Lens
#9 in Jesse Schell’s awesome book – The Art of Game Design is all about
endogenous value. If you consider this
in your game design you will have a simple but powerful tool which helps to write engaging games that have longevity.
In this post I will look at what
endogenous value is, examples of games which employ strong endogenous value and
not so strong. I will also look at past
console gaming, modern console gaming and mobile gaming. There is also a discussion about how well
themed objects/tasks without high endogenous value contribute little to a game
but objects/tasks with high endogenous values but not themed particularly well
can still add to your game. I will also
look at whether this is a fundamental necessity of a game or if we can do
without it.
What is Endogenous Value?
It’s a mouthful for a start. Schell draws this from a quote from Greg Costikyan:
“[A game is] an interactive structure of endogenous meaning that requires players to struggle toward a goal.”
Endogenous is a biological term which means growing or developing from within. Schell breaks it down like this – there are items, objects and tasks within a game that have inherent value within that game but not outside of it. So for example a ‘1-up’ has good endogenous value within the game because it gives you a safety net. A power-up for a weapon in a side-scrolling shooter also has endogenous value within the game. It lets you kill enemies easier and quicker. But outside of the game it is worthless. You cannot trade it for anything else or eat it or even give it your mum on her birthday which you’ve forgotten :S (sorry Mum) A few examples will make this clearer.
Bubsy – Accolade 1992, SNES & MegaDrive
If Schell hadn’t pointed this example out I would never have heard of this game. It is a platformer fairly typical of the era. Pretty good graphics and soundtrack, high production value and utterly forgettable. Bubsy is an example of not considering the value of objects and tasks within the game world.
Bubsy is a cat that has to do the typical platformer thing – get from one end of the level to the other. Along the way he can collect balls of yarn which increase his point score. Thematically this is spot on. Cats and balls of yarn go together like sex and regret – great fun at the time but not so great when you’re coughing up a fur ball. But what tends to happen is that the player learns quite quickly that there is no real value in picking up the balls of yarn because the score is meaningless. The players main motivation is to complete the level – it solves the problem of how am I going to get to the other side of the level without dying and marks progress through the game.
The balls of yarn were an unnecessary distraction that most people ignored because they had low endogenous value. This cannot be said of the next example.
Sonic 2 – Sega 1992, MegaDrive
Let’s face it this is one of the all-time greats. Simple game play, good graphics, exciting and another example of a sequel that was better than the original. I spent hours playing this game with my friends – going through the levels, finding the extra lives and doing the bonus levels. Not to mention the time we discovered you could use the second controller to move Tails, a moment of sublime excitement (this probably counts towards lens #2 The Lens of Surprise).
If we are to compare Sonic 2 to Bubsy then thematically a fast hedgehog collecting rings is nowhere near as consistent as a cat collecting balls of yarn. However the collection of rings did provide a ramp up of endogenous value. At the basic level a ring offered protection. If you got hit in the face by a coconut lobbed at you by a monkey in a tree you wouldn’t die. You would lose your ring and have the opportunity to exact your revenge. If you collected 100 rings you got an extra life which feels like a bloody good thing when you consider console games had no persistence. Turn it off or lose all your lives and that’s it chuck. You’re starting again. But more than that, collecting 50 rings gave you the opportunity to play the bonus level to get a chaos emerald.
Already we can see that the player is going to be more motivated by rings than balls of yarn. And actually the endogenous value of the rings was so high that eventually they became more important than completing the levels and defeating Dr. Robotnik. It was actually the Chaos Emeralds that Dr. Robotnik wanted and if you got all of those you could complete the game fully.
Bubsy v Sonic 2
Maybe Sonic 2 was just the better game. It was the standard bearer for the console and thus needed to be top notch. Besides we are talking about a time in game development where Japanese game companies were more successful than their western counterparts. Maybe it’s just coincidence that Bubsy got the balls of yarn thing so wrong. There could be an element of truth to this. Is there any more evidence that the internal value of objects has a bearing on gameplay experience?
Who remembers the time bonus in Sonic 2? There it was at the end of every level, a complete waste of pixels. Thematically it’s much more consistent than rings – a fast hedgehog would take pride in completing a level quickly you would assume. But what’s the point of spending months and years on a game that people are going to try to whizz through without stopping to find the secret boxes? The fact that this bonus would not affect the experience of the game if it was removed suggests to me that internal value is more important than thematic consistency. But I bet there is a counter example out there.
Resident Evil IV – Nintendo 2005, Gamecube & Wii & PS2 & Windows
Time for a confession. I am one of the unnervingly high numbers of fans of this game. But there was always one aspect of it I found jarring and it went like this:
“Welcome.” In a husky voice. “What are you buying.”
The collection of jewels in this game and the selling for ptas to buy upgrades annoyed me. It felt like a chore. I had to find these jewels so I could sell them and then decide what upgrades I wanted as I could only fit so many into my invisible briefcase. Realistically the game would be unnecessarily difficult if you didn’t upgrade. So you’ve got to do it and therefore it has high internal value but thematically it sucks. The village is overrun by mindless hosts of some horrifying parasite yet this guy stands around, clearly marked by blue flames with a mobile shop selling small arms and health packs. I wasted a lot of ammo on this sucker the first time I saw him and I wanted to report him to the UN for profiteering because his prices were so high.
