Game-like By Its Very Nature

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 04:09:33 GMT

Nobody asked, but if I have anything like a philosophy influencing how I approach my work on Microsoft simulation games, it's this:

A realistic simulation of a compelling real-world activity is game-like by its very nature.

Re-read that.

Rich simulations are by nature not (or not just) about blowing things up. Not just about quick thrills, or beating your friends. They're about a deep world that takes time to learn, and master, and explore. About visual and experiential nooks and crannies where amazing sights can be seen and thrills can be had. They're about feeling invested in the outcome of what you're doing, whether it's operating a train on a tight schedule, flying supplies to stranded climbers, or getting airline passengers to their destination with as few bumps as possible.

If the simulation has succeeded, when you finish, the journey is its own reward. If you get an evaluation or a score, or medals on top of that, sure--it feels good. But when you turn off the computer at the end of the night, your mind is filled not with memories of things you saw, but of things you experienced, and that is what you remember, what you crave, what you become addicted to. At least I do.

As Michael Hague says in his book Writing Screenplays that Sell (and I love this quote): "People do not go to the movies so they can see the characters on the screen laugh, cry, get frightened, or get turned on. They go to have those experiences themselves....All filmmakers, therefore, have a single goal: to elicit emotion in an audience."

It's the same with games and with those who make them. Whether someone's a project manager, or an artist, or a tester, or a sound engineer, or a developer, or a usability specialist, or a writer, or a game designer, I believe at root we all have a single goal: to elicit emotion in an audience. We each have our own bag of tricks with which to do that.

When my friend Bruce Williams was the Business Development manager here, he told us that we had won the war for bullet points on the box, and that the next step was understanding that "features are catalysts for experiences." A lot of folks took that to mean, "features are catalysts for structured experiences" (i.e. missions). But "features are catalysts for experiences" means more than that. It means thinking of everything we put in the simulation in a new way: from the glow of city lights below a layer of fog, to the reflections of the strobes on a wet runway, to the smoke coming from a cabin chimney hidden away deep in the mountains, to the urgent commanding instructions of an air traffic controller on the radio, to the raspy mutters of a deHavilland Beaver starting up on a cold morning, to the user interface that makes it all possible. Every feature has the potential to elicit emotion in an audience. The emotions--not the features--are what users who take the time to learn, and explore, and experience a simulation will keep coming back for more of.

Our challenge then, as a developer of simulation games, is to:

Consciously design the emotional experiences we want our users to have
Put these experiences and the features that elicit them into the product
Provide some structure in which users can easily discover these features and have these emotional experiences
Figure out ways that every user (from novice to hardcore) can have them

FSX took some bold leaps in this direction with its new mission system. The next version of Train Simulator will take some more.

I can hear mutterings from the back of the blog: "But they're turning my favorite sim into a game!"

Not to worry. Most of the people on the team I talk to about such things agree with me that our job should be first and foremost to dissect what people find fun (or challenging, or interesting) in the real world, and simulate that experience better than any other product on the planet. That's the attitude that we launched a genre with. We know that if we stray from it too far, we'll lose ourselves in a sea of games that were always games. We know that if we stick to it, we'll survive as a leading simulation developer. But we also know that if we stick to it and carefully expand upon it, we'll thrive, attract new fans, and ensure our existence over the long term.

Don't get me wrong: scoring, competition, and rewards can certainly add to the compelling nature of a simulation game. But it's not the essence of a simulation game. During the development of missions for FSX, I kept pointing out that if we focused on the extrinsic rewards too much, we'd be missing opportunities to focus on and design the subjective, experiential, and emotional experiences that we wanted people to experience and remember. Experiences that are inherent in the real-world activity (flying) that we modeled so realistically to begin with!

In the real world, hopping in the cab of a mile long train and trying to figure out how to drive it, and doing so for hundreds of miles up and over a mountain pass without killing anyone, and then stopping hundreds of miles away at another time of day, within 60 seconds of your scheduled arrival time--that's compelling and gamelike by its very nature. No need for a trophy or a badge after an experience like that. And yet, whine as I did about "the rewards" all through the FSX development cycle, I'm now finding myself actually enjoying getting rewards for successfully completing the missions I fly in FSX. Go figure.

I'm a simmer. I know how to make my own fun. But sometimes a little extrinsic motivation is nice. Like frosting on a cake. Interestingly, even console games that are mostly frosting are now starting to incorporate simulation elements. Everything's merging to a point where it's not only difficult to tell what's a game and what's a sim, but difficult sometimes to differentiate either from the real thing. You should have seen the sky tonight on my drive home. It looked just like Flight Simulator.

INFORMATION MIKE: Simulation

Game-like By Its Very Nature