My LCC Talk (Patreon)

So, I went to the London College of Communications today to do a talk for some game design students. The talk was about the way I analyse games, and how I think about existing games from a critical perspective.

I'm going to paste my "script" (I adlib a lot, but this is the jist of it) and some of the more relevant slides below. If you're a GMTK fan you'll have heard most of this stuff before. But maybe there's something in there you'll enjoy.

At the end of the day: why not give it to my Patrons, eh?

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Hi everybody. My name’s Mark Brown and I am a, uh, i guess video games analyst. I don’t even know. 

But i do know that i run a youtube channel called game maker’s toolkit where i look at games we all know and love - like mario, zelda, dark souls, and bioshock - and break down what makes them work, or maybe not work, from a design perspective

so i’ve looked at how resident evil 4 uses a dynamic difficulty setting, how doom’s enemies are designed, looked at how puzzles are made, tried to figure out what makes good artificial intelligence, or a good detective game. Stuff like that. 

the thing is, though, I’m not a games designer. I haven’t made a game, other than this picross app for iphone that just about made back my apple developer license fee. I Didn’t study game design at a cool uni or college like this.

so where do i get my information from? what makes me qualified to talk about this stuff? why did they let my get past security? 

well that’s what this talk is all about. how i analyse games, how we can learn from all the amazing games that came before us, and how i then go about presenting this information to people in an easy to digest way. basically i’m giving away all my secrets to my success, so hopefully everyone here is way too busy with their studies to start a rival youtube channel and take me out. 

but hopefully after this talk is done, you’ll play games in a slightly different way, and pick up all sorts of ideas from everything you play.

okay, so the first, most important step, is just to play games. i know right, my life is a constant source of misery and despair. i don’t know how i go on.

but i’ve found that it’s really important to just play the game normally, without trying to break it down or analyse things just yet. instead, we want to play the game, let it percolate in our brains, and then ask ourselves this crucial question: how does it make me feel? 

I’m looking for something much more specific than just “i had fun” or “i got bored”. I want to drill down to the specific emotions i feel when playing. maybe the game makes me feel really tense. or really powerful. maybe i feel a great sense of speed. maybe i feel a bit lonely. maybe i felt lost and frustrated. or maybe i felt like a moron for a bit… and then really smart. perhaps i felt a great sense of loss, at times. and a great sense of reward at others. 

now we’ve got those emotions sorted, it’s time to figure out what design decisions are contributing to that sensation. 

because the thing about art and media is that everything the creator does can instil different emotions in you. the use of colour in a painting. the rhythm of a poem. the use of camera angle or depth of field in a movie. 

all of these things create emotion and feeling. i’m sure you’ve seen these things where people have recut a trailer for a pixar movie to make it look like a horror film or whatever. everything in the scene contributes to how it makes us feel.

- and games have all of this stuff at their disposal, plus a really huge one: the design. the interactivity. the way the game bounces off you can create really strong feelings. 

so let’s break this process down with an example game. i’m going to use dark souls. so when playing dark souls, i personally feel quite tense. careful. isolated. and adventurous. so lets look at those. 

i often feel quite tense in dark souls. even though i’m a big strong bloke with a sword, i feel a knot in my stomach as i walk around.

and where does that come from? well, we can probably chalk that up to things like: enemies hide around corners and jump out to scare you. that’ll keep you on edge. there are traps underfoot. there’s the fact that only a few wrong moves can kill you. and death is a pretty significant setback, compared to most modern games. i think all of those things make the player feel tense.

also, when i play dark souls, i feel very careful and deliberate in my movements. i think very intently about which buttons i’m pressing and when.

This is probably down to the fact that dark souls doesn’t have “animation cancelling”. in a game like bayonetta, which feels very different in its combat, you can do a kick and then halfway through that move, chnage your mind and transition into a punch. it’s very free-flowing, non-commital, slightly button bashy if you don’t know waht you’re doing. on the other hand, dark souls doesn’t let you change your mind. once your sword starts swinging, you’ve got to wait for it to finish before you can do another command. so you have to be very careful with your movements.

i can feel quite isolated in dark souls. when i go deep down into an area like the depths, i feel lonely and homesick. and that’s probably because dark souls doesn’t have fast travel. at the start, at least. so in most games, you can always just warp back to a safe zone or a friendly town if you’ve gone too deep and need a respite. but dark souls doesn’t do that. 

and i also feel very adventurous. like i’m charting my own course, and exploring the world of lordran by following my curiosity, instead of a set path. and that’s because dark souls doesn’t have waypoints or floating arrows, and because the game is quite non-linear and full of branching paths that let you choose where to go.

