(Continued from Volume 13)
Throughout the previous two volumes, I explained the viability of the universal laws of game design as a backbone of future applications in the field of interspecies gaming. The idea that was first expounded was the weakening of the so-called "entertainment industry" as a profitable niche, which led to the notion that development efforts of our upcoming generations will eventually be more focused on multidisciplinary applications of games such as those which directly generate revenue from our primary industries such as farming, mining, fishery, forestry, and manufacturing.
This source of inspiration originates from the belief that, as the gaming market has been becoming more and more of a red ocean (compounded by the fact that contemporary game developers are competing with not only other developers but also AI and other means of automation), a game which is solely designed for human entertainment is hardly going to survive as a reliable means of income generation. This has been evidenced by the disproportionately huge focus on the concept of P2E (Play to Earn) happening in our Web3 gaming community, which suggests that one can no longer sufficiently convince the audience of the value of a game without giving them an obvious financial incentive to play it.
It is not nonsensical to conclude, therefore, that we are entering a new era of gaming in which the very definition of the term "game" must broaden itself out towards areas which had previously been deemed completely irrelevant to the notion of gaming. One may say that this has already been happening in many non-mainstream gameplay applications such as therapeutic games, educational games, training simulations, and so forth, yet such use cases are more or less solely focused on human experiences and thus are quite limited in their scope compared to the full spectrum of possibilities we may potentially uncover.
What the universal laws of game design are aiming at is a solid set of philosophies which will help us lay down the theoretical foundation for games that can be played not only by human beings, but also by livestock, agricultural crops, fish, wild animals, and even microscopic organisms. And the reasoning behind this kind of endeavor is that, once we figure out how to make a game that is universally playable by our planet's entire ecosystem, we will be able to turn our whole globe (aka "Gaia") into a gamer who has the potential to "pay" us by means of changing its own environmental configuration which can be considered beneficial to mankind (See volume 12 for more details).
Someone might say, "Animals are too stupid to play games that are made by humans. And we cannot even make them playtest and give us constructive feedback. You are speaking pure nonsense here!" To such a point of argument, I would first respond by saying that the average human player is not that intelligent either, and also that the series of reasons I am about to display below all speak in favor of what I have been suggesting so far.
(1) First of all, animals do not necessarily have to be "smart" in the sense of general intelligence in order to be able to play games. Abstract forms of reasoning which are deemed exclusive to mankind, such as symbol-based languages, mathematics, and so forth, are hardly needed in the act of play unless we are aiming to design a complex management simulator or a strategy game which requires a great deal of background knowledge and insight. After all, today's gaming industry, due to its extremely high degree of internal competition, has already been veering towards the direction of massive "dumbing down" of the whole entertainment sphere by oversimplifying games all the way down to the most instantly gratifying level of gluttony one can ever conceive of (e.g. hypercasual games). Such an ongoing shift in the mainstream game design strategy already pretty much aligns with the phenomenon we can expect from our near future - that is, games that are so incredibly patronizing in terms of the level of intellect they require from the user, that they can even be played by an amoeba.
(2) Conducting playtest with animals is far easier than with human beings. We do not need to compensate animals for playtesting, nor do we ever have to ask animals to reserve their own time slots to test the game. Also, animals do not have to be our friends, acquaintences, or fans in order to let us convince them that it is worthwhile to spend their time playing the game without incentives that are sufficiently great in magnitude. All we have to do is simply put the game console in front of animals in the cage (if they are either livestock or lab animals) or just put it in the middle of a natural habitat such as a forest, a meadow, or an ocean. As long as the game console is designed to automatically interact with any nearby animals of our interest (whether they be wild cats, insects, birds, wolves, fish, etc), the only work we will have to do is place a functioning copy of that console in an appropriate place and wait for playtesters to naturally come over out of curiosity. Receiving feedback from animal playtesters, too, is a piece of cake. Unlike human beings whose range of responses are quite complex and are subject to great individual variances (e.g. Hardcore Gamers VS Casual Gamers, In-App Purchasers VS Ad-Watchers, etc), animals and their monetary outputs are pretty straightforward to measure and analyze. Want to design a game which increases revenue in the dairy industry? Just measure the average quantity of milk generated by a group of cows which played the game, and compare it with the average quantity of milk generated by a group of cows which did not play the game. The resulting difference should indicate the amount of "success" of the game in terms of extra milk production, and any change in the game's design which increments this particular metric should be considered a right decision to make.
