Strange Design

The danger of "always live" development - how Disney killed Fix-It Felix on iOS

A week or two back I grabbed "Fix-it Felix" for free on my iPad.  I know some of the folks making the official "Wreck-it Ralph" DS / console game, I'm looking forward to seeing the film, and the premise looked solid.

I loved it.

It wasn't as especially clever game, and there were some clear problems with it at times (barriers that prevented you from moving were hard to see, and there was no feedback for "you can't move there" to differentiate it from the all-too-common "you didn't hit the move button properly"...) but I had a great time with it.  I told my friends to check it out.  It kept me aware of the film - all good things.

But then today I saw there was an update for it - and now the game is ruined.  All the level layouts are different - the visual feedback system is different - the controls are different.  Some elements seem to be gone from the game - though they probably just got moved to later levels.  Disney took a really charming game and just clubbed it into mush.  Ugh.

Always Live

I'm really excited about the shift the game industry has taken the past few years - I think moving to smaller teams, niche releases, free-to-play, and always-live games is a great opportunity for those of us in the development community.  But as with all change, these new paradigms are sometimes used poorly - which can shake our faith in their validity.

Always-Live game development means you change the game out from under people - all the time - without warning.  Farmville was the real pioneer here, with double-blind A/B testing and design-by-numbers.  It's a powerful idea, and it can really make games better.  Making games better is, by any measure, a good thing!  But this sort of unfettered access to games that are already being played can go horribly wrong - as I've just described with Fix-it Felix.  These changes weren't the result of careful testing - they are just changes made blindly.  Blind changes are a useful tool during internal development - being bold with your direction can reveal some really unexpected truths about your game.  But blind changes in a live game break the trust between developer and player.

Do developers have the right to change their game without asking permission?  Yes.  Should they be ridiculed when they make mistakes?  Yes.

Scoping with Play-Doh

I've been doing a lot of pitch work recently - giving big ideas and high-level overviews of proposed new projects.  It's a fun time in a project because it's incredibly easy in some respects - since the project does not yet exist, it's trivial to make adjustments.

Cutting Features, Adding Features, Feature Creep

Lots of my colleagues speak in terms of "features" for each new game.  Each new feature is geven a cost (in time, effort, and money) and groups of features are added, removed, and traded in these early meetings.  But something about this language hasn't been sitting well with me - because I know from being on the production end that "features" are not modular elements we can manipulate individually - no more than you can simply remove a wall from the side of your house or cut out a middle floor from an office tower.

Instead, I like to think of my project proposals as being built out of Playh-Doh.  The question is "how much do we have?"  And then we simply allocate to fit our requirements.  You can make nearly identical things out of differetn amounts of Play-Doh - the only difference is their scale.  If you can make a castle out of X amount, you can make a smaller castle out of Y.  You don't build half a castle - you build a whole castle which is smaller.

Ruled by Constraints

Of course there are limits to how small you can make things - we call these constraints.  If you have some doll furniture which needs to fit inside your castle, that provides a constraint.  If you need to be able to stand inside it - that's a constraint.  So it's not the case that projects made with less material are identical scaled-down models of larger proposals - but they are still whole-unto-themselves entities.

Predictions for the Future of Dead Consoles

I've discussed consoles from time to time - back in April I wrote a post explaining that consoles were well and truly dead as the vanguard of gaming.  Today, anticipating the launch of the WiiU, I thought I'd explain again exactly how consoles died, what it means to be "dead" if there are still lots of console games available, and where we're going in the game industry.

Let's start with a historical recap - game consoles in the 80s and 90s made some money, but not a ton.  There were a few consoles out at any given time, but they didn't compete with one another very much for market share - games tended to succeed or fail based on their own merit.  The investment to make a game was modest, and the possible returns were significant - but not ridiculous.

As console games became more mainstream, the money increased - to the point where Sony and Microsoft decided to get into the console business.  This signaled a major influx of money - and led to a MASSIVE increase in the number of consoles sold worldwide.  Consoles became a really big business, and started butting up against one another for market share.

