Sid Meier's Psychology of Game Design 

Summary: -The first 15 minutes and beginning of the game should be about showing the player what to expect and foreshadowing the potential of the game. You hardly can over-reward them, and you want to ensure they care and invest in the game. Also, they begin very vulnerable and don't know what to expect and what to do. You want to encourage them and show them how their investment is going in the right path instead of being vague and making them sceptic of their acts are in the wrong path and a waste of time. -Be it with the winning percentage (how players win more than we averagely win in real life), being rewarded more than punished, and surpassing greater and greater difficulties, the conclusion is that in your game you want to make the player to feel above the average. -Ensure players continue to suspend their disbelief throughout the game and to keep their identification. They want to see themselves as good people, fighting evil, winning, and progressing. To experience rare odds against them such as losing a 2v1 twice or to see their work and progress majorly lost and go downhill (even if temporarily) all can lead them to disbelieve and disconnect. Failure teaches you and so you progress or frustrates you so it motivates you to progress. Bad experiences can give you catharsis which is good and good experiences give you determination. But, to completely lose your work feels like a hurtful waste which will lead players to suspend their belief because games should provide sense of progress and self-determination. -Randomness and feeling completely out of control paranoids the players. Mystery should have patterns to master. -The player can always see more than you present, and you should use that. They can imagine what a character is doing outside of the screen without the need for you to show them. They will also believe what they have an inclination for even if it is not fully logical. A diplomat wants their help with dancing bears? Sure, sounds good, even if there are not dancing bears in the game; go with the flow and save your resources. -Tap into what the players already know. You don't need to explain to them that a black-hatted one-eyes pirate is bad, they already know that. Focus your resources on what is new and hard to sell. -The AI should be part of the overall experience and a measurement of your improvement giving you feedback and validation, variety, and competition. They should be characters you project onto them and not be like humans because they will start to feel either dumb or cheating. -The essence of a good game is providing and Epic Journey. This is done through making interesting decisions (ones they discover their repercussions and interconnections, ones they can project to the future, ones with fun alternatives they can later choose instead), learning and progress (they are aware of how better and smarter they are), one more turn (players are always leaning and anticipating the next turn, looking forward for their plans to come to fruition, to see what's going to happen next), replayability (to see the Epic Journey that they just played as just one part of the greater Epic Journey).

10 years later. Different times,. yet still a really excellent talk. Listen at 1.5 speed

It's nice to hear him still using his favorite phrase, "Wouldn't it be neat if..." A phrase he's been using since at least the late 80's.

you know this is old because they're trying so hard to look like TV

The "Rise and Fall" idea eventually found its way into Civ6 with "dark ages" and "golden ages" mechanic. And he was right about it being cool. I loved discovering that if you go from dark age to golden age it becomes a "Heroic age" with even more bonuses.

the extra rule as clearly demonstrated by this comment section, is that if you're going to manipulate your players psychologically ~be sure they never find out about it~

"My Bad:Rise and Fall" - Fast forward 8 years from this talk and you have Civ 6 Rise and Fall :D

22:55 About the different player experience between a 20:10 vs a 2:1 advantage. And it is about the law of big numbers. let's say you are fighting alone against two person. You have a lot more chance of winning the fight than if your army of 10k is fighting against an army of 20k, because each confrontation could be understood as a dice roll. But the designer might have seen it differently and say that they are they are just 2:1 ratios. They have different models in their heads. Likewise, if are playing rock paper scissors 3 times, it is much more likely that you win flawlessly than if you play 30 times.

FIIIIINE, I'll go play Civilization again.

"Everyone is above average" My math teacher just puked

I'm surprised to find that Sid Meier is a real person. I thought it was some kind of persona, like Tyler Perry.

Listening to Sid's talks has made me try out Civ V on the 3rd hardest difficulty with a culture run, only saving when I have to get off to do something. I'm getting wrecked and it's amazing.

