Author: Colin Northway

  • Playfull Problem Solving

    Me not writing a blog post

    I haven’t written much for a while because as soon as we got to San Francisco we got crazy busy. We have so many friends here it’s hard to find the time for things like blog posts. I’m having enough trouble finding the time to do development.

    I also haven’t taken any pictures apropos to this topic so I’m just going to pepper it with random snaps from our time in SF. This blog is also about travel after all. Anyway, one advantage of having so many people around is that I can run experiments on them.

    I’ve been interested in problem solving for quite a while. Specifically, the difference between just sitting down and thinking out a problem versus playing around with it and trying to tease a solution out. To get a feel for how good we are at just thinking something out I devised an experiment and tested some fellow indies.

    Sarah and I work during the day at a workspace we share with some other SF indie game makers. It’s nice to be surrounded by peers and their good ideas and it’s also a convenient space to hang ropes. Lately I’ve been hanging ropes from the light fixtures and proposing a challenge to everyone in the office. I’ll propose it to you now and you can see what you think.

    Sarah arriving in SF

    The setup is simple. There are two ropes that hang from the ceiling. One rope has a loop in the end, and one rope has a knot. Your goal is to put knot through the loop. The ropes are easily long enough to accomplish this but they aren’t so long that you can grab one and then walk over and grab the other. If you tried to do so you would find your outstretched arm about a meter away from the limp second rope.

     

    Now find 4 ways to put the knot through the loop. You can use anything you might find in a typical office. You can not cut the ropes or untie any knots. Give this a few moments thought, you are in a perfect position to be part of the experiment.

    When I do this in the office I let half of my subjects play with the ropes to find solutions. The other half can merely look at the ropes and propose solutions. You are in the second category and I imagine that your performance will not be as strong as the people in the first category (especially since you have to imagine the whole setup).

    Alright, are you comfortable with the solutions in your head? I’m going to give you the four intended solutions:

    • Take a chair, put it in the middle of the room, place one rope on the chair while you fetch the second rope.
    • Find an Ethernet cable or something rope-like to tie to the first rope. Use this to make the first rope longer so that you can reach the second rope.
    • Find a long tube or a stick. Grab the first rope and walk as far towards the second rope as possible, then use the stick to reach the second rope.

    Now here comes the important one. The first three are all pretty easy to find. If you were in the room you would have come up with them all. This next one is the one I’m interested in because people tend not to find it if they aren’t actually playing with the ropes.

    • Tie something heavy to the end of the first rope and give it a big swing. Then run to the second rope and back in time to catch the swinging first rope.
    Indie developers experimentally confirm the presence of gravity

    If you thought of the swinging solution then well done. If you thought of it in less than ten minutes then really well done. You are in the vast minority of people I tested. Most people had a lot of trouble finding the swinging solution unless they got to play with the ropes. Conversely, people who did play with the ropes often found it fairly easily. This is because the rope with the knot on it swings a little bit on its own.

    People who got to play with the ropes would usually find the chair solution first (actually there’s a couch in the right place so people tended to just use the couch). But after finding the chair solution they would drop the ropes and the rope with the knot would swing a little bit. They didn’t always notice it. Sometimes they were looking elsewhere, but by the time they found the three easy solutions it was almost inevitable that they would see the rope swing and that would give them the idea for the fourth solution.

    This is important because I think we tend to be overconfident in our ability to imagine solutions to problems and imagine how ideas will play out. As a game designer I am very guilty of this. I will discount ideas because I can’t imagine them being cool. The problem is that we aren’t as good at this as we think. Natural human problem solving relies on playing around with things. We shake things and pull at them, we hit things and try to mush things together. When we play we’re looking for novel behaviour. We’re looking for cracks in the problem that we can exploit and make wider. We can do this in our minds as well but we’ll never be able to find a truly surprising solution unless we’re in the room playing with the ropes.