Then the insanity which was the PS2 happened (Hey, I wrote about that before, too!) and we had a "big winner" scenario, where 70% of the market was dominated by a single console, and a single company.  Big money + big market share = INCREDIBLE amounts of money on the table.  This was really the highlight of the entire console history.

To follow up the PS2, Sony and Microsoft both went huge.  They created machines which were much more powerful, much more expensive, and which required much, much more investment to develop for.  They increased the "standard" price of games from $50 to $60, backed a huge network infrastructure, and created strategic partnerships with other media.  (Blu-Ray vs HD DVD).  Everyone was expecting another big winner, and an ever-increasing revenue model.

But that didn't happen.  Not by a long shot.  Games became so expensive to produce, and required so much investment up front, that many fewer games were released to market.  The average quality didn't really go up, so overall there was LESS money to be made of the games that survived.  Both Microsoft and Sony over-valued their consoles, so sales were sluggish.  Only the Wii, with their disruptive attitude towards technology, made any money.  (And they made a ton!)  Eventually Sony and Microsoft were able to turn things around - through cost reductions, better game support agreements, more open submissions, more digital distribution, and so forth.  But it was hardly the money bonanza investors were anticipating back in the PS2 days.

Into this sluggish console space a new player appeared - smartphones and facebook.  With the iPhone especially, a huge amount of leisure and gaming money started going to iPhone Apps.  99% of game development investments started going towards these new models.  Only 1% has been invested in future console development.  Consumers have not seen the effects of this yet, because games often take a few years to make.  But game development for next-gen consoles is 10% of what it was during a comparable period in the last cycle.  Investors are simply not interested in placing ever-increasing bets on styles of play which are already barely profitable.

We'll still see new consoles, but they can't remain profitable under their old revenue model.  We will see an inexorable move to free-to-play, freemium, streaming, and other alternative models.  It's not clear what advantage consoles have over PCs, tablets, and smartphones when selling to those models - that's very much a wait-and-see scenario.  But I think it's safe to assume that at least 1 or 2 of the new consoles will embrace those models.

More than ever before, I'm glad that my new projects are all outside the console space.  I'll still buy and play console games - but I'm not going to be looking to console development as a way to pay my mortgage for at least a year or two.

Idle Hands will Choke your Team

It is not always obvious how to work together as a team.  People experienced with solo projects often falter, or slide into inaction rather than step on their co-worker's toes.  Larger teams give some members an opportunity to hide - or play defensive "not my problem" games with their peers.  All of these things hurt your efficiency and overall productivity.

But the biggest team-killer is having a member without clear responsibilities.

A lazy or ineffective member can be replaced.  An actively malicious member can be identified and removed.  But an eager well-meaning team member without a specific goal will careen from subject to subject, adjusting and influencing your project unpredictably, and the results are predictably disastrous.

Why should this be the case?  I believe it happens for a very simple reason: because people without clear goals create their own high-level goals, which will tend to clash with your current direction.  I always advocate for including a vision-holder on your team, and your vision-holder should move between groups spreading influence.  But if un-tasked team members act like vision-holders, you end up with conflicting influences.

This might sound like an issue that only happens on large teams, but I've had this problem in teams as small as four.  Maybe an artist doesn't have any deliverables while you are doing initial tech-exploration, or a designer isn't provided with enough direction to stay in sync with management.

At this point some of my more cynical readers might suspect that I'm poking fun at producers - who often suffer complaints that they are superfluous to the project.  But there is a big difference between "produces no tangible assets" and "has no clear responsibilities."  Every discipline is, sometimes, responsible for tasks which produce no clear results.  Programmers might take weeks to evaluate dozens of tools - which feels like wasted time to many.  Designers might document features which are immediately cut.  It is the lack of goals, not the lack of results, which kills teams.

Why would a team put up with a superfluous member?  There are two cases I've had direct experience with:

1 - The person is very friendly, and pleasant to have around.
2 - The person is blackmailing the studio.

Number 2 sounds like an extreme case, but it's actually quite common for an experienced team member to demand assignment to a particular team, or demand to be left off a particular team.  It's often easy to simply let them have their way - they are experienced and valued members of the studio, after all!  But if this placed them in a position where they have no clear goals, the weight of their experience will drag down your project that much faster.

