This is my fourth Patch Wednesday post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or simply not posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas, and invite comments. 

The header sounds a bit like Ash Wednesday, so we can reaffirm our faith in the idea of examining video games, but Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies.

Where did Threes come from? The currently massively popular puzzle game Threes is seen as the victim of a large number of clones, particularly 2048. To prove their point, the developers have posted a long article explaining their design process.

At the same time, though 2048 is in many ways similar to Threes, some people also whisper that they think 2048 is the better game, because it is simpler (always doubling 2, 4, 8 rather than the 1+2=3 merging of Threes). It certainly is more intuitive to a programming mind.

Life is not fair, of course, and it seems a shame that someone can borrow from the game that someone else developed and through a minor change reap the seeds of the iterative design process of someone else. But you cannot copyright game ideas, only their expression.

Regardless, where does Threes come from? As a headline, the game contains two particular and rare mechanics: merging (the combination of objects to form higher-level objects) and slide-to-combine (pushing the entire screen to one side at a time, combining objects that are pushed into each other).

1) Merging

The merging mechanic does at this time seem to be inspired by Triple Town, where merging is reminiscent of match-three games. Yet where regular match-three matches lead to clearing the objects matched, Triple Town matches always creates a new higher-level object.

But where does this merging mechanic come from? Dan Cook, triple town developer stated that it was inspired by the idea of sets in card games as well as by crafting systems.

Quick research and the twittersphere proposed a few sources for merging:

• The king in Checkers – but this is not what I meant, since the stacking of two pieces is just a convenient way to signal a special piece, rather than an element of the gameplay. So merging is to be understood in a gameplay-sense.
• Combining stones in Mancala – again, I had to realize that this was not what I meant, and had to narrow down the concept of merging: merging should be unidirectional, as in the player being unable to take apart the merged object.
• Dan Cook’s suggestion of sets in card game was also not what I meant by merging, since sets are (generally) immediately removed from a game.
• A similar objection applies to the suggestion that melds in Gin Rummy are a type of merging, since melds do not become separate entities.
• Aaron Isaksen reminded be that he had shown me his chip-merging game Chip Chain game (2012).
• A promising candidate for a first merging-game is Money Puzzle Exchanger (1997) where you can combine yen coins into higher denominations.
• Dan Cook also suggested that the powerups in Bejeweled 2 (2004) are actually a type of merging. We may not think of it as merging because the default response to a match (three) is for the tiles to disappear. On the other hand, high-level match-three playing is quite similar to Triple Town in the requirement for planning the location of the generated powerups.
• A non-puzzle example is the Archon in StarCraft (1998), created from two high templars.
• And crafting, of course, but is it the same, or is it too much about managing inventory items and too little about what’s on the screen? If it is the same, then we may have to dive into the history of D&D (Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World would be a place to start.)
• (Winner) But then I was pointed to the 1996 Mouja, which also features merging of coins. As far as I can tell this is the first puzzle game to use merging, but on the other hand this also seems unlikely, given how simple a mechanic merging is.
• New winner (thanks to Marc Majcher): the 1990 Darwin’s Dilemma.
• For analog games, Cassino (ca. 1797) is a candidate, given the focus on building card stacks that act as one card.

I am sure I have missed something here (let me know). Until I came upon Cassino (which I played as a child), I was entertaining the theory that merging is simpler to do in digital form, and therefore was rare in analog games, but this theory is probably wrong.

2) Slide to combine

(Winner) This was easy: I immediately recognized the slide to combine control of Denki Blocks (2001). In Denki Blocks, objects don’t merge to occupy a shared space, but rather become stuck to each other.

Is there an earlier one?

What we’ve learned

The “first game to x” is not be as simple as it sounds. In this case, the concept of merging had to be defined more clearly before I could start tracing it. Slide to combine only had one obvious candidate.

Finding the “first” is very hard, since you can never prove your argument, only hope not to be disproved.

Note that the Threes developers have (as far as I know) not mentioned any of the games I have cited as sources for merging and sliding. I think some of this is due to a particular mechanic simply being “in the air”, and some of it may be parallel invention. In many cases, we will never know.

Games are made out of bits of other games, people!