23:38 The interface of these games doesn't make it seem like 3 to 1 odds, it makes it seem like a strength/power of 1.5 vs a armor/defense of 0.5. "A rifle would beat cardboard every time", that seems to be what players are thinking.

Funny that neither Sid nor the comments go back to the fact that, on the Civ:Revolutions example, they actually DO have dancing bears. Every sultan gift has models and animations and sound in the Throne Room. I kept expecting a callback to say something like "sometimes it's worth it to invest in details that can surprise the player positively"

Amazing speech Sid, been inspired by your games since a young age and no 4x/sim games have even come close to pirates, trains and civ.

To all idiots who think Sid Meier is not as smart he is said to be, I have this to say. The man created the following hit titles for the 8-bit Commodore 64 in the 1980s: "F-15 Strike Eagle," "Silent Service," "Gunship," "Project Stealthfighter" and of course: "Sid Meier's Pirates!" All are military simulators and I played them all with the exception of the first one. The last one was an incredible privateer/wargame freeform game. It's like "Elite" but you don't just fight and capture other ships, you could look for treasure after buying a map from some retired pirate in the local tavern. Or you could build up a name of renown at the start of your expedition, then use your name and fame to hire really large crews (after capturing a few frigates and/or galleons). Then you could assault the strongest cities like Panama in a pitched land battle. And of course you could choose to accept surrender after the enemy started panicking or keep the slaughter dragging on untill no enemy soldiers were left alive. I often chose the latter option because it would take a long time before the garrisson would have been brought up to strength again. Sid Meier was already a famous games designer during the 8-bit homecomputer boom during the 1980s. Remember, this was way before "Railroad Tycoon" and even "Civilization." Perhaps he doesn't make a big impression to some of you in person but I say judge the man on his games record.

1:09:10 Sid's answer to this part of the question...that's why the man's a genius

11:33 - One thing I learned is that consistent game world rules are more important than realistic ones since one can suspend their disbelief. It makes the world believable if its rules are predictable, although unrealistic. IE: flying like Superman. It promotes experimentation with the logic established by the consistent predictability of the game's rules.

The "let them be artists" comment is really good. Way too many designers treat artists like machines and then are surprised that the resulting work isn't as good as that artist's personal work.

1:00:30 "You have to make it fun, not to win."

awesome. Thanks!

Saw the video, intelligence went up. Read the comments, intelligence went down. Cest la RU-vid.

1:31 That title reminds a bit too much of a weird al song and now it's stuck in my head.

CIvilization Revolution totally invested time animating actual Dancing Bears. I've seen them a thousand times.

1:00:40 What you wanna do is make the protagonist have a goal. The protagonist wants money to live day by day or something and the car they got on loan. So you don't have to make it first place to get income and you can have the first match clearly demonstrate the protagonist only cares that they got money out of it and not playing into the whole 'Im the best' thing that the other ones are playing into. A more chill character. Then this way we understand the goal isn't whats normally implied. Or they have a dream to be the best, but oh look at that I don't got shit for money and I'm up against some famous names out there, how do I make do? They wanna start small and get bigger if you do it that way, so it wouldn't work because if you lose you'll soon think its insurmountable odds. The former example could work though because, lets say its a chill guy all he cares about is spending is extra money on hookers or something he doesn't like the attention from being a big name too much, like he doesnt want the heat on him or something from the competition. He wants to just enjoy life, congratulates the winner too. Or make it clear he doesn't care about leading or winning, like if Midnight club has gangs. His goal could be to earn trust, so he participates. You always get some trust for participating, but you earn more for doing better. But what this usually does is make people save scum because they want to maximize the earnings. So what would need to be done then, is have the goal not be to win. Have it be, focus on this other guy, your boss wants him to lose. He can lose by you blocking him you getting ahead of that 1 guy, or you winning the whole thing, he pays you the same amount no matter what if you win. Just don't let that other guy win! Then theres no incentive to save scum because the reward is the same, the goal needs to visibly shift so people know when to feel accomplished. Taking that other guy out makes you feel important to the group or whatever loyalty you are trying to have. So in that case you can be somebody who is doing it just for the money, rigging against people. Or someone with loyalty and ties, someone who wants to do jobs to work his way up. But if you do that you need variety, you need hazards, you need new challenges like there could be word going around at some point, idk. Grains of salt on what I say, take what makes sense, think of consequences to implementations and think of how the protagonist shifts the expectations, I guess.