Studios tend to use a self-reporting method of task-tracking, which is a poor way to identify which members of your team might be drifting without goals.  Management should always be able to draw a direct line between the goals of the project and each member's current task.  Period.

 

Coders are Landscapers

On most projects, especially large projects, coders are you most valuable resource.  Coders command the highest salaries, have the most flexible abilities, and are always in short supply.

This scarcity means that most projects try very hard to get as many high-quality coders as possible assigned to them, whatever that means in your particular project framework.

Unfortunately, collecting coders like jewelry is not, it turns out, a very effective way to improve your project.  I can explain why with the use of a simple metaphor:

Coders are like Landscapers

If someone comes to your house, your front yard is the first thing they see.  Having a beautiful front yard makes your house look great.  You can maintain your yard on your own, but if you need to make it really different - you need a professional landscaper to take control of it, and adjust it.  Many affluent people have regular landscapers who come every year to make adjustments, and keep everything beautiful and fresh.

However, trying to retain a landscaper to work on your modest front yard every day of the year defeats the purpose of landscaping.  While work is being done, the effect of your beautiful yard is lost among tools, half-completed adjustments, and laborers.  Landscaping is best accomplished as an intermittent task.  You adjust, then you get to know your new yard, so that you can better inform your next iteration of landscaping.

Coders are very much the same.  Coders adjust things at a broad, fundamental level.  But your goal is not to adjust things as much as possible - it is to find the best stable product you can.  In almost every project I have been associated with, coders were left to run rampant for too long - tilling the soil of the project such that it was impossible to keep firm footing.

Spending and Projecting efficiently

Of course projects don't just keep coders around because they carry prestige - there are real tasks which need coders to implement.  But without a break from the churn of constant code-adjustment, designers and producers cannot take proper stock of where things are.  This increases reliance on the initial plans - which everyone knows become nearly useless in short order, as things change out of necessity.

So what is the better solution?  Let your coders go!  Bring coders on and then take them off, allowing the cheaper talent to iterate on stable ground.  This allows your most valuable resource to be spread between projects more efficiently, since assignment doesn't mean your coders are locked-out of all other work forever.  It also means your feature sets can be re-evaluated, and require less revision.

It might also extend the length of your projects - but since your most expensive elements are only part-time, this lengthening doesn't have to impact the cost per development month too severely.  In fact, this can provide the magical "polish time" which teams are always looking for at the end of a project.  Even better, it provides this time in the early and middle of the development cycle - when teams are in a position to actually use the time to make improvements.

Learning and the Heart of Stone

When doing contract design work, I am frequently required to learn a substantial amount about a new subject.  Sometimes the material is personally interesting, but often it is not.  As a point of professional pride I try to put equal effort into both sorts of information.

I've recently started reading the "Kingkiller" series of books, which currently includes only two volumes: The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear,  Both are excellent.  They broadly tell the story of Kvothe - a man who learned to be a wizard, a thief, a bard, a lawyer, a warrior, a doctor, a chef - essentially he's the most diverse multi-class character ever.

One of his chief skills for learning so much is a mental technique called "The Heart of Stone."  It's a calming mental technique which pushes aside emotions and distractions - allowing a student to focus 100% of their mental energy on absorbing the material in front of them.

This technique jumped out at me because it's essentially the opposite of how I learn best.
Learning is a complex process, but at its core it is all about forming associations between different ideas.  It's partially memorization, and partially about contextualization.  Both of those processes are improved when you have a wide selection of ideas to associate against - clearing your mind seems, to me, to be entirely counter productive in hat pursuit.

I have a new member of my family, which means I have a new birthday to remember.  Learning and remembering a new birthday is a process I take seriously.  In this case, I remember the new birthday by thinking about how it falls in relationship to other birthdays - what it means for potential outdoor birthday parties - what it means for placement in school - what years might mark high school graduation and so forth.  All of that takes place in a mind which is not empty - but rather full of information, opinions, and ideas.

