We've come a long way from "the Princess has been kidnapped, go rescue the Princess". The Super Nintendo acquired a pile of RPGs with complicated plotlines, the gaming industry had a brief but ill-fated flirtation with live-action directing, and we've attempted all sorts of curious branching plotlines and fully explorable worlds.

Somewhere in here, the gaming press and public came up with an interesting term. "Theme park". A "theme park" game is one that calmly shunts you along from awesome event to awesome event, like a Disneyland attraction on rails. You get to see a lot of amazing stuff but, in the end, you had little to no choice in your actions. The most popular accusations, and the most damning of them, tend to be leveled at World of Warcraft. The curious part is that World of Warcraft plotlines never involved choice. People claim to have felt more immersed in the game years ago, and despite the complicated and deep plotlines that now fill the World of Warcraft universe, and the identical amount of influence players have on the world (namely, none), the game just doesn't grab people like it did.

Now, part of this is probably just people tired of WoW. The game has been out for a very long time and people are bored. But I think there's a different reason – one that can be analyzed carefully, and, with effort, avoided. In order to demonstrate that reason, we're going to have to take a journey back in time, tens of thousands of years ago.

Or, if you'd prefer, six years ago, to the release of Ice Age 2.

Spoiler-laden plot synopsis: The main characters of Ice Age are happy in their new home paradise. Then disaster strikes! The gigantic ice wall that's holding the ocean back is beginning to melt, and the entire population must migrate to the other end of the valley, where a boat awaits to rescue them. Will they make it in time?

Well of course they'll bloody well make it in time. It's a kid's movie. Right off the bat you know that it will have a happy ending, and that means everyone's gonna survive. The problem is that they've already tipped their hand. Nine minutes into the movie and you know the whole plotline. Sure, it's a kid's movie, and that means it will be happy, but that doesn't mean they need to tell you how everything will work out. Compare Ice Age 2 to Hook. We all knew Hook is going to have a happy ending also, but we didn't know how. We didn't have the entire plotline of the movie spelled out in the very beginning. This is important.

Second, the Ice Age 2 universe feels painfully contrived. Hundreds of creatures are all crammed together in the very end of an ice-filled valley, which is next to a gigantic wall of ice, and right beyond that wall is the entire ocean. What the hell? How did they even get there? Ice Age 1 ended with them walking into a sun setting over a gorgeous vista, Ice Age 2 starts with this:

Did they enter the valley on the other end, then troop all the way down here? What do they eat? Everything around is ice and bare dirt! The universe feels incredibly artificial – there's The Place That Everything Happens In, and then there's an impassable barrier ensuring that you're not allowed to think about stuff outside that place, and then there's an infinite ocean.

As the movie goes on, there are a lot of events. Many things happen. But in almost every case, these things are small self-contained events. Character gets in trouble –> character gets out of trouble. Hooray! Trouble is over! Let's move on to the next trouble! There are only a few plotlines that last any appreciable time, and as mentioned, none of those are really suspenseful. To make matters worse, Ice Age 2's closest attempt at a bad guy – a pair of prehistoric water carnivores – have no personality, no motivation, and no reason for the viewer to be interested in them. We know they're gonna lose. They're bad guys. You can largely discount any scene where they show up because you know in the end they'll be completely irrelevant. (In the end, they're completely irrelevant. Surprise!)

It felt like the world was created for the sake of the plotlines they wanted to make. Like they had a checklist of things they wanted to include, and by God they were going to make sure to include all those things, so they went down the list and when every event was checked off they called it a movie and released it.

Move forward three years and we've got Ice Age 3, which takes a dramatically different approach. Two minutes in we've got a plot point: the main character's wife is pregnant! Three minutes more and we've got another: one of the side characters is getting easily exhausted while hunting, and wants to leave the group! Another two minutes and we've got yet another: the main character is neglecting his friendships for the sake of his pregnant wife! Another five minutes and we've got a fourth plotline: someone's found some eggs! And then they hatch dinosaurs! And the dinosaurs don't play well with the smaller and fuzzier babies of the area! And, seriously, what the hell is the plot of this movie?

The answer is that there isn't a single plot. Everything listed up there is important and interwoven. Instead of having a single backbone plot, with subplots interspersed like a monotonous drumbeat, Ice Age 3 interweaves every plotline together – the short ones, the long ones, everything. The "main" plot isn't even started until 25 minutes into the movie.

The end result is that you never quite know what's going to happen. Oh, sure, it's going to end happily ever after, it's a kid's movie, we know that. But it's unclear what "happily" means in every case, and it's certainly not as obvious what the exact events are going to be. With that many plotlines running in parallel there are ample opportunities for them to bang into each other and interfere with each other, such as when the mommy mammoth needs for the hunter to defend her against attacking dinosaurs, despite his feelings of inadequacy. Dual plotline resolution, go!

And finally, Ice Age 3 spends a lot more time attempting to insert personality into the various side characters. With mixed success, I'll admit – the "main villain" is still little more than an angry killing machine. But this time it's a killing machine with a name, and backstory, and significant history with one of the main characters. I start caring about him because his behavior will actually have long-term consequences with the other characters in the movie.

Now, take a look at MMO questlines.

Today, each zone has a single largely-linear questline. You're shunted along a backbone plot from one event to the next. Sure, each event is related to the plot, but none of them go outside the plot in an unexpected manner. Each quest is predictable – hell, with few exceptions, each quest gives you the entire quest description before you've even accepted the quest. And there's no way to escape the relentless march of the plot. There's nothing outside the plot, there are no surprising interactions. You start the zone, and several hours later, you finish the zone.

But several years ago, things worked a bit differently. Sure, each quest was, if anything, even simpler. But zones tended to not have single unified plotlines. Often, they had a pile of smaller plotlines. And you weren't shoved along a single plotline – if you went and explored, you could find a different plot. You could pursue these in any order you wanted. There's the opportunity – you're walking around the world doing one quest, and bam, you walk straight into another quest! It didn't feel like you were on rails nearly as much, it felt like you were walking around in a significantly more alive world, where each player would end up experiencing the world in a slightly different order and with a slightly different flavor.

Another problem is the characters. I think this is a situation where, with the best of intentions, MMO design has gone in exactly the wrong direction. Modern MMO quest design is all about participating in epic plots. But that's the problem in a nutshell. It's not your plot, it's someone else's plot. It's Thrall's plot, or Asha's plot. With the old style of MMO quests you had limited choice, but you still had the option to say "haha, screw that, that's not worth the effort". And a lot of the best-known MMO plots were single people asking you for assistance with their person problems. With the modern style, it's the big leaders of your faction or alliance, requiring that you help them with whatever disaster has popped up lately, and if you don't, you can't continue the plotline. It doesn't feel personal.

As an example of how subtle but important this can be: Imagine you're talking to the Emperor's engineer. He tells you that he needs a left-handed sprongwhacker in order to build a machine to drive back the Infernals. You go and retrieve a left-handed sprongwhacker and give it to him. He says, "hey, thanks! Here, have some platemail." Received: [Platemail of the Emperor].

Now imagine a different quest. You're talking to a mechanic in a village. He says, "oh man, I'd totally make you a set of platemail, but I'll need a left-handed sprongwhacker. I used my last one yesterday!" You go and retrieve a left-handed sprongwhacker and give it to him. He says, "fantastic! Here's that platemail you wanted." Received: [Sprongwhacker-Imbued Platemail].

Which of these feels more personal? Well, the second one does by a long shot! You did something, not because a guy told you that you should, but because you wanted to. And your reward is a permanent badge of honor. You found that sprongwhacker, and this is the platemail that proves it! Whereas in the first place, you just got some random platemail. In fact, pretty much every piece of armor you find in a modern MMO is random. Every once in a while, a quest will offer a reward, but it's rarely thematically appropriate and never mentioned in the quest text. There is exactly one difference between a quest that offers equipment as a reward and a quest that doesn't: the quest that offers equipment says "you can choose one of these pieces of equipment as a reward".

I think this is a problem. I want to feel like I earned that equipment, and I want to feel like the person giving me the equipment has noticed that I am worthy of a new shiny piece of armor. As it is, there isn't even acknowledgement that you've gotten equipment. It feels like a perfectly mechanical side effect of pushing the "complete quest" button.

