Extra Credits

Making your first game can be difficult. Remember that your goal is to make a game, any game, not necessarily a complex game like the ones professional teams of game developers in a studio can produce. By starting small and focusing on the basic gameplay, a new game designer can learn a lot about their skills and build on that for their next game (or the next version of their first game). That way, you can actually complete a playable game instead of getting stuck on the details as so many first time game makers do.

Now that you know the basic principles of how to make your first game (remember: start small!), it's time to break that down into a process you can follow to finish your first game. These tips will move into the details: how to plan your production schedule for your game, what to do when those plans go haywire, and more. Above all, it's important to understand that every step of making your first game will teach you something important, and that the learning process doesn't stop when development ends: show your finished game to other people, get their feedback, and be proud of what you made!

When you're making your first game, we've told you to start small, but that may leave you wondering: just how small should you be planning for? This brings us to the concept of minimum viable product: figuring out exactly which features your game needs to be fun. It's often fewer than you think! Paring a game down to its basic mechanics has many advantages. It stops you from getting stuck in development, working on features too complex for your skill level. It ensures that you make visible progress towards a concrete end goal. And best of all, it allows you to focus on the core mechanics to make sure your gameplay alone is engaging.

Before you finish your first game, even before you're ready to publish it, you should plan your marketing and PR campaign. Being an independent game designer means it's up to you to get word out about your game! Start by thinking about what makes your game great and finding a way to say that. Once you've figured out your pitch, put together a short trailer and website so you can contact every news site, big and small. Remember, they want content, too! Entering your game into contests like the Independent Games Festival can help you get additional press if your game does well. Don't be afraid to call on favors, reach out to influential game designers, and join podcasts or livestreams to help you find your audience. And finally, think broadly about where you will publish your game. There are more digital distributors than ever, and they're more accessible than you may think!

Many studies have investigated whether or not there is a link between video games and violence, but few have looked at the bigger picture. What is the correlation between video games and empathy? Since games put us, as players, in the role of characters who are not ourselves, asking us to understand their situation and the problems that they face, they have the potential to teach us about how to empathize with others. While many gamers have anecdotal evidence about games that made them feel a character's pain, there's a disappointing lack of formal studies into that side of the question.

Assumptions that certain games are only for people of a certain gender have driven game design decisions for years. Genres that are stereotyped as male, such as first person shooters, are surrounded by the trappings of a supposedly male identity: guns, warfare, and so on. Games that are stereotyped as female, such as match three games, are decorated with gender signifiers like gems and jewelry. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle as designers see mostly people of the gender-targeted audience buying that type of game and so they double-down on the stereotyping, but this approach causes games as a whole to miss out on many opportunities for creative new games even within established genres. By eliminating our assumptions that certain mechanics only appeal to certain genders, we can create new experiences and find new audiences.

Games often condition us to go through the motions of solving the puzzle or saving the world without really asking us to take on the role of the character we're playing. But a few games, by intent or by accident, manage to make their world feel real to us, and invite us not just to play the game but to put ourselves in the same mindset as the people on screen. One of the biggest factors in creating that sense of connection is the existence of consequence: when a game makes it clear to us that our choices have an impact on the world that we're playing in and the people on screen can suffer for them, it compels us to consider every choice in terms of how it would affect the people we see in front of us. In causes us to get into character for whomever we are playing, and really put ourselves into their shoes so we experience their story as if it were our own.

For our long-running Games You Might Not Have Tried series, Extra Credits reviews and recommends a selection of video games that might have slipped under your radar. We've got everything from philosophical robots to roving Vikings!

Many multiplayer games have already embraced the idea of "soft" asymmetry, where different characters have skills and playstyles that make them unique but the overall game mechanics are the same. Recently, more games have begun to experiment with "hard" asymmetry where not only are individual characters different, but the game offers completely separate modes that interact with each other but share none of the same mechanics: for instance, a shooter (Dust 514) paired with a space exploration MMO (EVE Online). Where soft asymmetry promotes teamwork by giving players skills that work better when used with a team member, hard asymmetry has the potential to keep players (and their friends) invested in the same game even when they crave a different play experience.

