Every creative project has constraints: limited time, budget, skills, platforms, etc. That might sound like a bad thing, but it’s not. In fact, most advice says that constraints are a necessity, a solution to the problem of a blank canvas, a lens that can focus your creativity into a finished product. That’s always been true in my own experience, but with that said, I don’t believe that this helpful effect is something automatic. Instead, it requires a conscious choice to work with your constraints instead of fighting them.

This is most evident whenever a new platform emerges. Think, for example, about all the crappy mobile ports of traditional games; they had new constraints (small form factor, touch controls, a different context for playing) and generally tried to ignore them or fight through them. Result: not so good. On the other hand, the games that accepted and integrated these constraints became great; see Super Hexagon, Bit Pilot, Flappy Bird, Ridiculous Fishing, etc. I’m cherry-picking, of course, but the exceptions seem few and far between.

In my own work, I’ve always tried to imitate the success stories, thinking about the constraints early in the project and choosing to turn weaknesses into strengths. Auralux was built around my limited working hours as a full-time student, Bombball was designed around the new constraints and affordances of the Ouya, and Ciesswas shaped by a 3-week deadline and the new context of VR.

So what are my constraints on Darknet?

Well, I’ll start with a confession: I’m not a great programmer. I also don’t have a ton of time to build the game. So, like Ciess before it, Darknet was architected from the start to be easy-to-program. I also lack the big game dev skills outside of programming and design: I don’t have much of a visual mind, so I got external help figuring out the game’s art style, and I can’t make my own music, so I’m recruiting composers as well.

Of course, the biggest creative constraints come from working with the Oculus Rift.

Certain types of movement can cause motion sickness. In fact, most models of regular human locomotion seem to cause nausea. Considering that, I’m not very optimistic about the games that try to plainly simulate a person walking around an environment. I’m sure that a few of those games will turn out all right, but they’re still fighting the constraints of the platform, trying to force conventional first-person mechanics into a new and unfriendly context. I worry that they’re making the same mistake that all those doomed mobile ports once made.

Oculus has announced that they’re targeting a seated experience with a gamepad, at least at the start. That’s not their end goal, but it’s the current reality that we have to work with, and games that are designed for full locomotion or more advanced motion-controlled input modes are trying to fight against these constraints. With Darknet, I’m trying to accept the constraints openly. The player is a piece of software in Darknet, not a human being, so there’s no need for realistic locomotion or input. It’s a game context that fits the platform, and it’s abstract enough that I can make the experience comfortable without worrying about any sense of realism. No compromise necessary!

I’m confident in this strategy, and I think that the most successful games in VR will be the ones that adjust their input and motion schemes to be more platform-friendly. Cockpit-based games like Lunar Flight or EVE: Valkyrie might be one promising solution, but I believe there’s a lot of room for other compelling experiences in VR that fit the Rift’s constraints. Demos like Iceland, Shiny, or Don’t Let Go! strike me as promising, and I hope to see more like them as the Rift nears release.

Here’s the gist: Darknet is a cyberpunk hacking game that will be a launch title for the Oculus Rift. Taking inspiration from Hollywood’s vision of hacking, Darknet engulfs the player in a VR world of nodes and networks, code and data, viruses and firewalls. In terms of gameplay, it’s best classified as a strategy game, but with elements of roguelikes, puzzle games, action games, and more. It’s hard to describe in terms of genre, so it’s probably best to put your preconceptions aside and get ready for something different.

Darknet is the revised and expanded version of Ciess, a little game that I made in 3 weeks for the VR Jam (a competition that was hosted by Oculus and IndieCade). Ciess was a simplistic prototype, but I put a lot of effort into bringing the cyberpunk fantasy into reality. In September, those efforts were rewarded when Oculus awarded Ciess first place in the VR Jam, praising its “fluid and immersive VR interaction” and saying that it “is immediately accessible with a low learning curve, yet offers deep and addictive gameplay”.

Since then, I’ve added tons of new features, arranged for new art and music, and redesigned the game’s mechanics to allow for truly deep strategic gameplay. Darknet is bigger and better than its predecessor, and it’s by far the most ambitious game I have ever set out to create. Oculus has being saying that some developer is going to make the Doom or Halo of VR: a foundational, platform-defining bombshell. I aim to fulfill that prophecy with Darknet.

The plan is to release Darknet when the Oculus Rift launches, whenever that may be. At this point, the game’s features are defined and the core gameplay is implemented, but there’s still a lot to do. I’ve decided to follow in the footsteps of other indie game devs and continue development out in the open. Specifically, I’ve created a subreddit for the Darknet community, /r/darkcom, where I’m running a “perpetual AMA” (Ask Me Anything). Feel free to drop by and ask me whatever you’d like, and I’ll try to respond to all of it!

I’ll also be sharing a lot of my work via the Darknet dev blog, and you can get announcements via Twitter, Facebook, or a mailing list if you prefer. I’ve already posted the first dev blog post, describing one of the more fundamental changes from the old game jam prototype. Soon, I plan to release some limited playable demos of the game, so stay tuned if you’re interested!

If you’re attending GDC, and you want to be one of the game’s first players, I’ll be there, and I’ll be happy to give you a demo. Contact me to arrange a meeting at GDC, or find me at the Media Indie Exchange if you’re in the press.

Hack the planet,
E McNeill

The conference featured talks from Michael Abrash and Joe Ludwig from Valve, Alex Schwartz and Devin Reimer from Owlchemy Labs (developers of Aaaah! For the Awesome), and Palmer Luckey from Oculus, whose talk was probably the most fun of the entire conference. A good portion of the content was advice for making a comfortable VR game, much of which was already old news to those of us who have been following Oculus for a while. Make sure your game runs fast, minimize player acceleration in-game, don’t override the user’s camera controls, etc. All this has been collected into a handy new VR Best Practices guide.

Michael Abrash’s talk was notable for the amount of confidence that he projected. Valve’s VR demo is pretty incredible, and Abrash used it to illustrate that most of the big problems (on the visual side, at least) can definitely be solved. Achieving a real feeling of presence in a virtual world is now just a matter of time and good engineering; it WILL happen. It’s not so clear exactly when, however. Abrash kept saying “in two years” or “by 2015 or shortly thereafter”. I interpreted this as his deadline for reaching this mind-blowing golden standard of VR; I’m hoping that Oculus chooses to ship earlier with a merely excellent product. Palmer Luckey was pretty confident about the future of VR too, and it’s clear that both Oculus and Valve believe that it will be a huge part of the future of entertainment.

