What is a game condition? A game condition is an aspect of a game situation that promotes the continuance of the game. Opposed to these game conditions are no-game conditions. Game conditions and no-game conditions are the two sides of the coin that define games. In my other article, I described the three cornerstones of a game; game conditions and no-game conditions flesh it out more and add some specifics.

The first game condition is Not-Know/Forget, coupled with Know/Remember as no-game conditions.

But wait, you say, how can knowing something provide a lessening of a game? How can not knowing something make a game better? In a similar fashion, you would think off hand that remembering something would present more game, rather than less game.

Let's take a look, then, and see how these things assist and deter from a game experience. Let's start with

Not-know and Know

You fire up a game for the first time and it's a new experience. Things are exciting! Who knows what will happen! Some of the content may have been given away by the name or box art, or perhaps you've read some reviews; this game is an RPG, says so on the cover. Okay, well, you have some idea what to expect from an RPG. It's going to start off by introducing a character, typically by putting him/her into a day-to-day situation and having them react to something that is out of the ordinary.

Sure enough, the game starts off, your protagonist is wandering a field looking at flowers. Then BAM! enemies port in and kidnap your sister! The game starts introducing the fighting mechanics, and things get going. Well, this is all very commonplace. It is all Known. And, probably, you're feeling kind of bored by now. Yes, I know that if I want to attack someone, I should probably select the "attack" feature in the menu. Yes, I know how to use potions. Yes, I can, indeed, see that the cycling character icons indicate when my turn is coming up. But no, the game insists on grinding through a half-hour long tutorial telling you things you already KNOW.

Right off the bat, we're presented with a no-game condition. This is not FUN. This is not a GAME. It's a bloody tutorial, ffs. If I wanted a tutorial, I would read the manual. Let me play! This enforced Know is reducing the fun of the game.

Okay, you say, that's a fairly obvious example, but if you know nothing in a game, you won't have any fun either, right? Well, let's test that out. Same scenario, only we're going to skip the tutorial fight. Let's say your friend plays it through while you're nuking some popcorn, then hands you the controller. You pick it up. So far, you know nothing. Well, that's not true. You see a character in the middle of the screen. Logical deduction would suppose that was you. Left analog stick rotates the camera, right stick moves the character around. Bam, you're playing the game. You don't NEED a laggy pop-up telling you in one- and two-syllable words what the analog sticks do.

You walk down the hallway a bit and the screen has a seizure then suddenly you're fighting enemies! What do you do?!?! Well, as luck would have it, it becomes your turn. You have a blinking finger pointing at "attack". At this point, it would take a seriously handicapped person to get stumped. No buttons do anything except for "X" and that makes your character attack.

Things continue, you die, figure it's time to try out those other options. Who would have known, that "Magic" option gives you magic spells to aid you! Jeez, this stuff is complicated!

Okay, enough sarcasm, you get the point. Anyone with an IQ over 50 could figure this stuff out. It's not really necessary to have a half-hour long tutorial describing in intricate detail the fine print behind what the "attack" option does. And if it was necessary, that's what manuals are for. Or a help section in the menu for those people who maybe haven't played a few dozen RPGs already, or are new to games and don't know what a potion is.

Let's take another example. MMOs are getting to be fairly popular and account for the majority of money made in the gaming industry. But, as any scrub can tell you, the formula is getting old. "Go to zone X and kill ten goblins, then come back for this pre-revealed reward." To be frank, it's boring. Maybe when you first start playing, you haven't yet figured out what all your skills do (A game condition, Not-know!) and so it's still interesting to hike over to zone X and lay some down discretionary smack. But after you've killed your six-hundredth mob, you know the drill. Skill 3 to set up some damage over time, then 2 to stun, then 1, 1, 1, 1 until 3 wears off or the mob is dead. After a while, you know exactly how many 1s it will take to kill, if it's worth expending the mana to refresh the DOT, etc.

There is no longer any not-know in the action of killing goblins. You KNOW how to do it now. It's no longer interesting. The game has faded. And then your next quest comes up. "Go to zone V and kill 20 goblin-variation-C!" At this point, any experienced gamer groans inside, checks the quest reward to see if he really wants to do it or not, then probably sighs and figures the quest XP will advance him faster than killing 300 of some other equally uninspired monster.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! This is not a game! This is work! And it's BORING. Where has the fun gone? I'll tell you. The fun has gone with the acquisition of knowledge. You KNOW what will happen. You KNOW that there really isn't a chance that you'll die, barring some freak storm of critical hits against you, but even then you have contingencies.

Well, good job, Devin, you figured it out. That doesn't assist us in the least. We know the quest system is boring. We know something needs to change. But what? How? All these new MMOs are coming out, with "revolutionary" new systems, but once you pick them up, the newness fades and then you KNOW everything about it and it loses its gloss and fun.

So what's the solution? How do we keep things fresh without making a new game engine for every zone? We only have so many man-hours to program this game, you know, we can't make every game be thirty games in one.

I'll tell you, and it's simple. You remove the Know aspects you, as the game developer, have control over. Let's take your typical quest. There's an NPC with a big fat!over his head. You talk to him, he tells you something of a sob story about his poor mother that got eviscerated by those nasty Scourge. He points to a stack of shoulder pieces and offers one of them and a sum of 20 gold if you would be so kind as to slaughter a baker's dozen. You accept the quest and your map has a direction arrow pointing to where you need to go and a clearly delineated zone of where said Scourge could be located. You go there and start killing your allotment of 13 Scourge. A little ticker counts down how many you've killed, politely informs you when you've completed, and gives you an arrow back to the poor bereft man.