    Me driving a speedboat instead of writing a blog post

    This means I should be prototyping more. I should stop discounting ideas because I can’t imagine them working. I should sink an afternoon into hacking them out. I might waste a few afternoons at this but it’s also the only way I’ll find unexpected wins.

    It also means we should just hurl ourselves into those huge, daunting, problems that are so intimidating (like Spacechem). They are daunting because we can’t imagine all the moving pieces but we don’t have to. We can just play around and let the solutions make themselves known. It’s how kids solve every problem, I think we’ve just gotten lazy.

  • We Play Games so we can Eat Crab

    Next time the reason we play games comes up in conversation I have a great anecdote to answer the question. We evolved to push and pull at the world around us to see if we can learn something new and then exploit that knowledge to get something beneficial. Like crab meat.

    Like most mornings I was walking on the beach today thinking about game design problems. Our beach is filled with little holes surrounded by little sand pellets. These are made by little red crabs who are about 15cm from leg to leg. When you walk on the beach you can see them walking around making the pellets (they extract algae from the sand). When you get to within about 10 meters they all run over to their holes and start warily watching you. When you get to within about 5 meters they zip down their holes.

    The crabs are neat and I decided I wanted to see them up close so I chose a comfy looking log in the middle of crab-town and waited. After a while crabs within 10 meters went back to rolling balls. Then crabs within 5 meters went back about their business. Eventually crabs within just a couple of meters went back to work. Crabs closer than a meter never trusted me. They would dart out and back every once in a while to see if I was still there but never came out.

    Experiments like this are the kind of thing humans do. We are innately curious. I wanted to see the crabs close up because I thought it would be neat. I didn’t think there would be anything in it for me. Games are the same way. They are just neat. There’s almost never any good reason to play them. We just like neat things.

    As I watched the crabs I noticed that some of the them were getting pretty far away from their holes. The crabs are quite fast but I wondered if I could beat one of them to their hole. I picked out one of the closest holes and lunged for it. All the crabs scattered and all but one very nervous looking crab went subterranean. I love that humans do stuff like this. When you watch people play puzzle games they are rarely purposefully marching towards the end goal. They just sort of try stuff. They look for interesting effects. They wonder about random stuff and then fiddle with the world to see what happens. We gain knowledge not by persistently mapping a point from A to B we gain knowledge by playing with stuff we find neat.

    I wondered what the crab would do and it turns out they have a plan for this eventuality. The crab ran around a bit, found a nice looking hole, and just ran down it. This resulted in a bit of a tussle with the current owner but they eventually decided it was better to share it for now and work out a long term solution when there were no primates around. For my part I was satisfied. I couldn’t imagine any other crab-related experiments I wanted to perform so I wandered on.

    As I walked I kept thinking about the crabs. I kept thinking about how they had a really good strategy and how I’d never catch one of them because their strategy was so good. Eventually I went back to thinking about game-design. Then, bingo, I suddenly had a brilliant idea. I thought I’d figured out how to catch a crab. This is the best moment games can offer. You have a unique puzzle in front of you, you’ve experimented with the variables, you know all the rules and now you need a novel solution. Here is the moment of epiphany. The most human of moments when you have an idea you’ve never had before. It is the reason we rule the earth and it is the reason we play games.

    I went back to crab-city and I found a fairly isolated crab hole. Then I filled in all the holes near it (don’t worry, the tide does much worse, the crabs can handle it). Then I waited, crouched, a meter and a half away from the crab hole. A few minutes later the crab pops his head up totally unaware that I have set him a crab trap. He looks at me and then slowly comes out of his hole. Then he stars rolling up sand balls and slowly gets farther and farther from his hole until, when he’s about two meters away, I leap! The crab races me back to the hole but loses. He then sprints back to where all the filled-in holes are. But aha! Forethought has beaten you my little crabby friend! I jump up and head off his retreat deeper into crab city. He responds by running into the wide empty strip of sand between the crab holes and the ocean. He’s really fast but I manage to run in wide arcs cutting him off alternately from the sea and then the crab holes. Eventually he runs out of energy, stops running, and slowly gives up. I have beaten the crab.

