Learning From The 3000 "Classics"
What can MAME teach us about game design?
by Ben Garney and Eric Hartman

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Business Model Does Affect Gameplay

The mechanism at work is this: as technology advances, it enables new kinds of games. These new games are cool, so people make them. The old business models often don't work with these new kinds of games. As a result, new business models are introduced to support them. The temptation of maximizing these new business models can pathologically affect game play design.

In the beginning, hardware wasn't advanced enough to have more than one screen worth of game. As a result, successful games optimized for a compelling one-shot experience that you would want to do again and again from the start. The business model leveraged this - it cost one token to play the game once. Pac-man, Asteroids, and Robotron are all good examples of this approach - they take very limited art resources and build rich, infinitely repeatable gameplay.

Figure 4 - Note there are more bullets on the screen in DonPachi than there are enemies on screen in Galaxian. 1942 forms a pleasant middle ground.

Galaxian (Namco 1979) is a classic, single-token-per-play shoot 'em up. When your game is over, you restart from the beginning. Although there are multiple levels, they're all just repeats of the first one at increased difficulty.

As technology advanced, it was possible to put more content into games. 1942 (Capcom 1984) has 32 levels that you fly through; different levels have different enemies moving in different patterns. There's also a finite amount of game - once you clear the levels, you've won. When your game is over, you can put in another quarter to restart the level you died on.

This means it's possible to complete the game in a (long) arcade play session, and that each level has to remain defeatable on a single quarter, but that it's also possible to extract more money from the player. The limit on each level's difficulty means that gameplay is unaffected by the business model - it's still necessary that it be possible to defeat each level within three lives.

DonPachi (Atlus 1995) was one of the first manic shooters, which means that in some cases there are more bullets on screen than empty space. In DonPachi, you may continue whenever you die and when you continue, you reappear immediately with a full load of bombs. Because it's no longer necessary to beat a level within a finite number of lives, there's no built-in limit of difficulty - the game can be infinitely hard, and sometimes is, because you always have the option of pounding through enemies with an avalanche of quarters.

And this has parallels in nearly every other genre of arcade game.

We see similar feedback loops happening in the modern game industry. MMOs are subscription based because of the overhead of maintaining server farms. The subscription business model is optimized when people play as long as possible. Therefore, gameplay is stretched out, resulting in the infamous level grind.

Downloadable content has recently become practical, and many games are already taking advantage of it. Micro transactions are one business model being developed to support this new content type and we can see its potential to affect design. There is rampant speculation about portions of games being held back so they can be sold via microtransactions later, like the horse armor in Oblivion. There are also more legitimate examples of being able to buy additional content, like the level expansion packs in Halo. We can also see microtransactions' effect in MMOs and web-based games, where, sometimes unofficially, you can short circuit your advancement by purchasing game items for real cash.

Will microtransactions cause a slump in the PC and console industries comparable to the mid 90s arcade slump? Only time will tell.

Gradation Of Skill

How do you differentiate skill when you can buy life with a quarter? Have the game recognize when you do something awesome.

An example - the POWs in Metal Slug 2 (SNK 1998). As long as you stay alive, POWs you've rescued will accumulate. At the end of the level, you're rewarded with a list of the names of the POWs you saved, as well as bonus points. There is also a combo effect at work here - getting all of the POWs is worth much more than getting most of them. Completing the level while still in a vehicle is an even bigger bonus. The game rewards 100% success much more than it does 99% success, and this is the motivation to replay the game until it is fully mastered.

Figure 5 - Two different ways of rewarding skill.

A more subtle example is the music in Gradius 3 (Konami 1989). Whenever you die, the music restarts. As a result, only the truly masterful player gets to experience the entire song - less talented players are stuck with just the first few bars because they're always dying.

The gradated approach is a win on both ends of the skill spectrum. Beginners can experience and enjoy the game without having to contend with a steep skill curve. Experts have a way to differentiate themselves from the rest, and long-term goals to strive for that encourage repeat play. In either case, they're putting lots of quarters in the machine, so the game developer is happy, too.

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