Interactivity: Rules of thumb

I've been away a while. Holiday plus busy period at work. The holiday was great and gave me plenty time to think, and so I'd like to share my thoughts with you. Instead of picking apart a game this article, I'm going to pick apart a concept: Interactivity.

Interactive: adj. 1. Acting or capable of acting on each other.

Interactivity is a big word in games. It's what makes the difference between games and more passive forms of media like film. The player acts upon the game state. The game acts upon the player's avatar. The player is involved, rather than simply watching (although I should note that good films - and especially, I think, good books - make you feel involved, and many poor games do not).

Interactivity, I would contend, is what makes a game a game.

That said, I propose two rules of thumb for interactivity which I'm going to try to follow while developing Worlds Apart:

Rule #1: Don't prevent the player from acting.

"I don't feel involved" is a frequent criticism of computer games, J-RPGs in particular.

In many RPGs (including many poor pen-and-paper RPGs) the story chugs along without much input from the player. The player is railroaded through a series of cutscenes until they get to the "end".

I don't feel that this is always a bad thing. Good stories are powerfully emotive, and playing a game like you would read a script can still give you a connection to the game world and the characters. Some games have gone on to use railroading itself as a storytelling tool (e.g. Bioshock, Portal).

There are games without strong narratives, however. These include competitive multiplayer games like Quake or Counterstrike, more-or-less any sports or racing game, and most board games. Worlds Apart falls into this category.

With this type of game, and especially when you're playing for fun rather than at the bleeding edge of competitiveness, you don't have many options to fall back on when you deny the player interactivity.

Let's see some examples of where existing games have violated this rule. I don't mean to poke fun at these games, or to say that they're "wrong" or "badly designed" (e.g. there may be mitigating factors elsewhere), just to use them as an example of what I'm trying to avoid here.

• Counterstrike - Getting headshotted thirty seconds into a ten-minute game
• World of Warcraft - Crowd Control in casual PvP
• Monopoly - Drawing "Skip a turn" from one of the decks
• Magic: The Gathering - Playing against counterspell deck on a casual gaming night

In all of these situations, I want to play the game and the game won't let me. On the assumption that playing is fun, the game is witholding my fun. On the assumption that I'm playing the game for fun, the game is not doing its job.

Rule #2: Don't reward the player for not acting.

This is really just a special case of rule #1, but one that needs mentioned. If playing is fun, playing should be encouraged by the game rules. If the most effective thing to do is nothing at all, your game rules are not encouraging fun.

Now, none of this means that the game must constantly demand attention. It just means that "turns" ought to be predictable, that the player can take a turn when he expects to be able to take a turn, and that the player is rewarded for acting, rather than for not acting.

How this applies to Worlds Apart

In my first design document, I was following the planetarion/hyperiums formula of "build ships, put ships in fleets, fight". The problem with this (and this crops up in a lot of games) is that usually when you fight and lose, you lose your ships. This means that you want to avoid combat, and your fleet sits in your base doing nothing except slowly growing. The game encourages inaction. I'm going to save my solution for a future article, but this problem is one I've been thinking seriously about. I want to encourage the player to "always" have fleets in the air.

Another problem is that if you haven't built ships yet (or if your fleet has been destroyed), you typically have to spend time rebuilding before you can fight again. If you don't have resources to back up your building efforts, you might have to spend time saving first.

You might have been saving up for a big purchase, only to log on and find that you've been raided and your resources stolen - you now can't make your purchase and must log off without taking any action.

These are all things I'm trying to avoid. My goal is for the player to be able to predict (and to a certain extent, control) when Worlds Apart will require their attention, and for players to always be able to act when they log in.

Some games thrive on tedium, unpredictable or life-destroying play schedules, disruption, and frustration.

Worlds Apart is not one of those games.