Symmetrical vs. Asymmetrical Balance in Game design

These last few weeks I’ve been doing a series of presentations out of a fantastic book on game design, The Art of Game Design – A Book of Lenses, by Jesse Schell.

In the beginning of chapter 11, Jesse begins the description of two ways that fairness can be created in multiplayer gaming. The first is what is called symmetrical balance and many games such as football, chess, tennis and halo use this to create a fairness in play.

I think the most simple example of symmetrical balance is found in the classic game of tic-tac-toe. In this game, both players have the same actions available to them, namely the ability to fill any of the empty squares with their symbol. They are able to do this once per turn, then they wait for their opponent to make their move. The players also have an identical goal to win the game; they must place their symbols so that three are in a row either horizontally, vertically or diagonally. The first player to do this wins.

Because both players have identical affordances and goals, this game is completely symmetrical. The only imbalance is deciding which player goes first, which gives them a slight advantage. In many games like this, a random draw to decide clears up this final problem.

On the other hand, asymmetrical games give players different possible moves or different goals to win. On the simple side of things, the board game risk does this when played by the mission rules. Here players have the same kinds of moves, but they have different goals. A more complicated example is one of my current favorite games, Team Fortress 2.

TF2 has 9 player types, including:

• The heavy –  has a huge machine gun and a lot of life, but moves very slowly
• The scout  - has a small shotgun for close range combat, little life and moves very fast
• The engineer – has a shotgun similar to the scout’s, but can build things such as a robotic sentry gun or a set of portals to warp themselves and other players
• The spy – Can disguise themselves as opponents and even become invisible for a short time, but has no ranged weapons

So which character is the best? Well, that is where the asymmetrical balance is seen. Each of the characters have strengths and weaknesses. No single character is the best because if we assign values to things such as speed, maneuverability and firepower, we see that they all have the same value overall.

It should be obvious that designing an asymmetrical game is quite a challenge. Despite our mathematical models of predicted value, it is impossible to say how important each category really is for victory. In addition, the use of this characters is impossible to predict, all kinds of emergent and unplanned activity takes place. The bottom line, is that the only real way to find balance is to playtest the heck out it and see what players do. As soon as one character shows a clear domination, we change the attributes.

So there it is: Symmetrical vs. Asymmetrical Balance. Symmetrical games are easier to balance for fairness, but Asymmetrical games allow for a much richer set of player choices at the expense of much harder game design.

Games for Science

Tiger Sharks and 3d minigames

You have to love Dan, Dan and Alex of Filament Games In their demo of Uncharted Depths they are showing a bit of the scientific reasoning process that goes into understanding population densities of different animals. 

Field experiments are performed and sharks are collected, then you check out the contents of their stomaches and find out of if they are really eating all the baby seals. This data is stored like an inventory item and these are used to make a scientific argument (like Phoenix Wright). 

he complexity of these questions builds up to the final question: How to solve the problem of shark overpopulation. The model is tight, experiments and arguments, repeat. Though I would hate to see zero punctuation take a crack at it, this is one of the best examples of educational gaming I’ve seen to date.

I’m personally challenged on how my designs can integrate this notion of building a theory.

The space of education is changing

C. Ondrejka

Things are getting smaller faster better in every way. There are some trends that are a bit intersting:

• People are wearing tech
• The web is getting better (despite identit, offline access)
• Everything is connecting to PLACE

 What else can we collect to make data more interesting? Emotion…

For virtual worlds, its all about browsers and portable devices.

What do we use them for?

• Presence – Where are you, are you moving, etc
• Life Logging – Its comming! Should the default be to stream everything?
• How do we wanange multiple identities (second life, second life work, personal, etc)

But interfaces are the same! Mouse plus keyboard

There are a lot of things converging, should it be a feild? 

• Establish common vocab
• Preserve knowledge
• etc.

This whole thing is really encouraging. I’m seeing someone tell me that our work to utilize the portable devices is indeed interesting. Will ARIS be the gateway into this new field for our team? 

The Halversons

Redefinition of GLS society into participatory media experiences. 

Fan practice tries to retrace the primary activities (for example a baseball player trade), but fantasy games feed this back. This model of previous knowledge and reinterpreted primary actions combining into fantasy play can be reused for any data rich environment.

Mr Jim Gee

Linguistics, Education, Video Games.

We need to make a choice about paradigms. Many complex systems are interacting and biting us in the butt. We are on the cusp of this stuff being unsolvable (see book: plan b). Food, water, oil, etc, they are all interconnected.