Luckily everything else was awesome. But I did feel at the time that exploration would have been a better way of upgrading weapons. Maybe the jewels could unlock rooms that contained the upgrades with a mini-boss guarding it.
I think the problem with this is that the internal value wasn’t high enough. You could find weapons out in the map. Normally you did find one before it became available in the weapon mini-market so it was kind of pointless. If the shop was the only means of upgrading then it may have been more of a place of refuge and safety much like the box rooms in the earlier resident evil games and a valuable opportunity to re-group.
But we are dealing with a more evolved medium now. The story behind Sonic 2 was lightweight compared to Resident Evil IV. Perhaps the considerations I am talking about aren’t so important for modern console games and that’s why one of the biggest games of recent history was happy to ride rough shod over this consideration. But there are modern games that have good theming and tasks and objects with good internal value.
Bioshock – 2k Boston 2007, Xbox 360 & Windows & PS3
Another great game. Followed up by a great sequel. In this the task of collecting Adam from the sisters is thematically excellent and does have a high endogenous value. It allows you to upgrade and the manner in which you extract also contributes to the story. But still you can move through the game without collecting it and avoiding fights with the Big Daddy’s. It will get progressively harder but you can find Adam dotted around the levels. In this sense Bioshock is a better game than Resident Evil IV. There are other issues with the game, not very serious ones, but in this sense it is a fine example of well integrated sub tasks that have value. So it is still something you should consider to be of prime importance? Maybe.
Mobile Gaming
Just when you think you’ve got a handle on something Angry Birds comes along. We hit a real issue here. A lot of the games on mobile phones are targeted at the casual gamer. The guy/girl/ogre that has a few minutes to burn, not much of a track record with games and doesn’t mind dropping a quid or two on a game. As a result of this the structure of a lot of mobile games is such that they could be considered a collection of individual games with the same theme. So once you’ve done level 10 you can forget that and pick up on level 11 next time you start playing. No concept of energy, lives, money, normally only a nod towards a point system, each level is a puzzle to be solved then you move on. Great.
Well not so great actually. What if you want to put objects into your game which have an inherent value? For starters the endogenous value is limited to the game world. So immediately there are questions about how you give something value when each level is treated like its own game. Should you be able to carry an advantage into the next level? Won’t this ruin the game by making it too easy?
Let’s imagine a scenario where if you destroy all the pigs with one bird you unlock a new bird type – the Nukabird. It has much greater damage potential, can control its direction in mid-flight and really hates those pigs. You unlock this bird on level 1, the rest of the game is a breeze and your player stops playing after level 8 because it is too easy. On top of which they fail to see the value of the Nukabird because they haven’t experienced levels 2 through 8 without it. Disappointment ensues. They tell their friends and those guys at Rovio aren’t doing so well. Were Rovio right to not consider adding objects with an internal value? Absolutely.
It’s not all that way on the mobile front though. Consider if you will Doodle Jump. It’s simple, fun and challenging and what’s this. A pair of springy shoes! Wow I can jump further with these, score points quicker and reach higher platforms. Now I’ve got a rocket pack, I’m invincible, for a while anyway and I’ve basically had a bonus of a few thousand points. Excellent.
Obviously these items have value to the player whilst they are playing the game. Of course the structure is different to Angry Birds. It is essentially an arcade game, score as many points as you can without dying. This structure provides an opportunity to provide an array of objects with varying endogenous values. And it adds to the game and is thematically fairly well integrated. So what does this mean? There are some games where we should be spending time thinking about this sort of stuff and games where we shouldn’t?
Conclusions
I’ve discussed how various games address the issue of endogenous value in game design. I have mostly stuck with games that most people would consider successful and looked at how they’ve dealt with it. If it was fundamental to any game that it has objects/tasks within it that had high endogenous value then all these games would have it other than Bubsy. But we can see that they don’t. But we can also see is that where there are tasks/objects within the game that can have a high or low internal value then it is imperative that they have a high value or even a ramp-up. Some games it is not suitable to have these types of objects and it should not be a matter of crow barring them in. For example Braid – would that be any better if it you had collectable items that altered the time warping effects of the different levels? More likely it would be case of managing this so that it didn’t ruin the overall game. So when should we think about this?
Always. If it’s not a suitable consideration you need to think about it and determine what effect to the player experience would this have that makes it not suitable? If you don’t you could end up putting balls of yarn into your game which wastes your time, the developers time, the artists time etc. However, if you don’t put something in there that would augment the experience then you would end up not producing as good a game as you could have. Nobody in game development wants to do that. Besides players pick up on this sort of thing. A good game does the details well, and these are the details the player interacts with so they will know if something is not well themed, or if it could be done better. If you’re lucky they will ignore it, if not it could be a 3 star rating instead of a 4 or 5.
