This week's website work started off as a pretty natural continuation of last week's XP system improvements, and then took quite a turn. This might become a pretty lengthy post because a large portion of the week was thinking.

Quests

To start, I realized that simply having XP-based goals, such as "reach level 15" in drawing wasn't quite motivating enough. The levels are arbitrary after all, and it's hard to see what sort of real world consequences achieving that would lead to. The level itself isn't inherently valuable; what I actually want to achieve is the ability to do something, and the XP is simply a measurable proxy for that.

I felt that the natural solution for that would be to do something like the quest systems from MMORPGs like OSRS. What quests in games do is they essentially set a goal, and then the player uses any means within the game to achieve the goal. In my case, I would set the quest goal to be something that I actually care about, such as winning a game jam, and then, because the game is in the real world, I can use any means in the real world to achieve that goal. Basically this is just a fancy way of setting goals. I tried to formulate the quests such that they would somewhat adhere to the SMART criteria. The idea behind SMART is that if you set goals that are specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time-related, then you are more likely to achieve them. Here are some of the initial goal ideas I came up with based on things I'd like to be able to do:

Cycle to Nauvo in under 15 hours
Don't visit home for a 28 days while sleeping in a tent for at least 21 of those days
Win a game jam with over 100 registrations
Make 20€ of revenue from video game sales on itch.io
Release a game on Steam and have it make over 100€ in revenue
Make 20€ of revenue from selling 3D models
Make 20€ of revenue from drawing on r/redditgetsdrawn and r/redditgetsdrawnbadly
Earn 20€ of profit from selling wood crafts on Etsy
Pass T2 exam
Build a pannier that's able to carry my large backpack

In these quests the actual amount of money isn't really the thing I'm interested in. It's being able to know that I am able to do that thing. The money gives a clear goal and criterion for when it's achieved.

I then implemented a page on this website, in /quests, that would host my "quest log", also borrowed from OSRS. In OSRS the quest log looks like this. On the right you see the list of quests, where red means the quest has not been started, yellow means it's in progress and green means done.

Once you click a quest, you are shown how you have progressed in that quest, so you are able to see all the steps you have taken so far.

I made a similar thing on my own quests page, where you would see the quests listed with the same color coding. In this case there's only one quest, which is called First Game Jam Win, and it has already been started.

Clicking the quest opens its details, showing a more precise description. Each quest is also related to some number of skills from the skill graph, e.g. Game Design in the case of this specific quest. The timeline of the quest's progression shown at the bottom of the details then starts with the quest being accepted, and shows all the logs and posts related to those skills up to the point where the quest is completed, or if it's in progress, to the present date. The rationale is that if I have taken the quest of winning a game jam, then anything related to game design would in practice me working towards that goal, even if it's for a non-jam game. I'm still improving the skills that would help me win a jam.

Life Games

I chose winning a game jam as my first quest. I had many other ideas too as seen in the list above, but I felt that I needed to choose one, because otherwise I wouldn't achieve any of them. The next question is of course how do I get better at making games so that I can win a jam? This led to a very deep rabbit hole that takes some time to explain.

I would like the games that I make to be at least somewhat novel and draw inspiration from aspects of real life that maybe aren't explored as much in other games. Last year when I really started learning game development, I wrote a project report for a personal study project course about the first 6 months of the journey. It can be read here. In it I was talking about real life inspirations as well, and how for example in the field of concept design, artists first learn to look, draw and construct real world objects, which allows them then to manipulate, mix and match parts of them to create new things. This seemed like a very interesting idea to me, and I figured maybe this could be done with games as well, but I wasn't sure how. Figuring that out was one of the main reasons I took the Dynamic Sketching course. The dynamic sketching approach teaches breaking objects down into simple forms and manipulating them to create new things, and I figured that if I could learn that for drawing and understand how it works, I could then convert it into a similar system for games. Learn to break something about the real life into simpler elements, and use those to make new games.

Well, anyway. To be able to win a game jam, I had to get better at making games, and I wanted to somehow build them from real world things. But I didn't know what it was about real world things that I should be breaking down. In drawing it makes sense. You turn tires into cylinders and tables into boxes. But what are the simple forms of real life activities and what does breaking them down even mean? So I went to the Wikipedia article on Games at 4 am, because this thought was infesting my brain, not letting me sleep, as things often do.

The Score

On that Wikipedia page I saw C. Thi Nguyen's – and American philosopher – distinction of achievement play and striving play. For some reason related to winning game jams and this whole quest system, I found that interesting. That led to me finding his book The Score, and somehow that book completely captured me for the next day that it took me to read it.

This generated a LOT of thoughts, mostly related to the quest system itself, interestingly, because the book is largely about the difference between games and metrics, the former being a voluntary, temporary, fun activity, like a video game, and the latter being for example a performance score at work or the number of views or revenue, that is game-like, but that for some reason causes people to act in weird, non-fun ways and generally not feel very good. I'm not going to go through the whole book's thesis because I'm getting tired of writing, but read the book if what follows in this post and in other posts from today doesn't make sense.