Thanks

To Eric Zimmerman, Frank Lantz, Dan Cook, Alexandre Houdent, Aaron Isaksen, Bruce Boyden, Mikkel Faurholm, Clay Branch, Matthijs Holter, Marc Majcher.

This is my third Patch Wednesday post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or simply not posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas, and invite comments. 

The header does sound a bit like Ash Wednesday, so we can reaffirm our faith in the idea of examining video games, but I also call it Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies. It falls mostly on the day after Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday. Time to patch things up and start again.

I think it by now is well understood that players approach a new game on the basis of their previous game (and other) experiences – hence the success of casual games that can be approached by a new audience. And we understand that players during a game will expand their skill set gradually (what I call repertoire in Half-real).

OK, but can we extend this outside regular game-play?

I thought of this when last year, Richard Bartle posted this brain teaser from the “Daily Brain Games” calendar:

What is the right answer? Bartle proposed the following:

• Fish Only one with fins. Only one without lungs.
• Rat Only one with fur. Only one that has babies. Only one that carries the Black Death. Only one that Pied Piper can charm.
• Snake Only one that sheds its skin. Only one able to eat something bigger than its head. Only one Indiana Jones is scared of.
• Frog Only one without a tail. Only one to undergo metamorphosis. Only one that can jump.
• Hen Only one with feathers. Only one with a beak. Only one that can’t live in water. Only one that’s only female.

The calendar wants us to answer rat, because it is a mammal. I have posed this riddle to several people who can instantly identify the correct answer, while I struggled to choose between all the possible explanations I could come up with. I couldn’t figure out why at first, but I suspect that we can identify a number of genre conventions that govern how you are meant to approach such puzzles. For anything related to the natural world, I think there is a hierarchy where you are supposed to answer according to the first distinction applicable:

1) Natural / man-made
2) Fly / walk two legs / walk four legs / swim
3) Mammals / non-mammals
4) Nocturnal / diurnal
5) Cold-blooded / warm-blooded
… 23) Shed skin … 26) Extinction status … 48) Funny observations about the spelling … and so on.

So the trick is to approach a question like this not as logic, but as “what are the usual answers in this genre”.

IQ Tests and Probability

I find that the word and visual puzzles in IQ test often have a similar quality: it is easy to conjure up dozens of possible answers and explanations (like this one), but the test creators seem to believe that there really is one true answer. And again, it comes down to a set of genre conventions that have built over the years.

Another example concerns the kind of puzzles posed to show that humans have a poor grasp of probability or logic. I discussed the Tuesday boy problem some time ago, but let us take the simpler Boy or girl paradox.

• Mr. Smith has two children. At least one of them is a boy. What is the probability that both children are boys?

If you are into probability puzzles, you assume that there is something particular to look out for in the phrasing of the question, and yes: you understand that the question concerns the likelihood that someone who has two children and more than zero boys, will have two boys. The correct answer is 1/3. (Because there are three boy/girl combinations with more than zero boys: boy/girl, girl/boy, boy/boy, and only one of these is boy/boy, so the answer is 1/3.)

If you are not into probability puzzles, you imagine a situation where you meet someone with one of their children, a boy, and you are asked about the likelihood that the other child is also a boy, so 1/2. This certainly isn’t the answer you are meant to give.

It is undoubtedly true that we often apply too-simple heuristics to problems like this, but it is also clear that Boy or Girl Paradox may be more of a test of whether we are into probability puzzles than of whether we intuitively understand probability.

Compare this to the Monty Hall problem, which does not seem to be based on genre knowledge, but actual questions of probability.

I don’t mean to suggest that everything is a game, only that IQ tests and some probability puzzles are too much like stale and ossified game genres to actually measure that they are meant to measure.

As for game studies, I think this shows how the tools that we have developed for game design and game play – these tools can become useful outside regular games.

This is my second Patch Wednesday post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or simply not posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas, and invite comments. 

The header does sound a bit like Ash Wednesday, so we can reaffirm our faith in the idea of examining video games, but I also call it Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies. It falls mostly on the day after Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday. Time to patch things up and start again.

Question #2: Do Casual Games still Exist?