During the convention season, games media often bursts with predictions about new trends and technology that will be the future of gaming - but many of those bold predictions never come to pass. Meanwhile, the small changes that don't make industry headlines have been building up, and right now in 2015 four patterns are clear. Asian markets in Japan, Korea, and China will expand into more parts of the West, especially as the cost to produce games gets so much higher than what their domestic markets can support. The short play sessions that have made mobile games popular with such a large audience will inform design even for traditional games in order to accommodate a maturing audience with less time to play. The power, flexibility, and above all usability of licensed engines will take over from in-house engines as they become too expensive to build with too few advantages. Finally, the rising cost of development will cause game assets to be re-used in spin-off titles that can help earn back the studio's investment in AAA titles.

Game length does not matter. Game quality does. Keep your work focused and don't be afraid to cut content that's good but not great. Special thanks to our audience for sending us their photos for the #ExtraSelfies tag! Every person featured in this episode is based on a real life Extra Credits viewer.

Games often focus on the flirtation and courtship of an early relationship, turning it into a game where saying the right thing means you will win over your romantic interest. These simple game systems fall far short of delivering on the complexity of human relationships. The player never has to face rejection, and they hardly ever find themselves on the receiving end of a proposition from an NPC companion whose feelings may be hurt by rejection (hi, Anders). Moreover, once the player's overtures are accepted, the game is "won:" very few games deal with break ups or the evolution of a relationship over time.

Games do not dictate our behavior, but they do affect us. They can affect us in positive ways, by letting us share experiences with other people or giving us a refuge from the troubles of our daily lives. They can also affect us in negative ways, however, by building Skinner Box traps that teach us to play for rewards, not for fun, and by monetizing our basic human interests instead of helping us explore them. While games are a business, that business is run by people who must take responsibility for the products they create and seriously consider the impact that games have in our society.

Part of treating players with respect is respecting the time they have to play your game. Exit points make sure your game offers players plenty of opportunities to put down the controller when they feel they have reached a good spot to stop. Gentle messages reminding them how much time they've played or offering accomplishments like new levels or zones can provide exit points. On the flip side, however, developers sometimes create unintended exit points with frustrating design choices. Long, punishing load screens in games where death is frequent may eventually cause a player who would otherwise want to continue decide to give up on trying more. Minimizing the number of unintended exit points while striking the right balance of intended exit points not only makes a game more humane, it also improves its design by preventing players from forming the negative impression of being "trapped" by a game.

How much time will players spend with your game in one sitting? The answer affects many aspects of your game's design, and you can remove the guesswork from it by thinking about the environment that surrounds your game and how that affects players' engagement with it. Are they at home, unwinding in front of their console? Or are they out for lunch, sneaking in turns between bites of food? Test the game in these environments, and learn how they affect the amount of time players are willing or able to put into your game. Then you can choose to design towards those constraints or perhaps decide that you need to move your game to a new environment (e.g. new platform, genre, or monetization method): in either case, recognizing those needs early will help you develop a better game.

The classic heroes whose stories have resonated through time have many features in common with each other. Whether it's strength or cunning or some other quality, they have greater powers than the average person - but they are not gods. They experience failure. This classical structure not only forces the character to recognize their own limits, it helps us relate to them as a human being and gives us a greater appreciation for their achievements. In video games, however, we see heroes who really can conquer every challenge. It lets us play out a power fantasy, but doesn't give us a meaningful story arc to watch the character grow. Studying classic heroes such as Achilles or Gilgamesh can help games improve their narrative by showing how we can write characters whose immense power and lust for battle can coexist with human failings that make a story more engaging.

Violence lies at the heart of the Western tradition. Rage is an essential part of human nature, one that literature, art, and games can help us explore in healthy ways. It gives us an outlet to cool down and helps us address the question of whether violence can be directed to a good cause, like saving the world or freeing people from oppression. There's value in that, but there's no value in sadistic games like Hatred. These games revel in the pain we cause to others, crossing the line from violence to cruelty. These games have every right to be made, and calls for a ban would be misdirected, but they have no right to be rewarded for exploiting cruelty to create sensation. Do not buy them. Do not glorify them. Do not mistake sadism for expression.

Valve's attempt to introduce a marketplace onto the Steam Workshop raises questions about the effect paid mods would have on the mod community and the game companies themselves. The modders get only a small percentage of sales, but that percentage is still better than the cost of licensing the game's brand or engine. Game developers must consider the risks of legal action if a modder sells content using copyrighted or trademarked material, because even if they had no direct hand in the content's creation, the fact that they make money from it may open them to lawsuits. It could also drive down the interest in DLC even further while driving up the demands on customer service, since players may have mistake bugs caused by their mods for bugs in the main game.