Basically what I realized that when a game designer designs a game, what they sculpt is how the people act. Or maybe more specifically, how people want to act. They do that by setting goals, which, for the duration of the game session, become the player's values. In football, this would be scoring goals, which outside of the actual game have no value, because who cares if a ball goes between two pylons, but when you are playing the game, matter deeply. This makes players want to make the ball go between the pylons, because the game tells them that this is valuable. Designers also set constraints, e.g. not using your hands in football. Constraints allow the designer to tell people what they are allowed to use to achieve the goal. Together, goals and constraints cause people to act in a certain way, and the designer can look at the emerging behavior and determine if these are the actions they want the player's to take. If the players end up kicking the ball from the wrong side of the pylons for example, you set a constraint that the goal only counts if the balls enters from one side, and maybe set a net to the other side to block passage.

Another important point Nguyen makes is that games are temporary. The designer designs a game where certain things are valuable, and the player, by entering the game, accepts those values as their own for the duration of the gameplay session. Once they stop playing, they return to the values they have outside of the game, which are usually much much more complex and qualitative than whatever simple, easily quantifiable goals the designers has set for the game. Outside of the game, the player doesn't think the scoring goals is important in itself, and they don't decide to play the game to score some more goals. Goals are the things that are valuable to the player inside of the game. But the player makes the decision to play the game from outside of the game, so there is something valuable about the game that isn't the goals. That's what Nguyen calls the purpose for playing the game, which can be something like getting exercise, having fun with friends, etc., that the player finds valuable while they aren't in the game. Outside of the game, the player chooses the to play the game of football, because they want to have fun with friends. Once they enter the game, they primarily value scoring goals over everything else. When they exit the game, the goals lose their value again.

This is temporary nature of the values are what makes games like football fun, and metrics like work performance dreadful. The values given by metrics are the goal and the purpose at the same time and you therefore never leave the game. You always value the performance score or views or account balance, whether you are "playing" or not. It's not temporary and therefore you can't choose to take on those values and leave them behind at other times. They are always there.

Bounded Games

The Score made me understand the gnawing feeling I've been getting from the quest and XP systems I've been building on this website. The value and the purpose of playing this RPG for creating things is collapsed like metrics are. I don't exit or enter the game, it's always there. If XP measures things I post, then I'll only want to do things that I can post about, and everything else is a waste of time. And that's always the case, because there isn't a distinction between playing and not playing the game. And that makes the whole thing not fun. It's not a game, it's a metric. And the quests don't fix that.

If I want a game that's related to what I care about in the real world, then it needs to be a game where the purpose for me playing that game is different than the goals within the game, and the game needs to be something I play temporarily, not one I'm constantly in.

I'm running out of steam with writing here, so what I'll end with is this. I ended up pivoting form one grand game of doing things and collecting XP to many, smaller, bounded games that are designed to cause me to want to act in ways I would like myself to want to act, while I play the game, with goals within the game that hold little to no value outside of the game. To close, here's a list of some of the games I sketched. Some of them will probably be developed more, some of them die in the state they are in and inspire other games. I created a page where I list all of these games, and at least Cycling Game and Prototyping Game have gotten some development time.

Cycling Game

The player chooses to play this game because they want to
- Have fun
- Improve their ability to cycle farther
The action is sculpted such that the player wants to
- Not exert themselves beyond limits and cause injuries
Goal
- Ride for 30 minutes as fast as possible
- You get points for the distance covered
- The difficulty level is the assistance level used in the bike. The lower the assistance, the better.

What do I want to go for here? Tempo? Intervals? Distance? Some kind of app could be cool that gives you "boosts", e.g. some assistance level, for a set amount of time. Could even give you places to go to? Different game modes? Essentially different games. Builds? If you push to 80% max HR, you get boosts that bring the HR back down? Hitting 80% max HR shouldn't be punished with slowing down. But pushing too hard will cause injuries.

Maybe the goal can't be so close to the actual purpose. It should be something less clearly linked to one's physical prowess. Otherwise value capture might take place and the game collapses. You can't actually care about the goal outside of the game. It needs to be more obfuscated, I think.

If you dynamically take into account the heart rate then maybe you can somehow feed that into the game on the down low. Or other metrics. And then have the goal be something completely different? Points?

Nomad Game

The player chooses to play this game because they want to
- Explore what everyday things are important and what aren't
The action is sculpted such that the player wants to
- Stay independent
- Expend a minimal amount of money
- Require a minimal number of items
- Stay productive with things unrelated to the game
Goal
- Don't enter your home for 28 consecutive days
Rules
- Sleep outside, on property that you and nobody you know owns for at least 21 of those days

Has quite a lot of possibilities for degenerate solutions. E.g. just living at a friend's place or yard. Could have something like limited stays at friend's places or something built in? Limited use items? Higher difficulty levels have fewer aids and/or longer durations? Extra points for bad weather, etc.

