This week I was able to participate in the 2020 Game Makers Toolkit Game Jam. I created a game called Oliver Plays The Labyrinth.
I've been a fan of Mark Brown and his channel for many years but this was the first chance I had to participate in one of his jams.
In fact it was the first game jam I've participated in for several years. It's not as easy as it used to be to clear a whole weekend for dev.
I estimate that I was able to jam for around 25 of the given 48 hours, but I'm pretty happy with the outcome and enjoyed the creative exercise.
In game design it is traditionally considered best practice to be as economical as possible with your verbs. Don't use two when one would do. In the Legend of Zelda series players can break pots or destroy small bushes in order to find rupees, but there are no unique verbs for doing either of these. Players do so by using one of several other multi-purpose verbs - swinging their sword, rolling, bombing, picking up and throwing, shooting with an arrow, etc.
When verbs can't be repurposed they can be condensed to the point of being frictionless. For example in Grand Theft Auto the actions of hijacking a car, breaking into a car, and getting into an unlocked car all require the same single input. Also hot-wiring a car is done automatically. Having one button for all of these 'narrative verbs' essentially mitigates them to a single 'play verb'.
It's easy to imagine all of these interactions having more unique verbs (a break pot action, a break car window action, etc.) but unless adding them would achieve a specific design goal they could make gameplay feel more cumbersome. Verbs players will have to perform frequently must be very rewarding to not become monotonous. Sometimes the easiest way to make a verb fun is to minimize the amount of thinking a player has to do to perform it, or to remove its input entirely and make it passive (i.e. hot-wiring cars).
Also when designers add verbs players rarely perform they risk creating 'orphaned verbs'. These are verbs which have no relationship to the other verbs in the game and can be easily forgotten. Sometimes it takes a google search to remember that the verb exists at all (i.e. you forget what a specific item or spell does until you get to the boss that requires it) because you learned it 10 hours ago in a tutorial and barely used it since.
Parrying seems to be a feature that often becomes an orphaned verb. Games such as Dark Souls and Breathe of the Wild feature parrying but there is not a hard gate that requires players to use it. However both games feature enemy encounters near the end of the game which are difficult if you have not practiced parrying. On message boards you find players struggling with these late game enemies because they never practiced parrying or completely forgot about it.
However, the purpose of this post isn't to talk about standard game verb concepts, it is to talk about how virtual reality is overturning some of these conventional design rules. VR has changed input from something that has to be learned into something often instinctual, and it's completely changed what players expect from game verbs.
In VR the abstraction from input to verb can be greatly reduced. Every aspect of video game interaction has become subject to developers considering swapping button presses for physical movements. Picking up an object no longer has to be mapped to using a joystick to move close to it, you can physically reach out to grab the object.
Because of this immersion, instead of players assuming verbs will be condensed players will often expect each verb to have a unique input that to some degree simulates it's real life equivalent. In VR players would be disappointed if breaking a window, opening a car door, and hotwiring a car were somehow mapped to a single input. These are 3 distinct verbs in VR. However players also don't necessarily want every verb to be as complex and involved as they are in real life. Players still want verbs abstracted enough so they are fun.
I ran a small experiment once with the original Oculus touch controllers in which I put friends into a VR experience where they stood in a realistic looking kitchen surrounded by ordinary kitchen supplies. I asked them just to interact with objects around them. The trick was that I had programmed large items, such as pots and pans, to be picked up using the grip button while smaller items, like forks and spoons, required the trigger.
The grip button is the button most commonly used for grabbing in VR, and the motion players make to press it most closely simulates a grab. The trigger button, however, makes players use their index finger and simulate a pinch.
Without receiving any instructions all of my friends instinctively used the correct buttons when picking up the differently sized objects. After they had done so I asked them if they noticed a difference in how they picked up each item. They did not. They had to double check to confirm I was telling the truth that they had been using two different buttons for large and small objects.
More obvious instinctual interactions can be seen all the time in VR. Often players expect there to be verbs where there are none. Players try to pop open soda cans, try to push buttons on appliances, put their hands in front of other characters' faces to see if they will react realistically, etc.
Of course taken to a natural extreme, extracting these "instinctual" verbs from player expectation can create an unreasonable amount of interactions. I once had a client who was unfamiliar with VR (and video games in general) report a bug because a laptop prop in the game "didn't work" - as in she wasn't able to use it like a real computer and surf the internet. The power of immersion is a delight but where, and how, do we draw the line?
The challenge in VR is not necessarily to economize verbs, but to balance the amount and complexity of verbs while accommodating both for players' instinctual assumptions and their desire for ease of use.
Many games effectively push the envelope on the complexity of verbs and interaction. The game Onward has weapons with semi-realistic reloading mechanics. Many guns have unique ways to reload them and if you start a match with a gun you haven't used before there's a chance you'll be confused and need to ask your teammates how to reload in the middle of a firefight. You also have to remember where on your person the specific ammo that you are looking for is kept. This works great for a mil-sim like Onward but is probably much too complex to be a "best-practice" type approach.