The fundamental problem is that MMOs are trying to design their questlines like they're movies. Movies have it easy: they can tell you who the most important people in the movie are. They can focus on one character and now it's important, or they can give backstory with sad music and now you know the other character's important. But with games, we already know who the most important person in the game is. It's you. It's the player. It always will be the player. And that means that every event, every plot point, has to interact with the player, not a bunch of other characters that the designers are dancing across the screen in the hopes that you'll get entangled with their plot.

If you want me entangled, you need to make me entangled. And that means either giving my avatar a chance to develop some personality of his own, or giving me a chance to influence my own story, even if this is something as simple as giving me a choice between which stories I feel like pursuing.

As game developers, we, of course, want to harness that. Luckily, there are a few good ways to do so.

Many years ago, back in the SNES days, a game called Chrono Trigger had a clever innovation. You beat the game, and then, after the game was done, you could start the game again . . . with your existing characters, levels, and equipment, and with a whole pile of new endings unlocked. It was called New Game+.

The beauty of New Game+ is the the most devoted players, those who had loved the game and wanted to keep playing it, could keep playing it. It wasn't just a grind either, there were things to do that you could do only in this new mode. For example, killing the boss five minutes into the game, with a single character, resulting in a completely new ending. The game contained a lot of equipment that could be gotten once only, but of course, on the second playthrough you could get it again, allowing for combat strategies that simply weren't possible on a single playthrough. And, of course, you could see the effect of different choices on the plot, without having to spend all the time slowly bashing your way through the game at a normal level.

Most players, I assume, never tried New Game+. Or perhaps they tried it for a few minutes and stopped. But some – a very small number of players – played the game over again, once, twice, maybe more, trying to unlock all the endings and all the equipment, just enjoying their time in the game world that they loved.

Recently, there's been an interesting new financial model for games. It's called Free-to-Play. The idea is that you provide a game that doesn't cost any money, then you ask people to start forking over cash once they're already playing. There's a bunch of variations – some leave you hilariously underpowered unless you're giving them money, some games make it mandatory to give them money to proceed, some games make it frustrating to not give them money, some just constantly hound you for money, and some provide a fun game and let you fork over cash for vanity items and out of laziness.

I think there are a lot of interesting moral comments you can make about the various first variations, but this entry isn't about that, which is why I'm going to talk about the last one. Tribes: Ascend is nearing its release date and it's one of the more elegant and friendly Free-to-Play models I've seen. The only things that require money (known in-game as Gold) are purely cosmetic skins – everything else can be acquired simply through experience, acquired by playing the game.

And we're not talking boring grinding, either. The game is a team-based competitive shooter. You get experience by playing the game in a normal fashion. Now, you might think this means that someone who finds the game fun wouldn't want to give them money – after all, there's no reason to do so, you can still unlock everything without it – but there are two distinct groups of people who happily pay out.

The first group is the obvious group: those with more money than time. The game's fun, they want to unlock classes and items, here you go, have some money.

The second group isn't as obvious. It's the group of players who absolutely love the game.

About two weeks ago the first player reached Rank 50. Ranks have absolutely no bearing on the gameplay, they're merely an indicator of how long you've been playing. He's been playing a lot. He posted a screenshot of his progress, and one of the things quickly noticed was that he had enough experience to unlock every single item in the game several times over, enough gold to unlock every single item in the game several more times over, and enough Boost – an experience-multiplier purchased with Gold – to easily acquire yet more complete experience-based unlocks. And it turns out that he'd recently paid them even more money.

There's no logical reason for him to do this. You literally can't unlock anything repeatedly. He already has enough experience and gold to most likely unlock everything the developers will ever release. And yet, he loves the game, so he's willing to put more time and more money into it.

The long tail is usually a major point of interest with free-to-play games. In theory, there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who don't care enough about your game to give you $10, but maybe you can get $2 out of them, or maybe you can get them hooked and get $5. And, yeah, you get a lot of money off those people. But nobody talks about the outliers – the people who give you $300 extra just because they really enjoy playing your game. The people who will finish your game from beginning to end two, three, five times, as long as there are things for them to work on and achieve.

I think there's a lot of crossover between the free-to-play customers and New Game+ players. In both cases, there's a person who has deeply loved your world and wants nothing more than an excuse to give you more money, to spend more time playing, to do something more in the world you've created. Not only is this person going to play more, but they're going to evangelize you to their friends.

That's valuable, whether it be in goodwill or cold hard cash.

If you're making a game with a world, if you're making a game with an experience and not just a final boss, remember to let the player leave your world at their own pace. If they want to stick around, make sure there are things for your player to do. The benefits are hard to calculate, but you'll find them very valuable.

So let's talk about that.

Starcraft 2 and Supreme Commander

You could just as easily compare Starcraft 1 and Total Annihilation, but I'm sticking with these because it'll be easier to find screenshots. (And no, we're not going to talk about Supreme Commander 2. That game didn't exist.)

Starcraft 2 and Supreme Commander, on first glance, occupy the same genre. They're both real-time strategy games, where the player is given control over a base filled with resource gatherers and production structures, has to construct an army, and is told to go blow up the bad guys.

It's the same genre, but the two games differ drastically after that.

A race in Starcraft 2 consists of 13 to 15 units and 15 to 18 buildings. Most buildings have orders they can be given, either to produce units or to produce upgrades for units. The units themselves almost all have a gimmick – sometimes a passive gimmick like the Observer's cloaking field and cloak detection, sometimes an active gimmick like the Marine's stimpack. Combat in Starcraft 2 is mathematically simple, without any worries about ballistics or dodging. A fired shot will always hit and always do a predictable amount of damage, albeit with a little travel time. However, the complexity of the units make combat fast-paced and difficult to perfect.

Supreme Commander takes a dramatically different approach, with almost fifty units and fifty buildings per faction. Production buildings build units just like Starcraft's, but control over your utility buildings is limited to a simple on/off switch. The vast majority of units have no gimmick, either passive or active, and while there are technically "fifty units" the majority of them are simple upgrades on previous units – like the "Conservator T1 Interceptor" vs the "Swift Wind T2 Combat Fighter" vs the "Corona T3 Air Superiority Fighter". In Supreme Commander, there's no reason to build the older models of aircraft – you'd always want to build the new, higher-tech version.

First, there's a moving of complexity. In Starcraft, you upgrade units by researching upgrades at your various structures. In Supreme Commander, you upgrade units by building a new factory, then producing upgraded units. The result is that, while Supreme Commander has two classes of "thing" – buildings and units – Starcraft 2 has three classes of "thing", adding upgrades into the mix. Supreme Commander simplified the basic concepts available in the game by adding far more types of unit.

Ironically, despite having well over three times as many units as Starcraft 2, Supreme Commander's units are, overall, much simpler. Most of Supreme Commander's units do three things: they move, they shoot, and they die. In the meantime, Starcraft's units can do all sorts of things, from kamikaze explosions to directed area-of-effect attacks to mind control to teleportation.

Supreme Commander's base-building is significantly more complicated. Structures in Starcraft are largely passive, acting as large lumps of hit points that let you build things. Supreme Commander leans much more heavily on active buildings with weaponry, giving you an entire range of close-range and long-range defensive buildings, as well as a small number of ultra-long-range artillery buildings. To supplement this, Supreme Commander provides a range of defensive shield buildings that can protect nearby units and structures from incoming fire. Finally, Supreme Commander's energy-generation buildings also act as augmentations for nearby structures, doing anything from reducing resource consumption to increasing fire rate.

To compensate for this dramatic increase in complexity, Supreme Commander's bases are far easier to automate. While Starcraft's factories require manual intervention for every single unit, Supreme Commander's factories can be set to automatically construct units without the user being involved. This is a good thing because Supreme Commander armies are far far larger. Starcraft limits the player to an army of 200 "food", and the vast majority of units take one or more food – some reaching up to eight food per unit. Endgame armies frequently number around 50-75 actual units. Supreme Commander, by default, limits you to 500 units, but this is more of a computer performance limit than a game balance limit.

So, the Complexity Roundup so far:

Starcraft has more complicated units, more base management, and more complex upgrades to deal with.

Supreme Commander has more complicated base layout and far more units, but once your base is laid out, it mostly manages itself.

From what I can tell, the goal with Supreme Commander was this: Make the player spend effort only on things that are actively improving their position. Building a larger base is worth spending time on. Keeping your base running is not. Changing your production is worth spending time on. Mass-producing units one at a time, by hand, is not. Your base is meant to run itself while you're away. So what do you do during those times you're "away"?