    CrabAt this point I’ve won. I have shown mastery of the system and beaten the puzzle. I am rewarded by seeing some novel crab behaviour (he stands up very tall and threatens me angrily with his claws) and with a nice little rush of dopamine. Since this is the real world I could theoretically use this knowledge to feed myself with crabs. They don’t look very tasty but it’s a very direct lesson about why we like games so much. I followed a trail of interesting questions and thoughts to a reliable source of food. Most games don’t lead you to a crab dinner. But when you’re as smart as we are sometimes you just need to flex those most-human of muscles.

  • How to Have Good Ideas

    I think about thinking a fair amount. I recon it’s valuable for a game author to have some understanding of thinking for a number of reasons. The most obvious reason is to be able to predict how players will play your games. The other big reason is to make yourself think better. I think I’m starting to see some fruit on this second point so I thought I’d write up my thoughts on it.

    Thinking. Do you ever think about it? What are you thinking right now? Do you know how you read? I don’t know how I read. I also don’t know how I decide if something is funny or how I decide that I don’t like that dude in the corner drinking a Chimay. I don’t know why… he just rubs me the wrong way. This is because most of our thinking is subconscious. That’s really just a way of saying we don’t have introspective access to it. I like that phrase “don’t have introspective access to” better than “subconscious” because it’s less mysterious.

    My brain reads quite well. I just can’t “watch” it read. I don’t know what strategies it’s using. You konw taht tinhg wehre you can mix up all the lteetrs in the mdidle of wrods but can siltl raed tehm? I don’t know why that’s true. I think these subconscious processes are a lot more common in day to day living than we generally believe. Advertising works, but everyone says advertising doesn’t work on them. This is because it doesn’t effect processes you have introspective access to. It still changes your behaviour because grocery-store decision making is a largely subconscious task. You think you control it a lot more than you do. Your conscious brain (mostly in the frontal cortex) might add some variables to the equation or be the final arbiter of that decision but the heavy lifting is happening behind the scenes. Did you know people with damage to the emotional center of their brain can’t make breakfast-cereal decisions? That’s because conscious thought isn’t the prime mover behind those choices.

    Lets look at problem solving and creative thought. I make puzzles games and I love user testing. This means I have spent a lot of time looking over people’s shoulder as they solve problems. Often problems that require a lot of creative thought. I have spent hours upon hours engaged in this and one of the things I’ve learned is that people don’t have any idea how they are coming up with creative solutions. We don’t have introspective access to that part of the brain. I know a very bright man here in Costa Rica who makes a living having really good ideas. He’s a serial entrepreneur who has won and lost sacks of money many times in his life. His life revolves around having good ideas and he is convinced that they come from some shadowy spirit world. He is not very religious but when pressed will present good ideas as evidence for the supernatural. This also jazzes with everything you hear about authors metaphorically “channeling” their books and sculptors “just removing the excess stone around the figure hidden in the rock”. We don’t know how we do complicated things. Which makes sense.

    I’m sure you’ve heard about the 5 +/- 2 rule of short term memory. The idea is that we can only store 3-7 things in our short term memory and after that we have to kick something old out to make room for the new. When you think about it this has pretty big consequences. It means any problem with more than 7 moving parts is impossible to think about consciously. Problems like this certainly include books and video games. Worse than that, creative leaps don’t seem to have anything at all to do with conscious thought. They just conjure themselves out of some crazy pattern-matching engine deeper in our brain. The lesson here is that we can’t hold a whole problem in our head and we can’t make creative leaps with the fore-brain so stop trying.

