This weekend, thousands of households are likely to become good natured war zones as families and friends argue over whether to watch the Premier League football or the Rugby World cup. 300 years ago, lucky sports fans didn’t have to worry – because there was no such thing as football, or rugby, or American football for that matter – they all existed together as one sport: hugball.
Perhaps the purest of all ball games, legend has it that hugball (also known as Shrovetide Football, Mob Football, or la soule in parts of France) used to be played with the head of an executed criminal – though Fifa regulations now generally discourage this. But, no matter the name or the nature of the ball being used, the rules (or lack thereof) were always pretty much the same: two vast teams would rampage through a town or field trying to get an object into the opposing side’s territory.
By many accounts, hugball was once played rather widely across Europe, and similar sports were popular worldwide. Why did it fall out of fashion? There’s a simple answer: it’s boring to watch. There’s no final whistle, you can’t tell what’s going on, and it’s pretty dangerous (though arguably that’s also the best part). Since the participants can do anything, with essentially no limits, it’s uninteresting. It’s too close to real life.
What a good game does is introduce friction – a limitation that holds you back, and consequently makes the game more challenging to play and fun to watch. Video games offer hundreds of possible frictions. In Super Mario titles the strongest friction is probably Mario’s jump, which is just long and high enough to reach certain platforms, but limited enough to ensure that players often have to be pixel perfect in their timing when navigating the platforms. This friction is so integral to the series that Mario’s first game, Donkey Kong, was originally titled Jumpman. If that jumping mechanic was easier or bigger, the game wouldn’t work. The meticulously designed limitation is what makes it so compulsive.
By adding friction to an otherwise limitless activity, you get a game – and with hugball, each different friction added over the years created a different sport. You can’t use your hands: football. You have to stop play between each tackle: American football. You can only pass the ball backwards, but you can kick forwards: rugby.
In football, not being able to touch the ball with your hands opens the game up and spreads the players around the field, creating a fluid and constantly shifting playing area that resists rigid strategy and defies statistical models. In American football, the friction leads to a rather stilted game where tactics have to be carefully pre-planned.
Rugby, though, is one of the most fascinating sports from a game design standpoint. The core friction of being forced to pass backwards when you need to go forwards creates a fundamental tension that is released when someone makes a great run, a strong hit – or a perfectly weighted kick forward resulting in a moment of chaos followed by relief or jubilation.
Passing backwards forces teams to line up across the field, each player inches behind the other in a gorgeous collapsing human wave, receiving the ball and laying it off in what the All Blacks consider to be a single motion: the catchpass(not dissimilar to what the Barcelona FC academy refers to as ‘a mig toc’ – half a touch). The regularity of this motion, punctuated by moments of unforeseen brilliance or all-too-predictable failure, is what makes the sport so captivating.
Rugby has a long history of tweaking the rules to adjust the game in response to different issues. Take the try, for instance. Coming from the phrase “try at a goal”, the original rules stated that touching the ball down between the posts did not give you any points, but rather gave you the opportunity to try for a goal by kicking the ball between the uprights. After 120 years of twists and turns the rugby world more or less settled on five points per try only in 1992.
Another example of the development of rugby is the scrum, which has been part of the sport since its beginnings at the Rugby School in the 19th century. Arguably the most visually striking aspect of the game, it is also the least interesting. Awarded most often when a ball is passed forward, the scrum involves eight players from each side locking heads and pushing against each other to try and gain a position of advantage over the ball. It’s even more dangerous than it sounds. If the scrum collapses, as it does very often, it must be restarted (or if a team is deemed to have collapsed it on purpose, a penalty is awarded).
Somewhere around half of all scrums fail for one reason or another. It’s the main part of the game where players get injured, and the constant resetting can take up to 20% of the game time. It’s incredibly boring to watch, and only rarely offers any strategic advantage to either team. However, the rugby world seems to be catching on to this – the rules for the scrum continue to be tweaked, resulting in some slow improvement, but more importantly there are signs that many teams are avoiding the scrum entirely whenever possible. In many ways this is game design in action: if a certain way of playing does not provide any advantage, it will eventually die out. Perhaps the scrum will one day become a vestigial part of the game, like the uncaught third strike.
Many other sports are very reluctant to significantly tweak rules, resulting in stagnation and angry debate – look at the confusion in football about whether a player can commit a foul even if he or she gets to the ball first. The world of rugby, however, seems to welcome rule changes with open arms: there have also been alterations to the line-outs, the yellow and red card sanctions, and many other elements. Perhaps this is as a result of there already being a number of variations on rugby – most famously Sevens and Rugby League – so it is easier to imagine how the game could be changed or improved. Or perhaps it is as a result of being a very physical and potentially dangerous game, so a watchful eye must be kept on the rules to make sure injuries are kept to a minimum.