(3) Animal gamers are much easier to deal with than human gamers, which is an obvious advantage when it comes to the amount of work that is involved in tricky interpersonal businesses such as "customer service", "community maintenance", and all that jazz. Animals do not demand release dates, early access privilege, demo footage, Discord server moderation, marketing hype, buzzwords, and many others which pertain to the social psychology of the mass rather than the game's intrinsic quality as a medium of interaction. Animals do not even leave a single negative comment on Steam, nor do they complain whenever they feel like they are required to pay something which is worth more than a quarter dollar in order to obtain a special sword that is powerful enough to wipe out the whole dungeon as soon as it touches one of its hitboxes. Animals simply interact with what is available right in front of them if they are interested, or simply leave if they are not interested. There is no need to cuddle them like babies who need constant emotional care, and this is definitely a huge budget-saver when we consider the amount of workforce which would've been forced to be expended otherwise.
(4) Animals are much more straightforward in their reward-driven behaviors than humans. A typical human gamer would often expect a well-formulated lore, immersive UI/UX, hyper-realistic graphics and sound, non-exploitative in-game economy, meta-game features such as events, leaderboards, eSports (e.g. spectator mode), and many other complex systems which, when combined as a whole, are prone to convolute the whole product into an ugly mess of engineering nightmare. Animals, on the other hand, are extremely simple in their demands and their behaviors are way more predictable. All we have to do is give them food or anything else that they are naturally fond of (such as catnip for cats) whenever they do what we want them to do. Any conscious biological being that is keen to perceive the obvious advantage of being engaged in an act of exchange qualifies as one of our customers, and I am sure that our planet's ecosystem is primarily filled with such economically minded beings because most of them would have gone extinct if strategic decision-making weren't part of their appetite. For our own benefit, therefore, we just have to give them things which are more valuable to them than to us (such as grass for cows, since we cannot eat grass but cows can), in exchange for them giving us things which are more valuable to us than to them (such as a piece of coal, ore, or gem, since animals do not use them).
(5) Marketing will be close to being unnecessary if we do not consider human beings as our main target audience. Humans are way too much occupied with social media, work, hobbies, conversations, and many other daily distractions, which compels us to utilize various marketing strategies such as advertisement, teasers, and community-building just for the slightest hope of grabbing people's attention. Animals, on the other hand, have a much more confined list of interests (e.g. seeking foods, finding mates, protecting one's offspring) which means that we can easily grab their attention as long as we manage to present them with a medium which pertains to one of such instinctual focal points. A machine which emits a smell of food, for instance, will attract wild animals even from a long distance as long as it is placed amidst a forest, without having to explain to them why this particular smell of food is something worth spending their time on. This will continue to be the case unless the entire forest gets flooded with too many of such machines, in which case the target animals are likely to be spread out in multiple places and thus reduce the overall density of engagement in each machine.
Due to reasons like these, it is quite a surprise for me to realize that most game developers and publishers have been focusing solely on human entertainment which represents only a tiny fraction of what games can offer from a business point of view.
Another question which may arise at this point is, "Okay, I get your flow of logic here. But why on earth would you have any reason to claim that the so-called "universal laws of game design" are antecedent to the idea of interspecies gaming? If interacting with animals is much simpler than interacting with humans, why would we even need such a seemingly complicated set of theories to be able to construct games that are expected to be played by animals?"
To be honest, a theoretical framework is probably not necessary for a mere proof of concept. We may as well just build a vending machine which dispenses a fish whenever a dolphin donates a piece of plastic, for instance, and place it somewhere inside the ocean to let it function as an ocean cleaner. And for sure, such an application does not require any "theory" other than ones that are needed for figuring out how to manufacture such a machine and where to place it. So when it comes to immediate applicability, case-by-case analysis may suffice (e.g. "What does this animal want, and what can we gain from it when we give it what it wants?", etc).
We should also note, however, that the domain of interactions we are dealing with in interspecies gaming is the whole ecosystem (rather than completely isolated environments) where countless living things and natural resources are causally related to one another. When we place a game console in the middle of a forest which gives food to foxes whenever they play a game, for example, it can be expected to warp the forest's ecological dynamics in ways which may either benefit or harm us due to its side effects such as: (1) Increment in the number of potential preys of the foxes due to the introduction of an alternative source of nutrients, (2) Increment in the total number of foxes because of the increased chances of mating due to the fact that they now tend to gather in the same place (i.e. near the game console), (3) Higher chances for predators to hunt down foxes because they may be vulnerable against external attacks while playing games, and so on.