Information in the world

This ties into a memory technique which I learned as "storing information in the world."  The idea is that we do not need perfect recall of a topic in order to engage with it.  We don't need to remember where every stop sign is along the road - because we can see them while driving.  I don't need to remember every appointment I've made - because I have the recorded in my planner.  I don't need to remember whether the yard debris goes out this weekend or next - because I've built up a habit of placing it on opposite sides of our garbage can to indicate whether this is yard debris week or not.

This is probably a familiar concept to most people under 40, because the rise of "search" and ready information through sites like Wikipedia has allowed more and more of our information to move "into the world" instead of keeping everything in our heads.  In a world like ours, learning where and how to access information is much more useful than memorizing things by rote.  Those are associations - the sort of learning that comes from being attentive, not from closing yourself off.

Consoles as we know them are dead

Those of us in the game development industry have a good year ~ 18 month lead on consumers in terms of what is being produced.  I have been assisting several mobile or PC game projects the past year, and I have several more on the horizon.  But some people continue to ask me when I'll make a "return" to console-released games.  For a significant number of people (though a small % of gamers) consoles represent the apex of gaming.

They do not realize that consoles, as we knew them in the last decade, are already dead.

This is not a prediction - it is a statement of fact.  Any news article or industry piece I read which seems to still consider consoles to be kings of gaming is automatically disregarded.  The only developers who still actively advocate console supremacy are the people who have a lot to lose - and are trying desperately to ignore what has already happened.

What has happened?

In a nutshell, mobile gaming happened.  To a lesser extent social gaming happened, but that was really an expanding of "gaming" much like the Wii.  Combined with the decades-long trend of gaming going mainstream, it has been inevitable for years that consoles would lose their primacy in the gaming world.  Sony and Microsoft have been fighting over the same small 15% of the population (18-35 year old men) for so long, that the industry as a whole has started to respond more to the other 85%.

This means that strategic decisions - specifically spending on marketing, development, and service - are now looking to cater to the 85% of the population who play games but don't know what a "FPS" is.  Console gamers started as a niche market in the 80's, grew to be the face of gaming by the mid 90's, but have now been relegated to a niche market again as gaming overall has expanded to mean a whole lot more than which version of Akuma we'll see in SSF5.

Same as it ever was

This isn't the first time the game industry has expanded - games were originally targeted at a bar scene, then expanded and became primarily a children's toy, then expanded again and became the de facto entertainment for young adults.  Each expansion has dramatically increased the money and social power wielded by the game industry.

The problem that console gamers are experiencing is the fact that, from their perspective, nothing has really changed.  We still see big-budget console games released with lots of fanfare, and there are still hundreds of secondary games in the pipeline as well.  How can console games have lost their edge?  But these gamers are looking at the wrong end of the pipeline - the finished product.  If they investigated the opposite end - investment - they would see that console games in 2010 represented only 1% of new investments.  That was almost 2 years ago that the financial people largely stopped putting money into consoles, and the effects of that are readily apparent within the development community.

What This Means

All of this translates into another renaissance in PC gaming, a sharp rise in video-streaming services like OnLive and Gaikai, and a continuing flood of mobile games.  Consoles will still exist of course, but much of the innovation and bleeding-edge have moved on to other platforms.  This means more clones and sequels on consoles, with fewer and fewer "gotta-have-it" moments of insight.

The really interesting question - one hotly debated within the community - is what this means for the next generation of consoles (PS4 and "Xbox720") - will they sell?  The WiiU is certainly well-positioned to do well for itself, since it has embraced downloadable touch-screen games and thus will have access to thousands of mobile-style experiences.  But when a few million people shell out $500 for the latest Microsoft console, how much of the industry will be around to take notice?

 

The money fountain

Hopefully everyone is familiar with Kickstarter by now.  Kickstarter has been a pretty great source of funding for a year or two, but it has mostly been a success for Board Games or other Pet Projects.  That was the rule until Doublefine did this.  (For those wary of links, Doublefine raised $3,000,000 to create a classic-style Adventure game, up from their initial asking of $400,000)

One month later, lots of other game projects are trying to crowd-source their game into reality.   I think this is a totally positive trend, with some great potential benefits for everyone.  But it also opens the door for abuse, and in these first months we run the risk of getting abused into oblivion.

