Srekel

Dot Big Bang, Tides of Revival

Making Tides of Revival, FOSS sillily scoped open world RPG.

Work: Community Engineer @ dotbigbang

Prev: Hammerting, JC2, GTA5, Vermintide, game jams


So. The word "fun" as it relates to game design. It's something I've thought about quite a bit for quite a long time, which is quite a silly thing to be doing.

Here's an example of it being actively avoided at a studio, and someone thinking that's a crazy stance. Is it?

The problem

I've said on occasion that "fun" in game design is a bad word. I guess I've come to realize that it isn't bad, but it is problematic, and here's why.

When people talk about games being fun, it's subjective. I think roguelikes are fun, you think racing games are fun. Neither of us is wrong. I like pineapple on pizza, you like olives. (Actually, that's a bad example, because in this case, you are wrong)

For game design, it's the opposite. "Fun" must be an objective truth relating to the game or discussion at hand. Adding an AK47 to Counter-Strike is fun, adding it to Skyrim would not be fun. That is I think the best definition of the word fun in game design.

The problem, then, is that this often gets mixed up when people work on a game. "We should add this because it's fun", is said in the "because I like this kind of thing" meaning, not in the "it is objectively in line with the game's pillars/strengths/direction/whatever". This can be confusing and demoralizing.

Obviously that's a mouthful, and we don't want to say that every time. Good thing: we can use "fun" as a shorthand. Just be sure that everyone knows what it means. πŸ™‚

This does mean that, say, adding scary ghosts to a horror game would be "fun". I'm OK with that. If not, there isn't much use for the term fun in those types of games, or in games that try to be serious, like The Last of Us. And if there's no use, you've only robbed yourself of a very to-the-pointy word in your vocabulary.

Also worth noting is that in the typical usage of "fun", people often think of it in terms of a game that's amusing, stress free, careless, action packed, etc. Sometimes people argue that a certain type of game is wrong because "games are supposed to be fun!!". This post doesn't really go into this aspect. Perhaps mostly because I think it's a dumb approach. I think horror movies are fun. That doesn't mean I sit there laughing - but I enjoy watching them. I don't think horror games are fun. That doesn't mean I dislike them because they stress me out. Quite the opposite, they rarely have the intended effect on me, and what's a horror game without effect?

Anyways...

Now for a lot of you... this must come across as an Extremely Basic Game Design 101 type of knowledge. And yeah. It is. I mean, I think most people really know this even without thinking about it. However, it's also very easy to forget about, because we are just humans, and it's very easy to get excited about your favorite game mechanic from another game and want to toss it into the game you're working on because it would be so much fun! But.. is it your fun, or is it the game's fun?

Either way, at best you already know all this stuff. At worst, this post is a reminder, that I think we all need from time to time.

Exemplified

So... I saw this thread here πŸ‘‡ by Delaney King, and I really liked it! But it - and more so, the responses to it - weren't, I think, as fruitful as they could've been. It has to do with that word, fun, and so it finally prompted me to write this post.

First of all, I'd like to state that it's totally OK for a game design thread and the responses to it to not be 100% perfect. With game design being such a difficult and "soft" subject, it's much more valuable to read imperfect takes and have an imperfect discussion about it, than to not have any takes or discussions at all.

In it, she talks about how to make a journey in a world a more engaging experience - "fun", if you will. A lot of the pushback she gets (mind you, I haven't read it all), is: "No, that wouldn't help, because ultimately you're going to get tired of a space when you're trying to get to where you're going, so you need to be able to skip it."

Narrowing that down further, how I interpret what they are saying is: "In games, you spend your time going from A to B. Why spend energy on the things inbetween?".

And, how I interpret Delaney is, "What if there was a game where the inbetween - the space of the game, the world, was so good that you didn't necessarily spend your time going from quest checkpoint to quest checkpoint, but rather you spent the time in the world, letting it take you whereever you'd find yourself going depending on what happened in it and what you found and what you did and how it changed?"

Now I don't want to put words into people's mouths, so I won't say that that is what she or everyone else ackchyually meant, just that I'd like to frame it this way, because this is how I'm getting the most out of the discussion, and how it's relevant to the point I want to make.

I disagree with her a bit, in that I think in many of today's games, fast travel is a good and necessary option. The games are, honestly almost always, trying to tell more or less fixed stories. You can scour the landscape once for random (hand-written) quests, but once you've done that and the map is cleared up, what you want to do is to go to the next point in the main quest, and riding there might be pretty but not exactly interesting.

And that's fine. It's got an A-B-C-D main quest. That and the points of interest and the side-quests are what the game is built around, and that is what you came for. The world is perhaps the base of the cake, or the icing on the cake, but it isn't why you're eating the cake. The quests, scripted dialogue, story, special locations, are the fun.

Of course you want fast travel - it gets you to the fun!

But!

What if!

What if those things weren't the fun? Maybe that's the fun for you, maybe that's the fun that we have right now, because a lot of these games are structurally very very similar.

But imagine.

Imagine another player who might want a game where they can run around in a fantasy world... but not in a way that's tied to a quest. Their fun, in this example, is partaking in a world where there's enough content and depth to make their own internal quests. They might be riding through the forest, looking for an herb they can mix into a village's water supply so that they are all drowsy and defenseless which'll cause the nearby bandit camp to attack, at which point you can go to the camp to free their prisoners which will in turn go home and... maybe you get the point. Delaney's thread is full of great suggestions.