The intention, I think, was to set the player up as . . . well, as a Supreme Commander. (They're not subtle.) You have hundreds of units and you order them all around constantly. The trailers showed the player doing pincer attacks, feints, all sorts of clever military maneuvers.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work out well in a modern real-time strategy game. In real warfare, many of these clever military maneuvers worked due to limited information, bad communication, and extremely slow units. It's easy to do a pincer maneuver when the enemy is nearly incapable of relaying orders from one side of their formation to the other, and it's easy to do a pincer maneuver when the enemy is unable to look into thick brush. It's a whole lot harder when the enemy has a circle of visibility around their units roughly equal to yours and when the enemy can retreat at the same speed as you can attack.

And "far more units" isn't really a source of complexity in itself. When your units do individual important things, it certainly can be – if you're familiar with the game, imagine trying to efficiently manage a 1000-food Starcraft 2 army – but in the world of Supreme Commander, more units simply means a larger blob of death that gets moved around the map as a sort of conceptual amorphous accumulation of power.

Supreme Commander tried to move a large amount of Starcraft's base management and micromanagement complexity into largescale strategic positioning . . . but it turns out that really doesn't work well in the RTS genre. The end effect is to take a complicated game and just make it simpler, and that's one of many reasons Supreme Commander was unsuccessful.

But with that in mind, I can talk about a more successful example.

World of Warcraft raids vs God of War boss fights

I'm not going to even pretend that one of these was inspired by the other. We all know that's not true. But they make for an excellent study on how you can get dramatically different gameplay by moving complexity around.

For the sake of this discussion, let's just ignore the whole multiplayer thing. Assume your World of Warcraft pals are simply AI bots, and the boss lives or dies based on your success at your role in the fight.

World of Warcraft characters are very complicated. Even standing in one place trying to maximize damage on a single target, you're generally juggling half a dozen abilities or more, each of which has to be used properly in order to do your job right. Many of your abilities interact with each other in complicated and nonobvious ways and have to be activated in the right patterns. If you start having to move, or deal with large groups of enemies, or target-switch often, it gets far more complicated.

Conversely, controlling Kratos, God of War's main character, is quite simple. Maximizing damage is a matter of mashing a single button repeatedly, and your alternative attacks vary in only a few simple ways – usually recovery time or area damage. Kratos has no complex interacting moves. The only interesting thing Kratos does in terms of combat techniques is his combo moves, triggered by pressing the buttons in certain patterns – but Kratos has only a small number of these combos, and they are both completely predictable and easy to trigger.

Kratos is, fundamentally, much simpler to control than a World of Warcraft character. Basic understanding of Kratos's abilities takes minutes at most, and expert control takes perhaps a few hours.

Simplifying his control scheme opens up a lot of space for complexity in other places. Namely, bosses.

Much has been said of the complexity of World of Warcraft bosses, and in a sense, this is accurate. The most difficult boss fights tend to take a month or two for the best groups to kill. But this isn't a particularly even comparison. Warcraft bosses are intended to be tough to kill, while God of War bosses are intended to be relatively easy to kill. Challenging, yes, but doable. We're going to compare Warcraft bosses that are roughly the same difficulty as God of War bosses.

When making this comparison, the Warcraft bosses start looking simplistic at best.

Complicated bosses might do something every fifteen or even ten seconds – simple bosses will often have thirty-second-long periods of time where you're simply standing there whaling on the boss. Some bosses, such as the semi-infamous Patchwerk, have literally no gimmicks. They stand there and beat on you, you stand there and beat on it, if you survive long enough to kill it within the time limit, you win. Meanwhile, the God of War bosses tend to require a response every five seconds or so, at most. There's simply no time to get complacent and no time to rest – the boss will be smacking you if you let it.

Modern Warcraft bosses will usually have two or three basic attack patterns – "run away when he does this", "don't stand in fire", "get ready to cast a lot of healing spells", but all of these are telegraphed with a clear indicator and several seconds of spare response time. The God of War bosses often give you one second's worth of notice, at best, and frequently require that you quickly and accurately recognize the boss's movement and respond in the correct manner out of several options.

World of Warcraft has chosen to put a large amount of the gameplay complexity into the character. Once you understand your character – and that can take a phenomenally long time – most of the bosses end up being relatively similar. God of War, conversely, has chosen to put a large amount of the gameplay complexity into the boss. Each encounter is dramatically different, but your character is relatively simple and easy to deal with.

Proper complexity budgeting isn't just about putting complexity in the spots you want complexity to be – it's also about taking complexity out of the spots you don't want. If Kratos had a complicated control scheme it would take away from the real goal of the game: beating the shit out of horrifying monsters the size of a house. But if World of Warcraft had a simple control scheme, then the process of creating new bosses would be far more complicated and expensive, possibly resulting in huge budget issues. You can't get away with strictly removing complexity because that results in a dull game, but likewise you have to stay below an upper threshold, or your game is impenetrable and unplayable.

I could probably go on with more examples for months, but this has gone on easily long enough by now. I'd like for you readers to analyze a few games based on complexity. Take a look at what a game explicitly avoided adding, or what a game added that was unnecessary. Compare two games in seemingly the same genre but with different behavior.

I've found this to be a surprisingly powerful tool for analyzing game design, and I've already modified some of my game plans by reconsidering where I'm putting complexity. If you find anything interesting using it, let me know!

The concept behind this megapost really started about two years ago, when I played a pair of games that made unexpected but excellent design choices. Later, I found a third. In each case, the game removed an uninteresting mechanic that had become a staple of the genre, and in doing so, unearthed some new interesting mechanics that had gone unnoticed.

Just to warn you: two of these games don't really succeed. That's what happens when you try experimental things. But they're all intriguing games, and they all open up areas of game design that I think are worth analysis.

First off: Gyromancer.

Gyromancer is, at its core, a big-budget version of Puzzle Quest. Puzzle Quest is, itself, Bejeweled with an RPG grafted on. In the case of Gyromancer it's Bejeweled Twist, with a pile of surprisingly pretty art and a plotline that's . . . well, it's a plotline. We'll just go with that.

Most of the complexity of Gyromancer (yeah, we're back to complexity, you saw that coming) is tied up in your abilities, your opponent's abilities, and the effect of gems on the board. All of these have to be dealt with rather carefully. Spells can morph the board rapidly and only somewhat predictably, your opponent does quite a lot of damage when he attacks, and many of your abilities interact in complex ways.

And on top of this, you have to play Bejeweled.

Bejeweled Twist, at that, which is a more complicated variant – instead of the relatively simple block-swapping mechanic, you have to rotate a square of four blocks. It's a little harder to understand the side effects of a move and a little tougher to come up with long-term plans. Now, I'm sure Bejeweled experts will have no trouble with the mechanic, but I am not a Bejeweled expert, and I had trouble with it. The game has a lot of mechanics piled on top of each other and it was almost too much to handle.

I say "almost" because the developers made one little concession to crummy players like me. See, your cursor lights up when it's held over a valid rotation. This means that you figure out incorrect moves before you click and screw up. This also means that if you can't find the valid move, you can just skim over the entire board watching for your cursor to light up in order to find it.

In other words, they took out some of the complexity of "find possible next moves", and they moved that complexity into "choose the right ability or move to make". Being a Bejeweled expert is no longer as necessary, and training your eyes to detect valid Bejeweled moves isn't as needed. Instead, you can devote that time to choosing the right move to make.

But imagine what would have happened if they'd gone even further. Instead of telling you whether a chosen move is valid, they could simply show all valid moves. They could have removed all the difficulty of finding a move and simply left the player to figure out the best move. Even less player effort in the brute-force scanning, freeing up time and effort for the interesting decisions! I'm not going to claim this would have been a better game – I suspect I'm not the target audience – but it would have been a game I personally found more interesting. If I'd wanted to play Bejeweled, I would have played Bejeweled, but really I was most interested in the new mechanics, which Bejeweled masked.

Next up, we've got SquareLogic.

SquareLogic can be best described as Sudoku on acid. Sudoku takes place in a 9×9 grid, further divided into nine 3×3 boxes. You must fill each box with a number from 1 through 9. You can't use the same number twice in a row, or twice in a column, or twice in a 3×3 box.