Game Jam Game

The player chooses to play this game because they want to
- Have fun
- Learn game development
The action is sculpted such that the player wants to
- Constantly explore new ideas, features and directions for the game
- Sculpt the new ideas into games people like
- Have everyone in the team to have a good time
Goal
- Win a game jam
- The better your ranking, the better you do
- The more unlike previous games the players have made the submitted game is, the better
Rules
- The game has to be made by the players
- The game has to be entered in an existing game jam, and its rules have to be followed. If any of the following rules conflict with the rules of the existing jam, the existing jam's rules are followed.
- In an alternative game mode the game is not participating in an existing jam. In this case, some external set of one or more people are chosen as a judge. The players must decide a duration for the jam and one or more limitations, such as theme, technology, genre, mechanic, etc. The judges take the difficulty of the limitations into account as well. The game can be targeted to the judge(s)'s tastes.
- The game cannot be one that has been developed before
- At any given time, one player is the CEO of the game. Other players must follow the CEO's vision, and the CEO is responsible for the game's design and progress for that time. The role CEO changes every two hours. The new CEO can undo the previous CEO's changes and modify the whole game as they wish. The CEO must make sure that everyone has something to work on at all times.

I think cycling the CEO role makes the pressure of designing the game less, gives makes sure that someone always has executive power, and forces that person to make decisions. However, those decisions don't have to be permanent, and the fact that the CEO must give people tasks means that the tasks might not be all that good because of the time pressure. Ideally that would reduce the pressure the CEO feels to make good decisions and make the creative process consistently move forward and explore, even if the direction ends up not being fruitful.

Here too, is the goal too close to something I actually care about?

Prototyping Game

The player chooses to play this game because they want to
- Remove pressure from creating prototypes of things
The action is sculpted such that the player wants to
- Create new prototypes fast and cheap
- Not get hung up on details, polish, any kind of social pressures or anything else outside of what is absolutely required to build the prototype
- Not do so little that there is barely any work at all
- Show their work to other people
Goal
- Make as many of x as possible in the allocated amount of time.
Rules
- Time limit?
- With each new prototype, write down what you want to test with the next one

There need to be constraints and pressures so that the player can blame those instead of their own skill when things don't end up being pretty. Maybe make as many of x as possible in some amount of time, borrowing from Will Wright's / Ted Orland's pottery example. Basically just mirror the rule of the loop from Schell's Book of Lenses, except expand on the "risks" explicitly.

It's more important to keep the iteration speed high than making every prototype as good as possible. Even in terms of each loop "counting" as much as possible, in terms of Schell. At least if the player has some skill in reflection. It will most likely happen almost naturally, and the bigger risk is not doing the iterations at all.

Is an explicit reflection step necessary? Unsure. If you do it naturally, then you don't. But having an explicit evaluation step might guide the player towards new things they want to test.

I think adding the extra point for making the loop public is possibly a good idea. It mitigates completely degenerate behavior, where you basically do nothing at all. On the other hand, some people might feel that it's okay to post their work somewhere, because it's "for a game", not "for real". And they can use the extra point as a scapegoat for doing so. Then again, that does increase the social pressures of actually playing the game. So maybe not for now.

Archiving this here:

You earn 1 extra point if you put the collection of cycles somewhere where someone else is able to see it. This can be on your wall, in a DM to a friend, in a group chat, showing it to someone live, on social media, on your website, or anywhere else.

Some kind of lower bound would be nice though.

So this is a very bare bones, simple version of the game. It's not very fun, and to be fair that's not even in its purpose. Probably should be, so that I will decide to actually play that game.

Foraging Game

Give help dynamically, encourage players to identify and find spots themselves?

Drawing Game

Again, pressure out. Randomness with brushes or something? Colors? Random subject matter or reference photo? Random photo off of Reddit? What's the goal? As many as possible in a timeframe? Define what you want to do with each iteration?

Maybe you get time x for each iteration to start from scratch. Then you get time y for the next pass on each one. You could choose from some randomly picked subset which ones you want to continue with?

Unlock tools? Like rotating or zooming? Upgrades?

Grab photos from subreddits, and goal is to have yours picked? Can filter flairs?

One of the actions is evaluating ehat you have drawn and identifying issues. Then fixing them in the next iteration.

Maybe you actually draw cards for the game you sre playing? Doing more advanced steps like rendering etc. Upgrades the cards. Can choose subject matters and effecrs beforehand?

Ham radio game

Try to relay a message from point A to point B. Intermediate nodes get points for relaying as well. Website keeps track of and generates the data that's supposed to be transferred. Maybe skips could be available as well? Can follow where the data is moving on a map. Could have races, have the data take different paths.

Projects