people actually clapped for the cold war

railroads is my favorite wish they would have made it just a little bigger

24:00 So can I just throw a weak unity to lose first, then take advantage of the compensation and go with the main unity for the real attack? Wonder if they compensated for exploiting the compensation.

TFW the writer of that thing that changed your life reminisces about how she was inspired by how ad executives had marketed a plastic container of banana yoghurt

Is this the same as his other talk under a new name?

I think the "CivRev" battle part has also a lot to do with that the game mechanic doesn't really match completely with reality. In reality when i.e. you have 20 tanks vs 10 tanks (or 10 soccer players vs 5 soccer players) there is an exponential gain for the larger team. This is also reinforced with RTS games. In any RTS a battle between 20 vs 10 will be easily won, because you have 10 extra tanks that can just single out one enemy. Making it quickly 20 vs 9, etc. Also in a lot of other sports and competitions you have this effect, even if it's not team-based. Someone "twice as good" in running or table tennis will win probably 100% of the time.

Great talk. some stuff are slightly outdated now but it's still pretty good advice if you take it with a grain of salt. Besides that, the talk was also really freaking entertaining, heh.

1:06:00 is that Randy?

In Civ 2, I made a terminator unit. You needed AI technology and a cyberdyne factory, and you could build terminator units which were way OP, but so much fun.

I don't think he predicted the irony of modern video game graphics.

16:37 It's amazing how much of professional game design is just nerds discovering common sense.

How old is this talk?

Early shoutout to ppl watching this in 2122 playing Civilization 69

was i being played when i played civ?

1:06:00 Randy!?

720p... sure....

I want to play a Civ game now but I have a PS4.

What's going on with the quality in this video?

Interesting, I suppose one man defeating two opponents does feel more likely than 10 defeating 20

Funny how he says that when the AI do something really cleaver the player thinks the AI peaked behind the scenes and watched his numbers, when Sid himself erlier explain how the battle outcomes are one sided toward the player in all kinds of way, like keeping track of previous battles outcomes. So he is basically reinforcing the (founded and maybe subconscious) belief the player has that something "is off" by cheating on numbers outcomes and at the same time blaming the player for suspecting the AI he programmed to be cheating instead of being smart. Brilliant :| * slow clap *

5:20 I get what he means but not sure Rambo was the best reference, after the first movie he's arguably not that alright

Dificulty levels implementation in CIV 5 and CIV 6 is worst You cant have a good balance game For a moderate challange game you need to go to higher dificulty levels where game its unbalanced from start No fun to play with a DUMB AI who has massive advantages

what if you actually say " being the strongest lead to a higher chance of suffering random disasters" them players would take that for granted instead of the computer cheating and would be a catchup mechaninc

This dissection of players due to 2 different modes could be easily fixed by competent SLs. The ability to relieve SLs and even commander position and replace them by people able or at least willing to take over would fix sooo many problems. It's very frustrating to have one or even several squads full of and being lead by people not interested in proper Squad 44 team play whatsoever. I often find myself jumping into such squads, trying to first talk to SL and that doesn't help, then telling the rest of the squad to join my own I can create for them. However, sometimes even those players are such veggies that they don't respond to this anyway and just blindly (if even) follow their SL that does whatever anyway. Would be still better, if I would lead those lemmings to the frontline myself, instead of having some noob leading them away.

ripped from a VHS tape years later

28:11 How can make the player feel that he/she is progressing/winning by loosing everything he/she achieved? They kinda did this in Spec Ops but in narrative context. Taking away his/her weapons doesn't count.