What Kickstarter Can Do

The promise of Kickstarter is fantastically large.  It can help direct money into the projects people actually want to play, instead of into copy-cat projects chasing phantom marketing-speak.  Doublefine Adventures is a perfect example - publishers have been unwilling to fund the project, but customers can pick up the slack.

This isn't just about market forces replacing bureaucracy - it is also about efficiency.  Advances in distribution and creation have cut the overhead for producing a new game to the lowest level we've ever seen.  It is entirely possible to make games much, much more efficiently today than at any time in the past.  But the established team-sizes and business models are acting like friction - resisting this change.  It is hard for a studio of 90 to staff-down to 40, and it is difficult for publishers to spend $700,000 on a game instead of just charging $2M and throwing the excess money to their buddies.

But an independent studio can absolutely reap these rewards - and that should be lighting a fire under the rest of the industry.

Why Platform Owners should care

Kickstarter threatens publishers, but does it threaten platform owners?  It might.  The biggest reason the industry is driven by a handful of large-scale publishers is because of the way Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft have been wielding their power.  The buy-in cost to put a game on the Xbox 360 is around $300,000 - just to get the hardware and contracts necessary.

Console games NEED publishers, at least under the current model.  Microsoft experimented with opening up XBLA to smaller developers - and were largely successful, but the changing marketplace sort of obfuscated that process, so it looks like other Platform Holders will not be following suit.

Steam, on the PC side, has been bending over backwards to work directly with developers of any size.  Putting a game on Steam costs nothing - it uses a profit-sharing model which has since been copied by the apple app store (which should tell you something!).  But significantly, Steam allows developers to adjust prices however they want - a far cry from the console price-point rigidity.  Boxed goods have held on to strong price-points because there are so many companies which require their cut - shipping, distribution, manufacturing, publishing, retail, development.  Cutting the price of a game hurts everyone, and extra volume is expensive.  On the digital side greater volume is essentially free - so there is more price flexibility.

We've been watching the industry move to a digital-only model, and we've seen how cost-efficiency has been a big side effect of that trend.  Kickstarter is the latest symptom of that movement, and the smart money will be running to embrace that trend.

Build a Railing, not an Escalator

My latest game, Sun Stones, is out for iOS and Android/Amazon/etc.  I've spent a few exciting days tracking my analytics, viewing order history, etc.  I also now have tens of thousands of play-session data points, which allows me to look at user behavior in some very nice specificity.

I want to talk about one specific feature path in Sun Stones - they way you play/win/finish a puzzle.  Sun Stones is a puzzle game, which means that you solve a sequence of puzzles.  I followed my "Two Curves of Engagement" strategy, and built a nice aesthetic layer on top of the sequencing, so players who start the game can be pulled in by the aesthetics long enough to start to enjoy the puzzles on an abstract level.  In Sun Stones I use a Hopi Glyph series, which plays like this:

1 - Upon starting the game, players are presented with a glowing stone, and a sun.

2 - Players move the stone by touching and dragging on the screen - they place it on the sun.

3 - Intro animation starts, logo, sound effects - nice reward for figuring out the first puzzle (which was "move the stone onto the sun to start the game.")  This sets players up for the presentation style - no words, no explanation, but a simple, logical building upon past knowledge.

4 - Players are now presented with a "Glyph Wall" - which acts like a level select screen.  There is a cave-painting-style sketch on the screen - faded and incomplete.  One glyph is pulsing.  Touching that glyph enters that first puzzle.  Eventually all of the glyphs on the wall will appear, and the picture will be completed - allowing players to scroll the wall to find more glyphs to play.

5 - Players are brought to a closed eye, a puzzle name "Sunrise" and the first bit of text they have seen: "Open your eyes, your journey begins when you see the rising sun."

6 - Players must touch the screen, and drag open the eyelid.  This starts the first puzzle.  The top of the eyelid remains on screen at all times - players may drag the eye closed again to check hint text, and other useful data.

