Sure. Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re a game designer working for Blizzard on the next expansion for World of Warcraft. Your job is to create, modify, and balance items for the expansion. What kind of information do you think is necessary to create an item?

Well, let’s think about it. First and foremost, the item will need a unique ID number, probably generated for you so you don’t accidentally duplicate the same ID for two different items. The item has to have a name. That name will also need to be localized into each of the languages the game supports, so it needs its name in each language. It has to have a rarity, which will affect its stat budget. It has to have an item level, which also factors into its stat budget. Most items one or two specific types of rating bonuses (e.g. haste, versatility, mastery, critical strike), some primary attack stat number (intellect, strength, agility), and a bonus stamina number. Every item has an equipment slot, even if the slot is “inventory-only”, or an item type that determines what sort of thing it is (weapon, armor, potion, etc.). These items might have class restrictions, be part of a set, have procs, or an on-use effect. The item must have an icon ID for inventory use, a level requirement, and (if equippable) a model reference ID so the game knows what visual to apply to the character wearing it. These are all qualities shared every item in World of Warcraft, and many of them have mathematical formulae that must be applied (such as using the item level to determine the exact value of a specific bonus).

Now consider… you want a tool that can automatically enforce certain mathematical rules for specific shared values across the hundreds of items you’ll be creating, and the thousands of items that already exist. You probably want to be able to sort and filter specific qualities, like only showing rare wrist armors, or legendary capes. You probably want to be able to look at multiple items at the same time, so that you can compare the ones you did to the old ones, or make the same change apply to many of them at the same time. You need a way to organize all these data at a glance. So how do you organize this all?

The magic comes when you realize that every attribute you need to track and/or edit can be treated as a column in a spreadsheet, and each individual item can be a row in that spreadsheet. If you do that, Excel can run the math for you. You can write macros to limit the cells in a specific column to choose from a specific set of possible choices. You can filter them and sort them by specific attribute. You can copy and paste as needed. You can set up formulas to automatically update when values are changed. You can use the built-in graphing and charting to look at curves and see if groups of items are behaving the way you expected. This is why excel is an awesome game design tool and why it is used in development studios all over the world. 

It isn’t limited to just itemization either. This is applicable to any type of content where you have a lot of unique attributes on each of a lot of different individual entries. This could mean spells, abilities, bonuses, modifiers, crafting recipes, experience level tables, treasure drop tables, enemy spawn rates, NPC attributes, or any of a hundred other types of content. It’s all about being able to edit data in a way that is less bug-prone and more visually intuitive. Excel has excellent macro documentation and support from Microsoft, and can even turn the data values into graphs so you can verify the growth rate looks like what you want.

How do you learn to do this stuff? You must learn how to write excel macros to pull data and apply math and formulas from other cells. Think about really big spreadsheets and what you need to pull the information you need out of them quickly. Then, go to any of the excel macro tutorial sites and start digging. Excel is just a tool like any other editor; it has a lot of documentation and support already.

Got a burning question you want answered?

The biggest issue with single player content is that it’s expensive to make. There’s way more players than there are developers, and the rate at which players consume content vastly outstrips the rate at which we can create content. Thus, the only way to create enough content to engage you all without a commensurate cost increase is to drastically reduce that cost. This traditionally means one of two things: Automation or Crowdsourcing. This topic will run a little long, so I plan on breaking it up over two posts. Today, I’ll cover Automation and tomorrow will be Crowdsourcing.

Automation (a.k.a. Procedural Generation)

If we can build have tools that can generate content for us, we don’t need to spend a lot of money paying developers to make it for us. Procedural generation has been able to create a broad variety of interesting content - Spelunky and many roguelikes use it for maps, Diablo uses it for maps and items, Shadow of Wardor uses it for the nemesis system, Left 4 Dead uses it for the enemy spawns and behaviors, and No Man’s Sky uses it for their planets. Procedurally generated content acts as a force multiplier for engagement - if the generated content is fun and interesting, it will last a lot longer. The hard part is making it work.

Procedural generation is not without its faults, though. At some point, players are going to start recognizing the various possibilities the game is choosing from and it will lessen the fun. Also, content generated by the tools will invariably be less elegant or moving as hand-tuned content because it lacks the kind of polish that human expertise can put on it. However, it’s still a lot more replay value than one-and-done content. The main drawback to procedural generation is that it’s got a huge initial work requirement to make it functional and, without that massive initial investment, it’s not going to fly at all (see Mass Effect: Andromeda). While most games require smaller strike teams to work on a lot of different features, the number of developers needed to build and populate a procedural content generation system is much, much larger than normal. This is why most games with procedural content in them tend to be built almost entirely around those procedural systems.