The nature of the relationship between Valve and Oculus was not entirely clear to me. They’re certainly working closely together. Oculus talked about getting R&D help from Valve, while Valve named Oculus as the clear front-runner among consumer VR solutions. (Valve said they had no plans for a consumer product and that their demo system was not shippable due to its requirement that users plaster their walls with tracking markers.) On the other hand, Valve made it clear that their VR software work was not Oculus-specific, and mentioned that they want to be ready for when competitors start to arrive on the scene. I don’t think that means that they’re betting against Oculus in the short term, though. My impression was that Valve was taking a practical (if enthusiastic) attitude toward cultivating VR gaming, and they recognize Oculus as the obvious vanguard in that movement.

Palmer’s talk was called “Porting Games to Virtual Reality”, and his message was that porting “doesn’t really work”. Instead, make content that’s designed for VR! We’ve heard this message before, but it was a pleasant surprise to see it presented so starkly and with such candor. Oculus doesn’t know exactly what they want from developers (that’s our problem to solve), but they have a high standard, and that’s ultimately great news.

There was also a Q&A session with all the speakers after the talks. Again, a large part of the discussion had to do with common mistakes in VR games and how to avoid them. The speakers seemed to agree that FPSs and similar games would not translate very well to VR, especially in their current form (with fast movement, circle-strafing, lots of forced movement from explosions, etc.). I consider that good news, since it points the way towards a wider variety of experiences in VR. There was also a consensus that games involving small, nearby objects (e.g. a virtual board game) felt great, especially with positional tracking. The speakers agreed that player input was still a hard, unsolved problem in VR, and Palmer made it clear that (for now) they’re targeting a seated experience with gamepads. Lastly, there was discussion about how great a multiplayer experience felt when multiplayer head-tracking and simulated eye contact was implemented.

One audience member asked a business question, wondering how to justify making games for a new, small audience of VR players. I was surprised by the honesty of the speakers; rather than project false enthusiasm, they were practical. The general answer was “it all depends on how many units you need to sell to make money”. It’s an easier path for a small team than a big AAA outfit (another reason why indies should favor the Rift). Even then, the Owlchemy devs mentioned that, despite a fantastic attach rate of around 8% among Rift owners, they still didn’t directly cover the costs of the extra month of development they spent on the VR port. Of course, the outlook will improve when the Rift actually releases. I’m still optimistic.

Overall, it was a very impressive presentation from Valve and Oculus. They convinced me that VR is going to be able to deliver on a technical level, and they left me feeling more inspired than ever to create games for the Rift. At the same time, they tried to be very clear about what wouldn’t work. They talked openly about what they had successfully accomplished, but they also talked about the challenges that lie ahead. It didn’t feel like a bunch of marketing folks desperately trying to recruit developers. Instead, it felt more like they were sharing the news of a fait accompli: VR is happening, and soon.

Can’t paid games be unethical too? Children are vulnerable, but shouldn’t we also fight against the exploitation of adults? Can’t all business models corrupt artistic intent, as Dan Cook keeps pointing out in exasperation? F2P is the center of the current conversation, but I don’t think the ethical issue is really about the business model. “Free” is hardly a bad quality in itself, and high rates of spending seem more worthy of our aspiration than our disgust (after all, hardcore gamers and other hobbyists routinely spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, as Cook argues). Besides, if a game can rob you of your time or reduce your quality of life in other ways, it can be unethical without taking any money at all.

I’m optimistic about the F2P model (both of my commercial games are F2P), but I also believe that player exploitation is very real, very profitable, and genuinely immoral. Perhaps F2P makes it easier or more lucrative to exploit players, but any game can include exploitative techniques. Instead of making unfairly broad attacks on the F2P model, we should condemn exploitation wherever it occurs. There seem to be sizable groups of game developers who either A) don’t know about exploitative game design, or B) don’t see an ethical problem with it. Those are the designers that I’m hoping to persuade in this article.

Below, I’ll discuss game design techniques like randomized rewards, premium currencies, manipulative feedback, and pay-to-win schemes. But, first, I’ll try to establish a simple basis for my ethical claims.

Ethical Exchanges

When any product is sold, the seller is essentially saying “I’d rather have your money than this product”, and the buyer is saying the reverse. They’d each prefer to own what the other person is offering, and so the trade makes both of them “wealthier”. In this way, a healthy exchange benefits both sides.

This process breaks down whenever one party takes advantage of the other. For example, consider a used car dealer who knowingly sells someone a lemon. In this case, the buyer has a weaker position (since they lack information about the true state of the car), and the dealer can exploit that weakness to sell the car for more money than it’s worth to the buyer. The seller becomes wealthier, but the buyer does not. This is an unhealthy exchange, and since the dealer acted knowingly, it was an unethical act.

In other cases, the buyer’s weakness is not a lack of information, but a lack of willpower or judgement. Exploiting this kind of weakness is equally unethical. We might imagine someone trying to sell drugs to an addict who wishes to quit, for example. If this is done knowingly, then the seller is sabotaging the buyer, acting against the buyer’s best interest for their own profit. Even if the buyer enthusiastically agrees to the exchange at the time, the seller is still intentionally exploiting the buyer’s weakness.

This highlights an often-confusing point: it’s not enough merely to get the buyer’s consent. Instead, the proper standard is that of mutual benefit. The most instructive example (which I’m borrowing from Jonathan Blow) is that of a con artist who scams an unwitting victim, perhaps by selling them a counterfeit item of little real value. The victim might fully consent to the exchange, and might walk away happily, never realizing that they’ve been cheated, but that doesn’t mean that the exchange was ethical. What matters is that the seller made money by exploiting the buyer, instead of working toward a mutually beneficial exchange.

All I’m trying to establish is that exploiting someone else’s weakness for your own profit is wrong, and it doesn’t matter what form that weakness takes. I hope that, without going into any detail about a particular theory of morality, we can at least agree on that as a foundation for further ethical claims.

Essentially, you should be trying to sell to your customer’s “best self”, a hypothetical version of them with perfect knowledge, willpower, rationality, and judgement. Without any weaknesses affecting their decision, would your customer still consider your offer to be a beneficial exchange? If you don’t think so, then you shouldn’t make that sale.

Of course, in most businesses, your product is offered to a large audience, and there’s no way to evaluate each customer one-by-one. That doesn’t mean that you’re free of ethical responsibilities, though. You should consider the effect that the sale would have on the audience as a whole, and you should do what you can to reduce the possibility of exploitation. This is why foods companies list their Nutrition Facts and suggest reasonable serving sizes, why bars refuse to serve patrons that are excessively drunk, and why casinos allow customers to ban themselves. These measures are meant to reduce the potential harm of exploitative exchanges, and an ethical business would enact them voluntarily.

Exploitation is unethical. But what does exploitation look like in the context of games?

Techniques of Exploitation

Some games are regularly accused of employing “psychological tricks” to exploit their players. Without specifics, this can end up sounding like a paranoid conspiracy theory. It’s not. The “tricks” are simply the exploitation of common weaknesses such as cognitive biases. Many cognitive biases are widespread, well-understood, and experimentally verified. Still, I’ll make the disclaimer here that I’m writing as a practicing designer, not as an expert in psychology.