The long-term consequence of such side effects is something which requires a great deal of scientific research to predict, and is not something we can foresee just by looking at individual cases and their immediate outcomes. When we are developing games which are designed to entertain human beings, we can assure that such games will not directly influence our environment as a whole because it will only involve changes in the moods of human players and their personal expenditure of their own personal time. When we are developing games which are designed to involve direct exchanges of tangible resources with wild animals, on the other hand, we must be aware of their direct influences over the environment because such factors may severely disturb the overall balance of the food chain and hurt our passage of income in the long run.
And in order to analyze the ecological implications of a game in a scientific manner, we must reestablish the whole game design framework based upon a purely mathematical model which does not attach itself to vague emotional terminologies such as "fun", "engaging", and "creative". It is because what we are dealing with here is a set of strictly quantitative relations among things which pertain to our economic interests.
The underlying theory of the new kind of game design I have introduced so far is meant to be both mathematically minimal and quantitatively expandable - "minimal" because the design must be understood by anyone who has received a decent level of education, and "expandable" because the design's scope must be able to encompass the entirety of our ecosystem rather than specific use cases alone. And for the purpose of justifying this train of logic, I will start with an example that is fairly easy to understand.
Let us imagine that we are in the middle of a jungle, which is populated by a sufficiently high number of monkeys. We have a machine mounted on a fairly visible part of the ground, not obscured too much by rocks and trees (which makes it an ideal spot for attracting animal customers). If we are to let this machine execute a game that is playable by any monkey in this habitat, what shall we do?
The very first step I can think of is to just use our common sense. For example, we know that monkeys eat bananas, right? This means that the machine should probably be able to have a bunch of bananas ready and hand them over to monkeys whenever they "win" the game. This is a rudimentary reward mechanism which is so simple and straightforward, that even an average human player can understand it (which means monkeys should have no trouble understanding it as well).
The next step is to determine the condition of winning, as well as to make sure that monkeys understand it. This is a tricky part of the design because we want to require monkeys to exhibit a behavior which is beneficial to us before they win the game. Obviously, it is necessary for us to first identify types of monkey-activities which provide us with resources that are valuable to us, and then find out a way to make monkeys realize that they ought to perform those activities in order to receive the treats they desire.
The aforementioned criteria should be satisfied if we interface things in the right way. For sure, a completely opaque and airtight box with a bucketful of bananas in it won't encourage monkeys to partake in any banana-seeking attempts, since they won't even realize that there are bananas in the first place. The machine should be designed to let monkeys notice the presence of bananas (probably by means of a transparent and scent-emitting chamber), as well as to let them learn the method of obtaining those bananas. This "learning" part of the interface is indeed quite difficult to formulate because, just like human players, monkeys do not read instruction manuals. Thus we cannot teach them the full course of the game's reward mechanism right at the very beginning of their gameplay experience (If we try to do so, they will simply get frustrated and "rage quit" just as a typical human player would do).
A solution to the problem stated above is to break down the whole game into a series of individual missions, each of which is so simple and intuitive that monkeys already know how to play it. For instance, let us suppose that we want monkeys to deposit pieces of wood into the machine in exchange for receiving bananas as a reward (because we would like to use those pieces of wood as a fuel). Since we do not know how to directly explain this win-condition to monkeys, we must solve this communication problem by splitting it into smaller ones which parallel the sequence of archetypal monkey-behaviors.
When a monkey sees a cage of bananas, it may try to reach one of them by stretching its arm as much as possible. When this primary method fails, it may try to open it up by the act of beating, shaking, pushing, and pulling. When this secondary method fails, it may try to search for a hidden passage through which it may enter the cage, and so on and so forth. Here, we can recognize that the monkey's decision-making process consists of a cascade of problem-solving strategies which are functionally separable from one another.
What this means is that these individual strategies can be mapped into their own corresponding reward-and-punishment feedback loops, which will effectively turn them into mini-games (aka "quests") that can be played by the monkey without requiring it to learn anything new (because such a series of mini-games, when carefully crafted, will align with the monkey's default line of behaviors).
Such decomposition will then help the designer construct each phase of the game in a highly modular manner, thereby reducing the complexity of the design process by orders of magnitude. Once decomposed, each part will then be able to be represented as a discrete mathematical (i.e. atom-based) model which had been described so far. In the next volume, I will explain the benefits of this approach.
(Will be continued in Volume 15)