1
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.
« on: September 12, 2019, 04:55:49 pm »
Why does Dominion draw to 5, instead of to 4 or 6?
You mean drafting e.g. Magic. "Drafting games" are games where you draft all game, like Greed; when the drafting is done the game is over.You are right. I was not aware of Greed's mechanic.
For me the purpose of choices is to have a fun game. You can only maximize one variable; I am maximizing fun. I don't need to teach anyone anything, or simulate the experience of learning, or any such thing. Fun.My "learning" comes from my analysis of the word "fun"; I'll provide a more careful description. If you look at things that are fun vs not fun, I think it comes close to "players have fun when something improves the way their minds organize things. Like realizing something new that matters, or a worldview-changing experience". I haven't seen examples that contradict this definition. Non-interactive things are fun too: books, movies, music, art, humor. A game has choices, which allows the realizations to be tailored to that person's individual profile.
In 2007, I attended the World Championship. One of my responsibilities was to play in a free-for-all multiplayer game and subtly show off a preview card from an upcoming set that no one knew I had in my deck. That card was Chameleon Colossus, and I wasn't particularly subtle...doubling its power eight times, I attacked with my Chameleon Colossus for 27,648 damage and gained 55,296 life.A game designer shows up in your game, uses a card that doesn't even exist yet, creates a giant creature, and steamrolls everyone with it. All these things are new and unusual experiences, changing how people's minds organize things and the world - showing them something they didn't expect. So we expect it to be extremely fun. If Rosewater repeated it 10 minutes later, the impact of the fun would be way smaller, because the changes in everyone's minds have already happened. It won't change anyone's mental organization much further than it already did.
For me, Spike is not a relevant factor period. I just never think about the Magic psychographs when working on a game.That's a very interesting perspective, and I think an ideal one. (Yes, I want to be that kind of designer too.) I think the reason you don't take Rosewater's psychographics seriously is that his psychographics are not totally correct, so they have unusual bits that don't make sense. Instead, I'll redefine them. Vorthos is part of Timmy. Melvin fits along with Timmy and Spike. Johnny doesn't exist; he is a different dimension and partially applies to all three. Here's the correct psychographics:
He claims innocence by being unaware. While he may have had his head buried in the sand, Bruce had his eyes wide open...I'm referring to plays that you make that you know are incorrect. I'm talking about finding an excuse to lose. Ah there is no problem losing when you have a good excuse. Heck when you are all set with a battery of excuses it is so much easier to swallow the bitter pill of defeat.
Making a game "deep" is trivial. It's never a focus for me because I can always get as much of that as I want.I have trouble doing so. One obstacle to depth is randomness: in a random event, connections are no longer clear in the before and after, creating a barrier to learning. I've never played Ascension, so let's pretend my following description of it is true, even if it isn't. In Ascension, random events happen regularly. Nobody is able to predict the future very well, so when players make decisions, their future performance is not connected to their past in any clear way. After a game ends, how should they change their behavior? They don't know. Even though there is certainly room for them to improve their decisions, they are not able to, and hence the game is not deep. The depth is there, but they can't achieve it, so it effectively doesn't exist. Poker is like this: depth is there, but learning is slow, and many people stop learning before they hit the maximum.
I do think you need to sometimes push stuff in the players' faces that they want to be there but might miss. There were all those people who tried Temporum, didn't change history, and then said, "well changing history was sure nothing." The box doesn't include a good player to show you how they make out from changing history. So it wasn't enough that it had strategic value; it was too subtle for some players (and could have been less subtle).Wow, that theme is great. I thought you sucked at theming but now I completely changed my mind. Temporum's theme is really well-chosen, and is still strong even as a theme chosen before mechanic.
During the first such playtest, we noticed that when players got an Eldrazi out, they wouldn't attack with it. R&D had quickly realized the power of the annihilator mechanic, but the less experienced players didn't seem to feel safe throwing their giant creatures into the fray.Basically, when players don't realize something, the designer forces them to do it and see the fun. It's hard to predict when this is needed without newcomer playtesting. Magic's huge financial base really helps them here.
We took notes and talked about it, but changed nothing. The next playtest the same thing happened, and the playtest after that... we added the text "CARDNAME attacks each turn if able." Once players saw how much damage the Eldrazi did when they attacked, hopefully that would encourage them to attack with the other Eldrazi.