In Half Life Alyx there is a very clever mechanic that allows players to reach over their shoulder and grab exactly what they need at that moment out of their backpack. It's kind of magical. Without even having to specify what you want to pull out of your inventory you instantly find whatever ammo the gun you're holding uses. Or if your weapon is in an upgrade chamber you grab the resource needed to complete the upgrade of that weapon. I would describe this as a contextual verb, something that is a staple of non-VR games but less common in VR, and is a smart way to accommodate for the expectation of physical interactions in VR while not increasing the complexity of a verb you want to remain simple. The rest of Alyx's reload mechanic is, by design, much more complicated as players fumble to insert clips or shells before advancing head crabs suck their face off.
On the other hand Valve handles switching weapons abstractly. Moving your hand left, right, up, or down selects different weapons from a pop-up menu. It's interesting to see one game utilizing so many different verbs of varying levels of complexity and abstraction. Each one, of course, designed perfectly to put the tension and anxiety where Valve wanted it to be.
'In Death' (a good VR rogue-like with an excellent bow and arrow mechanic) semi-economizes their movement verb by giving players 2 different methods of teleportation. One is a unique verb that requires the player to throw a shard to the spot they want to teleport, and the second recycles the bow and arrow mechanic by allowing the player to shoot an arrow to where they want to teleport.
The first method (which by the way is fantastic in my opinion) is a unique verb as grabbing and throwing is not done at all for any other reason in the game. I have seen this mechanic become orphaned when watching friends play as it can be easily forgotten in lieu of the second, reinforced, method.
Pistol Whip economizes verbs very cleanly by allowing the player to do almost everything with a bullet. Choosing a level, customizing your gun, changing settings, it's all done by shooting something with your gun, the same verb that is used for 95% of the gameplay.
At this point it seems that there is no one right way to economize verbs in VR. We see brilliance in economizing verbs as much as possible in Pistol Whip, while Alyx leans into a variety of verbs while also looking for ways to economize. Simulation games such as Onward will likely continue to thrive in their complexity of verbs, and ultimately it seems likely that instead of seeing standard best-practices form in the near future we will see designers exploring and taking advantage of the breadth of possibilities VR offers.
Do mainstream gamers enjoy difficult games? For the last 20 years or so mainstream games have been trending toward accessibility as the industry has grown to include more types of gamers. Frequent save points, quest markers, low death rates, and general hand holding have become design staples in a way they were certainly not in the 90s and early 2000s. There has been some counter-culture to this trend, with genres such as souls-like and rogue-like gaining mainstream popularity and a certain "cool kid" appeal. But these are mostly thought to be targeting "hardcore" and mature gamers, and are considered by many to be mostly niche.
However, in 2017 a new genre emerged and dominated the gaming world. Battle Royales attracted hundreds of millions of gamers of all ages, from all gaming backgrounds, and on every device. Yet Battle Royales are, by traditional metrics, also one of the hardest genres on the market. Few players will ever win even a single game. In any given game only 1 player or 1 team of 3-4 can be victorious. In most online FPS half of all players in each game are victorious, and even low level players will frequently get lucky enough to be on the winning team.
In spite of all of this battle royals have become the most popular genre for casual gamers. How did this happen? I want to look at a way that battle royales use failure and disappointment to create addictive game loops that keep players coming back again and again.
Because of how rarely you win a battle royale I frequently walk away from playing them feeling bummed. Regardless of how well I do they usually leave me feeling mildly upset. Yet I keep playing. And I have a hard time stopping. One more game. One more game. One more game.
One night while miserably playing Call of Duty Warzone I could only wonder 'why am I doing this to myself?'. The answer to that question occurred to me in one of the post match lobbies with my squad. I wish I had an audio montage of all the "we should have won that", "we were so close", "that was garbage, we got screwed", "they were camping", "they must be hacking", "how did that happen", etc, that I would hear. The magic that got us into another game is that while my squad is almost frustrated after every game, we had two things.
The first is the general memory of the last game as being fun, despite how it ended. Why? Because a lot of good things happened in the middle of the game. Maybe we picked up great weapons, maybe we completed a contract, maybe we got a few kills. Enough went our way that we felt we had a chance, we had hope, and we had fun before it went to hell.
The second thing is that we have hope the next game could be different. There are so many variables to battle royales that there is good reason to think “next time will be differentâ€. What weapons will you get next time, where will the circle be, what will the other players do this time? Winning in some ways is just waiting for the right combination of variables. It can almost feel like a slot machine.
Matches seem to follow the same pattern for most players. Optimism when you drop in, excitement when you are looting and finding weapons, a rush for every kill you get, and then eventually and almost inevitably disappointment when you die. But you don't want to stop playing when you are disappointed, you want to go back to the beginning of the loop and feel optimistic and excited again.
The gaming industry has always incorporated elements of gambling into their designs, and the last decade in particular saw many new attempts to replicate the addictive science of casinos. Social games, loot boxes, and now perhaps battle royals carefully integrate tested practices that keep players hooked and coming back for more. Winning can feed addiction, but so can disappointment.
