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Sid Meier stepped on stage before a packed house of thousands of Game Developers Conference attendees to share decades of experience making games in his keynote address.
Game design, he argued, is fundamentally a psychological experience. You have to consider what your players are thinking and feeling if you’re going to create a great game. Gaming has what is fundamentally a winner’s paradox. In real life, only one team wins the Super Bowl, but gamers expect to be able to win their games. Designers also need to carefully balance reward and punishment. If players have something positive happen to them in a game, they attribute it to their skill as a player, but if bad things happen, they tend to blame the game and designer.
Sid introduced the idea of the “Unholy Alliance” between the player and the designer. The player agrees to suspend their disbelief and accept certain things as game logic, in exchange for the designer providing an engaging experience that makes the player feel good. When players feel like they’re being let down on their end of the bargain, they become disengaged from the game, lose interest, or quit playing. Designers need to be sensitive to their players’ expectations and be consistent between look and theme in the game.
Sid also presented a list of “my bads” he’s committed in game design over the years. These ranged from trying to make the first Civilization game a real-time game (it made players feel like a spectator) to the inclusion of a gold-sharing mechanic in the prototype of Civilization Network (nobody ever used it).
He also said you can save time and money in the production of a game by using the players’ imaginations. People already have knowledge about your subject, whether it’s pirates or trains, and so you can spare time and energy in production by simply letting some of the action or story take place in your players’ heads.
Artificial Intelligence is part of the overall experience of a game. It’s important to make the AI something of a standard against which players can judge their progress. A “clever” AI can seem dumb to players, whereas one that’s too good feels like it’s cheating.
All of this goes into creating what he describes as the “Epic Journey.” A game should be an epic journey, where interesting decisions have interesting consequences, and where at the end, the player feels great about what they’ve accomplished and wonders what would have happened if they had chosen things differently.
Later, during the question period with the audience, someone asked Sid what he thought was the future direction of gaming. “I think it’s the Year of Civilization,” he said, and the hall broke into waves of applause.
Photos courtesy of Tom Bass
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