In any case, it seems to be working. This year’s Rugby World Cup is breaking viewing figure records worldwide, and it offers a particularly interesting approach to tweaking the game off the field. Since 2003 the group stages have had a relatively unusual points system – wins are worth four points, draws are worth two, and there are two ways of getting bonus points: by scoring four tries in a game and by losing by fewer than eight points. Experimenting with points systems like this can lead to some bizarre and disastrous results – see what happened, for example, when the organisers of football’s Caribbean cup tweaked the rules in the 1994 qualifiers.
But the Rugby World Cup rules are working, and they lead to a tantalising possibility - that a team can lose a game and still get two points. In the recent South Africa v Japan upset, the Springboks managed this very feat despite their stunning loss, while Japan only received the minimum victory tally of four. It’s not outlandish to suggest that the points system helped produce such a thrilling result because it encourages teams to score tries, rather than grind out dull victories based entirely on penalties. It also gives teams something to play for all the way through a match even when they are losing, and it goes some way towards evening out some of the huge mismatches in quality between the top tier of teams and everyone else – one of the more intractable problems with international rugby union (the shock Japan result notwithstanding).
Developing a points system like this is exactly the kind of thinking that goes into video game design, and in many ways the game world would do well to pay attention to rugby. The major sports that we now watch on TV or take part in down the park have had hundreds of years of iterative development and play testing – and game designers are engaged in a similar process. Just as hugball developed into rugby and football, tic-tac-toe has developed into Agricola and Puerto Rico, the ancient randomised maze game Rogue has morphed into Don’t Starve, and Donkey Kong, after many twists and turns, became Canabalt, Fez and Tomb Raider.
Saturday, October 3, 2015
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Could the new Consumer Rights Act spell good news for gamers?
Changes to the Consumer Rights Act have come into effect in the UK today, and with key amendments designed to deal with software purchases and digital goods, there are some important gains for gamers.
Most obvious is the provision of a clear 30-day period in which consumers can return goods that they deem to be faulty, and ask for a refund or a replacement. In the past, the act ambiguously required that goods needed to be returned within a “reasonable time”, which allowed more wriggle room for retailers, who could also insist on just offering a repair.
The act makes clear that goods must be fit for purpose and “free from minor defects”. With an increasing number of major games now being released with significant technical issues – including the likes of Battlefield 4, SimCity and the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight – consumers will now be in a much stronger position to request a refund from the supplier of the game if it won’t load or can’t access online features.
“The reasonable time has been clarified, which is good,” says Alex Tutty of entertainment law firm, Sheridans. “Retailers previously relied on this – especially if you think about a game that can be completed in 10 hours; they would say ‘you can’t return this after 20 days’.”
The act applies, not just to physical boxed game releases from online or highstreet stores, but to digital games purchased from online sites like Steam, Origin, or the Xbox Live and PlayStation Network stores. Most of these have refund policies in place, but the new act makes their specific responsibilities much clearer. Titles will have to match the descriptions given on the website and be fit for the indicated purpose.
“The update clarifies that the sale of goods act will now apply to digital products,” says Tutty. “Previously you had more rights if you bought a game on disc, now you get the benefit of that even if you’re buying digitally. From 1 October, anything you download has to be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and meet the description that’s given. If you download a game and it’s bug-ridden, you can demand a refund and quote the sale of goods act. Before this, it wasn’t especially clear cut.”
The act also covers free-to-download games. There is obviously no refund potential on the title itself but virtual goods, such as customised characters or new maps and levels, will be covered by the act and users will be able to demand refunds on unsatisfactory in-game purchases.
Early releases and day one disasters
The new ruling also allows for the growing number of titles now released in unfinished or “beta” form, through services like Steam Early Access. “If you do indicate to people that the game is going to be buggy, that is allowed,” says Tutty. “But the act will allow people to get a refund on games that are released as full titles, yet are filled with bugs and don’t work.”
So how will this affect those big day one releases, especially multiplayer games, where players want to get online and start levelling up their characters as soon as possible – but find that the code is broken or the servers have collapsed? “There are two remedies under the act,” says Tutty. “The right to repair or replacement, or the right to a price reduction up to a full refund if a repair or replacement is not possible within a reasonable time. So a company could possibly say, ‘well, we’ve got a patch coming that will fix it pretty quickly’. That’s a repair.”