Below I’ve listed a few ways that cognitive biases or other weaknesses can be exploited in games. These aren’t examples of wrongdoing per se; they are techniques that can be used unethically, but they can also support healthy mechanics or be included accidentally. In most cases, however, their primary effect is to exploit some psychological weakness for profit, and they should be avoided without good reason otherwise.

1) Exploit loss aversion

Loss aversion refers to the common tendency to care much more about losses than gains. To an irrational extent, players will seek to avoid getting a penalty or missing out on an expected reward. This bias can also manifest as the sunk cost fallacy, in which people act irrationally to avoid feeling like they’re wasting resources. The simplest exploitation of loss aversion might be “crop withering” mechanics, in which the game threatens to take away a resource or to erase an expected gain unless the player takes some action. There are plenty of other, more subtle uses of loss aversion. For example:

• Make the player work for the opportunity to buy something (“You’ve unlocked a new purchasable item”). The player will not want to waste the effort that they already made to reach this opportunity.
• Pair plentiful in-game currencies with scarce premium currencies (“You have lots of gold, but not enough gems”). The player will not want to let the plentiful currency go to waste.
• Increase the amount of time it takes to perform some common action (“The build time doubles every level”). The player will not want to lose the rate of progress to which they have become accustomed.
• Cause automatic growth to halt until the player intervenes (“Your collector is full / Your crops are ready to be harvested”). The player will not want to waste time by leaving the game idle.

2) Use variable ratio reward mechanics

Essentially, variable ratio reward schedules are slot machine mechanics. The rewards are based on random chance but remain linked to player inputs: the perfect combination to elicit compulsive behavior or addiction.

Randomness is not a bad thing in itself, and it’s often used in the service of healthy dynamics. Procedural generation uses randomness to provide variety, for example, and poker uses random chance to create dynamics of probability management and bluffing.

However, randomness can also be used to create gameplay that is both compelling and empty, a simple recipe for regrettable wastes of time and money. Variable ratio rewards can be combined with the illusory rewards from the near miss effect (the positive feeling of “almost winning”). It can also be bolstered by the gambler’s fallacy (“I’m due for a win!”) or the hot hand fallacy (“I’m on a lucky streak!”).

3) Use excessive extrinsic feedback

When a game gives positive feedback (any attempt at positive reinforcement), the player will enjoy it to the extent that the feedback feels true and meaningful. However, most players don’t stop to think about the validity of a game’s feedback; instead, they accept the feedback by default, subconsciously giving the game the benefit of the doubt. This may be especially true for less-experienced players. Excessive positive feedback can thus be used to string players along, giving them the illusion that they are accomplishing something meaningful.

This process could be as simple as doling out rewards or other positive feedback whenever the player is getting bored, whenever it could make the player re-engage with the game (e.g. upon logging in), or upon the completion of a trivial goal. The effect can be enhanced by building a structure or pattern out of such goals, e.g. by presenting them as a short checklist or as a set that must be completed. Wrapping goals together into a larger structure encourages players to see them as more meaningful, regardless of whether or not that’s true, and effectively creates a new mental reward that acts as yet another bit of feedback (“You completed a set!”).

In the worst case, the abuse of extrinsic feedback can undermine the player’s intrinsic enjoyment (the overjustification effect).

4) Offer purchases that short-circuit game dynamics

When a player wants to reach some goal (like earning an item, or defeating their opponents in a competition), the game can offer to sell them an advantage, or even to sell them the goal directly. This is often derided as “pay-to-win”.

In the most innocent case, selling an advantage is just an indirect way of selling a difficulty adjustment. In a presentation about the game Shellrazer, for example, the developers explained that they balanced the game for the players with lots of time or skill, while selling advantages to the players who had neither. We might see this as selling access to the easy difficulty mode. This strikes me as bizarre (why is a game primarily making money from the players who are presumably least-engaged?) but not necessarily unethical.

More often, though, selling advantages is a means of extracting money from a treadmill dynamic. The player decides upon a goal, starts working toward it, then decides to pay to get it right away (or more easily) instead. The player is essentially paying to play less of the game, short-circuiting the existing game dynamics in favor of more immediate gratification. It’s a poor trade of long-term gain (ongoing gameplay) for a short-term reward, except that the short-term reward is meaningless unless the player continues playing, e.g. by choosing a new goal and repeating the process.

When the game is intrinsically rewarding, a pay-to-win system is more damaging, since short-circuiting the dynamics will skip over the intrinsic rewards entirely in favor of the extrinsic goal. For a multiplayer competitive game, this process can potentially ruin the game for all participants, not just the player who paid.

5) Make purchases harder to evaluate

A game can get around a player’s better judgement by obscuring or inflating the perceived value of whatever is being sold. For paid games, this might mean any pre-purchase misrepresentation (e.g. “bullshot“).

In F2P games, this technique usually involves a premium currency, which keeps sales one step further removed from actual money in the player’s mind. This is doubly effective if the cost of purchases in the game is constantly increasing; this sort of inflation can cause a purchase of premium currency to seem like a great deal initially, only for it to rapidly decrease in practical value as the game proceeds. The game might also misrepresent its dynamics; for example, if it’s implied that a purchase will make the game more rich and dynamically interesting, but instead it just scales up all the numbers in a way that produces equivalent gameplay, then the player receives only a momentary extrinsic reward instead of ongoing intrinsic rewards. Any other sort of bait-and-switch would serve just as well.

6) Rely on post-purchase rationalization and restraint bias

In addition to the active techniques listed above, there are two cognitive biases that serve to passively amplify the impact of exploitative game design. Restraint bias refers to the tendency to overestimate one’s own self-control, which may lead people more easily into exploitative situations (“those tricks wouldn’t work on me”). Post-purchase rationalization is the tendency to justify voluntary purchases even if later information reveals that the purchase was a poor decision. This can combine with any exploitative design technique; if you can get the player to make a bad purchase, they might still convince themselves that it was a good idea (“If I already spent that much time and money, I guess the game must be fun after all”). It may be impossible to avoid these passive biases, but it’s useful to note how they can enhance or disguise the effect of exploitative design.

How to Not Exploit Your Players

The techniques that I’ve listed above can be hard to resist, in part because (since it’s possible to use them ethically, and since their downsides are not obvious) they’re so easy to rationalize. More importantly, exploitative design works. Even games that were designed to parody these techniques (such as AVGM, Progress Quest, or Cow Clicker) have surprised their creators with their popularity. If you’re using a simplistic metrics-driven design process, it could easily lead you toward exploitative game design, and it takes vigilance to avoid that pull.