Rust assigns players a skin color on character creation, then ties it to their Steam account so they can never change it. This game design decision creates diversity in the player base and has forced many players to play as characters of an ethnicity different from their own. Since the game does not censor players' language, many of these players are hearing themselves called racial insults for the first time. While uncomfortable, this experience also pushes players who might normally be oblivious to those issues (or even participate in them) to consider things from a different perspective.

Force-of-Nature villains embody pure evil, or chaos, or other forces that move the world beyond the hero's control. They're not traditional characters with motives, desires, and a backstory that makes it easy to understand them. They exist purely to drive an agenda. The force they represent (and push relentlessly onto the world) defines the hero's values by interaction, giving the hero's human flaws and virtues greater value when contrasted with the villain's single-minded purpose. These villains are frequently portrayed as gods or monsters, like Sauron, but when written as humans, like the Joker or the Illusive Man, they are usually written as insane or obsessed.

Exploration appeals to basic human instincts, and the basic joy we get from discovery makes exploration a key element for many games. While the geographic discovery of finding new levels or zones is a great example of exploration in games, it's not the only type of exploration that exists. Among others, games can provide mechanical discovery, where players try new build paths or skill combos to increase their mastery of the game; content discovery, where players seek to unlock secrets or rush to open new packs to find out what they carry; and narrative discovery, where instead of being walked through a story the player must piece together backstory and lore from evidence they find around the world. This joy of discovery comes as much from the hunt as from the finding, but the designer must reward the player's successful exploration with new tools or insights to show that the game recognizes their efforts.

Designers graph gameplay engagement on a curve, making sure that new players have the time to learn and grow comfortable with the mechanics before introducing new ones. Yet for all that games have become more and more social with the spread of internet access, too many still bury new players in social mechanics while they're still trying to learn how to play. Just as games have tutorial levels, they should also ease the player into chat systems, auction houses, and guild participation one step at a time.

Once players like Emily have gotten comfortable with the mechanics of the game, they're ready to dip their toes into the social features. Early social challenges should be easy to complete in a single play session, like small raids that can easily be defeated by a random pick up group. Instead of just ramping up the difficulty to force players into groups, though, the game designer should give bonus rewards to players who work together (even if it's something as small as increasing their chance of getting better loot) without making solo missions impossible. Hitting this balance between low effort social tasks and better game rewards makes the player feel comfortable and confident about reaching out to other players, which is crucial to move them onto the next stage of social curve design.

Social play allows players like Emily to take on greater challenges than solo play. With the player's confidence in the game's mechanical challenges well established, the design can now push them towards social challenges. For example, the player may recognize instantly how to beat a high level raid boss, but to succeed at their plan they need to recruit other players to form the right party. Their successes naturally lead to them making friends with players they get along with, and at this point the community takes initiative into its own hands as players elect to join guilds or even step up to leadership. At the peak of social curve design, the prestige players get from coordinated play (exclusive loot, titles, and other visible bragging rights for beating the most difficult quests) becomes more of a reward than stats alone. While the designer must provide tools to make it easy for those players to coordinate with one another, they should still avoid the pitfall of making interactions automatic since that would undercut the entire cycle of social challenge and reward.

The Witcher: Wild Hunt distills all the best practices of hard-boiled detective novels and translates them brilliantly into a game. To understand how and why this works so well, we have to look at the origins of detective novels, going all the way back to Edward Allen Poe first showing us how feats of logic (as opposed to feats of raw strength) could be engrossing. Characters like Sherlock Holmes and authors like Agatha Christie turned that revelation into a formula, but one that often revolved around the English upper class or quaint country life with stories led by a detective who seemed outside and above it all. American detective novels like those of Raymond Chandler, whose essay in the Art of Murder could practically be a design document for the Witcher 3, broke with that tradition: they expanded the stories to not only show lower class people but humanize them, allowing the reader to learn and empathize with their stories through a detective who moves smoothly between both upper and lower classes with disdain for neither. The recent war upheavals in the Witcher create a society much like that in the hard-boiled detective novels, where everything and everyone is in flux. Geralt fits perfectly into the mold of the gritty detective, a sarcastic, unflappable person who can both give and take a beating but whose honor throughout is both unquestionable and unheralded. The main storyline of the Witcher III is a thread we follow as players, but the real value of the game lies in the stories we find along the way: the human moments we discover because the game gives us so much to explore.