7 - In the puzzle proper, players must move stones onto black squares.  This is mechanically trivial, but it might take them a few seconds to understand what to do.

8 - We now play the victory sequence - which closes the eye and brings up some brief information - how many moves did the player use to match all of the stones to the pattern?  How did that number of moves compare to the bronze, silver, and gold rankings?

9 - Players are now returned to the glyph wall - and a new glyph is pulsing.

Too Complex?

Now, that was a rather verbose description of something which generally takes about 30-40 seconds for players to experience.  And in my face-to-face playtests players often have questions or comments to the effect of "That was pretty tricky" or "I think a lot of people would have trouble with that" or "It wasn't clear what I was supposed to do."

So what does the data say?  I can't actually track "player understood how to play the game" but I can track the number of new users each day, and the number of unique players who get a gold rank on at least one puzzle.  I think it's safe to say that a player who gets a gold rank on at least one puzzle has successfully navigated into a puzzle.  With 4 days of data reported, here is what I can say:

Day 1 - 91%

Day 2 - 87%

Day 3 - 93%

Day 4 - 92%

So at the very worst 90%+ of users are earning gold stars on puzzles, which lets me say with some authority that people are absolutely getting into the game without significant difficulty.

This actually sounds just about perfect to me - I WANT the game to seem tricky, to give people a sense of accomplishment.  An ideal game is one where a player is able to beat a section just barely - and feels as if most other people could not have replicated the accomplishment.  (Of course, if everyone feels that way it's obviously not true.  But it's still nice for players to feel that they have made a significant leap by performing the task.)

Falling into the Canyon

Imagine that you are giving tours of the Grand Canyon.  People are lining up and paying you to walk them along a path at the bottom of the canyon to an exit point.  (Perhaps a raft is better, since the Grand Canyon ends in a river - but let's just run with it.)

But there is a problem - a significant number of people are getting to the bottom of the canyon, then realizing that they've left their camera, or medicine, or some other critical thing back at the top.  It's very inconvenient for everyone to wait for them to walk all the way back up, get their item, and then come back down.  Folks suggest that the park pay to build an escalator from the bottom of the canyon, to speed up these incidents.

This is a terrible idea.

It's terrible because the problem is NOT the fact that it takes forever for someone to climb back out of the canyon.  The difficulty of access is a huge part of appeal of the canyon!  The problem which needs to be addressed is the fact that some significant number of people are entering the canyon unprepared.  Building an escalator does nothing to help make people more prepared - in fact it will quite likely increase the number of unprepared passengers, because the penalty for forgetting something has now been reduced!

The proper fix to the situation is to help people double-check their supplies before they come down the canyon in the first place.  This might just be a sign which reads "Do you have everything you need?" or perhaps better would be a warning sign like "WARNING: Once you go down, you will not be able to come back up for lost or misplaced items."

Build a Railing, not an Escalator

I call this principle "Build a Railing, not an Escalator", because it is almost always the case that preventing an error is better than facilitating people who have made an error.  In early version of Sun Stones our testers complained that when they entered the wrong puzzle by accident (touching the wrong glyph on the wall) there was no easy way to leave the puzzle.  Our solution?  When you touch a puzzle you have already played, a box pops up showing your record, earned stars, and asks if you want to re-play that puzzle.  We tried an "exit" button within the game, but it make puzzles seem not very important - like we were always pushing you to just quit the puzzle without solving it.  It reduced engagement for players when they entered a puzzle, and led to shorter overall game sessions (3-5 puzzles, instead of 8-10).

Getting Into the Game - How your mechanics might be unintentionally keeping players out

Cosmic Wimpout is a classic dice game - classic because of the groovy symbols, the catchy name, and the simple rules.  Cosmic Wimpout claims to have only 3 rules, though it stretches that point with one basic premise and two clauses.  The basic premise is that you roll dice, and set some of them aside as points.  You may continue to roll as long as you like, but should you ever fail to add points with a roll then all the points earned during that turn are lost.  It's the classic "Press Your Luck" mechanic.  

