Make Games

My first encounter with the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky was when I read The Metabarons, a comic book series that describes a lineage of superhuman warriors, the titular Metabarons. The book is lavishly illustrated by the Argentinian artist Juan Giminez, who, to his credit, manages to keep up with the maddening pace of Jodorowsky’s ideas as they escalate from weird to absolutely fucking insane within a matter of issues.  This is one of my favorite comic books and a must-read for anyone who appreciates the artform.

Later, my friend and fellow independent game developer, Jonatan “cactus” Söderström, introduced me to El Topo and Holy Mountain, the two films for which Jodorowsky is probably best known, and cited them as inspirations for his mind-bending games. At this point I started to wonder what Jodorowsky thought of video games himself. Surely, someone with a mind toward the violent, the surreal, and the mystical would appreciate the possibilities of playing games.

A few interviews on the web revealed that Jodorowsky was, indeed, aware of video games and had some interest in them (apparently there was even the possibility of a Metabarons video game), but it wasn’t until I picked up the first trade paperback of The Technopriests that I realized how keenly aware he actually was. In fact, The Technopriests is very much directed toward the games industry, although in the comic it’s called the Technoguild, having been ported over to the unique sci-fi/fantasy world in which The Metabarons takes place.

(Note: the rest of this post contains spoilers.)

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After the first few releases of Spelunky, there was one player who began nagging me constantly to make the game easier.  “Derek, I hate your fuckin’ game,” he said.  “Because it’s the first roguelike/platformer implementation I’ve ever seen, which is totally awesome.  But from this game it seems you suck at difficulty.”  I thought about it, but I really felt that the game’s challenge was one of the things that made it work.  No challenge, no tension, no mastery… no fun.  I tried to explain my thinking to this guy, but he wouldn’t have any of it.  “Feeling cheated and insulted by a game is not fun, unless a person is brainwashed or mentally handicapped.”

I considered ignoring him, but I really did want him to enjoy the game.  He was annoying but also very passionate, writing short novels describing how much bile was in his throat as he kept playing… and dying.  I felt like he might have a good point about the difficulty level of Spelunky, but I couldn’t see how to fix it without diluting the things that made the game compelling.

Instead, I fixed bugs that other players were finding and released new versions of the game.  Interestingly enough, I noticed that while The Angry Player(tm) was getting more and more angry, he was also making progress in Spelunky, getting to the later levels and eventually beating the game.  This convinced me that the difficulty was not the problem in-and-of-itself, and that I was right to not include an easy mode in the game (since obviously it would have become an unnecessary crutch for players like him).  This was a game that you could get better at, even if you weren’t a great video game player.

In the end, the various bug-fixes and improvements I made to the game’s controls DID make the game easier… but in a good way.  So in some sense, The Angry Player was right: the game was too hard.  But not for the reasons that he or I assumed.

What I got out of this experience was that player feedback is very valuable, but cannot always be taken at face value.  I’ve come to think about it as almost a doctor/patient-type relationship: the player may approach you with symptoms (“My head hurts!” or “Your game’s too hard!”) and it’s up to you to figure out what the real problems are.  Simply treating the outward symptoms may alleviate them temporarily, but won’t necessarily address the underlying, and more fundamental, problems.  I call these types of solutions (e.g. adding an easy mode) “band-aids”.

Taking the doctor analogy further, it’s interesting to think about how doctors actually take care of patients: they ask the patients how they feel and try to eliminate potential illnesses.  Eventually, they’re left with just one possible problem.  In game development, there’s perhaps an inclination to want players to be more specific with their feedback, but like patients, players are often most in tune with how they feel about the problem rather than the problem itself.  With The Angry Player, I probably should have asked him more questions to zero in on what was wrong, rather than spending so much time trying to convince him why I was right.

One of the many things I heard this year at GDC that stuck with me goes something like “design your game for hardcore players first, then make it accessible for casual players.”  I’m probably butchering it a little bit - I heard it from my friend Mark Johns, who attributes it to Blizzard.  Who knows?  Maybe the original saying was “Anchovies are the best pizza topping.”

In any case, I like it.  The implication, to me, is that if you start with a shallow game you’ll end up with a shallow game, no matter how many doodads you stick onto it.  Instead, start with something deep, complex, and satisfying, and then polish it up.  Makes sense.

It also answers simply the question that is on every game designer’s mind: “who should I be designing for?”  Other than “myself”, the answer is not “hardcore” or “casual” (or the nebulous “core”), but “hardcore first, then casual”.

Defining hardcore: to me, these are the players who will enjoy your game at its deepest level, who will discover things about your game that you never knew existed, and who will champion your game and give it life for years to come.  They’re also the players who might turn off casual players by calling them “scrubs”, or telling them that they just aren’t good enough… or that they “don’t get it”.  But I think the benefits of having a hardcore fanbase far outweigh the consequences, and for every asshole who wants to shut new players out you’ll have a knight who wants to spread their infectious enthusiasm for your game far and wide.  (See: the Street Fighter and Dwarf Fortress communities)

As a game creator, I like the idea of converting casual players to the cause, rather than conceding things to them, or “dumbing down” my game for them.  I’ll enjoy the game more, they’ll enjoy the game more… everyone will enjoy the game more.  In game design as in anything else, I believe that win-win situations do exist and we should be seeking them out.  This idea - ”design your game for hardcore players first, then make it accessible for casual players” - seems to me like the best way to approach a win-win situation.