so as you can see, every design decision changes how a game feels. and two games in the same genre can feel very different based on which mechanics and systems are implemented. restricting the amount of ammo you find in resident evil keeps the game tense - compared to a game like doom, which makes you very powerful by supplying you with practically endless bullets. 

a really interesting comparison, i think, is far cry 2 with far cry 3, 4, and 5.

thematically they’re all pretty much the same game. a patch of land is taken over by some mad narcissistic war lord, so you shoot people, drive cars, and start fires to slowly take back land. they’re all about war and violence and all that fun stuff.

so from a visual, audio, and storytelling perspective they can feel pretty similar. but in play - which is obviously the most important part - they extremely different. FC 2 feels oppressive and harsh, compared to the later games which are like action-packed playgrounds

and it’s just down to lots of tiny decisions. far cry 2 has lots of little design choices that go against the player like malaria attacks, jamming weapons, and cars that can break down. not much like that in the later games. very play friendly

far cry 2 has harsher punishments for death. on console, you can lose huge amounts of time between deaths - never the case in the later games.

and in far cry 2, enemy camps constantly respawn. in far cry 3 onwards, you permenantly clear out the map and slowly reduce the presence of the enemies. there’s more, but you get the idea. 

so from all this, we can learn how game designers use different types of mechanics to create experiences for the player. we can drill down really deep, and look at how the rally mechanic in bloodborne, which lets you regain lost health if you quickly attack enemies who just hit you, makes you feel aggressive. or go really broad, and look at how the open world of zelda breath of the wild uses landmarks and terrain to draw your attention.

sometimes you can quite easily see which mechanics are contributing to each sensation. like: yeah, the permadeath on your soliders in xcom contributes to a feeling of careful play and painful loss when you mess up. but often, you don’t need to think too hard because if you know where to look, you can find out exactly why designers make the decisions that they do. 

loads of resources exist out there to help us understand what designers were thinking when they made certain decisions. i use a lot of interviews, GDC talks, books, post-morterms, podcasts, and blog posts to get into the designer’s heads. if you’re lucky enough to be able to get them on skype, that’s good too. i often chat to designers when working on my videos.

so. lemme give some examples. in his book about the game spelunky, designer derek yu explains why he implemented a deadly ghost enemy that appears at 2 and a half minutes into each level. he says…

“I never intended Spelunky players to collect every piece of treasure, get every item, or explore every room each time they play. Instead, I wanted to force them to make difficult decisions and experience both the satisfaction of choosing correctly and the regret of choosing poorly.” 

so we have the emotions - making difficult decisions. satisfaction and regret. and the contributing mechanic, the ghost.

similarly, in a rock paper shotgun interview. jake solomon explains why he added a turn limit to missions in xcom 2, saying “Risks are what lead to loss and what lead to triumph”. 

in this case, you might argue that the design decision wasn’t quite right. you could say that you actually ended up feeling rushed - which was not a positive emotion. analysing decisions you don’t like is just as important as analysing the decisions you do like. 

an important thing to consider is whether all of the different feelings are compatible. if the combat makes you feel really powerful and strong, but the -say - levelling system makes you feel kinda weak and meek, then something’s a bit wrong. you want something like doom from 2016, where all of the mechanics are about pushing forward, being aggressive, being strong, and fighting demons. everything contributes to that central experience that the designers are coming up with.

And then, that experience should match the game’s fantasy. every game has a fantasy. this is something pretty unique to games, because they’re interactive. every game is saying: for the next hour, you should feel like an assassin, or a soldier, or a commander, or a rally driver, or a post apocalyptic wanderer. this fantasy explained through marketing text, through the picture on the front of the box, through the CGI trailers. if the experience of playing the game doesn’t match the fantasy that the devs are selling, something’s gone wrong.

a controversial example. the fantasy of sonic the hedgehog is that you will feel incredible sense of speed. this is explained through the adverts at the time, sonic’s aerodynamic design and his trainers, through the checkerboard pattern on the walls that looks like a racing flag, through the loop the loops in the level design. and yet, the actual experience of that game is - if you go really fast you hit spikes or run into an enemy or fall to your death. if you take things slow and cautiously, you’ll probably survive a lot longer. the fantasy and the experience don’t match.

compare that to a game like hitman, which says you will be a cold, calculating, ghost-like killer. and the experience lets you become a cold, calculating, ghost-like killer. ding ding ding, we have a match.

so that’s kind of the main way i analyse games. I ask myself how the game made me feel, and then figure out what design decisions were made to create that sensation. 