In this day and age, it's "What they did before, helping them evaluate whether they made the right decision." Yes I am actually correcting you there.Sure. I don't follow that for my own writing, but I understand both the cultural context and the linguistic context of your choice. You're not wrong. Related is my preference for writing "publically" and singular "data" despite them not being common. I switch some of these choices depending on the audience I'm writing for. I keep Spike strictly masculine because he is strongly associated with negative connotations; this is from awareness of a cultural context. Otherwise, I often switch between random he and she for uncertain third parties.
It's not great to have decisions where players don't have a basis for deciding what to do, yes. It's also bad if they can "do the math," and you end up just sitting there doing the math all game. You want choices that are clear in how they matter but still don't let you easily tell what's better.This relates to the "I don't want to add 100 numbers" type of depth. Unrandomizing things makes connections clearer, but the created depth should be interesting, not pointless math. (I heard that Mage Knight is like this.)
I suspect he was just talking about how you want players to get to ease into the game. If you read a card a turn for 8 turns, at that point you've read 8 cards, and it's way less demanding of the player than reading 8 cards turn one.Thanks, that fits in with "clock time between information and the choice given...to digest this information and form good decisions." But your perspective is better, because the player sees interactions play out to help make a better choice, not just spending time internally introspecting on the choice.
if players are taken out of the bidding by say winning an auction, they will get screwed over by the other players turning out to undervalue things; ideally good players can stay in the auction as long as possibleI played a multiplayer game called Offworld Trading Company. In this game, there are exclusive locations, each accommodating one player only, and some locations are better. Players choose exclusive locations, one at a time, so later choosers get locked out of the best locations. To determine the choosing order, an auction system is used: a clock ticks down saying "if you choose now, you will get $X debt", and X ticks down over time. Players decided how much debt each choice was worth, then pressed the "choose now" button when it was worth it. The final chooser got 0 debt, to remove collusion between the final two players. However, the issue you described came up: players only have the ability to influence one of the auction slots, and then were taken out of the auction.
I don't see what I would get out of secretly moving a card from your deck to your discard. I don't flip over cards just to flip them over; I look at the card and care what it is. Just moving the card isn't harmful enough to be an attack or penalty, or beneficial enough to be a bonus. It's busywork. I think it would feel like busywork; not an attack or benefit, but stupid. In Magic e.g. "put the top card of your library on the bottom" (if it goes to your graveyard, we'll know what it is) would be completely meaningless. Okay sometimes you'd have some information about your deck order, but aside from that, it's just shuffling a shuffled deck.You're correct that it's a pointless mechanic. I'm interested in how players respond because it helps me understand the overall design space. Some of the ideas I'll mention will be quite bad, but illustrative of concepts. Your comment that "it would feel like busywork; not an attack or benefit, but stupid" is perfect.
Tribute isn't self-milling; you do it to your opponents! Lots of cards can flip over your opponents' cards; what was special about Tribute was that it didn't say "attack" on it, and people didn't like that they couldn't Moat it. This is why Chariot Race doesn't discard the opponent's card (which some people then dislike for different reasons).
Start the game with a few easy options and slowly raise the number of choices as the game progresses.In particular, Mark says that that a game's first few choices should be easy. We can look at how other games handle it.
The purpose of choices is to promote learning. You make a choice and then receive feedback on that choice, learning about the quality of your decision.In particular, as the game progresses, the player should have some feeling of how the ongoing events are related to what he did before, helping him evaluate whether he made the right decision. If a choice is a black box, then the game designer should remove that choice. Is this the correct framework in which to evaluate why Rosewater wants early decisions to be more obvious? How come early choices require different treatment from late ones? Perhaps because they affect more duration of the game, and hence require a clearer connection between the choice and its consequences?
If choices are too obvious, then you already know the right decision and so you don't learn.
If choices are confusing or nonintuitive, with unclear connection between the choice and the consequence, then it's hard to evaluate your decision.
The player should make a decision whose correct answer is not obvious, and should be able to relate future consequences to that decision. A decision being high-impact will make the connection between consequences and decision easier to see, but the impact is otherwise not important. What's important is the clarity of the connection.
