Game design is too complicated. My experience of game design theories is that they add too many unnecessary components for them to be used in practice. They become too advanced to grasp or you end up sinking too much time analysing the game instead of making the game. I studied game design at Gotland University, and although I learned to understand games better, I never use game design theory as a tool when I make games. Instead I have built up my own guidelines that I use. A red thread through all my theories is that they are based on non-game design literature.
I call this theory of Goal Oriented Design. It is a cut from the rules Csikszentmihalyi suggest setting the human in a Flow state (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), then extend it through more research. It´s built upon self-acclaimed goals and feedback systems. It makes you ask yourself “What is the current goal of the player?”, and check if the game is supporting that goal at that given moment. But first, let´s see how we humans handle movement. You will get why this is important soon, so bear with me.
How we handle movment with Optimal Feedback Control
Movement is complicated. We have more than 600 skeletal muscles in our body, and every muscle can contract themselves on different levels. That combined with all the things we can do with the muscles, the possibilities become almost infinite. To figure out what to do is a very tiresome process for our brain. Rather than constantly calculating what our muscles should do out of these endless possibilities, our brain spreads out its computations by the use of goals (Wong, Aaron L., Adrian M. Haith, and John W. Krakauer. 2015).
The latest theory in motor control is called Optimal feedback control (Todorov, Emanuel, and Michael I. Jordan, 2002). It´s based on that we set up goals. Example of goals can be: grab a coffee cup, move the character away from an attack or press that arrow key. Setting up a goal takes around 0.2 seconds, this is the time before we start to move our muscles, in other words, the reaction time. During this short period, we analyse our environment and figure out what is the most important thing to do. In other words, we are figuring out a goal. Like taking a gasp of air before we can change our actions.
To further decrease the processing power used by our brain, the brain only gives us a rough sketch on the action we should do to complete its goal. If we have the goal to grab a cup of coffee, instead of calculating how and when we should bend our muscle to make a perfect cup grab; we use our previous knowledge on how we grab coffee cups and do similar actions. Then we set up a feedback system to measure progress on how our action is performing. If we want to reach for a lovely cup of coffee, our body sends out it´s hand towards the cup as we done before, and we only correct our movement if we deviate from the path towards the cup. We get positive feedback if we have a good trajectory and bad feedback if we deviate. This also helps if there is something unexpected in the way. If we would make a perfect cup grab, were we calculate every muscle move at the same time and we did´t account for the strong wind in our calculations, our hand would miss the cup because of the force from the wind. But with an optimal feedback control we are able to recalculate the trajectory of our hand movement with the wind force in mind, but only if we need to, all the way to the coffee cup.
I think one of the best examples is crumble a flat paper to a ball. The goal is the paper ball and our rough sketch is squeezing the paper where it sticks out. Then we sense with the palms of our hand if the paper sticks out and we press a little bit harder on that spot, then repeat this until we complete our goal of making a flat paper in to a round ball. We control our movements with goals and feedback. That´s the foundation of Optimal feedback control. This help us understand the foundation on what Goal oriented design is. Self-acclaimed goals and a self-acclaimed feedback system. We as humans set up goals and ways to measure progress.
Setting up goals and feedback system´s in games
A good example to describe goal-oriented design in a game is Minecraft. Building in Minecraft, the player first their goal, let´s say a house. Then the player set up a feedback system of what matters to complete that goal. In this case it would be changing the space, so it looks like a house. Then you start to progress towards the goal. Every time you put out a block your brain registrate that as progress and we release positive reward chemicals.
I think death pits, that is in the middle of the map flow, in generic deathmatch games is a good example of bad design from a goal-oriented perspective. I want to note that every game is unique, and that it may be a good reason to have a death pit in a deathmatch mode map. The goal for you is to shoot the enemy, you will set up a feedback system that supports shooting your opponents. You will shoot and if you miss you will revaluate your movement to hopefully hit the enemy next time. In the middle of this comes a more urgent threat, a death pit! The game is now presenting two goals where one leads to instant death and demands focus on precision platforming and one is tweaking your aim and macro movement, little on how exactly you are placing yourself on a platform. Either you will shift focus towards precision platforming or continue to shoot the player and potentially fall to your death. If this was a game built on risk management this could be good. Then the main goal would be to find the best chance for success, but now the main goal for the player is shooting the other player. In this case they will either fall to their death or get shot down by the other player. A problem with the death pit is that most times they are sporadically placed on the map. This means that most of that the player will foremost focus on shooting. Then suddenly a death pit appears that is more important than the main goal. Even if the two goals are conflicting in a second our reaction time is 0.2 seconds and we can registrate feedback much faster than that (See my post about subconscious game design). So even if it appears to be a small thing for our consciousness it´s a huge thing for our subconsciousness.
To summarize: think of what goals your game is signalling to the player. It can be a game that is very open for what the player set as a goal, like Minecraft or The Sims. Both of them still acknowledge that the player will set up goals and give feedback if they progress towards that. The game can also be more precise in what the player needs to do. Take the example of a classic corridor shooter, where all the feedback should support the goal of killing off enemies. That´s why many games like doom for example focus so much on the satisfaction of destroying enemies. I strongly recommend seeing the push forward GDC talk on the latest DOOM game, which I think is very well executed design, using the principle of a strong goal-oriented design process. It´s easier to remember a concept if it is put in context. I too put the goal-oriented thinking in sentences to help your brain remember.
Talk about Goal oriented design.
“I think it´s okay to add random elements to our rouge-like. The goal of the player is to estimate the best choice”
“The player seems to like the raft building mechanic; the raft could sink down a little bit if you build heavy objects on it to show progress.”
“We can´t have explosive barrel in this game, this game is about using close combat, it will be to fun to shoot the barrels from a distance.”
Links:
GDC talk: Embracing Forward combat in DOOM
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. "Flow: The psychology of optimal performance." (1990)
Wong, Aaron L., Adrian M. Haith, and John W. Krakauer. "Motor planning." The Neuroscientist 21.4 (2015): 385-398.
Todorov, Emanuel, and Michael I. Jordan. "Optimal feedback control as a theory of motor coordination." Nature neuroscience5.11 (2002): 1226.