    Instead, think of the fore-brain as a sort of inept cook. You can decide what goes into the pot and you can decide how much the heat is turned up but that’s about it. The hind-brain seems to be built mostly on pattern matching so fill it up with patterns. These are ideas, images, feelings, anything a human can comprehend. If you have a specific problem cast around for anything related to that idea and push it in. Then push in a bunch of stuff that’s only tangentially related. Once you get it in there turn up the heat. Really focus on that idea. Emotion is the language of the subconscious so you have to really give a shit about your problem. Agonise over the solution. Imagine failing to find one and how your game will then fail, no one will ever play it, and you’ll have to go back to making websites for law offices. Then let it simmer. My personally like to slightly distract myself. Take a walk, stare at the clouds, untangle some headphone cords. Give your brain some very light work. If you can walk around somewhere new then do that. The extra visual stimulus seems to help things percolate. Don’t mind too much if your conscious mind wanders. Aim for a pleasant thoughtlessness but if you end up trying to remember the order of all the original Mario levels that’s ok. Fighting it is going to be counter productive. Sleep seems to be a pretty productive time so have a good hard long think about your problem while you’re falling asleep as well.

    I don’t really worry about down time. I’m pretty lazy so I never worry about letting “work” thoughts overtake personal time. I think this is a great advantage. Derek Yu compares our games to Head Crabs. Things that control us utterly. I think that’s why we’re successful. We live our problems in a way less invested professionals don’t. Our stew is always simmering and when it’s finally ready it will be filled with flavors the world has never tasted and they will love it. Even if we have no idea how we did it.

  • Splitting your Attention between Malta and Hydorah

    I want to talk about Attention Splitting and Hydorah and Malta and Clutter. But I can’t pay attention to that many things at once! Inevitably I’ll fail to give one enough time and I’ll have to try again later hoping I’ve learned from my mistakes. Such is the essence of Attention Splitting and the essence of Hydorah. Hydorah is a shooter written by Locomalito with tightly-knit music by Gryzor87. I played Hydorah last winter when we were exploring the festivals and medieval cities of Malta.

    In Malta I was working on a game called Clutter (which I shelved in Honduras months later). We lived in Rabat, just outside the medieval walled city of Mdina. I used to walk the silent streets of Mdina in the mornings to think out game design problems. Malta had a lot to offer; fireworks, good wine, ancient forts and festivals but it was hot and hard to get around without a car so we ended up at home gettin’ work done a lot of the time. Well, I was gettin’ work done until Hydorah came along. It’s a great retro-hard game and I played it through to 100% completion. A big part of why Hydorah works is Attention Splitting. Not so much in splitting my attention away from work but in splitting my attention between dodging bullets and shooting targets.

    In Hydorah there are guys who fly at you from the right, shoot some bullets at you, and then fly off to the left. There is variation in bullets and flight patterns but mostly that’s how Hydorah and all shooters work. So why is such a simple formula so successful? Well, like other successful games, it lets you practice something your brain likes to practice. In this case it’s paying attention to more than one thing at the same time.

    In Hydorah you have to watch for and aim at enemies but you also have to dodge bullets coming at you. You have to pay attention to these two major catagories as well as several individual items in those categories. I talk about how this challenges the visual centre of the brain in Of Rods, Cones, Meat and Monnaco. Only a small part of your eye is capable of seeing much detail (called the fovea). To keep track of so many important things you have to constantly scan back and forth between them while attempting to store their positions and velocities in your head. The better you are at storing predicting, and updating the state of the game the better you are at Hydorah. This also makes you better at a lot of other things like Starcraft, Rails Shooters, playing hockey, being a fighter pilot, lots of stuff. Attention Splitting is so critical to Starcraft play that Attention is called the “third resource” and gosu players attempt to steal attention from their opponents with raids and harassment.

    Since Attention Splitting is so useful to so many activities it’s not surprising that your brain wants to practice it all the time. And since your brain wants to practice it all the time it’s not surprising that it’s so fun. Like traveling, video games are fun because you are learning. In Malta we learned what that a medieval festival with cloth banners and gilt relics parading the streets behind a brass-band can be just as amazing as a parade filled with floats and lights. In Hydorah you learn to take it all in and not lose track.