Well, you can probably sense the trend. Everything is known! There's no question from the very beginning of your entry into town to the point where you equip your new shiny shoulder pads. But, you say, that's how games were in the very beginning! You got lost on your way to the questing zone, you couldn't find the monsters you were supposed to kill, you didn't know how far through the quest you were. These changes were innovations on a bad design!

My answer to you, dear reader, is that knowing everything removes the sense of fun. So, let's mix things up a little bit. Let's see where we can remove some of the all-knowingness of the player to make a quest a little bit more exciting than a tired series of 3, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, repeat ad nauseam.

I personally think it's a good idea to keep the!over the NPC's head, so we'll leave that be. Nobody wants to run through the town and talk to every NPC just to find the next set of quests. In an ideal world, you wouldn't have to go TO the quest NPC, but we'll leave that for another discussion.

Next is the contextual blurb that gives the "kill 10 of X" some weight and purpose. Honestly, I think it's a bad idea to have bounty quests like that, except as a rarity. So, for the purpose of this discussion, we'll say they are hardly ever used as a quest plot. Instead, we'll say "Oh jeez, the monsters have stolen the (story contextual object) and it's a bad scene. Please help us recover it. The last place they were seen was (obvious landmark) to the north." It might show a screenshot of the landmark to help clarify what is being looked for.

Okay, let's break that down. First of all, this gives the quest Purpose. In the first example, nobody gave a damn about his mum being killed by monsters and nobody wants to avenge him. He's a pointless NPC with no back story or contextual weight. Next, while giving directions (no directions would be a lack of Purpose, as well as a lack of Freedom) it doesn't give you ALL the data. Yeah, the monsters are by the waterfall. This isextremelydifferent than a waypoint on the map. Also, it makes the maps a little more interesting. Landmarks have purpose rather than "ooh, shiny."

Well, this waterfall is a bit of a mystery, so you climb the watch tower in town and lo and behold, there it is on the horizon, visible over the surrounding forest. (Or you could just go North until you trip over it.) So you hike over to the waterfall. The (story contextual object) is NOT a random drop off one of these mobs, it's sitting in a chest in the center of their camp. Now, in a typical MMO, your job would be to slaughter these mobs until one dropped the quest item and then you'd go back to town. In all likelihood, you would have two quests, one to kill 10 mobs and one to get the object, just to make sure you spent enough time in the zone. Well, by putting the object in the middle of the camp, you're more or less guaranteed to have to kill 10 of the mobs. It's kind of unavoidable. So you kill the scurvy swine , get the quest object and head back to town.

As an anecdote, the monsters could have a template, but have a random element added in. The base monster, for example, has 200 hp, but can vary from 150 to 250, with appropriately scaled armor, damage, etc. Experience granted for killing monsters would scale as well. This breaks up the Known about the monsters somewhat and can make the game a little bit more re-playable.

The NPC is appropriately grateful, gives you some hard cash and gives you a pick of a few different items. Note that this is virtually identical, in effect, to your typical MMO, with one major difference. You didn't do the quest knowing beforehand you were getting 12 gold and 3 silver, you didn't know beforehand what items you were going to have a choice of and you weren't told that you would get 2183 experience for completing the quest.

So this quest actually would be fun to play. While maintaining virtually the same structure of your average MMO, the Known elements are smudged around a bit and make the game enjoyable. It makes the players observe, think, react and plan rather than "this group of mobs will require 3, 2, 1, 1, 1 rather than 3, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1."

I could belabor this further, but I think you get the idea. The less is Known, the more fun the game will be. The less Known is enforced on the player, the more the game is enjoyable. The more is Not-known, the more challenging the game is and the more it breaks from the routine.

Let's take a look at the similar topic of

Forget and Remember

Games are often gauged by their re-playability, especially single-player games and MMOs. What makes a game re-playable? Well, obviously making things different the second time through, and this falls under the Know/Not-know category. When I play a game the second time through, I remembereverythingabout the game. From how difficult a particular mob is to kill to terrain oddities. This makes it hard for me to enjoy a game a second time through, as it is all Known for me.

While not everyone has the same level of detail recall as I do, there is a way for a game developer to break up the routine, especially in an MMO. A break in the expected flow of things makes the player uncertain of the next action. This could be as simple as, to use the above example, randomizing which of three groups of mobs stole the quest item. The first time it's the group by the waterfall, the next time it's a different group on top of a cliff somewhere, etc.

It is true that this expands the map development considerably, but if you think about it, it's notthatmuch more work. Let's say a particular zone has three distinct groups of mobs. The neighboring town has two quest chains it peddles out to the passing players.

Let's get specific. Three groups of mobs: the goblins by the waterfall to the North; the snake-people in the woods to the East; the bird-men on the cliff-aeries to the South. Two quest chains: recovering the magic item that raises a protective field around the town, hunting down and saving the children of the town that have been kidnapped.

Upon entering the town, the player (or the player's group, gotta keep friends together after all) is assigned variables. Quest chain A is with the goblins, quest chain B is with the bird-men. So the birdmen have stolen the magic item while the goblins have kidnapped the children. The quest text is appropriately doctored for the situation and any scripting done has to be done for each group.

"Oh no," you say, "this is too much work!" Well, I respond, do you want people to have fun playing your game or not? The re-playability will keep people paying you their monthly fees, and if you have to hire a few more level designers,suck it up.

This is just one example of removing the Remember from a game. There are other ways, but this article has gone on long enough. Suffice it to say that any way you can remove Remember or produce Forget, you should do everything you can to implement it.

For more insightful thoughts on game development, tune in later or visit mywebsite.