Some of his stuff is outdated, some of his DONTs have been proven wrong, proven that those rules can be broken if handled well. Gaming has advanced in the last 8 years, and pushing past our old preconceived notions of game design is only a good thing. He's still a legend for what he's accomplished, for what he contributed to gaming, but that doesn't mean his words of wisdom are always the best advice for designers today. As with most things, take it with a grain of salt.

I miss the way you could brake a big computer nation into two, iff you took their capital. Never thought of gunpowder as the thing to rush to. was the classic. -> the republic, via philosophy taht grats 1 free sci if you do it first. ( or great library, when on level emperor, then 100% tax ) maps have ALWAYS been to small. "enemy" nations, way to few. and teck tree to simple. thx for the game started with a copied version off civ1 in 93.

We actually need 9 levels of difficulty. DarkSouls wants to know your location

Has Sid Meirer and Tom Clancy ever collaborated?

(Spoiler-Alert for Undertale, don't continue reading if you haven't played it) LOL, what he describes at ~16:30-18:00 is exactly how Undertale works. And everyone loves that concept in Undertale. It kinda is bound to the guilt of the player, but the concept is similar nevertheless. I kinda really don't like how he thinks about gamers and ridicules them. Maybe those are valid points if you develop games for children, or shooters, but not adult games. Same thing with what he says afterwards. A game that starts happy and with cartoony graphic but then bad things happen. Sorry, but imho that is definitely not a bad concept.

younger gamers are savage... sid is making games for his own demographic.

The gamers are sort of right. 20-10 in battle terms is fundamentally different then a simple 2-1 scenario. Because a real battle isn't over until one side has 0 or surrenders. For simplicity lets say just say the battle is over when one side has 0. To calculate the result more accurately, you have to treat it as several instance of 2:1 encounters. So starting with 20 and 10. For every 2-1 encounter there can be one of these three outcomes (2:0, 1:0, 0:1) - Ok I know technically there could be a 0:0 outcome but lets keep it simple for this example. Now honestly in real life those first two outcomes are much more likely then the last. So lets say that for the first round the first two outcomes happened twice as much as the last one. Round one sees 4X (2:0), 4X (1:0) and 2X (01) That means we now have 12 and 2 going into round 2. That 6-1 odds now in round 2! Now the possible outcomes for round 2 are (0:1, 6:0, 5:0, 4:0, 3:0, 2:0, 1:0) Let's pretend that 1 of those two was freakin' Legolas and he picked off 6 from a distance. And the other guy was super skilled and managed to take 2 down in close combat before falling to his 6 attackers. Round two's results would be 1X (0:1) and 1X (4:0) Sow now we have 4 and 1 in the final round. You decide if Legolas wins or not. The point is, In this hypothetical battle calculation the odds went from 2-1, to 6-1, to 4-1. So yeah 20 to 10 in simple math might be the same as 2 to 1. But the gamer's intuition was telling him that in real life 20-10 are actually better odds than 2:1. TL;DR A real life 20-10 battle should be treated as several small 2:1 encounters. Each encounter _won_ (so not a neutral result 0:0), leaves at least 1 man standing to tip the odds in his teams favor for the next round of calculations. Therefore, 20-10 is not equal to 2-1.

Maybe in Civ VII you should double the spyware.

I am astounded to find that I don't wholly agree with Sid on this talk. But I do wonder if current day Sid agrees with Sid from 10 years ago?