Celebrity game developers from Japan have become frustrated with AAA development and begun breaking off to form their own, small teams. The AAA side of the industry is shrinking worldwide, focused solely on games that have marketability and thereby forcing derivative games with an emphasis on graphics over gameplay. In the US, this spurred small, relatively unknown developers to create games that succeeded on the back of innovations that broke with traditional rules. In Japan, however, it's famous developers who - frustrated with the limitations of large studios - have broken off to form small teams and return to their roots, perfecting old school game genres that they themselves created. While the success of this new direction is uncertain, the industry as a whole could stand to benefit from an increased focus on craftsmanship in our games.

Procedural generation can be used to create almost any kind of content, but in games, we usually see it used to create levels, enemy encounters, and loot drops. This random element allows games like Diablo to offer players infinite replayability, since every dungeon run will both look different and yield different results. This approach does have its weaknesses, however. Handcrafted levels will always be better at delivering a powerful experience that's mapped to the game's story pacing. Procedural generation is also best thought of as an economy of scale: the more levels you have, the more worthwhile it will be to program a procedural generation system since it's a complicated undertaking that must check for broken, unplayable maps and special rulesets in certain areas. It's also possible to merge the two, by having a specific handcrafted experience like a boss fight in the middle of an otherwise procedurally generated world. Overall, as more games start to focus on creating infinite content to keep players engaged, we can expect to see more procedural generation in our games.

A passionate community has grown around speedrunning, when players try to find the fastest possible way to complete a run. Different types of speedrun may require the player to beat the entire game or allow them to take shortcuts enabled by glitches. Game developers may want to attract an audience for their game through a design that appeals to this community, but to succeed they should keep three factors in mind. First, focus on tight controls so the runner can focus on their path through the game. Second, allow them the versatility of multiple approaches, but make sure the game provides enough consistency that each performance of the same route can be executed in the same time (or close to it). Scripted enemies vs. AI that generates random responses help with that! Finally, be mindful of how patching affects the speedrunners who are learning your game: you can still patch, but try to patch in new options for the community along with your bug fixes!

Making new content is expensive, time-consuming, and risky. Many publishers have fallen back on remastering their previous games, where they only need to upscale the graphics and can rely on an existing fanbase to buy the game again. This risk averse approach to publishing has led the current generation of consoles to be dominated by remasters instead of new AAA titles. Remasters can make old games more accessible, but recently they've been focused on simply updating last gen games that many people could still easily play. But truly old titles have become so out-of-date that any remaster would require the game to be built from the ground up, as we're seeing right now with the Final Fantasy VIII remake, and cost just as much as a brand new game. Despite the trend of games being remastered, then, many classic games are actually being ignored.

World War 2 games like Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, and Battlefield flooded the market during the 1990's and continued to dominate the first person shooter genre for years to come. Players grew fatigued with the sheer number of them, however, especially since it seemed that many replayed the same battles over and over again in new game engines. But in their rush to recreate the most famous moments of WW2 for the Western World, they left huge, important, and very game-worthy parts of the war unexplored. It was called a World War for a reason, yet many fronts of WW2 in Africa or Asia have never been covered in a game. Developers could also focus on a specific battle rather than trying to cover the entire experience, allowing players to experience the highs and lows of a single, fierce struggle. They could also change the gameplay from traditional run 'n gun shooter to styles that have worked for games like Far Cry or Red Dead Redemption, focusing on raiding parties or freedom fighters. And finally, they can make the world outside the battle feel more real by engaging with real themes of the war - far too many WW2 games have simply ignored the Holocaust and acted as though the war took place in a cultural vacuum.

Progression systems in games are far too often designed as Skinner boxes: psychological traps that feed us carefully measured rewards to create habit-forming activity loops. Skinner boxes are not rewarding in themselves, but progression systems can be, and they should be used to create a better game experience. Building in choices that allow the player to select their own build (and optimize it) lets the player think ahead and makes progression a part of the game experience in itself. It also helps them become familiar with the systems in the game at their own pace as they level up. These systems can even actively make the game better by encouraging players to try and then improve on the most engaging types of play, giving rewards for skill or strategy, for example. Finally, they can actually enhance the story, giving the players faction alignment that responds to their actions in the game and locks or unlocks hidden parts of the story as they progress.