If you want to act ethically, you need to honestly evaluate the value of your game. Keep in mind that games can have value beyond mere pleasure, and costs beyond time and money. People are affected in subtle ways by the media that they consume, and you’re responsible for those effects as well.

Here are a few tests that might help you get a better perspective on your game’s design. These aren’t hard-and-fast rules, but I’m hoping that they can provoke some thought:

• Looking back with perfect hindsight, would a player feel that your game was well worth the cost, or would they regret the time and money that they spent on it?
• Are your customers paying to play more of your game, or to play less?
• If you removed as much extrinsic feedback as possible, would your game be worth playing?
• Are you trying to get purchases during a “moment of weakness”, or would your players confidently make each purchase even if they had plenty of time to consider it? In other words, are you trying to circumvent the player’s better judgement?
• Does your game design push the player primarily toward paying more money, or toward getting better at the game?
• Are you faithfully representing the values and costs of your purchases, or do you make them harder to think about?
• Do you expect that your typical target customer will, in total, be better off after buying what you’re selling?
• Are you trying to increase profit primarily by increasing the value of the player’s experience, or by tweaking your monetization scheme?
• Is your design primarily about presenting interesting gameplay, or about making the player take certain actions (driving metrics)?

Ultimately, these are components of a more important, more broad question: Are you doing what you can to ensure that the player’s encounter with your game is mutually beneficial?

Objections and Responses

In the sections above, I’ve argued that exploitative game design exists and that it ought to be seen as an ethical issue. There are a few natural questions and counter-arguments that seem to come up again and again; I’ve tried to offer initial responses to them here.

– You call it “exploitation”. My players call it “fun”. If people enjoy it, who are you to say that they’re wrong?

Recall the earlier example of the con artist selling a counterfeit product. The buyer might feel totally satisfied with their purchase, but that’s not enough to conclude that it was an ethical exchange. We have to look more closely.

Sometimes the player can benefit even when exploitative design is used. In small doses, and for a cheap-enough price, most games can be genuinely valuable to their players, even if only as an idle distraction. But the real issue with exploitative design techniques is that they are used to divorce perceived value from actual value (as the customer’s “best self” would judge it). Irrational loss aversion, compulsive behavior, and getting tricked into purchases are not good, valuable, healthy experiences, even though they are freely chosen.

In most cases, exploitative techniques surround a simple or vapid gameplay loop, which would normally lead to boredom. Exploitative design can get around boredom by using techniques like variable ratio rewards and extrinsic feedback, but boredom is sometimes a healthy reaction to wasting time. If your players knew this, fully understood your game’s dynamics, and saw through your game’s monetization design, would they still be happy to spend their time and money this way? If the answer is “no”, you’re exploiting their lack of understanding.

– My game is not unethical because it can be played entirely for free / because it has a cap on spending.

While these are good methods of reducing the maximum harm that a game can cause, neither method is a get-out-of-jail-free card. A totally free game can still be addictive and waste a player’s time, and a F2P game that fails to extract money from some players (despite its best efforts) is hardly worthy of praise. Similarly, a spending cap is not a complete defense; a game that exploits someone out of a few dollars is still unethical, in the same way that a thief who only steals a few dollars is still committing a crime.

– A lot of people use those techniques. Do you really believe that all those developers are evil?

No, of course not. In most cases, I think that these techniques are employed due to a designer’s lack of understanding, a naive reliance on metrics, or an innocent but misguided emphasis on monetization. In other cases, developers might knowingly work on exploitative games for practical personal reasons (after all, taking the high road can be expensive). I certainly don’t think that all exploitative game designers “are evil”. But, then, I don’t think that you have to be evil to do unethical things. My hope is just that good designers will reflect on their designs and consider what effect they’re having.

– Are you saying that the players of these games are stupid?

No. Maybe some players are, but everyone has biases, and everyone can be manipulated. More importantly, the players don’t bear ethical responsibility. If someone is scammed by a con artist, I don’t blame them or ask about how gullible they were; instead, I blame the con artist for exploiting them.

– What about [another common exploitative sales technique]? Are you saying that’s unethical too?

Yes, probably. Exploitation is far too common. Others have written about the subject with regard to state lotteries, web design, lending money, and social networks. Any time that someone seeks to gain at the expense of another, I’m concerned.

– You just think you know what’s best for everyone. Let them make their own choices! People should be free to waste their money if they want to.

I agree that people should be free to spend their money as they please. However, that doesn’t mean that you should be encouraging them to spend their money poorly. If someone is considering buying your product, and you believe that the transaction will make their life worse, you should not sell it to them. If you do, you’re knowingly profiting from their harm, and I call that unethical.

– “A fool and his money are soon parted.” These games may be exploitative, but the audience for them is huge. Even if I refuse to take their money, someone else will. If they want to buy my product, I’m going to sell it to them, period.

Yes, there are people out there who are ripe for exploitation. But just because they are especially vulnerable doesn’t mean it’s okay to prey on them, even if they are literally asking for it. I reject the idea of a dog-eat-dog world in which exploitation is the only way to get ahead. You don’t have to contribute to a collective wrong, and instead you can try to produce an alternative. The creators of Plants vs. Zombies proved that it’s possible to make a non-exploitative game that’s still a hit. Why not make that your ambition?

– Players will eventually realize that they’re being exploited and stop playing those games. The market will sort itself out.

I hope that this will prove true in time. But it’s not a sure thing (see the ongoing success of slot machines), and I suspect that a particularly vulnerable subset of players will continue playing exploitative games for a long time. In any case, it’s never too early for developers to start considering the ethics of their game designs.

– You can’t compare games to addictive drugs or to scams. Drugs are physically addictive, and scams involve lying to the victim. That’s not true of games.

Those differences aren’t relevant to my point. (In fact, I don’t think that drugs or lying are always bad.) I bring up these subjects as examples in which the buyer is making a voluntary purchase and yet the exchange is still exploitative. These examples show that it’s possible, and this dynamic is relevant when discussing exploitative games.

– Lighten up! They’re just games. Nobody’s dying here.

I admit, this is hardly the world’s biggest moral issue. But even a small wrong is still a wrong, and when it’s potentially repeated millions of times, it’s surely worth our attention.

– You say that sometimes those techniques are acceptable, and sometimes they’re unethical. Where do you draw the line?

They are unethical whenever they result in harm to others, usually by convincing customers to spend time or money without delivering sufficient value in return. Determining whether that’s happening is not always simple, but it deserves our earnest reflection.

– Why don’t you call out any specific games as exploitative?

I avoided giving examples of exploitative games here, since I’m mostly trying to offer a foundation for future discussion. I hope that others will write more specific analyses of existing games.

