confused, or freaked-out. Sometimes thats EXACTLY what its all about.

Democracy 4 is not too complex. Neither is Dwarf Fortress. Dark Souls is not too hard. Surgeon Simulator’s control scheme is not too fiddly. Agatha Christie is not too formulaic. Star Trek doesnt have too much technobabble. Its all absolutely fine.

Democracy 4 is on steam, epic store, gog, humble store and itch.

I recently added some code to Democracy 4 which introduces a new configurable option for people who are really into the game. This is not ‘live’ yet but will be in the next update. I have not totally settled on a name for it yet, but I think I’ll call it something like ‘opinion inertia boost’, because that ties in with other uses of the term throughout the game. So what is it?

Inertia already exists in the game. Every effect that a policy, an event, a dilemma choice or anything else may have on anything can have some inertia applied to it. This means that instead of X affecting Y, and it being a simple equation, in fact its an equation that takes the average value of X over a certain number of turns, which is an integer called ‘inertia’. You can see the value of inertia at the far right of any of the indicators in the game that show an effect:

The inertia is a value set by me, or by a modder, and its fixed. Its basically part of the equation, and set in stone. There has not yet been any way to change this by the player or during the game.

Inertia plays a vital role in making the game both realistic and fun. In practice, if you introduce grants for business startups, it does not convert 500,000 citizens to become capitalists the next day. The impact is going to take years. people need to hear about the grants, apply for them, see their business do well, tell their friends, people have to read newspaper stories about this happening… and perhaps even more relevantly, people who were once socialists but get ‘converted’ to capitalism have to slowly get out of the habits of their previous views, and adopt new ones, even in opposition to their friends/family and peers.

I see this sort of thing happen quite a lot, and have witnessed it with both friends and relatives. When peoples circumstances change, they tend to continue to cling to their existing core beliefs and principles, but over a period of time, opinions will change. With weakly held opinions, its quick to change, but with deeply ingrained beliefs, especially those that come from family, change can take a very long time.

I’m an example of this myself. I grew up in a very working class circumstance. My mother was a trade union representative at work, where she worked as a filing clerk for a trade union HQ (different union!) so she was Trade Unionist to the power of two! My father was also a union rep. We went on exciting day trips to the labour party conference. I read the communist manifesto, and Das Kapital as a teenager.

Fast forward thirty five years and I am a director of two companies, who trades on the stock market, and has employed people and run a multinational company (albeit v small). I’ve even worked on stock market trading floors. I own a single book by Ayn Rand (which I thought was interesting, albeit pretty ranty and very repetitive). My views have definitely changed over time, and with changes in circumstances.

The point is… change of core beliefs takes time. We all think we would keep the same principles until death, but thats unlikely. Societal change is very real. You might think your views regarding being liberal/conservative or left/right are very deeply held sensible views you independently arrived at, but this is very unlikely. I thought I was right as a teenage communist.

So the big question is… how long does it take for politics and society to convert someone from being hard right to hard left, or liberal to conservative? I have no definitive answer, but its a long time. Democracy 4 limits all inertia to a maximum value of 32, for technical reasons, which is 8 years. probably not long enough…

Like all games, Democracy 4 has to balance fun with realism. Not many games have a core mechanic of it taking 32 turns for you to see the impact of your choices, especially not if you can lose the game in an election in maybe 16 turns. Thats pretty brutal. Not only does this make the game hard, it also makes it frustrating. If inertia is too high, many players will just think ‘the game is random’ and complain about the RNG. Ironically there are very very few random numbers in the game…

Plus many players will not bother reading the tutorial or looking at the tooltips. I bet a good 30% of the people who play the game don’t even know inertia is a thing, or where to find it. Most players don’t really know what they are doing, because people have 1,000 games and no time to devote to learning the intricacies. If I modelled inertia realistically, a lot of frustrated players would have no fun.

…and yet…

There are definitely players who feel that they would prefer realism over ‘simple fun’. These players are frustrated that real societal change feels so easy in the game. If they want to convert France to a Capitalist state, they WANT to have to really struggle to take its left leaning population slowly along for the ride. They WANT change to be slow, and take longer, which is why I am adding this cool little slider to the games option screen:

This slider defaults to zero, where it has no impact, and goes as high as to add a 3x modifier. At the far right it will triple the inertia values for all inputs to socialism and liberalism. This will make all policies and events and dilemma choices act more slowly on the membership of these voter groups. (One value affects membership for both socialism and capitalism, on a spectrum and the same for liberal/conservative).

I’ve written all the code, and tested it works on both new games and save games. Everything seems fine but I will do a bunch of playthroughs before I do a new update that includes this slider. I’m pretty sure that 95% of players will never experiment with it at all, but I have enough players that I think its worth adding it all the same. It definitely gives me an easy answer to anybody who comments at me telling me that this part of the game is unrealistic!

Note that this difficulty in changing the country’s views is very much a real world modern problem. Even if Joe Biden was a communist, there is no way he can convert the majority of the US electorate over to his views in a single term. Arguably all Obama managed to do, in his entire tenure, is to get the affordable health care act in place, and it comes nowhere close to being a state health service like the NHS in the UK. Even a popular US president, with control of the house & senate, has to move extremely slowly in changing what the acceptable size of the state is, or changing social policy.

Trump found it almost impossible to actually build a wall, Obama found it impossible to close Guantanamo. Blair did very little in terms of raising taxes, Thatcher did very little in lowering them. Change takes real time.

One final thing: This slider only affects liberal/conservative and socialist/capitalist. I am unsure whether it should also affect membership of the religious group. Opinions very much welcome. I don’t think it should affect most groups, as peoples membership of these is a lot more fickle and easily swayed.