Over
the years there have been various efforts to create a Bill of Rights
for game players. Someone named PeterB, in a blog called Tea Leaves,
wrote a PC Gamer's Bill of Rights about a year ago. Noah Falstein's 400 Project
is an excellent ongoing effort to find 400 rules about game design, and
even better, to document how those rules relate to one another. Then
there's someone named [MC]Daschande, whose Gamer's Bill of Rights
actually demands that the publishers provide access to a game's source
code. (Yeah, right.) And of course, there's enormous ongoing debate
about the rights of players in persistent worlds—do they have freedom
of speech, can they sell game-world objects, is automated gameplay
cheating, and so on and so forth.
So,
not satisfied with what I've found on the Web, I thought I'd put
together my own Bill of Players' Rights just for the fun of it. Because
my approach to game design is based on empathy with the player, these
are features that I demand as a player, and that I believe
every player has a right to expect. My list concentrates specifically
on the experience itself rather than on things like The Right Not to
Crash or The Right to Take the CD Out of the Drive. I'm restricting my
list to things that I consider to be an absolute right, not
just a good idea or a useful design principle. Finally—an important
qualification, here—my list is really intended for single-player games.
A number of these items don't make sense in a multi-player context.
Before
I go on I should say in fairness that some of these overlap with
PeterB's Bill from Tea Leaves; some overlap with Noah's project; and
some are derived from my own Twinkie Denial Conditions.
The Bill of Players' Rights
The Right to Play. The
majority of the time a player spends in a game, he should be making
decisions, exploring, creating, overcoming challenges, or otherwise
acting upon the game world in some way. Players come to play, not to
watch cut-scenes. Notice that I say the majority of the time.
Non-interactive elements are not forbidden, but they should not take up
more than 50% of the playing time of the game. (This is the absolute
maximum; many gamers would contend that non-interactive elements should
take up no more than 1% of the playing time of the game, if that.)
The Right to Win. If
a game's marketing, manual, mission briefings, or other introductory
material tells the player that a game is possible to win, the game must
be possible to win. It doesn't have to be easy, but it does have to be
possible. Anything else is cheating the player. This right doesn't
guarantee that every player will win, only that every player can win.
The Right to Instructions. Absolutely
required. Games that dump you into a situation and force you to figure
it out by trial and error—even down to which button does what on the
controller—are bad games, period. A tiny minority of players might like
this sort of thing, but the rest find it frustrating and no fun. The
instructions don't have to reveal everything about the game, but they must tell
the player which buttons, commands, or menu items do what. If you don't
feel like writing it all down, give the player a tutorial.
The Right to Feedback. The
player has a right to know how she's doing, and in particular, to some
means of determining if she's in danger of losing the game. If the
player doesn't get feedback, she can't adjust her strategy, and the
outcome will feel random. Players need to know whether their approach
is working or not.
The Right To Motivation. A
game must not only give a player things to do, but also give him a
reason for doing them. Just plunking the player down in a sandbox and
saying, “have fun” isn't good enough. Especially at the beginning of a
game, the player should have a clear sense of what to do next and, in
particular, why . Players need a reason to spend their time on a game, and the game must provide one.
The Right to Make Decisions.
There's a carnival game called “Whack-a-Mole.” You stand in front of a
table with a lot of round holes in it, and at irregular intervals a
mechanical mole pops up at random from one of the holes. You have to
hit it with a big rubber mallet before it disappears again. You get
points for every mole you hit, and the game ends when you have missed a
certain number of them. There's no decision-making at all. That might
be OK as a three-minute, one-dollar game for little kids, but as a
video game, it won't do.
The
right to make decisions is related to Sid Meier's definition of
gameplay as “a series of interesting choices.” Personally I think his
definition is a bit too vague, but if a game is nothing but a series of
physical challenges with no decision-making, it's lame. It takes almost
no design effort to incorporate some decision-making into a game. With
“Whack-a-Mole,” all you have to do is make some moles worth more points
than others; then the player has to decide whether the optimal strategy
is to wait for the high-value moles to be sure of getting one, or whack
away at everything and risk missing the valuable ones.