SquareLogic, on the other hand, goes from 4×4 through 9×9. You're roughly limited to the same count of numbers – a 4×4 grid will take numbers 1 through 4, a 9×9 grid will take 1 through 9 – and you're still subject to the row/column restrictions. But it gets far weirder from there. First, while SquareLogic does have subcontainers, they aren't necessarily square. They might be rectangles. They might be strange bendy shapes. Worse, these containers don't care about uniqueness. They care about other things. For example, you might have a 24x container, which means that the product of the numbers within the container must be 24. Maybe that's 1*2*3*4. Maybe that's 1*1*4*6. You might think it could be 2*2*2*3, but you'd be wrong – remember, you can't have the same number duplicated in a row or a column, and there's no way to lay out 2*2*2*3 such that no two 2's share a row or column. But 1*1*4*6 would fit in an S-shape, with the two 1's on opposite ends.

That's not all, though! SquareLogic doesn't tell you where the containers are. You're given one square in each container, and the rest of the container locations have to be derived logically. Sometimes that's easy: if the container is "12x", you know it needs to be at least two squares large. Sometimes that's tougher, though: is "12x" two, three, or four squares?

And then, just when you feel confident in that, SquareLogic throws double-board puzzles at you. Two boards, the same solution on each board, but different containers. You'll have to solve them simultaneously to win, as neither board has enough detail to get a full solution.

All of this could easily become overwhelming. In fact, just the busywork could be overwhelming – Sudoku-style games require that you keep track of which numbers have been used in which rows or columns. But SquareLogic, after throwing an enormous amount of complexity in your face, quietly shuffles much of the busywork away and takes care of it for you. Each box contains, greyed-out and in small type, all possible numbers that could fit there. You can eliminate numbers manually by right-clicking them. But if you make a decision and place a number in its final location, SquareLogic instantly clears all instances of that number from that row and column, as you can guarantee the number won't show up in any other similar places. The busywork is boring, and the computer can do it, so why shouldn't it?

SquareLogic helps in other ways. If you mouseover a container, it will list all possibilities. Mousing over 12x will show 3*4, 1*2*6, 1*3*4, 2*2*3, 1*1*3*4, and 1*2*2*3. If you've determined that your 12x container is only three squares large, it will restrict that down to 1*2*6, 1*3*4, and 2*2*3. If you've shown that none of the squares can contain a 3, it will cross out 1*3*4 and 2*2*3, leaving you with just 1*2*6. Sure, you could do it by hand, but does anyone want to spend their life trying to factor numbers?

(Especially the larger numbers – multiplication containers can easily reach the thousands, as 6*7*8*9 = 3024. I don't want to factor 3024. That's why I own a computer.)

The end result is a horrendously complicated, but surprisingly manageable, puzzle. When you get stuck, it's usually because you missed something clever, not because you misclicked or forgot to cross out an option. Since the game keeps track of all the little mental details for you, your brainspace is available for the far more interesting logical derivation.

But it's worth noting what SquareLogic didn't automate. SquareLogic will never actually choose a number for you, even if you've eliminated all alternatives. SquareLogic will happily tell you that there's only one possibility for a container, but it will never narrow down the elements in that container without your explicit input. The automation is solely limited to removing row/column conflicts and informing you about container possibilities. If you go too far, you end up writing a game that plays itself. SquareLogic went further than most do, but not too much further, opting to stay back and leave the fun bits up to the player.

Last, though with unarguably the highest budget of any of these games: Final Fantasy 13, and specifically, FF13's combat system.

(Before I continue: no, it hasn't escaped my attention that all of these games either involve squares or are made by Square. I promise this is a coincidence.)

From Final Fantasy 1 all the way through Final Fantasy 10, the most fundamental assumptions of Final Fantasy's combat system remained unchanged. You controlled a party of characters, from one to four at a time. Each character had a number of abilities, generally including Attack, Magic, Item, and a special gimmicky thing. Each character attacked in some order – generally determined by the character's speed – and used a single command at a time to damage the enemies, heal friendlies, or cast helpful (or harmful) spells. The enemies did the same, interspersed with your units.

There were many variations, of course. Some games used an "active time battle" system where characters attacked somewhat in realtime, although this was essentially a realtime wrapper around a turnbased game. For a while, every Final Fantasy game came up with a new way to gain magic, from Espers to Materia to Guardian Forces to the Sphere Grid. In FF7, your characters' spells were highly customizable before battle. In FF10, your characters could be swapped out at a moment's notice in a fight. FF8 let you buff your characters by "attaching" spells to them. It got complicated. But the fundamental design didn't change – one character took their turn and did something, the next character took their turn and did something.

FF11 broke the pattern by virtue of a genre change. FF11 was a massively multiplayer game, where you controlled a single character, and your party fought as a cohesive, realtime group. The gameplay didn't surprise anyone, at least after the MMO layout was announced – MMOs don't work with the old Final Fantasy method. But FF11 heavily influenced FF12. In many ways, FF12 felt like a single-player MMO. Instead of controlling a party, you directed a party – you wrote general-purpose scripts to automate what you intended, then gave direct commands to your characters when you needed to override their behavior.

Which taught us some very curious things. It turns out that the old Final Fantasy combat style is, fundamentally, very repetitive. Classic Final Fantasy combat consists of three things: healing, buffing, and attacking. First, make sure nobody's about to die. Then, cast the spells that make your characters vastly better. Finally, kill the bad guys. Most of this can be automated. In fact, the only part that takes any thought is "attacking", as various monsters require different attack spells. For example, robots are vulnerable to lightning, so if you're fighting robots, hit them with lightning. That's all the thought you need to put into it, though – after you've figured that bit out, it tends to be quite formulaic.

When FF12 automated all the basic bits, they were able to use that freed-up gamespace and make the bosses more complicated.

Now, FF12 didn't do a great job of it, because in order to play the game efficiently you basically had to be a programmer. Your characters had little automated scripts that you had to design. If you weren't good at that kind of process design, you sucked at the game. But FF13 took this to another level altogether.

In FF13, you didn't really control your characters at all. Instead of telling them what to do, you told them how to behave. For example, you'd tell one character "be a healer", and that character would start lobbing heal spells around to keep everyone else alive. You'd tell another character "cast buffs", and that character would automatically choose appropriate buffs and keep your party fully augmented. At the same time, FF12 took the old three-role Final Fantasy system and split it into a whopping six roles. The "buff" role was joined by a "debuff" role. They picked up a fully functional tank role, able to absorb firepower and take minimal amounts of damage. And, in a rather uncommon twist, "damage the bad guys" was split into two separate roles – a Ravager that gradually knocked the enemy off-balance, and a Commando that did enormous amounts of damage, but only once the enemy was off-balance.

Now, you did have direct control over one character, but to be honest, most of the time you just mashed the "do whatever you would normally do" button. The AI was smart enough to prioritize buffs intelligently and it understood which debuffs worked on the enemy. The tank would do a good job of keeping damage contained, the healer would distribute healing spells appropriately, and the various damage roles would quickly figure out the right spells to use and . . . well . . . use them. Instead of spamming Lightning on the robots, you watched while your characters spammed Lightning on the robots.

And as you'd expect, this opened room for more complicated bosses. Bosses in FF13 are truly deadly – a few turns of the wrong actions will often result in a party wipe and a game-over. Your characters will respond quickly, and do an amazing job of efficient damage mitigation and recovery, leaving the only real in-battle decision to a moment-by-moment choice between party roles, deciding on the fly which combination of roles will prevent your party from dying and kill the boss.

Which is, in many ways, where FF13 fails. You simply don't have enough choices. I'm all for automating the repetitive parts, but it turns out that the Final Fantasy combat model is repetitive parts. When you take away all the repetition, and don't replace it with something new, you're left without a game. In the case of Final Fantasy, the "game" becomes recognizing the right response to half a dozen boss abilities. When boss does this, you mash Tank button. When boss does this, you have time to rebuff. When boss does this, you can go back to kill mode.

The problem is that the roles are very, very specialized. If you need a tank character – and you often do – that's a full third of your party's functionality tied up. If you need a healer as well, that's another third. That leaves you with one character left to do damage, and that's only if you don't need buffing or debuffing. The game stops being about fighting the monster and starts being about juggling role timings.

Which is admittedly an interesting mechanic. Perhaps not one that stands on its own, but one that could be used as part of a much better game. And a mechanic that simply wouldn't have been uncovered without automating all the boring parts of combat.

So, what's the conclusion to all this?

I've talked about three games that got rid of large parts of their complexity. In the case of SquareLogic, I think it was a clear win. In the case of Gyromancer and FF13, I think it was a bit more dubious as a game, but quite valuable as research. The real lesson is that removing obvious sources of complexity does not always result in a better game, but it does usually result in learning more about your game and finding unexpected deposits of fun deep inside your game's emergent behavior. Even if you don't want to do it in your final release, it may be worth trying it out as an experiment, just to see what you discover.