And so you can get pretty far with that. it takes some practice, a clear mind, and good research skills. but from this, we can understand why games make us feel the way they do, and use that to inform our own designs and games.

but another thing i like to analyse is levels. maps. dungeons. and that’s a slightly different process. 

Well, the start is the same. I play, without taking notes, just to get a feel for the level and understand how it works as a first-time player

Then, I try to figure out is what’s actually important. Like, when I started researching dungeons in the Zelda games, I assumed that maybe the number of keys would be worth tracking. Not so much - that doesn’t actually tell me much about how the dungeons work. 

So instead, for Zelda, i learned I needed to track things like branching paths, player choice, and backtracking. Which lead me to make these graphs, to evaluate how each dungeon works.

For another game, Mario, I found it was interesting to track the areas where you can safely stand on the ground, and areas where you’re at risk of falling into a bottomless pit. See: it gets more perilous as the level goes on

In dark souls, it was worth figuring out the overarching structure of the game. Look how there are linear bits, and bits where you can make choices, giving it a nifty concertina structure with moments of froward momentum and moments of adventure. Coincidentally, maybe, it’s also very similar to the structure of zelda link to the Past. 

It’s also interesting to look at how a single element is used throughout a level. One of my most popular videos is about Mario’s 4 step level design, where each stage in super mario 3d world has this cool formula.

An idea, like a type of enemy or platform or whatever, is introduced in a safe environment. Then it’s ramped up in complexity. Then we get a bit of a surprising twist. And then it’s used to finish off and round out the level. This lets nintendo fill the game with clever ideas, and make sure the player understands the mechanic - and that it is fully explored.

So that’s cool. And after that I started looking at other platfofmers to see what they do. Donkey Kong tropical freeze, for example, does a similar thing but with multiple mechanics. Like in this level, the designers explore the idea of horns, and also falling leaves. And then they even combine the two for really cool sections. 

And in Rayman Legends, a mechanic is carried through an entire world to really let it breathe and so it can be explored fully. In the water world, these security camera sentry lights appear in almost every stage, but in very different set ups. 

these are three different ways to handle escalating challenges in platformers, and i learned about them, just by keeping track of how different mechanics are used throughout levels and worlds. Neato.

so, the final thing i want to talk about - is how i turn this information into a presentable argument for a video. and this might not seem super relevant to you guys. but, really, i’ve found that having to actually explain what i’ve learned to people really helps me drill down and properly, fully understand the concept. it’s not just some vague ideas floating around my brain anymore, but something specific and well thought out. and that sticks in my head much more clearly.

so - i pretty much always start a video by posing a question to myself. like “what is a systemic game” “why are some games more engaging than others” “how are cuphead’s bosses designed” or “whats the difference between different health mechanics”? Sometimes i’ll even keep that question as the name of the video.

the video then serves to answer that query. So I’ll go off and do all the research I just mentioned: I’ll think about the emotions and sensations a game provides, try and figure out which mechanics are responsible for that feeling, i’ll read about what the designers were trying to achieve, and maybe break down some levels with maps and graphs. 

then I’ll present that information. i want to strip it down to its most basic form: i want to keep my stuff pithy and approachable so videos should rarely exceed 20 minutes. i mean i don’t know if i’ll make it to an hour on this talk, i have trained pretty well to do short productions at this point. but here we are. 

and a big deal for me is the flow of my argument. i want to grab the viewer’s attention in the first couple minutes, and then take them by the hand and walk them through my thoughts. so i’ll often group my thoughts into big chunks, and then spend a lot of time rearranging them to get them into an order that really makes sense.

a really important thing for me is to back everything up with examples from games. I’m not an acedemic and so i can’t just say “games should be like this!” or “you should design like this!”. i have to say “here’s how this game works, so that proves this design technique works”. i try to use games people know well, so they can nod along like yeha, i’ve played uncharted and i totally agree with that!

i also use images and graphs to illustrate my points. i’m a very visual learner, personally, and i think it helps other people too. 

and really, that’s about it. in retrospect, it’s quite hard to explain exactly how i analyse games. it’s almost like a muscle that gets stronger the more you work it. but once it starts going, it’s hard to stop. you’ll be examining every game you play. you’ll be asking yourself - why does this game make me feel so powerful in combat? and then can drill down into each mechanic and try and figure out how they’re contributing to that feeling. or perhaps the other way around. you’ll ask yourself why did the developers use a certain mechanic, and then perhaps you’ll realise that they’re trying to create a certain experience, to contribute to a certain fantasy

hopefully that’s of use to you in some small way. and i guess we can open the floor to any questions, now!

thank you