We're big fans of Seattle-based "escape the room" designers Puzzle Break, so we teamed up with them to run a big, 100+ person party during PAX. The premise is simple: you're locked in a room with a group of other people and given one hour to find the key to escape. Most groups don't finish in time, but it's still the best team-building exercise ever. Turning a puzzle game into a multiplayer experience creates three distinct aspects of play: finding the clues, assembling those clues, and then using them to solve the puzzle. People who normally might not enjoy the solo experience of a traditional puzzle game, such as those who enjoy exploration or communication, will find lots to do here. Even traditional puzzle solvers will need to apply different types of logic to solve the wide variety of challenges in the room. This set-up allows everyone to display their talents, and rewards groups for having a diverse set of skills. It also teaches you a lot about the members of your team!

The Fallout Shelter app's breakout success took everyone, including Bethesda, by surprise. It's a casual, free-to-play game - exactly what many hardcore players hate - but it became so popular that its revenue overtook Candy Crush, the traditional King of the mobile market. Nor is it just the traditional mobile players who hopped on board: user reviews and the game's forum come from the hardcore audience. The simple gameplay inspired by Tiny Tower has very little interactivity and is heavily timer-based. It also makes the best characters available only to those who pay money for the game's "lunchbox" gachapon. So why does this game succeed where other hardcore-into-casual games like Bioware's Heroes of Dragon Age or EA's Dungeon Keeper reboot failed? It may be that the lack of energy systems and PvP, traditional drivers of F2P monetization, made the game more friendly and less demanding to play.

Geralt in The Witcher III: Wild Hunt finds himself torn between two women he loves. His relationship with Yennefer is passionate but tumultuous, while his relationship with Triss is more tender and caring. Choosing between these two women doesn't feel like picking your favorite option at a buffet, a fault that Bioware romance options often fall into - it feels like defining Geralt as a person through the choice he makes. Geralt's relationship with these women reflects an inner conflict about who he already is (Yennefer) and who he wants to be (Triss). It also showcases a weakness in the "blank slate" character model so common in Western RPGs: by giving the player full control over who the character is, we actually limit ourselves since we can only define the character in broad, easy to design strokes such as "good" or "evil." The defined character and existing backstory of Geralt allowed the Witcher 3 developers to create nuanced choices that help the player think about who he is and what his choices mean.

To understand the debates over frame rate that pop up over so many new game releases, we have to start with an understanding of what frame rate means and does. All moving video is really composed of a sequence of still images, or frames. The rate at which we change those frames determines how smooth the motion looks. In film, the standard frame rate is 24fps, but that's actually a slow rate which creates effects like motion blur that our brains have been trained to recognize as cinematic. Video games aim for a minimum of 30fps, however, because the interactivity means that a slower frame rate can make the game feel laggy. While developers sometimes hit a higher framerate, we usually only hear 30fps and 60fps discussed because our TV and computer monitors refresh in intervals of 30, although we can turn off vertical sync (vsync) to get somewhat closer to the refresh rates pumped out by our graphics cards. So why do developers sometimes cap frame rate at 30fps? Sometimes it's contractual - they're prohibited from making a PC version definitively better than its console equivalent - and sometimes it's bad architecture - a game that's programmed to check something every frame becomes more laggy the more frames there are. But in the end, to achieve a higher framerate, developers have to trade off other aspects of the game's performance, and every industry study shows that better graphics trump better framerate when it comes to sales.

Since we last talked about power creep on Extra Credits, the phrase has become widely used by many players and yet it is often used incorrectly. Many Hearthstone players responding to the recent "Grand Tournament" expansion have called out the wrong cards as examples: Evil Heckler and Ice Rager are numerically better than cards from the original set (Booty Bay Bodyguard and Magma Rager), but those original cards were so weak that they almost never saw play. The new cards fix that because they meet the game's power curve (the graph of power vs. cost to play) so they're actually playable. But the last set, Goblins vs. Gnomes, contained a card that serves as a perfect example of what power creep actually is: the Piloted Shredder offers such high value relative to other cards of that same cost that it basically becomes the best choice in almost any deck. To respond to that, Blizzard added more cards that have the same cost as the Piloted Shredder, but can kill it without dying themselves. This is true power creep: when one element of a game becomes so strong that the entire game must shift to match it. It effectively deletes the design space for any equally costed card that can't compete with the Piloted Shredder, and if Blizzard can't find a way to reign it back in, then it will eventually force the entire power curve of the game to creep upwards.