Procedural generation’s future is probably expanding the formula to other areas that have yet to be automated. Imagine, for example, a procedurally generated game narrative. Instead of developer-defined characters and a set plot, the game could generate characters for the player based on archetypes and assign them random collections of iconic visual and personality traits, or even let the player create and customize their own story characters. There’d be a player character protagonist, a love interest, a villain, a few supporting characters for both hero and villain, and they’d all generated from a pool of different traits and voice sets. Then, the system could put together a story out of a three-act structure, pulling from a pool of different maps. You could choose to have episodic adventures with the same cast, or try out a totally new one if you like. Does that sound like fun? It’d even be fairly easy to monetize as well - just add in new areas, traits, and potential plot hooks for players to play with as DLC or microtransactions. We saw the beginnings of this with Shadow of Mordor and their nemesis system, but some enterprising team could expand on it in different and interesting ways. The possibilities abound.

Tune in tomorrow for a post on Crowdsourcing content generation.

Got a burning question you want answered?

This is a really interesting question, since “most successful” is a subjective term. Here’s the criteria I used to determine whether an IP qualified or not:

I avoided mobile and social games in this. Here’s the list I came up with.

Present day: (2013-2017)

Honorable Mentions - IPs that met multiple criteria, but not all of them:

PS3/XBox360/Wii Era (2006-2013)

Honorable Mentions:

This list is by no means exhaustive, of course. You might have noticed that the lion’s share of the new IPs from the last generation came from the first half of the life cycle. What other new IPs can you think of from these time periods that adhere to all of the criteria?

Got a burning question you want answered?

One of the things that has always been true is that games have always sought larger audiences. It stands to reason that we want this because everybody’s money spends just the same. The “hard core” fan isn’t necessarily more valuable to us than a new player who just picked up the latest game in the series for the first time. When you say things like “made less appealing to look at”, I have to mentally append the implied “to me” to the sentence. So here’s the general rule - whenever you see a game move in a direction away from what you like or find appealing, it most likely means that the publisher of the game is not targeting you with the game. That includes things like sexy characters. 

The biggest reason that representation is such a big deal these days is monetary. Publishers are, for all intents and purposes, pushing the upper limit on game sales to the old tried-and-true gamer demographic (young heterosexual men ages 15-35). We aren’t getting the kind of sales growth from them that we need in order to keep our shareholders happy. So we look to make changes to the development formulae in order to grow with other users while (mostly) retaining as many of the hardcore fans as possible. However, we are much more willing to sacrifice some of the low-growth numbers to gain high-growth numbers because that leads to happier shareholders. High growth numbers usually come from underserved demographics like women, minorities, older players, younger players, former players who have matured and had families, or foreign markets that haven’t gotten our games yet. There are so few games that directly appeal to these groups that it’s much easier to get the players in them to try something new. Many people in these underserved demographics I know personally have expressed interest in story-based games like Mass Effect 2, but immediately retracted it when they saw how much the camera focused on Miranda’s rear.

You might call it “pandering” to these other groups or that we aren’t serving our “true” fans or some kind of “artistic integrity”, but let’s be honest here - we want to make the best game that we can for as many people as possible, and that means we need to earn money. What you may call “pandering”, we call “appealing to”, because that’s exactly what we’re doing - we’re appealing to a demographic of potential customers. The sexy stuff before was “appealing to” people who like that sort of thing. Scaling it back is “appealing to” people to whom it is a dealbreaker. Having scantily clad, huge breasted, hourglass-shaped women being ogled by the camera is really off-putting to a large number of potential customers. Their money spends just as well as yours and the publishers believe they can get more of them to buy the game without losing many of you. 

There’s a good reason for this. In many cases the sexy characters aren’t really the reason you play, nor are they particularly integral to the game itself. There are plenty of great games that didn’t need sexy characters in order to be fantastic games or huge sellers. Off the top of my head, there were very few overtly sexy characters in Mario, Call of Duty, Zelda, Katamari Damacy, Dance Central, Shadow of the Colossus, Rocket League, Team Fortress, Portal, Civilization, the Sims, Half-Life, Journey, the Lego titles, Little Big Planet, Psychonauts, Amnesia, any licensed sports title like FIFA or Madden, Forza, Pikmin, Pokemon, Tetris, or Gran Turismo. I’ll bet that many of you all have played many of these games and never once thought “You know what would make this game way better (or sell more)? Boobs.” 

At the same time, you seem to think that there will be a point in the future that there won’t be any more sexy characters at all. That’s also not true - there’s definitely a place for overtly sexy characters in the future of games. Some titles and franchises just wouldn’t be the same without them - Bayonetta, Dead of Alive, Soul Calibur, God of War, Assassin’s Creed, the Batman: Arkham games, Metal Gear, Ninja Gaiden, Street Fighter, Oneechanbara, Tekken, Final Fantasy, and Grand Theft Auto all have overtly sexy characters and they are generally well received commercially and/or critically. As time passes, some of these franchises might change and evolve, but it is highly unlikely that they will all disavow and stop the sexy entirely.