  • Super Crate Box tells us the magic number is 600

    Hats off to Vlambeer for making Super Crate Box. A great single screen platformer. Before it was nominated for a design award at the IGF it was nominated for love by the judge in my heart. And in my heart it took the grand prize.

    I found Super Crate Box while we were in Honduras and when you’re at the end of an impassable dirt road with no TV and spotty Internet what you really need on your hard-drive is a good super-hard game with both running and gunning. I played the hell out of it and am proud to have 100% unlocked everything.

    So why is it so fun? To answer that it would be helpful if you had at least a passing understanding of Super Crate Box (no I will not be acronyming that). There’s really no reason I should have to describe it to you. Just go play It. It’s free and more fun than reading.

    During my Super Crate Box phase we made a trip to Pigeon Keys with our friends Julie and Ed who run Radical Adventures. It was an amazing trip! We’d done a lot of snorkeling before but the waters off Pigeon Keys were perfectly clear. So clear it was like there was no water at all and we were flying 10 meters over the ground in a giant beautiful Catamaran pointing out fish and rays like you might point out birds. Diving off the boat became like bungee jumping. This one novel twist on an experience we had had many times before made it go from fun to once-in-a-lifetime amazing. Our brain loves to be in a familiar situation with a twist because it loves to learn.

    Video games are about learning and our brains do a lot of learning through pattern matching. When we have a decision to make we compare the situation to previous situations we’ve been in. If we can can find an identical one and we know how to solve it then we just do the same thing we did back then. If we can’t associate it with a previous situation at all we panic and do something random. But if it’s similar but slightly different to a previous situation, or better, is a combination of previous situations then we get creative. We try a combination of stuff that worked before. And this can be genius. This is an incredibly powerful tool evolutionarily so it makes sense that our brain likes to do it and it’s fun.

    Super Crate Box is in the business of giving us these slightly-different problems to tackle. It has dedicated its life to this task and I applaud it for its selfless dedication to making me joyful. It manages this by taking a simple proven game (jumping around and shooting stuff) and combining it with a dizzying array of weapons, all of which are slightly different from each other. “But that’s hardly new, lots of games have a dizzying array of weapons” you say. Yes that is true, imaginary reader in my head, you are correct. But Super Crate Box knows you’re too shitty a game designer to use them properly.

    Games are about learning and our brain really likes to learn. But it doesn’t like to learn just any old things. It likes to learn helpful useful things. It wants to learn how to win! Most games with a dizzying array of weapons let you chose which ones you want to play with. Super Crate box recognises this as a fault. The better you get with a weapon in Super Crate Box the less you play with it. The better you are with a weapon the more ruthlessly efficient you are at getting to the next crate and the next random weapon. In this way Super Crate Box refuses to let you specialise. It refuses to let you get good with one weapon and ignore all the others, which is how I (and I assume most people) play all those games with a dizzying array of weapons. We play games that way because our brain recognises that its often more efficient to get better with something we understand than to start over learning something we don’t. Unfortunately that’s less fun but our brain is a shitty game designer.

    By forcing us into a situation we’ve already been in but with an unfamiliar weapon Super Crate Box gives us a problem we can tackle creatively. And when we succeed at one of these problems it feels great! In fact it’s probably possible to mathmatically determine the number of possible situations and therefore the number of situates which should be contained in the perfect game (assuming Super Crate Box is the perfect game). Say there are 15 weapons (amazingly I can’t find a list) and say there are 40 unique board states (I’m pretty much just making that up) that means there are 600 totaly states. So take a look at your favorite game or the game your making and count the states. 600 = IGF Design Nomination!

    Anyway, once more doff your hat to Raimi Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman for being smarter than the human brain and giving us all something slightly different to play.

     

    Also thanks that there is this