In other news, tynansylvester.com was hacked recently. Now it’s fixed and back better than ever.

The skill ceiling is basically the answer to the question:

How much can a player theoretically improve their skill at this game before there is no way to get better?

Alternatively:

How good can a hypothetical perfect player be at this game? How much better is this from average performance?

It’s easy to measure games on this scale.

Modern Warfare 2 has an extremely high skill ceiling – so high that no human being will ever come close to it. It runs at 60 FPS, game verbs generally have little or no inherent latency, and the game-state can change very quickly with skilled play. It is possible, with excellent tactics and aim, to eliminate entire enemy teams in moments. A theoretical perfect player in that game could singlehandedly defeat an entire team of very skilled human players.

In the middle of the spectrum, Assassin’s Creed 2 has a medium skill ceiling. A perfect player could do significantly better than an normal player, but would not be so astronomically beyond him as in MW2. Many game actions initiate momentary losses of player control – while Ezio swings a sword or grabs another handhold – during which the normal player can mentally catch up with the perfect player. The gamestate cannot change nearly as fast as in MW2. Even with perfect swordplay, for example, it would take at least 50 seconds or so to kill 10 enemies, since the animations to kill enemies take about 5 seconds. A normal player could probably get quite close to this level of performance with practice, since the optimal strategy doesn’t is not that complex and does not require inhuman reflexes. Ezio’s performance is limited by the game instead of being limited only by player skill.

On the low end of the spectrum are games that quickly break down into degenerate strategies, like Tic Tac Toe. Game designers who want their games to play out exactly like the envision them often end up with games like this, since there are so few strategies. This is, for example, the problem with using quicktime events as skill challenges. Since there is a binary outcome which can be secured by an average player, there is no way to improve on this, so there is no difference between an average player and a theoretically perfect player.

Toylikes like The Sims can’t be measured by skill ceiling per se since there is no traditional goal or competition, so this concept breaks down when applied to them.

You’ll note a sharp downward trend in terms of replayability as the skill ceiling falls. The reason for this is that replayability ends as soon as a player consumes all content and hits the skill ceiling. MW2 multiplayer is endlessly replayable since there are always ways to get better, even for players who are inhumanly skilled.

There are two ways to build skill ceiling that I’ve thought of:

The first is the SHMUP method, which is to simply demand such accurate moment-to-moment input that no player could ever do it perfectly. The game simply runs so fast that no human mind can keep up. Racing games, SHMUPS, and fighting games depend on this method to a high degree. Pretty much any game sped up to a high speed will start to do this. Imagine playing Tic-Tac-Toe, but you get a third of a second to make your move. As a mental exercise, you can strip out this element of any game by slowing it down. Imagine MW2 multiplayer played at 10% normal speed.

The second is the Go method. This has nothing to do with twitch skills and all to do with managing complex strategic and tactical information. The game simply presents so many options and variables that nobody can easily see where it is going, even if they can stare at is as long as they want. This type of complexity is harder to do meaningfully than simple high frequency input.

The best games use both these methods. Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer, for example, uses both. Starcraft does as well. Both games are very different, but both have vibrant online communities.

Even in Modern Warfare 2, note the replayability difference between online multiplayer and Spec Ops, which really only uses the SHMUP method of building skill ceiling since the AIs are so simple and predictable.

The above theory is descriptive, but not predictive. I’ll be thinking and writing more about how to design games for high skill ceiling in the future.

When the Bomb Goes Off.

When people started calling them games, that’s what they were. Simple sets of action-reaction rules and mechanics. You’d take your action and the system would apply the rules and respond. There were defined goals and boundaries. Pong, Galaga, Space Invaders – All resembled board games and pinball more than novels or films.

We’ve moved on. Games aren’t packages of action-reaction rules any more. Often there is no defined goal, or at least not one as clearly defined as before. Success is no longer measured in abstract points.

Doesn’t it seem strange we’re still using the same word to describe the Hungry Hungry Hippos, and Fallout 3?

Modern games are virtual worlds. Packaged experiences. Artifical realities, pre-designed and tuned to produce meaningful, interesting experiences, which we can enter and experience at will. It’s like stepping into someone else’s life at the start of the most important day of their lives. Sometimes the limitations of the universe railroad it towards a single predetermined outcome. Other times, it can go one of many ways, or never ends at all.

If we had a word for games that combined the connotations of a “novel”, “film”, “story”, and “interactive”, we’d be free of a lot of wrong connotations among mainstream culture as well. I don’t like lugging around the cultural legacy of Space Invaders whenever I try to explain to laypeople exactly what I’ve chosen to spend my life creating.  We create interesting lives you can step into at will, not games. None of this is to say there is anything wrong with true games. They’re just not the same thing as Fallout 3 or Pathologic or Fahrenheit or even Flight Simulator.

So what should we call them?

“Role Playing Games” might make sense, but it has acquired an association with collection-based gameplay and numerical character growth.

“Adventure Game” seems to have developed a connection to puzzle solving and third-person control.

“Interactive Fiction” implies a text interface.

“Interactive Movie” implies the use of full motion video and long noninteractive scenes.

We need something totally new. Alistair Reynolds called packaged experiences “experientials” in his Revelation Space series. Or, we could use Greek roots – Mnemograph would be a “written memory”, for example. But that’s kind of a mouthful.

It’s tricky to find new words for something. I’m not going to try to coin one today, but I’m hoping one will appear soon. And perhaps one of you can think of a name that doesn’t sound goofy.

Edit: This post was crossposted on my Gamasutra blog and has many more comments, in case you’re interested in reading more views on this subject.

Edit Again: Michael Samyn has a better-written post on this topic already up. And he wrote it two years ago.

All you need to know: it’s about a giant bikini-clad woman attacking a city.

In other news, sorry I haven’t been posting much recently. I’m sure both my readers have been disappointed. I’ve been pouring my writing efforts into a project larger in scope, so it will probably be pretty quiet around here for a while.

Wow. My brain hurts so nicely watching this stuff. I really want to try this game. I haven’t seen something this mechanically original in a long time. And it looks like it might actually work. Their solutions to the classic time paradoxes are beautiful.

From the FAQ:

Q. Dude, paradoxes?! You know, grandfather paradox, units fighting side by side?
A. Paradoxes can exist, but since the window of time is limited (e.g., an 8 minute window) all events eventually fall off. A paradox will oscillate between its different states until one of the states reaches the edge of the time window, leaving the players locked into one of the two states. Example: in the case of the grandfather paradox (where you use a factory to build a tank, have the tank time travel to before it was built, and then use it to destroy the factory) you will play with the paradox until it ‘falls off’ the time window, at which point there is a 50/50 chance of either the tank lives and the factory is destroyed (because the tank destroyed the factory), or the factory remains and the tank goes back in time and is lost. All paradoxes are nicely resolved with time.