Most games released today are expected to have at least a 5-year lifecycle with patches and expansions. As the original design team moves on to new jobs, they must be careful about what they design and try to lay down a set of best practices to prevent new designers from creating new features that accidentally break the game. Hearthstone's Grand Tournament expansion provides good examples to look at. The Tuskarr Totemic, which summons one other card labeled "totem" into the game when played, is currently balanced since only one-third of totems are strong cards. To prevent this card from getting out of control, Hearthstone designers will need to maintain that ratio or the odds of the Tuskarr Totemic completely changing the board in favor of the player who uses it get out of control. On the other hand, the Druid's Living Roots card is currently balanced, but has much more potential to unbalance the game because it can be used to summon multiple small creatures. This opens the door to combinations: any time another card (like Savage Roar) rewards having more creatures on the board, Living Roots can become unbalanced. Finally, there is the new Druid card Astral Communion, whose properties boil down to "win the game immediately" or "lose the game immediately." This card accelerates late game in such a way that it basically has to be unplayable (like it currently is) or it completely breaks the game, making it a risky card to release and an interesting choice from Hearthstone's designers.

Bartle's Taxonomy was the earliest attempt to break down player psychology in a multiplayer environment. Richard Bartle, who created the first MUD in 1978, interviewed the players of his games about why they played. Their responses fit into four categories, which we now call Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers. Achievers focus on in-game goals like getting high scores or collecting gold. Explorers seek to discover new locations on the map or new ways to use the mechanics. Socializers come to meet people, often organizing guilds or collecting on social forums. Killers seek to dominate other players, usually by killing them in PvP. Bartle went further than creating these four categories, however: he also mapped them to a graph with Action-Interaction on one axis and Player-World on the other. This simple graph helps developers evaluate new content: what category does it fall into, and therefore what type of gameplay does it encourage?

Dr. Richard Bartle's Taxonomy provides rough guidelines for understanding the types of motivations that players have. It also allows us to appeal to those players in broad groups, for example, providing easter eggs to lure in Explorer type players. These players groups also have a natural synergy with each other: for example, killers like to prey upon achievers, so they require a population of achievers to enjoy the game. But if there are too many killers, then it gets in the way of any achievers succeeding at their own goals, so game designers have to make sure that they balance these populations by keeping track of what type of gameplay they're encouraging most when they add features.

Horror settings fall into two basic categories: places of disempowerment and places of isolation. Places of disempowerment - such as alien worlds and the bottom of the sea - force us into situations where we don't understand the rules of our environment, and can never tell when our expectations will be suddenly reversed. Places of isolation, like remote cabins and arctic research stations, make sure we know that no one will help us: if we can't find a way to survive, we will simply die. The inherent terror in these settings can be amplified by giving them a haunted past, such an ancient graveyard or an abandoned asylum, or by making the place itself possessed of malice and willpower that's directed against those inside it. Finally, these settings can provide psychological landscapes that reflect someone's inner struggles and fears directly back onto them.

Destiny is rarely great, but it is consistently good - enough to become a "comfort food" in the games world. The first person shooter style gameplay is familiar enough to most players, and executed well enough by Bungie, to feel interesting and accessible without requiring too much gameplay. Even as the game evolves over time, the designers have consistently hit good notes without reaching for brilliance or attempting to introduce radically new design ideas or even, frankly, fix all of the design flaws that have been around since the game's underwhelming launch. This is because the game must appeal to a large audience, and while it doesn't offer the best in PvP or the best in PvE, it does both well enough that players who enjoy either of those options can often agree to settle on Destiny in order to play with their friends.

Randomness has three major functions in game design: 1) it creates exciting moments, 2) it gives the weaker player a chance to win occasionally, 3) it forces players to adapt to changing circumstances. When adding random elements, game designers must look at the delta of randomness, or the difference between what baseline impact that element has without a random effect and the realized impact it has with its random effect. Hearthstone once again provides an easy example: a card with a random effect should have its baseline below the average power curve on the assumption that its realized random effect will boost it over the curve. Surprisingly, cards with the least variability in their random effect tend to be more exciting for both players than cards with a large but unreliable random effect. Large randomness can swing the game in ways that make it seem like the outcome was decided the moment one player lucked into a huge random draw. But small random effects can still give one player a slight advantage without completely shutting down their opponent, giving both a chance to play around the inherent RNG in the cards.