“However, where it gets quite interesting is that lots of people really want to play on day one – that’s a key selling point, especially when you get these exclusive deals where a certain map pack may be available first on a specific platform – well, presumably you’ve bought that game because you want to play it online, on day one, against your mates.”
Pre-orders have become a contentious area of the games industry, with a greater number of publishers and retailers looking to get players to commit to a purchase before the final release. Tutty believes that the new act may mean that these customers find they have more power to ask for a refund if the final game doesn’t live up to early promises given on the pre-order page.
He explains: “If the company says, this is how the game is going to work, and later they pivot and say, actually it will be slightly different, players could complain that, well I bought it under the belief it was going to be something else, so I want a refund.”
So could the changes to the consumer act – which only applies in Britain – lead to any significant changes in how major games get released? It’s possible. Although the UK is only one market, games revenue was £4bn last year, making it second only to Germany in the European sector. Britain also boasts a large development community and is home to some of the most highly subscribed, vocal and influential YouTubers. “If I was a games publisher I would be more mindful now of releasing buggy products,” says Tutty. “I think the quality assurance process is really going to have to ramp back up. It should make things better.”
Most obvious is the provision of a clear 30-day period in which consumers can return goods that they deem to be faulty, and ask for a refund or a replacement. In the past, the act ambiguously required that goods needed to be returned within a “reasonable time”, which allowed more wriggle room for retailers, who could also insist on just offering a repair.
The act makes clear that goods must be fit for purpose and “free from minor defects”. With an increasing number of major games now being released with significant technical issues – including the likes of Battlefield 4, SimCity and the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight – consumers will now be in a much stronger position to request a refund from the supplier of the game if it won’t load or can’t access online features.
“The reasonable time has been clarified, which is good,” says Alex Tutty of entertainment law firm, Sheridans. “Retailers previously relied on this – especially if you think about a game that can be completed in 10 hours; they would say ‘you can’t return this after 20 days’.”
The act applies, not just to physical boxed game releases from online or highstreet stores, but to digital games purchased from online sites like Steam, Origin, or the Xbox Live and PlayStation Network stores. Most of these have refund policies in place, but the new act makes their specific responsibilities much clearer. Titles will have to match the descriptions given on the website and be fit for the indicated purpose.
“The update clarifies that the sale of goods act will now apply to digital products,” says Tutty. “Previously you had more rights if you bought a game on disc, now you get the benefit of that even if you’re buying digitally. From 1 October, anything you download has to be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and meet the description that’s given. If you download a game and it’s bug-ridden, you can demand a refund and quote the sale of goods act. Before this, it wasn’t especially clear cut.”
The act also covers free-to-download games. There is obviously no refund potential on the title itself but virtual goods, such as customised characters or new maps and levels, will be covered by the act and users will be able to demand refunds on unsatisfactory in-game purchases.
Early releases and day one disasters
The new ruling also allows for the growing number of titles now released in unfinished or “beta” form, through services like Steam Early Access. “If you do indicate to people that the game is going to be buggy, that is allowed,” says Tutty. “But the act will allow people to get a refund on games that are released as full titles, yet are filled with bugs and don’t work.”
So how will this affect those big day one releases, especially multiplayer games, where players want to get online and start levelling up their characters as soon as possible – but find that the code is broken or the servers have collapsed? “There are two remedies under the act,” says Tutty. “The right to repair or replacement, or the right to a price reduction up to a full refund if a repair or replacement is not possible within a reasonable time. So a company could possibly say, ‘well, we’ve got a patch coming that will fix it pretty quickly’. That’s a repair.”
“However, where it gets quite interesting is that lots of people really want to play on day one – that’s a key selling point, especially when you get these exclusive deals where a certain map pack may be available first on a specific platform – well, presumably you’ve bought that game because you want to play it online, on day one, against your mates.”
Pre-orders have become a contentious area of the games industry, with a greater number of publishers and retailers looking to get players to commit to a purchase before the final release. Tutty believes that the new act may mean that these customers find they have more power to ask for a refund if the final game doesn’t live up to early promises given on the pre-order page.
He explains: “If the company says, this is how the game is going to work, and later they pivot and say, actually it will be slightly different, players could complain that, well I bought it under the belief it was going to be something else, so I want a refund.”
So could the changes to the consumer act – which only applies in Britain – lead to any significant changes in how major games get released? It’s possible. Although the UK is only one market, games revenue was £4bn last year, making it second only to Germany in the European sector. Britain also boasts a large development community and is home to some of the most highly subscribed, vocal and influential YouTubers. “If I was a games publisher I would be more mindful now of releasing buggy products,” says Tutty. “I think the quality assurance process is really going to have to ramp back up. It should make things better.”
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