Related Material

Most of my arguments above have been made before by others; this article is just my attempt to combine them and restate them in a way that makes the most sense to me. If you’re interested in reading more, here is some particularly salient material from those other authors:

– Two talks by Jonathan Blow: Design Reboot (most relevant 16:15-31:30) and Video Games and the Human Condition, addressing reward schedules and exploitative design.

– Achievements Considered Harmful? by Chris Hecker, discussing the effect of extrinsic rewards.

– who killed video games? (a ghost story) by Tim Rogers, a look at the mechanics of monetization in social games.

– Chasing the Whale: Examining the ethics of free-to-play games by Mike Rose, focusing on addiction.

– Social Games vs. Gambling, by Raph Koster, discussing the similarities and differences of those two industry segments.

– Contrivance and Extortion by Adam Saltsman, and Part 2, discussing the intersection of the “Checklist Effect” and microtransactions.

– Let’s Admit it: Addiction is not an Asset by Drew Dixon, pointing out that “addictive” should not be a compliment.

– I’d Like Fewer Addictive Games, Thanks by Patricia Hernandez, making a similar point.

– Apple is Gambling by Colin Northway, attacking games that “basically earn their money from failures in the human mind”.

– Shit Crayons by Ian Bogost, a response to the assertion that some exploitative games are actually about creativity.

I funded my indie game career from my own savings.

It’s weird to talk about “funding” myself, as if this were a well-considered investment instead of the long shot that it is. I figure that the odds are stacked against new indie game developers, even if my goal is just to become self-sufficient instead of “making it big”. But I know that this is my dream job, and when I went indie (about 8 months ago), it was obviously the best time to take my shot.

After graduating college in June 2011, I got a job as a Technical Design Intern at Sony Santa Monica, working on God of War: Ascension. When I finished my three-month internship, Sony offered to let me stay as a contractor for the duration of the project.

I liked the studio and loved my coworkers, but just then, out of the blue, I got another job offer. The CEO of a small, technical government contractor in Virginia discovered me through a contest that I had entered three years ago (the Imagine Cup), and he ended up offering me a job. I could have the title of Lead Game Designer, and they offered nearly double the money that Sony would pay. They didn’t usually make games, but it was suggested that they might someday work on educational game projects, and that was enough to make me accept.

I was earning a salary in the high five figures. Also, out of sheer luck, the company was located within driving distance of my parents’ house. I moved back in with them, thinking that it was probably a temporary arrangement, and thus found myself living extremely cheaply.

At this point, I hadn’t yet made the decision to go indie, but I was tuning into the indie game world and was rapidly coming around to the idea. When it became clear that the new job was not scratching my game design itch, I eventually settled on a plan: I would keep living with my parents, save up as much money as I could, and prepare to go indie. (I had another reason too; my girlfriend was happily living and working across the country, in San Diego, and I wanted to move to be with her.)

I worked there for about 13 months. By the time I finally quit and went indie, I had saved up enough money to live cheaply on my own for about 3 years. That’s a very long runway for a new indie, although, so far, I feel like I mostly wasted time and became the poster child for not making money on the OUYA. On the other hand, a game that I made in college (and a separate company agreed to develop for mobile) was finally released on Android and iOS, and was featured by Google on the Play Store. Thanks to the revenue from that old game, I’ve actually made more money than I’ve spent since going indie.

I’m usually a risk-averse person, the opposite of the stereotypical startup entrepreneur. I don’t know what lessons other people looking to fund their own development should take from my story. To complicate matters, I’ve glossed over the enormous amount of privilege that made this possible for me (most obviously through the lack of any college debt). Beyond that, all the events that were partially out of my control (winning the Imagine Cup, getting the surprise job offer, being featured by Google, etc.) all felt like strokes of luck, though I suppose I could quote the adage that “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”.

Even then, though, I’d have no right to call this a success story. At least, not yet. I’ve only released one game since going indie, and it doesn’t seem that it will be profitable. I’m having lots of fun and feeling very fulfilled, but as long as I’m still living off of my dwindling savings, that happiness looks almost like irresponsibility. If I can make it work, though, then I think I’ll be in excellent shape. After all, since I “funded” myself, my success would be all mine to keep.

If TV shows had opposites, Honey Boo Boo‘s might be something like HBO’s The Wire. This series was fictional as opposed to Honey Boo Boo‘s nonfiction, and featured sex, drugs, and violence aplenty, yet was still far more intelligent and enriching. The Wire pulled me into a complex, realistic, relevant story that made me think critically and reconsider my biases and assumptions. I enjoyed it immensely, but not as a guilty pleasure. Instead, I feel certain that it made me a better person.

I don’t imagine that anybody is surprised by this observation; we already have a cultural understanding of “trash TV”. In most media, we routinely and instinctively differentiate guilty pleasures from higher art. And yet, in the realm of games, we too often lump together entertaining games under the label of “fun”, as if our enjoyment and pleasure are all that matter. It’s not so simple as that.

Consider a game of slots. I rationally understand that a game of slots is rigged against me; no matter how well I play, I will never get the upper hand, and most of the time I’ll just lose money. However, I can still get pleasure out of slots, in the same way I can enjoy Honey Boo Boo. If I choose to turn off my brain, I can enjoy the lights and sounds, the fake “close calls”, the fantasy that I’m about to win big, and the feeling of false agency. I can only enjoy the game if I give in to my biases and weaknesses.

The opposite of slots may be Go, a game that can only be enjoyed by engaging with its strenuous strategic challenge. But I think a more instructive counterpoint might be Poker. When people play a game of Texas Hold ‘Em, they can enjoy the same close calls and randomized outcomes as slots, but the game is always asking the player for more. Poker confronts players with the option to play smart, to overcome mere luck and instinct and gain a true advantage. At high levels of skill, players must find advantages beyond probability, learning to read the competition and exhibit careful self-control to avoid tilt. Poker can be simple fun, but it also encourages players to think deeper, see through the game’s traps, and improve their skills over time.

The point of this example is that an enriching game doesn’t require educational content or an ascetic focus on strategy. In fact, I believe that most games are enriching to some extent, and often in more ways than one. Most commonly, any novel and significant challenge is enough to do the job. A challenging game requires players to learn new mechanics, discover the dynamics, train their skills, and apply themselves to the task until victory is achieved. I come out of these games feeling stronger, more confident, and more wise than I used to be.

Games can also offer value through narrative, much like other media. A good story, in any format, is naturally enriching; if it’s both internally realistic and novel, then the story is teaching us something new and true. If a story is shallow or nonsensical, we might still enjoy it for its fast plot or sensational moments (see exploitation films for example), but most sophisticated readers/viewers/players will recognize it as lower art.

I don’t want to focus too much on enrichment, though. That’s only one way in which games can ascend beyond guilty pleasures. Another way might be to remove the “guilt” from the “pleasure”. Much like a limited, decadent dessert, a game might offer simple fun without being shallow or exploitative.