Umm.

self destructive behaviour: me playing civ. life ceases to exist for around 40h

Militia killing a Battleship won't work today…

As brilliant as Sid Meier is on many areas, it's really confusing to show "75% win chance" as 3:1. I've never seen anyone use "2:1" or "3:1" when talking about odds. 3:1 means ratio. 3 parts water, 1 part juice concentrate. 1 cm on the miniature means of 3 cm of the real object. There's 1 dog for every 3 people. By Sid Meier's logic that would mean there's 25% chance of dogs outnumbering humans, dogs just magically appearing. A vast majority of people is going to think that 3:1 means that my "army is 3 times stronger than the enemy army", which would mean roughly 99% chance of winning.

"If your game starts all cartoony and then terrible things start happening, the player turns off their game." Excuse me, but people like happy tree friends. It's called juxtaposition.

Rise and fall mechanics were a mistake... yeah civ 6.... yeah.

Old school thinking where the player has to win and should be encouraged to make the easy and moral decisions.

There is a bias, barbarians were sometimes even more powerful than the romans even though they were not "civilized"

the cynicism is quite funny, but also bums me out a little. feels like civilization is a game with no hardships in this way now that i think about it. junk food.

Ab

Sid Meier is very good at killing aliens

I have to interject at 6:40, When I walk around the map and randomly get a 100 gold from a ruin, I don't feel smart or that I earned it, it makes me question whay that 100 gold laid there for so long with nobody taking it. In other words I do question positive thingas that happen to me as I play

The thing is he is viewing the maths in like a "roll dice" kind of way. thats totally different to how fighting works. even 2:1 is a massive advantage in a fight, 2 people fighting 1 person at the same time, 1 guy could go behind while the other distracts. the odds of winning a 2:1 fight is not 33% like a dice roll, that itself is ridiculously low if everyone was the same strength, unless your 1 person was legolas or leonidas then its a different story.

Bunch of angry zoomies around here.

Pretty boring with just the sound, maybe add the camera in the editing ?

I know it's been 13 years but some of that advice seems extremely wrong now, and I'm not a designer and not even that much of a player... Also, Sid comes out kinda patronizing at times. I have huge respect for this guy and his legacy, but, as it often happens with icons, I don't think I would like to work or spend significant time with him. Or even play new games designed by him anymore.

Sid Meyer: _designs a historical game so an army can regularly defeat an army of twice its size_ Sid Meyer: _publicly mocks players for questioning this and blames their math skills_

Cheat codes "damage" people's experience of the game. In my opinion, people having fun is more important the dev's original vision or design. And fun is the imperative thing to seek out of the experience, and having freedom to allow people to choose their own experience is a good thing towards maximizing their enjoyment of the title.

40:50 The AI bit is bullshit. To cope to the fact that AI technology is still subpar, they say that the players don't really want good ai because they will think that the AI is cheatting. NO. The player thinks that the AI is cheating when he gets the AI cheating unquestionably. Once it is stabilished that the AI cheats, than yeah, maybe the player don't believe when the AI legitimately does something good on it's own merit. The proof of that is that new AI'S like OpenAI or even chess or GO AI are not suspect of cheating. No one thinks that alpha go was actually consulting a team of go experts, or that OpenAI didn't have war fog on, etc. when they didn't. But if the civ AI has 3k cities and no happiness problem, than there is no question it is cheating.

why have so much ramdomness in battles in the first place?

I have to say I've been listening for a few min and this all seems quite generic

In order to save the game, we had to destroy it. I could go on like this all day. Assuming you know what is best for players can never be better than expedient. In this 42:25 instance, where it is not a feature that is offered to the player, but taking away an option of how to play the game from the player, it is unequivocally arrogant.

Some people should try to learn something, before trying to prove him wrong...