And that neatly segues into our third entry, in which I'll compare pairs of games to see how differences in complexity layout can result in vastly different gameplay. I'll see you again next time. :)

I've also been spending a lot of time playing Anno 2070.

Let's start with Anno 2070.

The game industry is fickle and deadly. Franchises appear out of nowhere, make it big, and instantly fall on their own sword, only to be resurrected in a sort of grisly undead state years later when some publisher realizes they still own the rights. The surviving franchises are either mutated out of recognition within a few years or exploited beyond all sanity. The Anno franchise is an exception. Anno 1602 was released way back in 1998, and it's been followed by four major sequels, two spinoffs, and an expansion pack. Despite this 13-year history, the core game mechanics are unchanged since the very beginning, which makes it absolutely perfect for this discussion.

Unfortunately, I've only played the most recent two games. I'm sure I could say a lot of fascinating things about the entire series of five games, and maybe someday I will, but that's not today. So, instead of talking about the Anno series as a whole, I'm going to talk about the changes between Anno 1404 (known in the US as Dawn of Discovery) and Anno 2070.

Anno is a citybuilding game. There's combat in it, but very little – the core game mechanic is about building a really big city with a whole lot of people and industry. Now, in most games, you'd expect that a city would need a lot of workers in order to run factories and farms. Anno doesn't work that way. Production buildings work whether or not you have people, but they cost money to run. Houses, meanwhile, do only three important things. First, they unlock new technologies and new buildings, based on your population type and your population count. Second, they give you money in taxes, which is needed to keep your cashflow positive and your production functional. Third, they consume the output of those aforementioned production buildings. Playing Anno isn't about balancing Residential, Commercial, and Industrial zones, then watching people move in, it's about building a ton of houses and then trying to keep them fed when they start demanding eighty tons of pasta every minute. And you're the one in charge of the pasta.

(All goods in Anno are measured in tons. This makes perfect sense when talking about wood, coal, or oil, less sense when talking about pasta or glass, and very little sense when talking about diamonds, lobster, or marzipan. You get used to it.)

For a game that's all about production quantities and production chains, Anno 1404 provides very few tools to keep an overview on your industry. In fact, until midway through the game, the only way to count your buildings is to do it manually. To make matters worse, Anno 1404's tech trees can be complicated and interdependent, and figuring out the proper building quantities requires that the player either do a lot of math by hand or use tools.

For example: To run a a wine press at full capacity requires three vineyards, one barrel cooperage, 2/3 of a lumberjack hut, half an iron smelter, half an ore mine, and half a charcoal burner's hut. An Optician's Workshop at full capacity requires 3/4 of a quartz quarry, 3/4 of a copper smelter, 3/4 of a copper mine, and half a charcoal burner's hut. A Redsmith's Workshop requires 1.5 candlemaker's workshops, 2 apiaries, 1.5 hemp plantations, 3/4 of a copper smelter, 3/4 of a copper mine, and 2 charcoal burner's huts. Now: If you want four wine presses, five optician's workshops, and three redsmith's workshops, what buildings do you need?

The answer is "I have no bloody idea, let me alt-tab out to check my Excel spreadsheet".

Even worse than that, however, is the fact that the game doesn't tell you these ratios. I had to look them up. The early tutorial gives you some of the basic ratios – "you will need two hemp plantations for every weaver's hut" – but the complicated stuff has to be determined either by trial and error or by looking it up on a wiki.

Anno 2070's solution to this is . . . incomplete, but an improvement. First, the very first buildings you can construct in Anno 2070 give you access to an easy building-counting station. Apparently they decided that counting buildings manually was boring.

I'm going to pause here, because that last line is the crux of this entire entry. They decided that counting buildings manually was boring. Got a boring mechanic? Take it out! We don't want that here! Every time you get the player to stop doing something that's boring, the player will have more time and more intellect available for things that are interesting. Counting sucks -> get rid of counting.

But they didn't think that calculating building numbers was boring. Now, it's obvious I disagree with this assessment, but I strongly suspect this was an intentional choice of theirs. You can't spend 13 years developing a franchise based around an accidental game mechanic. They also don't seem to think that production numbers are something they need to show. It'd be easy enough for them to do so. As it is, a chunk of the Anno community spends time figuring out the actual production numbers, which the rest of the community embeds into utility programs and the like.

Counting isn't the only interface improvement in Anno 2070. I've mentioned "production buildings", but really there are two important and unique kinds of production buildings – factories and farms. Factories take up a fixed area of land. Farms include a farmhouse, which takes up a small area, and then some number of farm plots – frequently larger than the farmhouse, and always more numerous – which have to be near the farmhouse. Through sheer bulk, the farm plots end up dominating your industry in terms of size, and you spend a good deal of the game time trying to lay out farm plots efficiently.

In Anno 1404, this is somewhat difficult. Farmhouses have a circular zone that you can place plots within, and there's a bit of latitude in how far outside that zone the plots are allowed to go. However, if your farm plots go too far outside the farmhouse radius, they'll produce slightly less efficiently. Remember the mess up there about building production quantities? Imagine if a few of your hemp workshops were running at 90% efficiency. Yeah. You don't want that. To make it even more complicated, some of your farms need to be within range of a water-producing building, which has its own circular radius. To make it even more complicated, you get further bonuses by having overlapping water-producing buildings.

Anno 2070 simplifies things considerably. First, there's no longer such a thing as a water-producing building. Second, while the farm plots still have to be placed nearby, and while the latitude still exists, farm plots placed "close enough" count 100%. Always. You can still be clever and place plots slightly outside the circular range . . . and now that's totally okay! There's no downside! It's just a little extra flexibility you have with placement.

The important thing to realize about complexity is that it's not simply a matter of increasing or reducing complexity. We're not talking about making a decision between Cow Clicker and Paradox Interactive's insane wargame simulators. This is all a matter of moving complexity. I'm going to use the term "complexity budget" – you have only so much space for complexity (both in your game design, and in your poor player's brain) and you have to spend it wisely. Anno 2070 took some of the complexity out of farm placement, which meant they had complexity to spare, which meant they had complexity to spend. And spend it they did!

Anno 1404 has several farm variations. The most common farm is the one that has four 3×4 plots. Later, you find a farm with eight 2×3 plots, as well as the behemoth Cattle Farm that has five 4×4 plots. But that's as weird as it gets – with the exception of the eight 2×3 plot building, every farm has between three and five plots, sized between 3×3 and 4×4.

Anno 2070 goes absolutely insane with farm layouts. Early buildings have a mere two 3×4 plots. The Fruit Plantation has eight 3×3 plots. The Corn Farm requires nine 3×6 plots. 3×6? What the hell is 3×6? And nine of them? Meanwhile, the behemoth Dairy Farm has seven 5×5 plots, making it by far the largest and most irritating structure in the game.

This, right here, is what I mean by the complexity budget. Anno 1404 spent a bunch of complexity on the difficulty of placing farm plots correctly. Anno 2070 threw away that complexity and replaced it with the difficulty of aligning farm plots in efficient patterns. 2070's Dairy Farm would simply be a nightmare to deal with in the world of 1404. With 2070 logic, it's certainly challenging, but it's nowhere near as horrifying as it could be. Moving the complexity out of one area of the game allows you to move it into another area without actually making the game more difficult to deal with – and if you're clever, you've moved it into a more fun location.

2070 moves complexity around in a few other directions as well, though I'm going to go over these quickly. Compared to 1404's Patricians, 2070's Executives are easy to keep happy. The Patricians gain a whopping six new demands at the end of the game, while the Executives only acquire two. But while 1404 has two population types – one complicated type with four stages, one simpler type with two – 2070 has three population types, two with four stages and one with two. The end result is that you spend far less time clawing your way up through the final stage and far more time watching your population upgrade. If 2070's four-stage populations had the complexity of 1404's four-stage population it would just be intimidating.