Or, we could find value by discovering deeper sorts of fulfillment. Professors Eric Zimmerman and Frank Lantz have both argued convincingly that games should aspire to reach the level of the sublime. I don’t feel qualified to go into greater detail, but Lantz’s talk “Life and Death and Middle Pair: Go, Poker and the Sublime” is freely available and very much worth watching.

This discussion of “guilty pleasures” and “higher art” will probably leave me open to accusations of snobbery, but Zimmerman has argued that we need more of this kind of snob, and I think he’s right. We have plenty of stupid fun on the level of Honey Boo Boo, and the developers who are making more ambitious games should be able to feel proud of what they’re doing. At first glimpse, The Wire might look like just another formulaic police procedural, and it’s important to acknowledge that it’s not. It offers something deeper, and we should treasure it, like it deserves.

First, some juicy sales metrics! After six days of being featured, Bombball has been downloaded about 8000 times and has actually sold 46 full copies (at $4.99 and $2.99 after a recent discount). It’s still early, but I feel that this was a weak launch, and I figured that now was a good time to do some public reflection on the project. I’ll start with the good:

WHAT WENT RIGHT

1. Gameplay

During the game jam that spawned Bombball, I knew there were a few things I wanted to focus on: a high skill ceiling, spectator-friendliness, good local multiplayer, and simple mechanics. The version that won the game jam delivered on these goals pretty solidly, but the game was still a little awkward in places. It wasn’t until I demoed the game at a San Diego indie meetup and got feedback from other designers that the game finally got whittled down to its current form.

It’s a small game with simple mechanics, but I’m very proud of how it plays. I achieved my design goals, and although it hasn’t reached a large audience, the people who have played it seem to enjoy it too. My favorite bit of affirmation:

2. Visuals

Bombball started out with my usual ugly prototype art. When the time came to finish the game jam version, I gave myself some constraints (highly saturated colors, no black) and made the best programmer art that I could, but it still looked very amateurish to my eyes.

The art was completely transformed after I got put in touch with Will Stallwood, the genius designer from Cipher Prime, who generously agreed to help out with the art style. He completely redesigned the visuals, introducing a crazy awesome shifting-prism look. While we weren’t able to bring it up to Will’s own high standard in time for release, I’m still immensely pleased with the gorgeous new graphics.

Here’s a look at how the game evolved from prototype to game jam version to released product (and check the trailer to see it in motion):

3. Music

While trawling for some Creative Commons audio during the game jam, I was reminded of the incredible music in Brendon Chung’s Atom Zombie Smasher, and I decided to go for a similar surf-rock-inspired soundtrack. I was lucky enough to find enough CC-licensed audio for the game jam version, but I was initially at a loss when I needed to expand the track list.

Royalty-free licensed music saved me. I found a few sites that were selling the sort of music I was looking for, and I bought tracks from a few different sites, but I ultimately found my best stuff on shockwave-sound.com, thanks largely to their excellent search function. A composer named Pierre Gerwig Langer had a collection of polished, professional, energetic surf rock that fit my needs completely. Most of the tracks in the final game come from him, and I’ve heard more than a few people comment that this music is their favorite part of the game.

WHAT WENT WRONG

1. Bad Scheduling

The CREATE game jam was in January. After winning, I knew that I would want to develop the game further for a release on the OUYA, but I figured it would take me about 1 month, or maybe 3 months at max. I hoped to get the game out before the console started shipping to Kickstarter backers.

Instead, it took over 6 months. Some of that was due to my own slowness (see below), but it was also because I waited too long to find an artist. I finally did get a talented artist to agree to work on the game, but then it took until mid-June before he was able to get started in earnest. Then, he got sick soon before launch, and I had to crunch for the last few days alone. In the end, I missed the OUYA’s official launch, though only by one day.

2. Wasting Time

During the time I was waiting to get started on the art, I barely got anything done on my own. I should have been more actively finding ways to improve the game, or working more ambitiously on other major projects, but instead I puttered around on features that I never really expected to include in the game (side note: online multiplayer is very difficult to do with a fast physics-based game). When I finally showed the game off to other indies, I was able to get some good revisions done, but that was an exception to the general pattern of waste. I lost months of time thanks to my own inability to focus or temporarily move on from the game.

3. Lack of Playtesting

I can excuse a dearth of playtesting for the game jam, since there was never much time to do anything except finish the game. But even during the long period of slow development described above, I never played the game with anyone other than a couple of friends and a few indies a single meetup. The feedback was useful and largely positive, but there wasn’t enough of it to actually make informed decisions, and I still worry that the final version of the game has poorly balanced AI and other issues.

4. Narrow Audience

I’m proud of Bombball, but it’s ultimately a game that’s built for local multiplayer with controllers. That’s a limited audience, and a rough bet for any indie. The OUYA seemed like the perfect system for this type of game, but it seems like its audience is smaller than I had hoped for at launch, and it seems like a fairly small portion of those who download Bombball ever play a multiplayer game with it.

Let me interject here that I love the OUYA team, and I support their ambitions. They’ve been great to me, from early dev support to featuring the game after release. Still, the system didn’t live up to my hopes as a developer. It was a tall order for them from the beginning, but I still find myself a little disappointed.

5. Poor Marketing

A few OUYA games released early, got some attention and traction, and were mentioned in most of the reviews of the system. Bombball, in contrast, released silently a day after the system launched, and probably owes most of its downloads to the fact that it got featured. Some of the blame for this weak reception is that the game doesn’t have an easily marketable high concept; it’s abstract and simple and only interesting when you play it or see it played. It’s not a game that sells itself. It’s just a fun local multiplayer action game, and that niche is also occupied by more prominent games like Towerfall and BombSquad.

This issue also ties back, in large part, to the scheduling problems mentioned above. For a long time, I knew that the game was going to radically transform once the new art came in, but I didn’t have any of that new art to show. I was reticent to market my game to the press or to OUYA owners before I had the sexy new look. When the art was finally ready, I was too busy implementing it to focus on promotion. I didn’t even have a trailer finished until a couple days after release. The game got a couple of nice mentions in the press, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be one of the more talked-about titles on the OUYA.

6. Flawed Monetization

Bombball released with 10 free rounds of multiplayer and unlimited singleplayer for the easy and medium levels of AI. This seemed like a good idea since the game is focused on local multiplayer, and I thought that hooked players would quickly want to access the hard AI too. Unfortunately, based on the comments I saw online, most players seemed to focus on singleplayer, and they were satisfied with the easier AIs. I only sold about 35 copies at a $4.99 price point with this scheme, and that’s after fixing an issue in which the option to buy the full game was unnecessarily hard to find. I recently updated the game to put the medium level of AI behind the paywall and drop the price to $2.99; whether this will be any more successful remains to be seen, but I’m reluctant to go much further.