The player judges quality of a presented choice by how much he expects it to teach him about something he cares about. Obvious choices will teach him nothing, and meaningless choices will also teach him nothing (or nothing that he cares about).
He may perceive an obvious correct answer, and later discover his "obvious" answer was wrong. This is a strong and excellent learning event, but it requires that later discovery to happen. Otherwise, his initial judgment of obviousness, and hence uninterestingness, will stand. (See: healing)
Note that if connections are clear, the player will learn very fast. That's good if you have lots of things to teach the player. If you run out of teachable things because the player has learned everything, the game becomes dead.
Teaching everything in a short time is not a good thing for a designer, even if it delivers all the same learning value in a shorter time. Because player perception of what they learned is not decided by how much they learned, but how much time they spent learning. So stretching out the learning is useful in tricking players to see a game as "deep".
Having fewer choices makes them more obvious and less confusing (by eliminating ones that the player shouldn't consider).
I don't try to have scapegoats. I try to make it fun to lose; if it's fun to lose I'm set, I don't need to add more wrinkles there, e.g. making sure you feel like you could win, or a scapegoat. This is one of those cases where I cite Scrabble. You can start a game of Scrabble knowing that the other player will beat you, that they are simply better at anagramming than you are, and still have fun. You can blame your draw in Scrabble, if it's close, but when they beat you up, man, you know, they were just better. And that's fine, it doesn't make the game no fun. It's not something that needs fixing in Scrabble (what needs fixing is downtime, and people have fixed it, e.g. with Boggle, which provides no scapegoat at all).You are correct about mana screw being a flaw; I just wanted to cite a concrete example of something being scapegoated. (The cognitive bias underlying Mark's perspective is that he's invested in it. It's post-purchase rationalization, but with 20 years of design replacing the purchase.)
I would not cite mana screw as serving an important scapegoat role in Magic either. You can always blame all the other aspects of your draw, e.g. drawing early-game cards late and vice-versa. Mana screw is one of the two giant flaws Magic has (the other is that the rules are too complex). When e.g. Mark says how great mana screw is for Magic, he's either towing the company line, or suffering from Stockholm syndrome. Mana screw is: sometimes you don't get to play. In 1993 that was not unusual; these days we know that games are better when everyone gets to play. It's not some impossible dream; there are tons of games now where you always get to play.
I think people get way angrier about online games than real-life games. A huge difference is that you're up against friends irl, and often strangers online. But well, if people complaining online is toxic, then all those communities are toxic; there will always be something to complain about. The players are all humans.
Monopoly has no mechanics. And usually no winners or losers either - the game drags on and everyone quits. But it's still a strong Timmy experience because of the theme and story.
Players hate self-milling, and they will hate this. As one of many examples, look how little Arc-Slogger is worth compared to how powerful he is. Just stop submitting it - everyone
...
As it turns out, players generally hate hate hate self-milling so much that we would never actually do that
Some people feel like it's attacking them, since it can flip over good cards; I think it tends to help as much as hurt, but so what, I don't need people to feel bad over a non-attackLogically, it makes no difference when something is milled - they just draw the card below that. But people hate milling anyway because of loss aversion. They weigh the loss of a discarded good card far higher than the benefit of a discarded bad card. So even though their emotional reaction makes no logical sense, they can't help it anyway.
Mana screw is a great scapegoat. In fact, one of the best roles that it serves, is if you want to blame your game on your mana, you can. Even if it has nothing to do with your mana. Someone would come up to a player after they’re done and go “How’d it go?” So much of the time they would just say “Oh, I got bad mana or bad draws". But I watched the match. They didn’t have bad mana or they didn’t have bad draws. They just lost. They made bad decisions or whatever. But it’s a nice excuse that anybody can give. And that is important.Let's focus on the notion of a scapegoat. When someone wins, they want to feel it's fair and they won against a good opponent. When someone loses, they want to believe that RNG screwed them over and nothing is their fault. These two needs create tension. So in a game with public and private information, someone's disadvantages should all be private information and his advantages should all be public. (This is for ideal scapegoat design, ignoring all other considerations.) So a player sees all the things screwing him over and goes, "wow, I'm so unlucky". But he doesn't see the things screwing his opponent over, only the ways his opponent got lucky. He has the perfect scapegoat.