Finally, 2070 does have a replacement for 1404's water mechanic, but it's a simpler island-wide mechanic. Instead of overlapping circular water radiuses, you can change the ecology of the entire island, anywhere from a polluted hellhole into a glorious green paradise. It's a heavier-weight mechanic – instead of being a little localized effect on certain farms that you can ignore if you don't care, it's something you can and probably will put a significant amount of effort into – but it also has big and, more importantly, predictable results. It's not quite as complicated and minmaxable as 1404's mechanic but it's a lot easier to understand and has simpler ramifications through your supply chain. Anno 2070's water mechanic is made a running theme of the story and set, with a large amount of documentation explaining exactly how it works, while 1404's water mechanic is so undocumented and unintuitive that it's considered by some people to be an exploit – the developers have never fixed it through several major patches and an entire expansion pack.

So. Summary: 2070 takes 1404 and makes incremental improvements to it. They moved complexity out of some mechanics (counting buildings, finicky farm plot placement, water, complex population end requirements) and were able to use that space to add new mechanics (complicated farms, ecology, third population type). The game doesn't feel any more complicated than it did before, but most people seem to feel it's more interesting. Without removing the old things, it may simply have felt overwhelming.

Right now, I think this entry has gone on long enough by far. But we're not done with this subject – oh no, we have quite a lot further to go. We'll be posting more later.

More recently, the same developer released Rocketbirds Hardboiled Chicken. R:HC is a remastered version of the original R:R game, with an additional half-dozen levels grafted on the end and a pile of cutscenes. See this intro for an example. It's pretty dang badass. The game is filled with similar cutscenes, and every one of them is enjoyable and stylistic.

The whole contraption didn't quite gel for me.

Rocketbirds has trouble figuring out what it's about. On one front, it's a sidescrolling action game, with plenty of guns and enemies to mow down (see: Shoot Many Robots). On another front, it's a puzzle game – the Hardboiled Chicken spends a surprising amount of time pushing crates around (see: Abe's Oddysee). On a third front, it's an atmospheric game, with a distinctive art style and soundtrack (see: Limbo).

Now, all of these things are totally awesome. Seriously, I'd joyfully play any of the games I just described. The problem is that Rocketbirds didn't have the funding or time to do all of it well.

The action game, for example – the Hardboiled Chicken gains multiple guns as he travels through the game. But almost each one of these guns is just a number increase over the previous weapon. New gun? More damage! Since your enemies are upgrading at the same time, this comes across as just a number treadmill. Bigger gun -> tougher enemy -> back where you started. Worse, the majority of the Hardboiled Chicken combat isn't really about firepower, it's about stuns. Shoot anyone, they're stunned for several seconds. If you're facing a single opponent, here's your strategy: you shoot them, they're paralyzed, they die. If you're facing multiple opponents in one direction, here's your strategy: you shoot them, and hope you manage to hit the guy in back before he fires his weapon. If you're facing opponents on both sides of you, here's your strategy: shoot one, then the other, and keep swapping back and forth to keep them off-balance, and eventually they die.

None of the weapons change this fundamental mechanic. Sure, you get a shotgun which does a ton of damage at close range and almost no damage at long-range, but this just isn't relevant to the combat – it simply means you kill the enemies faster, if they're at close range, and slower if they're at long-range. Or change to a longer-range gun.

The puzzle game includes three major gimmicks: crates can be pushed, doors can be unlocked with keys, and you can take over the minds of your enemies. That latter one has a lot of potential for cool puzzles (again, see Abe's Oddysee), but that potential isn't really exploited. Abe's Oddysee made it a fantastic game mechanic through providing new abilities to each creature type, but in Rocketbirds, the monsters have a strict subset of the protagonist's abilities. Mind control is nothing more than a way to pass through inconvenient walls.

And then there's the plotline. In Rocketbirds Revolution, the plot was thin at best – the Hardboiled Chicken is trapped behind enemy lines and must fight his way out, destroying the bulk of the enemy forces at the same time. In Hardboiled Chicken, this plot was augmented by a pile of stylistic music videos.

The problem is that this doesn't really improve the plotline. I don't want to watch these music videos, I want to play them. They actually look like a lot of fun! Sure, it's not the most innovative plotline, but whatever – it's an action game, I'm fine with that! Instead, though, we're relegated to watching cutscenes that look more interesting than the actual game's plot.

Once you get out of Rocketbirds Revolution, and into Rocketbirds Hardboiled Chicken, everything kicks up a notch. The combat gets a bit more deadly, the puzzles get a little deeper, the plot moves away from cutscenes and into the game itself. But even during this segment, it never quite clicks. The combat is deadly, sure, but it's still not interesting – the game mechanics are unchanged. The puzzles are still mostly restricted to "walk everywhere, then mind-control the guy standing in a place you can't reach". The plot eventually moves to a full assault on the penguin castle followed by chasing the evil leader Putski, who escapes in a rocket, into space.

Which, I'll admit, is pretty neat. It's a step down from the coming-of-age story shown in cutscenes, but it's certainly better than the non-plot provided in the first half of the game.

Then you hit the final boss battle and the combat takes a major step up.

The final boss is actually a really complicated boss fight. It involves the boss, a near-endless swarm of simpler enemies, and – unlike every other battle in the game – takes place across multiple screens. The boss an invulnerable energy shield that he only brings up occasionally, powerups can be requested with some delay, and the terrain is varied enough to make it a significant, though not critical, part of the fight.

It turns out that, given the appropriate battlefield and enemies, Hardboiled Chicken's combat is really good. The final boss suffers from a few problems – you haven't actually been taught many of the tactics you need to use, for example – but overall, that boss is the highlight of the entire game. It's a fast-paced battle requiring you to really know the character and really know the mechanics and it flows better than the entire rest of the game.

Which makes me wonder what the game could have been like if they'd started with those game mechanics, then gone from there.

In the end, that's the most disappointing part. It's clear the designers are able to make really good games – they just, in this case, didn't. I'm not sure it was worth the effort to go back and remaster the original Rocketbirds Revolution. Fact is, Revolution just isn't as good as Hardboiled Chicken – so why spend all those resources on replaying Revolution? Why not make an entire new game, with entire new mechanics, set in the same universe?

In the end, Rocketbirds Hardboiled Chicken feels like a teaser. It's saying, "hey, look, we could have a good game here! We don't, but we could." Which is crazy disappointing . . . but also leaves me optimistic for that developer's future games.

Rocketbirds II, guys. Let's see it.

I don't mean a game balanced perfectly for one player. We've all played games like that. Oh man, we think afterwards, that was very difficult. I barely made it through! Clearly I am awesome.

No, I mean games balanced perfectly for every player. Balanced so that everyone enjoys the game and thinks it was well-designed. Balanced so the guy who just wants to walk through the game and nuke everything can enjoy themselves, and the girl who wants to slam her head against fiendishly difficult monsters for hours on end can make it through and feel proud of a major accomplishment.

Simultaneously.

While working on an MMO, I hear balance complaints all the time. Sometimes it's interplay between the various classes, and that's understandable – if your friend really is just flat-out stronger than you, well, that's a balance bug. But sometimes it's complaints about the game difficulty. One person says "this boss is too hard, I couldn't beat him in three hours of trying!" while another says "this boss is too easy, I beat him after only three hours of trying!"

Well, fuck.

But if I think about it, I've seen games solve this. Two games, in fact. And I'm going to talk about these games.

First, The World Ends With You. I've talked about TWEWY before, though not on this subject.

In TWEWY, you could voluntarily choose to reduce the player's level. You lost hit points and attack power. In return, you got improved drop rates. Reduce your level by one, you got double drop rates. Reduce it by nine, you got tenfold increased drop rates. Level up to 100 and drop your level all the way to one – kabam, hundredfold increased drop rates!

You could also choose to change the game difficulty. By default, you were on Normal. Early on, you unlock Easy. Later, you unlock Hard. Eventually you unlock Ultimate. Each difficulty gives you new drop items from monsters, giving some of the rarest items in the game.

Note that I didn't say rarest and most powerful.

Power, in TWEWY, is surprisingly unrelated to drops. For one thing, many of your powers can be leveled up to reach the top tier of effectiveness. For another thing, many of the "higher-tier" powers aren't actually much stronger at all. Finally, you need only one copy of each power. If you have twenty copies of a power, it doesn't make you any stronger, it doesn't make the game easier. It just gives you more to sell. Which you can use to buy more powers . . . that also aren't really any stronger.

These difficulty settings are also extremely transient. You can change difficulty, or raise or lower your level, at any time you're not in battle. It's easy, it doesn't cost anything. Want the next battle to be tough? Make it tough. Want it easy? Make it easy. Additionally, almost every fight can be backed out of. You can just say "no, I want to cancel this fight, let's go back before the fight." Defeat works the same way – the "game over" screen asks if you want to try again, back out to before the fight, or change your difficulty. Want to try a boss on hard mode and get slaughtered fifty times in a row? Go ahead. The game will let you do so easily. Give up and want to just breeze through? Sure, no sweat, let's do that.