WHERE TO NOW?

As you might gather from above, my belief is that I succeeded in making a great little game, and most of the issues come from the process of the development and release of the game. At this point, Bombball is “done”, but there are a number of places it could still go. I’ve submitted the game to a few festivals (fingers crossed for IndieCade 2013!), and it sounds like several small, indie-friendly, controller-based platforms might be worth looking at. MOGA, Project Shield, PS Mobile, the new iOS controller API, the rumored Google OUYA-like console, et cetera could all be possible homes for the game, though I’m not sure if any will really work out.

Also, since this is a Unity project, I have a PC/Mac version available. If anyone reading this is interested in playing this game on their computer (hopefully with a controller nearby (and ideally with some friends to play against)), send me an email and I’ll gladly send a free copy! More than anything else, I want my game to get played.

The latest in the misguided indie backlash

It’s not uncommon to feel some occasional frustration (see the annual rant session at GDC’s Indie Game Summit), but Kurt was unusually harsh in his condemnation. The article is full of quotes that paint the indie scene as an exclusive and disingenuous clique, motivated by an insular agenda, that hates the casual gamers who just play games for fun.

Kurt, in disgust, has decided to drop out of the indie community. This is a shame in itself. His game Circadia is exactly the sort of game I’d like to make someday, and he presented some interesting stuff in last year’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop. The indie community is poorer without his voice and perspective.

Several prominent indies responded to the article. I collected part of the Twitter conversation. Some of the responses were defensive or lashed out, which I imagine didn’t do much to help change minds.

We can talk about this

Kurt’s two primary complaints are that the indie community is incestuous and anti-casual:

“Now indies make games for other indies, or for awards, or for kickstarters. Every game is the next greatest game forever and ever and ever, and honestly, I find myself mostly disappointed and uninspired when I play them.”

“Then I remembered the many conversations I had with game devs who hated casual gamers, hated those who played the ‘ville games, hated people like my wife, even though only a few decades ago we were in pizza shops dumping quarters in machines while people scoffed at us telling us we we’re wasting our money.”

I’m not privy to the “many conversations” that Kurt cites, but I’ve never personally heard indies speak ill of casual gamers. I’ve heard them complain about the design practices of casual game companies (Zynga etc.), but that’s not the same thing. When someone criticizes a cigarette company, does that mean they hate smokers? (No.) There are plenty of well-regarded hardcore or niche games in the indie scene, but there are casual games there, too. I wish Kurt would stick around to help advocate for more.

As for the “incestuous” claim, Kurt has a point; indies do tend to speak well of indie games. But that’s not evidence of an exclusive cabal with selfish motives. Usually, the main reason is that indies share the same interests and are genuinely enthusiastic about the same things. (That’s why they formed a community, after all.) In other cases, they’re choosing to be more forgiving of risky, experimental, limited-budget work. And in some cases, it’s just difficult for friends to criticize each other’s work in public. (Liz Ryerson has made this point too.)

But that’s not a good excuse, and I agree that more indie-to-indie criticism would be helpful. If conducted respectfully, we could get a lot out of it. You’re allowed to have your own thoughts, and others are free to disagree with you. Personally, I think that the 8-bit aesthetic is overused, and that grindy unlock mechanics (as in, say, Ridiculous Fishing) are distasteful, though I struggle to articulate why. Maybe I’ll give it a shot soon, and I’ll hear the other side’s perspective, and we’ll all be better off for it.

So Kurt is not wholly wrong in his complaints. But he’s not wholly right, either, and his frustrations stem from problems that can be worked out. A blanket condemnation of the indie community really isn’t justified.

Don’t gloss over the good

When talking about problems in the indie community, it’s easy to forget the good that indies have done. I experienced a lot of that good firsthand.

When I was a student, just getting seriously into game design, it was the lectures by indies Jon Blow and Chris Hecker that first introduced me to the concept of exploitative game design, and ultimately led me to understand design as something more than just a craft. Along with early indie games like Audiosurf and flOw and Everyday Shooter, they were the ones that first made me think that I could build personal, ambitious, meaningful games.

When I was making my first commercial indie game, I was inspired directly by Eufloria. I posted my game’s beta on an indie game forum. By chance, the co-creator of Eufloria, Alex May, saw it and critiqued it. His insight helped me make a better game, but more importantly, the mere fact that he noticed and responded was hugely inspiring. Later, around the time I released the game, I needed business advice. Kellee Santiago and Eddy Boxerman each spoke to me for over an hour, giving personalized guidance based on their own experience. Later, when I moved to a new city, Andy Schatz took the time (during crunch!) to meet with me and help me find the local indie community.

I’m leaving out a lot of details, of supportive online conversations, meetings at conferences, talks and videos and podcasts and blogs and articles that guided and motivated me. But my point is this: these people were celebrities in my eyes, and owed me nothing, yet they treated me with respect and generosity from the beginning, even though I was just another aspiring game dev.

Then there’s the games themselves. There are too many great games to name, but the last five indie games I’ve played are Fez, Monaco, Year Walk, Cart Life, and Howling Dogs. There’s incredible variety between them in terms of mechanics, setting, tone, et cetera, and yet they’re all personal and successful in their own ways. Each one has inspired me to make better games, nudging me towards greater ambition. Even the ones that I didn’t like have taught me something.

This is all from one person’s perspective, but I’ve received so much support from the indie community that I can’t accept the picture that Kurt painted. I can’t believe that the indie community is insular, or exclusive, or disingenuous, or full of hatred.

I don’t know what Kurt saw that pushed him away, but based on what I have seen, it’s not all bad. Come back.

Since going indie about six months ago, I’ve spent some time dithering around on prototypes and side projects, working on my website and blog, and occasionally entering game jams. Although I found some success, I wasn’t satisfied with my output, and I wasn’t sure what to work on next. Noel’s question sounded like a good start for some reflection.

So then, why am I making games? Aside from some very real limitations of practicality, ethics, and motivation, I can think of six reasons. (They aren’t fully orthogonal, which, as a system designer, bugs me, but whatever.)

1. To create trojan horses for ludic joy. In other words, to show others the beauty of gameplay. I know a lot of people who don’t play games, or don’t understand what I see in them. I want to make them understand, and my best scheme is to create hardcore games for casual gamers. My game Auralux is an attempt at this, and hearing my usually-a-nongamer dad avidly discussing his strategies is hugely rewarding. This isn’t about distraction or escapism or even entertainment, but rather the innate beauty of gameplay, of the sort that Lantz and Zimmerman promote. Bringing that to the world seems like a deeply meaningful and worthwhile use of my time.