The three rules are:

1 - You must earn 35 points to get into the game.

2 - You May Not Want To But You Must: if you score on all 5 dice, you must roll again.

3 - You must roll again after rolling a flash.

The two clauses are:

1 - Re-roll clause. (or, Flashes Must Be Cleared)  If your roll after a flash contains the symbol just flashed, you must re-roll all dice.

2 - The Flaming Sun Clause.  If you roll doubles and the flaming sun, you must use the flaming sun to make a flash.

Cosmic Wimpout, as everyone thinks of it, is all about a single choice : Do I keep rolling or stay?  Every rule and both clauses are about instances where you must continue to roll.  The first rule is an introduction to the game - forcing you to make dangerous decisions.  You literally cannot begin a game of Cosmic Wimpout (that is, you cannot earn 35 or more points) without taking some risk or other.  It is often a successful strategy for players who have earned their initial 35 points to claim small rolls of 20 or 25 points for the rest of the game.  It is also not unheard of for players to spend an entire game failing to reach the initial 35 points.

I've found that most games I enjoy follow this same precept: you take your chances at the beginning.  It's terrible to play a game for hours, or months, and then be faced with a difficult choice which potentially causes you to lose the game.  It makes sense to take big risks early, because a game which goes sour right at the start can just be re-started.  That's how it works among friends in any case - a lot of designers go through great pains to ensure that players fear re-starting a game.  But when I play a game with my friends and get a terrible deal, or fall impossibly behind on the second or third turn, everyone is generally amenable to just re-starting the game.  It's often fun to play a few turns of a new game, and then re-start just because you all understand the game now, in a way you couldn't before you actually had to play it, and see the rules in action.

But this system carries the same potential downside that I've seen in Cosmic Wimpout - some people just can't get into the game.  They are unlucky, or they won't take the necessary risks, or (worst of all) they CAN'T take the necessary risks because they haven't understood the rules well enough.
There are also the stubborn, or the unwilling.  Some people whould rather not play, and demanding thate they take a risk - to invest in the game - gives them an easy way for them to guarntee their failure.  That's unfortunate but I don't think of it as a flaw in the game - because everyone can tell that the fault lies with the player, not the mechanics.

Fear of the Future

The great thing abouth risk is that the tension associated with risk dissipates almost immediately once the moment is past.  If you can just get your players to experiment a little bit - they won't be disappointed.  Players only fear the future, not the past.

But fear is a powerful deterrent, so one good technique you can use is to hide your difficult decisions from players until the last moment.  It's like giving players a random selection of potential skills each time they gain a level in an RPG - rather than a known skill tree that they could peruse ahead of time.  A known, fixed skill tree means opportunities for min-maxing.  It means that some choices are of more benefit depending on your playstyle.  It means that other people have faced the same choices, and maybe did a better job planning than you did.  Conversely, a random selection means pot luck - you get a choice, but it wasn't something you could have planned for.  Your personal judgement is the only guide.

Choice Chains

The worst offenders in pre-determined choice options are the moral choice systems present in so many current-gen games such as Bioshock, Infamous, Mass Effect, etc.  In these systems players are given dozens of choices throughout the game which sway them toward good or evil.  If players were to make random choices, they would almost always end up in the neutral "normal" ending, so players are trying to either achieve 100% good or 100% bad ratings.  This is actually a single choice, generally made at the beginning of the game, but that one choice is spread out over the whole game.  That absolutely kills any sort of anticipation - the reward from the choice happens (by definition!) at the very end of the game, so even though the choice happens early on the consequences occur very late. 

Our Three Rules

So, in the spirit of Cosmic Encounter, I'd like to offer 3 rules which we can use to determine how much effort is required of our players to make their first difficult choice - which gets them on the path to investing in the game.

1 - The first choice should occur very early on, to acclimate players to making choices within the game.

2 - The consequences of the choice must occur very quickly - immediately in most cases.

3 - Each choice should be atomic - independent of other choices the player makes.

 

How do these work for you?  Has anyone successfully used an approach which was way outside these parameters?