That sounds like a completely different kind of fun. A fun I honestly haven't seen much of.

If you argue on Twitter about whether games should have fast travel or not, because fast travel is boring (not fun), or fun, and you all have different ideas of which type of game you're talking about... you're gonna have a bad time.

The Elvengroin Legacy, fast travel, and "fun"

So The Elvengroin Legacy, or EGL, as I like to call it, is my side project. It is a fantasy RPG set in a huge world.

In one specific tweet, Delaney says if you need fast travel, you should consider making your world smaller. This implies that fast travel is so detrimental to games that we should not make games that are large. This is, imho, a subjective-fun take, and not an objective-fun game design take. Some games ought to be large, and for those games, fast travel is a necessity.

For story driven, or location-based games (for example, Elden Ring is a great game to zoom around to different places on the map as you progress), I believe it is congruent with their fun-ness to make fast travel easy and frictionless.

For a game like Skyrim, it's a mixed bag. There's a lot to see and discover - it's beautiful and packed with content, so you are definitely missing out if you are only fast travelling. But... inevitably, once you've cleared out bandit camps and quests, there really isn't much left to do, and so a lot of people will want to get to the next quest on the other side of the map, but they don't want to go there.

The base Skyrim game (i.e. mod free) is not built for perpetual world travel. It's not particularly dynamic or systemic, and to make it that would be a huge undertaking, adding a whole new direction for the game. I'd love it, but it's an unreasonable ask.

So then, for EGL...

With a world size that is on the order of magnitude of Daggerfall's, that is to say, it might take anywhere between five and twenty realtime days to ride across by horse, no matter how you slice and dice it, fast travel of some form is necessary.

I think Delaney does a great job of asking "People want fast travel because world traversal isn't fun, how can we make world traversal fun?".

As I mentioned in a reply to the thread, in my case I need to flip that question on its head. "Fast travel is often a boring mechanic. In a game that really does require it, how can I make fast travel fun?"

EGL will be simulationy, and dynamic, so it's natural that fast travel is not just an instant teleport from A to B. Things need to happen while you're on the road even if it's not in first-person-view. To that effect, it makes sense that you'd be able to...

  • Set the pace: Go there faster but risk being tired or miss out on discovering things along the way)
  • Have skills that affect how the travel goes - does your character spot the ambush in time, does your character pick up any nice herbs on the way, etc.
  • Choose to take the fastest route, or a route that allows you to sleep safely at inns every night.
  • Set priorities: Are the lands bandit or slime infested? Better spend most of the time with your eyes and ears open. Is it relatively safe? Maybe look for those herbs. Study a book. Or ponder something. (What does pondering as a passive action mean in an RPG? I don't know. Isn't that exciting?!)

Now, I haven't thought that far about this, I'm sure there are many fun (!) things that can be done. But I tend to not overspeculate, as it's better to solve those things when you get there.

One thing I am doing is building up a set of design values, guidelines to help me when the time comes. This list is not final and is guaranteed to change and be added to. I'm sure that most of these aren't understandable to most people, and that's fine for now, I've written them down mainly for myself. But I do aim to write about them in more detail, so that when someone joins the project, they can read it and be on the same page as me about what constitutes fun in the context of The Elvengroin Legacy.

  • Abstractions must be transparent
  • The world must be concrete
  • Simulation builds gameplay
  • Procedural generation provides breadth and fidelity
  • Feelings comes first
  • Balance comes last
  • Rough edges are preferable to perfection
  • Gameplay loops should be at the back of the mind, not at the front.

Thanks for reading my not-100%-perfect hot take on these two bits of game design. πŸ™‚


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in reply to @Srekel's post:

Hot takes are supposed to be short Anders. :P

Personally I think for any game design you have to embrace the subjectivity there isn't an objective take even if you have things like pillars and what not. And an AK in Skyrim would be amazing.

Hehe yeah :) Subjectivity is what lets the designer make their own inprint on the game. If I really wanted to double back on my claim, I could argue that "being in line with the designer's preferences" is something that could be considered part of the objective ruler. A metric that'd be high for artsy games but low for Zynga games, you know? But.. doesn't really matter. I'm happy for my post to have holes for people to find and point out :)

(Honestly I'm quite happy to have finally posted it, went through several iterations and publishing actual words is definitely more scary than posting code.. :D )

Interesting stuff! I agree with you that people use fun in such a general way that it loses meaning. In my opinion the meaning of the word fun can still be salvaged.

  • "Fun" = "learning through interaction" (like how Raph Koster uses it in "A Theory of Fun" https://theoryoffun.com/)
  • "Pleasure" = things that are pleasurable in games. Fun is one pleasure. Other pleasures include the satisfaction of snapping legos together, a cool narrative moment, looking at a beautiful sunset and infinite other things that people find pleasurable in games.

Using this terminology I think it's easier to talk about the fast travel problem. Fast travel usually does mean that the areas in between are no longer fun. There is nothing more to learn from them. You have already (probably) bested the challenges which lie between waypoints.

I don't know much about your game so I'm not sure which applies but I could see either being useful to think about. You might want fast traveling to be fun, in which case you probably want to include systems which reward deep learning. You may also want to find some way to make fast travel pleasurable. In this case you'd be focusing on things like (if fast travel is teleportation) beautiful and snappy animation of your character disappearing and reappearing somewhere else.