2. To explore and advance the medium of games. Discovering or demonstrating the possibilities and limits of this medium is fascinating, and it makes the game design community (including myself) more powerful. Making games at the extremes is more useful and interesting than making “just another [genre] game”.

3. To make the games I want to play. I grew up on games and cultivated a healthy crop of fantasies and wild ideas of games that didn’t yet exist. Bringing those games into existence is innately exciting, and since my own intuition is my guide, I can execute on a vision more successfully.

4. To improve my skills at making games. Sometimes I want to explore a design or technology or style that’s intriguing or useful or difficult. Actually making a game with it seems like the best way to learn.

5. To impress the people I respect. This can be paralyzing. But I already wrote a whole blog post about that.

6. To make money. You might view this as a natural practical concern, but I also mean it in a selfish way. I want to make enough money to continue a comfortable middle-class lifestyle and to securely work on my own projects for the rest of my life. I’d be happy to make enough money to sustain myself, but I’d really like to make millions and millions. A starving artist I am not.

Noel explained the problem with his initial goals like this: “I wanted to make a unique and different game, yet at the same time I wanted it to reach a huge audience. I wanted to ride the wave of financially successful iOS games, but I didn’t want to sell my soul with freemium-based games, and instead, I was going to make a “good” freemium game. I wanted to make something innovative, but I wanted to do it in just 6-9 months. I wanted it all, and I wanted it yesterday. Bad combination.”

Writing out my goals doesn’t seem to save me from the “wanting it all” issue. I apparently want to make games that appeal to everyone, do things that no other game has done, in ways that appeal to my arbitrary personal preferences, using skills that I don’t yet have, to impress a broad set of opinionated outside voices, in a way that will earn me millions of dollars. Sounds like a plan!

Laid out like this, I feel like the only way forward is to select a few of my goals to focus on. In a sense, I’ve already done this for my prototypes. One is a card game that will appeal to hardcore gamers and game designers (and me), but isn’t very innovative or widely appealing. Another is a IF game that aspires to appeal to broad audiences, but won’t impress the tastemakers or make money. My current project, Bombball, is guaranteed to make at least some money (thanks to a game jam award) and to teach me a thing or two about networked multiplayer programming, but it ultimately feels too limited to leave much of a mark otherwise.

The one idea to which I keep returning is a prototype that lacks almost any substance, but which serves as a perfect platform for my dreams and ambitions. I can see what it would look like, I can feel what it would be like to play, I know what I want to accomplish with it, but so far every bit of actual gameplay I’ve implemented has been a dismal failure. There’s no game there, and yet it’s a constant siren song.

Picking which goals to pursue seems like a classic strategic choice. Should I pick the goals that will improve my skills, leaving me equipped to make better games in the future? Should I pick the most fulfilling ones that reside within the bounds of practicality? Or the ones based around my less selfish, more noble goals? Or the ones that I would most enjoy the process of pursuing? Or should I embrace ambition, return to my amorphous dream game, and try to do it all at once?

Noel’s question is a good lens, a prompt that clarifies my issues. But it’s still up to me to provide an answer.

…You don’t want to revisit the thing. I mean, readers are always disappointed when you talk about your work. You have to say to them, ‘Look, you’re talking about work you may love … I’m talking about work that I loathe …’ It’s nothing to do with me any more. Really, it has nothing to do with me.

50 famous authors recently agreed to annotate their old works for a charity auction, as described by a recent FT Magazine article. “However unlikely it sounds, that a writer would revisit a work he or she finished decades ago and risk uncovering its errors, to say nothing of the potential agony of rereading a younger self, this is exactly what they have done.” I understand their reluctance, but I think it can go beyond the embarrassment of discovering old flaws.

In January of 2011, I released the PC version of my game Auralux. It was a minimalistic game with bare-bones features. I could think of dozens of possible improvements, but I knew the saying: works of art are never finished, only abandoned. Besides that, I knew I would want to move on to other projects. So, I picked a coherent set of features, polished the game up, released it, and tried to avoid promising anything more. That was that.

Over a year and a half later, the Android version of the game (handled by a separate company, with some light input from me) was released, and the game’s audience expanded hugely. It happened again several months later, when the iOS version came out.

For the first time since the PC launch, I was inundated with requests, complaints, and reviews from players.
To them, this was a new game. To me, it was old work that I had long since “abandoned”. I had put so much distance between myself and the game that I found myself unwilling to commit to revisiting the game. I had put a lot of effort into cutting myself off, and I had no desire to re-attach.

I actually sympathize with most of the requests and complaints that I get. At this point, I suspect I see the design flaws of the game better than anyone. For instance, the game moves too slowly early on. The difficulty labels for half the levels are wrong. At high skill levels, the game is just about exploiting flaws in the AI. That’s to say nothing about obviously missing features like rally points, multiplayer, or custom levels.

The trouble is that fixing any of these issues would call for a much deeper, much more involved return to the game. The game feels slow, but every part of it was built around that pace. The AI is dumb, but it would need to become vastly more complex to avoid player exploits. Multiplayer is missing, but it would be horribly unbalanced or stagnant if it were added without other big changes alongside it. Surgically fixing any individual design flaw in the game would first require cutting the game open. Usually, the expense and the risk of complications are too great to justify it.

But I also have to admit a bigger reason for my inaction: I already came to accept the game’s flaws as permanent. Over two years ago, when I first released Auralux, I worked hard to shape it into a coherent whole that was lovable despite its imperfections. I chose to accept it rather than “loathe” my earlier work like the author quoted above. I appreciated it just the way it was, and so (apparently) do thousands of players. It was my child, and it grew up, and I sent it out into the world. To go back and assert myself over it now, long after the fact, somehow feels wrong, profane.

That, of course, is not a widely-held view nowadays, in the age of Minimum Viable Products and constant updates and living software. The company that did the mobile port wants to put out new content consistently, adding new levels and features to keep the audience engaged. I usually agree to help, albeit with some grumbling; I recognize their practical reasoning. But every time I implement a change, even the ones that players have asked for, I feel more guilty than proud. I feel like I’m violating the game’s integrity in some way. I feel like I’m tinkering ineffectually, when the game is demanding to be either accepted as-is or replaced completely.

Sometimes I’ll respond to players’ requests by gesturing towards a hypothetical sequel. I’m not sure if that’s for their benefit or mine. If I do attempt a sequel, I could wholeheartedly address all the design flaws I see, but I don’t delude myself into thinking that I could ever reach a point of perfection. I suppose I could plan on continuous development, periodically changing the game’s design after release. But constantly alternating between building the game up and tearing it down (effectively “rereading a younger self”) sounds even more agonizing and exhausting when it’s all in public. And even if I pass the game onto others, no development process lasts forever. If I start development of any new game, it will eventually have to end the same way it did last time: recognizing its flaws and choosing to accept them. I’m not sure that I’d want it any other way.