21st century skills are all about thinking about complex systems.

Passion communities:

• recruit
• manage
• find solutions

The passion communities with (amateur knowledge) often come up with better solutions! So why are we leaving the hard stuff to politicians? There are passion communities around everything (sims, modding wow, etc) and have/create experts in that field who are very unlikely. Ex: the failure girl who learns photoshop at an expert level to design clothes for the sims and has 400 people downloading her designs.)

These people are PROSUMERS

Producing, but not for money. They get social status, control, fun

 Same girl, still no good at school, now moved into second life. When interviewed, she doesn’t want to be a fashion designer. She wants to work with computers because they give you power.

The future of education is not to design games, but game like systems. 

Let’s talk about Portal. The whole game has you running around in a bunch of labs using the portal gun, but the last phase puts you in a real world, with sno suggestions. You have to transfer to succeeded. The game wants to give you a tool that let’s you see the world in a new way. It let’s you see the (my word) AFFORDANCES OF THE KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM.

Empathy for a complex system.

Example: Modding – Experts theorizing their play and building a tool to support that theory. Better than the designers!

3rd Spaces, Games and Online Learning Community

This afternoon I attended the third (or possibly forth) ENGAGE lunch this semester. At these lunches we gather the faculty that have received grants to build games with our group as well as all the ENGAGE support staff. Demos are done, design challenges are discussed and sometimes small talks are done by one of our staff or an outside voice. Today the main speaker was Constance Steinkuehler.

There were a couple of interesting topics that came up in her presentation about social learning spaces that are manifested in video games. The thing that most inspired me was the discussion about 3rd Spaces.

3rd Spaces are informal social gathering grounds that are not work or home (1st and 2nd spaces). A number of years back, the catacombs coffee shop on Library mall was a place like this to me. I would drop in between classes and chat with people I knew as well as have chit chat with people I didn’t know at all. These days, I’m not quite sure if I frequent a place that falls in this category.

Constance’s stance was that MMOGs are a third space in our contemporary culture. In games like WoW, players gather together and meet one another. They play, chat, learn and teach in a space outside of home, school or work. Meaningful dialog and relationships occur here, identity is formed here, people find community here, all despite the fact that it is taking place on a computer monitor.

One of the things I have been picking up on throughout my academic work is that a growing amount of people believe that the university as we know it is a pretty lousy place to learn. For many, a class is simply a means to an end, a way to fulfill some requirement for a degree. Is it even possible to learn something you don’t care about? In addition, students are often put in relational silos in each of their classes, working alone except for rarely utilized office hours. Collaboration is often minimal, while individual reading, listening and homework dominate the time spent for a class. Content is decontextualized from meaningful practice or a community. Courses are the ruling organizational unit above all else and then they dissolve every 16 weeks. One thing I’m sure of: Things learned outside of practice, interest or community fade away at a blistering pace.

I for one have been fascinated by the concept of an online learning community. A community of this sort, say a group of users from all over the world that participate in fandom or political discourse, organizes itself around an interesting common trait, exchanging dialog and relationship in a technology mediated format. What I see today is that whether it be video gaming, digg, or your friend list on facebook, these 3rd spaces play a large part in our education. We may even learn more about what we really think the universe is like in these informal environments than anywhere else.

I do.

In these separate spaces, the rules change. The awkward become leaders and the powerful become noobs. It doesn’t matter that you have a PhD or make a lot of money. The effects of this equalizing are likely impossible to measure and I’m sure the effects are not always positive. However, the interactions that take place give us things to consider as we think about the teaching and learning processes that we do facilitate in our traditional courses.

That all said, I feel like I have one more reason to explore the development of games in context of the class. While the university structure is too mammoth to change from the top down, I can at least allow the benefits of informal learning, 3rd spaces, fun and community to make their way into the individual courses I work with. We might even succeed in changing our own view of education along the way and have a good time doing it together.

From Simulation to Scoreboard – Designing Playable Engineering

As part of a team on consultants the University of Wisconsin’s Academic Technology group I was involved with a project to lead faculty in a process of designing video games that teach or involved in the teaching of their courses. One such course was in Cryogenics, the study of getting things very cold.

During this time, I was also taking a course with Kurt Squire about the use of video games in the classroom. This paper was written for that course and outlines the differences between simulators and games, additionally taking the stance that games have educational benefits that are not seen in simulators.

Here is the paper for your reading pleasure:
David Gagnon, From Simulation to Scoreboard