Next, let's talk about Bastion.

First, you should go play Bastion. It's really, really good.

In Bastion, you can choose to activate Idols. Each Idol represents a god. Gods aren't helpful in the world of Bastion – each god makes the game harder in some manner. Maybe enemies move faster, or slow you when they attack, or gradually heal their wounds. Or maybe you turn all ten Idols on, and the enemies absolutely wreck you. The game gets incredibly tough.

The difficulty settings, again, are quite transient. Unlike Twewy, you're stuck doing a level as a single unified run – you usually can't change settings in the middle – but the game is perfectly happy to let you tweak settings between levels. There's also no penalty for losing besides having to try again, so if you die horribly, turn an Idol or two off and give it another shot. Or just give it another shot with the same idols. Your call.

Each Idol increases your rewards a little, however – both experience and money. Experience is used for leveling up, which is surprisingly unhelpful. Money is used for buying things, which is also surprisingly unhelpeful. The gods don't increase your experience and money very much – from 5% to 10% per god, coming out to a total of under 100% with every God turned on. The end result is that the benefit from turning the idols on is nowhere near the magnitude of the penalty – you'll farm experience and money faster with the idols off, simply thanks to how much easier the creatures are to kill.

You've probably noticed similarities in these descriptions.

Each game lets you customize the difficulty in whatever manner you choose. If you want one level to be easy, and the next to be tough, it's your choice and the game won't stop you. Each game gives rewards for increasing the difficulty . . . but largely irrelevant rewards. They don't really make you stronger, just give you an excuse for the difficulty changes. The games don't penalize you for choosing an easier mode, nor do they really reward you for a harder mode.

I'm really liking this idea, and I think it should be used in more places.

Take Halo. Let's say at any point, you can go into the menu and change the difficulty. When you do, you're popped back to the last checkpoint (note that checkpoints in Halo are quite common.) The game keeps track of which checkpoints you've done at which difficulty and gives awards based on them. Maybe if you've done things at higher difficulty, Want to go back and replay something in a tougher mode? Go for it. No skin off our back.

Take any MMO of your choice. You get a little difficulty slider. Easy, Medium, Hard, Deadly. You can change it at will, and it makes you weaker and makes the enemies hit harder. Each quest keeps track of the easiest difficulty you were in while doing the quest. If you do the quest on a harder difficulty, you get a little extra money (money never matters in MMOs) and maybe a little shiny collector's token that you can turn in for vanity gear.

Want an easy ride? Do it on Easy, the plot's still all there. Want a challenge? Flip it over to Deadly, and now every single monster is potential death.

The only games this *doesn't* work well with are games that can't be easily chopped into bitesized pieces. I'm not sure how to apply it to Civilization, for example. I think you're just stuck there.

But if your game can be chopped up into pieces, and especially if death is not intended to be a catastrophe, and especially if it's very skillbased, then I'd strongly recommend considering this.

Or, at least the very least, play Bastion and TWEWY, then consider it.

Or just play Bastion and TWEWY. Seriously. They're great games.

It's fun. They did a good job with the beginning, at the very least. You have quests, like a normal MMO, but each "quest" is an real-time-strategy mission. It's pretty cleverly built, to be honest – if one mission is too tough, you can come back to it later after you've leveled up a bit. "Leveling up a bit" is what replaces the old tech unlocking process. Instead of saying "after mission 12 you can use ballistas", they say "after you gain 12 tech points you can use ballistas", and each mission gives you a tech point, and you can reset your tech points for a fee if you want to try a different build. So that's cool.

It also has an inventory system. You can collect equipment for your units. Equipping units gives your units bonuses. I didn't get far enough to see if this is a tradeoff deal, where you'll be sitting there saying "hmm, do I want faster cavalry or stronger cavalry", or whether it's just a strict linear upgrade sequence. But it exists. Along with inventory comes crafting, where you can take raw materials that you find and turn them into gear, and I'm assuming there's an auction house and trading and all the standard stuff that comes along with crafting.

It's an interesting approach, and I'm not sure if I think it's a good idea – a good RTS is balanced on a razor wire, and this feels like wildly shaking the razor wire. But this entry isn't about that.

Age of Empires Online is "free-to-play" with "micropayments". You'll notice the scare quotes. First off, the micropayments are pretty damn macro. The cheapest things you can buy are $5, and those are purely cosmetic items for your capital city, and there's four of them. For the price of all the cosmetic items, you could buy the X-Com Complete Pack on Steam – including five games, two of which are great and a third of which is totally playable as long as you don't get frustrated easily – and still have cash left for an overpriced coffee.

You can also buy the Premium Civilization Packs. These take the civilization you choose and give you . . . well, the rest of the civilization. See, it's free to play, but it's not really free to play everything. Large segments of the game, including a lot of the gear you get, including Advisors, including a good chunk of the game's economy, are only available if you buy the complete packs, which cost $20 each. Keep in mind there's one of these per civilization. If I've been playing Greek, and I decide I want to switch to Egypt, I get to fork over another $20 for it. That's the price of an entire game.

Then there's a game mode, Defense of Crete, that costs another $10.

And the thing is that I sorta want to play these modes. I enjoy the game. It's fun. It's a nice timekiller between doing other things. But the game spends an incredible amount of time telling me I'm a second-class citizen. "You should learn a crafting skill! You can learn two! Yay, you've learned one! What, you want to learn a second? Haha, I'm sorry, you need a premium civilization for that. Lol. Loser. Hey go do this mission, you get rare equipment from it! You can't use the equipment, but you can totally look at it. Man. Isn't that shiny? Premium civilization, dude. You could make and sell gear like this! Oh, wait, I'm sorry, you need a premium civilization for that. $20. Fork it over."

Which reminds me a lot of Puzzle Pirates. Puzzle Pirates has a similar system, where large parts of the game are locked away. If you want to do all the trade puzzles, you need a trade badge. If you want to captain a ship, you need a captain badge. If you want to go sea monster hunting, you need a sea monster badge.

The difference is that, in Puzzle Pirates, these badges don't cost money. They cost doubloons. And there's two ways to buy doubloons. First, you can pay money for them. Second, you can pay in-game money for them . . . by buying them from other people who paid real money for them.

Realize that Puzzle Pirates still gets just as much cash either way. It doesn't matter who bought the doubloons. Someone bought them, and then someone spent them, and there's no need for those people to be the same person. For someone like me, who treats the game as a fun timewaster, this is perfect. I can burn some time enjoying my puzzling, make ingame money, use that money to buy doubloons, and get access to further parts of the game.

And here's the brilliant part. If, later, I decide I need a ton of ingame money to buy a boat, I can fork over $10 on doubloons, turn those doubloons into ingame money through the exact same trading system, and buy a boat without having to grind.

No matter what game you're making, there will always be people who would like to trade time for ingame shinies and people who would like to trade real money for time. These people are your best friends because, together, they give you money that you would never have gotten otherwise. But if you don't allow those transactions – if you cater only to the group of people who want to trade real money for ingame shinies – then you're cutting out a significant portion of your userbase.

One last story before I wrap this up. Recently, Eve Online added a new cosmetic item: a monocle. The monocle could be purchased in their online store for Aurum, a currency similar to Puzzle Pirates' Doubloons. A little math quickly demonstrated that this monocle would cost $60 if you were to buy it with real money. The community hated it – what moron would pay $60 for a virtual monocle – but CCP stuck to their guns. In two days, they sold fifty of 'em.

I don't know for sure, but I'd wager that the majority of those weren't purchased with dollars. There are a lot of players in Eve Online who have horrifying amounts of ingame money. I'd wager that a lot of those monocles were the result of a player saying "hey, that space monocle is pretty, and I'm space-rich, so, I'll buy it with my space money!"

And yet, CCP still made $3000 in two days, possibly without anyone giving them a single dollar for a monocle.

Guys: Knock it off with the free-to-play games with twenty-dollar mandatory micropayments. Make a sensible economy, then rig things up so that your devoted players can give you extra money and your broke players can consume it. It benefits us all.

In fact, I totally have two ideas for posts. They're good ideas. They will make good posts.

Unfortunately, I just spent the first chunk of the month preparing for the Digital Game Museum booth at PAX, and now – right before the month ends – I'm heading out to Burning Man. So. We're not getting a post this month. It happens.