It seems a long time ago, but I once wrote a book called A Casual Revolution (2009), where I talked about the expansion of the video game audience, and focused particularly on the downloadable casual games, the Nintendo Wii, and music games.

I had picked the most important platforms, genres, and distribution channels of the day. I knew that these things come and go, and they did, quickly. The Wii is all but gone, and the Wii U is doing poorly and not even built around motion controls, and Sony’s Move didn’t take off. Music games are all but dead. Downloadable casual games is not as important a channel as it used to be.

So do casual games still exist? Is it still an important category? Since publishing the book, I have liked to tell the big-picture story like this (some of this material was also published in the Korean translation):

There was a period of time, roughly from 1980 to 2005, when we knew what video games were. Video games, we knew, followed a standard model: they were fairly involved activities that you had to spend hours and days to play; they were mostly sold in boxes; new games and game platforms were always promoted on technically better graphics; games were mostly targeted at young males. (We knew, of course, that video games were in actuality played by men and women, young and old, but most video games were still targeted at the traditional “gamer” demographic.)

This standard model fell apart around 2006. At that time, video games distributed online became a major factor; the industry woke up to the fact that women and adults are perfectly interested in playing video games; the most successful console of the generation, the Nintendo Wii, wasn’t even promoted on better graphics, but on a new easy-to-use interface; game developers began experimenting with games that could be played in shorter sessions.

When I originally wrote the book, these changes were most clearly visible in music games, the Nintendo Wii, and downloadable PC games. Since then, the casual revolution has continued. The trend is still towards new distribution models, a broader audience, and video games arriving in new shapes and sizes, only the revolution has moved on to new platforms. Much of today’s innovation is happening in games for cell phones where the selling point is rarely the latest graphics, but much more about style, about game designs that fit into the lives of players. Furthermore, games on social networks are showing new ways in which games can be integrated into our lives, allowing us to keep contact with distant friends, still playing through every busy day. Games find a way.

The Tally

To score my own efforts, the book was correct in seeing the casual revolution as an expansion of the audience, and as a series of design principles that made games available to people who would not otherwise play them. I was also correct in seeing it as a change that would continue to reshape the industry.

In retrospect, the book put too much emphasis on particular platforms (notice the controller on the cover), but it is hard to tell such a story in the abstract.

I also described five principles of casual design (this was inspired in part by conversations with many industry people):

1. Positive fiction. Set in a situation you would actually want to be in.
2. Usability. Easy to use.
3. Interruptible and with low required time investment.
4. Difficulty that can become high over time, but always with lenient punishment for failure.
5. Juiciness. Excessive supportive feedback to the player.

Does this still hold? Time investment remains the most important barrier to play, and most of the principles hold, with significant footnotes for 1) and 4):

1) Positive fiction: Plants vs. Zombies showed that you can make a mass-audience game that is gross and violent, if the representation is sufficiently cute.

4) Punishment: with the recent popularity of Candy Crush, Canabalt, Super Hexagon or Flappy Bird, some of the casual-hardcore distinction seems to collapse. “Casual Games” were never just easy, even if they have sometimes been discussed as such. But the endless runner genre is hugely successful, even though it actually punishes players strongly for failing since you go back to the beginning. This is, in many games, just offset by an accumulation of powerups and resources.

What I failed to see here was the way in which high difficulty and punishment can actually lower the required time investment. Super Hexagon or Flappy Bird are so difficult that the required time investment becomes minuscule, and the individual game session is only a few seconds long.

Things also not predicted:

1. That the Wii would fade out so quickly.
2. That the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, though being delayed as predicted, would still be promoted on better graphics, and would sell well (at least initially).
3. The popularity of smart phone and table gaming.

*

Ironically, the casual revolution in video games is making the term “casual games” less central that it may have been: the audience has become larger and more diverse, and the distribution channels are becoming less distinct. It used to be that the big-budget “hardcore” games could be found on consoles, and the small-budget “casual” games could be found the casual sites, but this is less clear-cut than it used to be, so where do some of recent hits even belong?

So this is the big picture: we used to know what video games were, and now we don’t. We remain in a space of uncertainty: video games can be so many more things than we thought they could, and they continue to change and confound our expectations.