While a positive random effect can only benefit the player who controls it, there are other varieties of random effects. Negative randomness means the effect can actually be bad for the controlling player - for example, if their card or character (like Ogre Brute) randomly targets the wrong enemy. Where positive random effects needed to be balanced by putting a card below the power curve, negative random effects should be offset by raising a card above the power curve so the player feels like they're getting a reward for risking it. There is also reciprocal randomness, where the random effect applies to all players in the game. Hearthstone's Spellslinger card generates a random spell for both players, but is not a well-designed example because its ability to generate any spell in the game for either player creates far too large of a delta of randomness. Winning or losing in that case doesn't rely on the player's ability to adapt, but simply on luck of the draw. A card like Mechanical Yeti which generates similarly powered advantages (or perhaps disadvantages) for both players does a better job of generating small but impactful results for both players. Ultimately, randomness in game design should not aim to create big moments - as those can make it feel like the game tilted unfairly - but should instead be focused on creating engaging moments for all players involved.

An antihero is someone whom you want to see succeed, even though it almost feels like you shouldn't. They're not villains, whom we can love but whose plans (like world destruction) we can't support. The antihero has an objective we agree with, but a personality that just grates on us. In Western literature, the predecessors of the antihero include Shakespeare's Hamlet or John Milton's Satan from Paradise Lost: they had grating, yet attractive, personalities, but their goals were not really those of a hero. Lord Byron introduced the first real antihero in his poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which became so well known that "Byronic hero" is another way to describe the antihero. Since then, we have seen antiheroes in everything from Kafka's Metamorphosis to detective noir and pulp sci-fi novels. They tend to appear when a new generation of writers in a genre wants to escape the stale cliches of their predecessors. Games may be due for an antihero movement, but since they are interactive, it's difficult to make an actual antihero rather than just a character who acts like a jerk in between action sequences. Brooding is not very engaging for the player, for example, so how do you create brooding moments for an antihero when the player is in control? How do you make players feel that angst?

Consoles take a complicated route to get from us - all the way from being minerals in the ground to being assembled in factories across the world. A close look at how this happens reveals ethical and logistical difficulties worth talking about. Varying labor laws, outsourced work, and even worker reluctance make factories hard to inspect for good working conditions. Further down the chain, the raw minerals used in consoles often come from war-torn regions such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, where local militias seize control of the mines and use them to raise funds to propagate their brutal civil war. The electronics industry has gotten better about rejecting conflict minerals, but it's far from perfect. Microsoft and Sony are part of industry organizations to track and reduce abuse along supply chains, but Nintendo has only made small steps and simply refuses to collaborate with the rest of the tech industry to help solve this problem. Console manufacturers can still do more by putting a bigger focus on supply chain audits, voicing support for laws that would improve nationwide standards, being vocal to draw attention to these issues, and giving factories a bigger lead time for product launches. As consumers, we need to understand the impact our demand for launch day console availability has on pushing more unsafe labor practices and consider whether a small price increase (perhaps as little as $5) to guarantee that our consoles were manufactured without conflict minerals would really be too much of a price to pay.

For our long-running Games You Might Not Have Tried series, Extra Credits reviews and recommends a selection of video games that might have slipped under your radar.

China has gamified being an obedient citizen with the creation of Sesame Credit. The game links to your social network and gives you a score for doing things that the government approves of, but it also reduces that score for doing things the government disapproves of. Even your friends' scores affect your own, and being friends with people who have a low score will drag your score down as well. This insidious system applies social pressure on people to ostracize their friends with lower scores, either forcing those friends to change their ways or effectively quarantining their rebellious ideas. While many sci-fi visions of a dystopian future have centered around a bleak government that controls through fear, Sesame Credit shows us that a government can use gamification and positive reinforcement to be just as controlling. And it's real. While currently the system is opt-in, the government plans to make it mandatory in 2020. Once mandatory, it may give rewards for good scores or penalties for bad ones. And in the meantime, making it opt-in has already set the tone for the game: people participate willingly, so they find it fun, and they set a very high standard for what the "average" score should be. Already people have begun sharing their scores on social media.