But we will be back, and we will have more to talk about. Just . . . maybe when I'm a little less covered in playa dust.

I started with Dungeons and Dragons Second Edition, or, more exactly, I started with a horrifyingly botched interpretation of the rules, filtered through my middle-schooler mind. I vaguely recall rolling a d20 for stats and I'm pretty sure we had no idea what spell slots were. Since then I've played three major editions of D&D, three major editions of Shadowrun, had a brief and unfortunate foray into the world of Rifts and a briefer and far more unfortunate foray into a hand-rolled Xanth roleplaying system, and, to be quite honest, spent far more time thinking about roleplaying than I actually did roleplaying.

Anyone who's hung around roleplayers has heard a bunch of the same horror stories. I played this game, the whole damn thing was on rails, we had to read the GM's mind. The GM was a control freak and everything had to happen his way. It was a great game, except that the story always followed the GM's plan, no matter what. If you've played games, you know this GM. You've probably met him, you've probably played in his games, you've probably spent a frustrating hour coming up with clever plans and having them shot down unilaterally.

I used to be that GM. I'll admit it. My Xanth games were the worst example – little more than a thinly veiled excuse for running through the plot of the books, including skipping entire chapters when I couldn't figure out how to shoehorn the player through the *cough* scintillating plotline. My Rifts game was better, albeit only slightly. I had one of my best moments in that game, when the players managed to spy on the enemy encampment and, as what was intended to be a throwaway bit of scenery, I mentioned a huge dragon sleeping off in the corner of the camp. This kicked off about four hours of violent explosive shenanigans that left the camp in ruins. Followed immediately by one of my worst moments when I Deus Ex Machina'ed the entire thing away so I could give a speech. Seriously, Zorba. What the hell were you thinking.

The nice thing about RPGs is that the GM is sitting there, and the GM is a human. So when the players say "fuck that, we're not going into that cave to rescue the Mayor's daughter, that's way too dangerous" the GM can come up with a solution. Maybe they get driven inside. Maybe the mayor offers a bigger reward. Or maybe they just walk away and in the next town they have to deal with people telling stories about the adventurers that ran from a fight. You can improvise, and a good GM will improvise.

You can't really do that with games. When you release a game, that's the game, that's what the player's going to play. If the player doesn't want to go into that cave, well, tough cookies, the plot isn't going to continue until you do.

And that's not really a bad thing. We've only got so much money we can pour into game development. We can't make a game where the player can go into the cave and kill goblins, or the player can go abandon his adventuring lifestyle and become a farmer, or the player can hire mercenaries to go in and clean out the cave and then turn the cave structure into an amusement park serving Goblinburgers and Gnollshakes. We can't make all that stuff fun, we just don't have the developer time. And, for many years, that's where the limit was: you implement a game, the user plays the game, the user beats the game, hooray.

Then we invented multiplayer games and all hell broke loose.

It turns out that human social structures are unbelievably complicated. It turns out that human motivations are deep and multilayered. It turns out that when you have the goal "kill a bunch of monsters, you are a better player if you kill more monsters", and you expect people to go kill monsters independently, some bright person is going to realize that, hey, you can pay people to help him kill monsters, and then he's a better player because he's killing more monsters!

The industry response to this is swift and predictable: They're playing the game wrong. Put them back in their box and tell them to play the game right this time.

And it doesn't work, because we seal up one exit to the box, and then it turns out there's another exit, and the whole thing happens again.

When World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King was released, a player named Athene had a clever strategy to reach level 80 before anyone else. Despite asking the GMs for permission, he got banned for it because he wasn't playing the game right. When World of Warcraft: Cataclysm was released, he tried again, this time succeeding. Wanna guess what will happen when they raise the cap to 90? I'm willing to bet Athene will be there powerleveling to 90.

When someone finds a hole in the rules, our first reaction as game developers isn't "whoa, awesome, they found a new way to play!", it's "We have to stop them, because this is our game and you're not allowed to do that." Which we can do, because it's our world they're playing in, we can just push a button and make them stop doing whatever they're doing. Back on the beaten path, boy. That's where you're meant to be. And the game goes on, and we rest, satisfied that we're the master of our own domain, and that the players are playing the game correctly.

Which goes all to hell when we do something outside our domain.

Example One: Chain World. Jason Rohrer bought a Flash drive and put a copy of Minecraft on it. He gave it to someone, with a single set of rules: Do not copy it. Play the game once, building and creating whatever you wish. When your character dies, pass it on to someone else. These are the rules and these are the only rules.

The rules were broken instantly. Jia Ji was the first person who got it, and he put it on eBay and made the buyer promise to send it to specific people next. The community was outraged. He's playing the game wrong. Then broken again, perhaps – the game may have been destroyed, the game may have moved on, but nobody's saying. The rules lasted exactly as long as it took Jason Rohrer to describe them.

Example Two: Eric Zimmerman's coins. At the most recent GDC, there was a talk, and during that talk, coins were handed out. At the end of the talk, the person with the most coins got to give their own talk. Those were the rules, and the rules were defined by Eric Zimmerman.

Ryan Creighton used social engineering to acquire the entire bag of coins, and the watchers were outraged. He's playing the game wrong. So Eric broke his own rules, and gave the extra talk to someone he felt was more deserving. Then Eric broke his own rules again, and let Ryan talk for ten words. Ryan, of course, broke that rule, and gave a substantially longer talk than ten words.

You make a game. You offer to let someone play the game. They play a different game than you intended. Then you get angry that they're playing the wrong game.

This is a mistake.

When Athene plays World of Warcraft, he's not playing Blizzard's World of Warcraft. He's playing Athene's World of Warcraft. It's a similar game, with some of the same fundamental rules, but with different guidelines. In Blizzard's World of Warcraft, you don't join and drop groups to maximize the amount of experience you gain. In Athene's World of Warcraft, you do. And, critically, these are the same games. Neither game has a rule that says you cannot, or that you must, but in Athene's game, which Athene plays to accomplish Athene's goals, you do.

Jason Rohrer bought a Flash drive to make Jason Rohrer's Chain World. Then he gave it to Jia Ji and Jia Ji turned it into Jia Ji's Chain World. Jason Rohrer invented Jason Rohrer's rules, and Jia Ji invented Jia Ji's rules.

Eric Zimmerman invented a game involving coins, and he made Eric Zimmerman's Coin Game. Then he gave it to a room full of people, and each person invented their own coin game. Many of these were equivalent to Eric Zimmerman's game, but Ryan Creighton's Coin Game was different. You see, Eric Zimmerman's coin game was about collecting coins, and Ryan Creighton's coin game was about collecting coins in a slightly different manner that Eric Zimmerman hadn't thought of.

Jia Ji wasn't following Jason Rohrer's rules, and Ryan Creighton wasn't following Eric Zimmerman's rules. But Jason and Eric had let their games escape, and someone else had found a new way to play it. When they realized that, they tried to bring the game back. No. That's my game. You can't play it like that. You're not playing the game right.

But it wasn't Jason Rohrer's game anymore, and it wasn't Eric Zimmerman's game anymore.

When we make a game, we give it life. We create the rules of its existence. But then we send it out into the world, and other people take the game and change the rules and make it their game. Traditionally, this happened in people's homes, with house rules and tweaks and simple unintended misunderstandings, with people finding a new way to play the game or inventing a strategy that we never considered. But today we make huge multiplayer games. When we let the game go out, we tell people they're allowed to play it, but then we punish them for not following our view of how it should be played. We're telling them to play, then forcing them to follow.

I think this is a mistake. More accurately: I think reflexively doing this is a mistake. With multiplayer games there are certainly situations where someone finds it fun to destroy other people's enjoyment of the game, and that should be taken care of, ideally swiftly. But in a situation where one person has invented a new way to play the game that does not harm others, what's the issue? In a singleplayer game, or a sandbox game, or even a multiplayer game, why, whenever we are confronted with someone who's playing our game in a different manner, is our first instinct to stop them?

We cannot and should not hover over people's shoulders, telling them how to play the game. We should develop games that people want to play, and if they discover a way to play the game that we were not aware of? Maybe that's for the best. Maybe we can learn from that. Maybe we can say, hey, you are not playing the game I invented, but that's cool, and your game looks like fun, how about if I change my game to behave more like your game.

Maybe we need to learn to let go of our toys and let others play with them for a while.

Maybe we'll learn about some new games.