Sexy characters will never be completely gone because there are plenty of people who still like them and have money to spend. Developers who want to make sexy games will continue to make sexy games, and there will always be a market for them. Sexy characters certainly help sell some of the games, as I’ve shown in that list.But, in the future, this sort of overt sexuality probably won’t be as commonplace as it once was, because it doesn’t necessarily help sell all of the games. The size of the market for people who explicitly want sexy games is limited and definitely should not be conflated with the size of the market of people who tolerate sexy but don’t explicitly want it. You’re just starting to see those limitations in action.

Got a burning question you want answered?

Whenever we talk about making decisions, the first word to pop into your head should always be “triage”. For those unaware, triage is a medical term that means “the process of determining the priority of patients’ treatments based on the severity of their condition.” This principle applies to practically everything that we do in the game industry, whether it’s cutting, adding, or allocating resources. When it comes to deciding what gets the cut, we usually need to consider several major factors. 

This question does seem to delve more into the philosophical than the practical, but I’ve done a bit of work in the field of artificial intelligence, so I’ll bite.

When you’re looking at designing artificial intelligence, you’ve got two major camps. The first is to create something that will pass the Turing test. That is, to create something whose responses are indistinguishable from a human being’s. This is pretty much just purely theoretical. The AI here would have to be able to parse inputs from people and respond accordingly. Once the AI could adequately make decisions like a person, it would then be able to go on and add priorities, self-improvement, and increase its knowledge base in a more traditional way. This would be the sort of AI that would get angry, sad, happy, or frustrated, because emulation of human behavior is the goal. This sort of AI is generally developed at research universities and R&D programs simply in a theoretical exercise of seeing whether it can be done. Much like building a computer to play chess, it doesn’t really serve much of a purpose other than “Can it be done?” Research scientists are hard at work trying to prove the answer is “yes”.

The other camp of AI is that designed for a practical purpose, like the sort that exists in games. This sort of AI is built with a specific goal in mind, and any iteration on it would serve to further that particular goal. For other goals (such as an ATM machine) the focus of the AI is to emulate a bank teller to provide a user whatever services are needed at the bank without needing a living, breathing human to parse the necessary information. In that regard, anyone funding the development of such an AI would want to spend his or her money on the data parsing, and less on the human emulation. Much like a sarcastic or foul-mouthed cashier at a restaurant or coffee shop doesn’t add particularly much to the experience, adding such things to a directed AI would not be useful unless it is solely to put the user at ease. That effort in research and development would be much better spent working on recognizing and understanding all of the possible tasks that a user could possibly attempt to engage in with a teller, and then being able to recognize the various ways those tasks can be asked for.

As an example, let’s say that you want to apply for an auto loan in order to buy a car. This sort of task is currently outside the scope of an ATM, but with a sufficiently developed AI, it could handle the majority of the work necessary. It would need to understand what information is necessary to begin a loan application process, and how to calculate things like an applicant’s factors such as credit rating, job status, whether there is a co-signer, any mitigating circumstances, and things like that. It would need to be able to understand what sort of common issues might come up, adjust its internal metric for grading whether an applicant is an acceptable credit risk. The benefits to this, of course, would be that customers seeking loans could then get them nearly instantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without needing to keep staff working around the clock. The benefits here would be to the automation of the processes and increasing efficiency by being able to ask for, parse, and process the necessary information that a customer provides.

In game development, that goal would be to provide a challenge to the player and to be enjoyably beaten. There have been experiments in this arena, in games like Left 4 Dead with its AI Director where there is a perpetually running algorithm that will purposely attempt to vary the amount of tension in a Left 4 Dead run to provide a more varied experience. It does so by choosing which sections of the map have zombies, and which don’t. It also chooses when to spawn the special enemy zombies, and attempts to build tension through audio and visual cues. By periodically building up tension and then releasing it at key moments, it is intended to provide a fun and repeatable experience that doesn’t get as repetitive. It isn’t perfect, but it is an example of using procedural game design to create content. Instead of creating the content him or herself, the designer sets the rules and the game creates itself.

There is a tradeoff, of course... you lose out on the specific authored touches. Things like a specific camera angle, or a specially constructed scene won't necessarily work with primitive procedurally generated content, much like how the levels in Diablo 3 feel rather generic and haphazardly put together. However, as procedural algorithms become more advanced and more capable, designers will add more such things to their own repertoires, and they will become better at crafting more interesting and engaging content.

I think that the future of AI will actually end up taking over content creation. Our ultimate goal is to let the machinery do the work and the effort while we can do things like the creative parts. We already have tools like Maya, Max, Motion Builder, etc. to create the content we use. The next evolution would be to abstract the need for this and to get the computers to write the majority of the code for us and generate the assets we want after we define an art style and are able to establish rules and systems via plain language rather than complicated proprietary scripting languages. In such a situation, far in the future, we won't need specialists to create content anymore because they won't be needed. The AI would be able to generate the content itself, and all we'd need to do is give it the direction.