The Right to a Swift Death. If
the player has made a decision, or failed at a challenge, that will
inevitably lead to losing the game, then he should lose it promptly.
The game must not keep his hopes up, stringing him along for minutes or
hours, before revealing that he has lost. This only applies if there's
no way out, of course. If there's still a way to come back from the
brink, then obviously he should be given the chance to do so.
The Right To Control Cut-Scenes.
This means the right to pause them, to interrupt them, and to replay
them again later. The replay option is essential if the cut-scene
contains information important to the player's success. Some people
want a full set of VCR controls in the game, but I think that's
overkill, and besides it would destroy immersion on the first
playing—the right to replay is good enough. This right also applies to
long monologues by mentor characters, mission briefings, scrolling
text, and any other period in the game when the player can only sit and
watch.
The Right to Quit, Pause, Save and Resume the Game. In
a single-player game, the player has the right to start and stop the
action at will, including switching the machine off and coming back to
the game later, i.e. saving and reloading. The player has a right to do
this an indefinite number of separate times until the save-device's
memory fills up. I will make one exception about saving, for
games that last 30 minutes or less. Other than that, you must allow him
to save. I've been over this ground before, so I'm not going to list
all the arguments again. The player's right to save and quit is
absolute, and it trumps your right to make the game harder by not
letting him do so, and any other excuse you may have. No, I don't care
what you think. Shut up and do it.
The Right to Choose Not to Save the Game. Some
games give the player only one save point, and the game saves to it
automatically. Occasionally, the game does this beyond a point at which
the player will inevitably lose the game—which means the previous save
is lost and the current one is worthless. This is evil, bad, and wrong.
Besides, a good many players like to establish an extra challenge for
themselves of making it through a tough spot without saving. Players
should be able to save when they want, and should not have to save until they want.
The Right to Reconfigure the Input Device. A little leeway is required here for very small
games on things like a Tamagotchi or a handheld. But on a PC or a
console, the player should be able to adjust which button does what in
the primary gameplay mode so that the game is most convenient to use.
We're not all right-handed and we don't all speak English. Mnemonics
like “C for crouch” mean nothing in other languages. How far you go in
supporting this right is up to you, but you should do it if your device
supports it.
The Right Not To Be Insulted. I downloaded somebody's version of Minesweeper for my cell phone the other day. Minesweeper is
one of those games that you can lose instantly, by pure bad luck. It's
a short game, so that's OK. But in this particular version, if you
accidentally trigger a mine, the game puts up a message saying, “Better
learn the RULES,” and that's simply insulting. Of course I know the
rules. This need to taunt the player for making a mistake, or losing
the game, seems to be a weakness of young male game designers, and it's
a bad practice. With a lot of games, the only way to win is by
repeatedly losing until you know your way through them. If I'm going to
be subjected to snide remarks every time this happens, a lot of the fun
goes out of the game. It's a sure sign that the designer is designing
for himself, not for the player.
Notice
that I said “insulted,” not “offended.” People can be offended by a lot
of things, often without the designer intending it. But an insult is
deliberate and personal, and there's no excuse for it.
So
that's my Bill of Players' Rights: a dozen fundamental rights that
every game must respect. You might wonder why I don't include a “Right
to Have Fun.” The reason is that no game can guarantee that to every
player. Fun is an emotional response to playing, it's not something
that you can build into a game and know for sure it's there for all
players. Whether the player has fun or not depends in part on whether
she likes the kind of game you made, and that's something you have no
control over. Besides, some games are used for research or study;
they're not necessarily designed to be fun at all.
My
Bill of Players' Rights is by no means complete, and I welcome
suggestions for additions. Remember, though, a “right” should be
something that is general enough to apply across the whole spectrum of
gaming, not just to one genre of game or one type of device.