Sid Meier discovered the ways of making games compelling to bronze tier players xDD

and yet Sid hasnt figured out how design interesting factions by game 6, look at endless legend, their expansionist faction doesnt get some worthless BS like a unit that is a litttle better, no they get less food forcing plus they get food for killing units and you can also get more units for killing so the player plays a very different game with faction A then faction B

Too many games these days rely on pure RNG. Mathematically, if you have a 50% chance to hit an enemy, that means out of a hundred attacks, you're going to get wrecked 50 times. Count up to fifty, and imagine for each count, you get punished. It may be mathematically accurate, but it's just not fun. You lose units. You lose gear. You waste time trying to rebuild. You feel like you're not progressing. Worst of all, you feel like your choices and skill is irrelevant because the dice kick your ass as often as not no matter what you do. Sometimes you gotta massage the numbers a bit to improve the player experience.

hahahaha credit urself more

Pretty much every single point has been disproved by another game, but where he really lost me was at "we change the odds based on previous outcomes". Maybe we should just expect more from players, instead of giving them games that re-enforce their ignorance.

"No one ever gives gold to another player" That is definitely true in real life too. No one ever gives you money for nothing because we are greedy humans who do not care about others, unless it is a sob story on gofundme.

why does this talk feels like it is an infomercial from 80s?

Hm... Im not sure that Mr Sid Meier is as good designer as everyone think he is

"not the game that I designed." Here's a thought: maybe it is the game that the player Bought. Your consensual involvement with this game's players will end as soon as you spend the money you were paid to make it.The fewer automated tentacles you put in it to exert your control for the Ages, the better.

I don't really like the way he thinks about the whole stuff. Fortunately not everyone is like him, so we have games like This War of Mine and also games like Dark Souls. Now that I heard his talk I kinda feel that he is a bit overrated. Literature can be used to explore more serious topics. Films also. Games also.

so random, isn't it? there are much better talks out there. civ and col are great, but i feel when he talks he is the most average game designer in the world

Uhm, this, uh, talk was, ah, quite interesting. Um, but, ah, I thought the, um, delivery was, uhm, ah, uhm, frustrating.

Sid Meier or as I call him "Mr Umm".he say Umm so often, sometimes 2 or 3 times per sentence. So distracting.Great knowledge and information, but he really needs some training to up his skills as a public speaker.

this guy should not be allowed to even mention "mathematics" ... what a non sensical piece of sh... 1.5 damage vs 0.5 damage = NOT "3 to 1". 1.5 damage when ppl has life = "2" means that 1 and a half attacks will certainly kill someone. .5 damage in the same scenario, means that 4 attacks will kill someone. this means that barbarians have ZERO chances of winning a battle where each person hits in turns. because when they manage to lower the hp of one roman to a HALF, they are DEAD AND CANNOT KEEP FIGHTING ANYMORE. that means that 1.5 to 0.5 is not a 3 to 1. is a infinit to zero. you can then add a "critical lucky strike" where you multiply the damage of any unit by a margin. if both troops have the same modifier (*1.5). one "lucky" hit of a roman = 2.25 damage. means that in one hit he insta kills a barbarian. but for a barbarian, a 0.75 damage will mean pretty much the same as his normal hit value. also 20 ppl hitting 10 ppl means that when one of the ten fall, there are 4 ppl hitting one. that one will fall fast. then you will have 6 ppl hitting on 1. that one will hit faster. that same situation is happening to all ten of those ppl, so actually you never even reach the 6v1 situation, because your 20 have already killed all 10, probably with a single casualty, maybe 2. 20 to 10 is definetely NOT the same as 2 vs 1. this guy is not very smart really. and certainly math is not something he understands. nor actual ppl fighting.

It's funny that so much of what he believes has been disproved by Dark Souls.

"As designers, we're kind of here to make the game, and not to hand it over to the players" If you could make a program that would allow players to make their own game easily, that would be the best. If you see that there is no reason for you as developer to do a thing, because the player can do it, and decide that you will do it anyway because otherwise, what point is there for you to be a developer, then you shouldn't be a developer

Really bad talk. It incredibly bad because i played civic games and they all have great idea, but horrible execution. Mainly AI. Some part of this talk was about AI and i never saw worse one... . Civic how to do difficulty is to ridiculously boost up AI stats, like double .... What is AI about that ? its just brute force without any logic or "AI"...