About halfway through the process we realized that, wow, this game really is a lot of fun
to play. It was a pleasant discovery for us.
So you don’t have any advice for how other designers can try to achieve that
addictiveness in their own games?
I think in hindsight we know, or we think we know, why the game is addictive, or have
our theories. One thing is what we call “interesting decisions.” To us that means you
are presented with a stream of decision points where the decisions are not so complex
that you are basically randomly choosing from a list of options. A too-complex decision
is one where you say, “Oh, I’ve got these three options. Yeah, I could spend five minutes
analyzing the situation, but I really want to get on with the game so I’m going to pick B
because it looks good.” And on the other extreme there’s the too-simple decisions:
“It’s obvious that I must choose A, because it is clearly better than all of the other
options.” InCiv.we try to present you choices where they are easy enough to under-
stand, but in a certain situation you might choose A, in a slightly different situation B is
a good choice, in another situation C is a good choice. So you’re really saying, “Here are
the three technologies that I can go for next.” And you say to yourself, “Well, right now
I’m about to get into a conflict with those no-good Romans. So I really need that tech-
nology that gives me the next cool military unit. But, well, that map-making looks kind
of interesting. Next time I might take that because I want to do some exploring.” So if
you can create decisions where the player is always saying, “Next time, I’m going to try
that one, because that looks interesting too,” that creates this whole idea that there’s
this richness there that you’re only scratching the surface of this time.
The addictive quality, I think, also falls out of the fact that you’ve got multiple
things happening or in process at the same time. On the one hand you’ve got your next
technology churning away over there. Your scientists are working on that. And this city
is making that first tank that you’re looking forward to. Over here is a unit wandering
around to the next continent, and pretty soon he’ll find something interesting. You’ve
got different things that you are looking forward to in the game, and there’s never a
time when those are all done. There’s never a reset state. There’s always two or three
things happening in the game that you are looking forward to when they finish. So
there’s never actually a good time to stop playing. I think that really helps the “you can
never stop playing the game” phenomenon.
I knowGettysburg!was not your first real-time game, but it seems to have
been in part inspired by the big hit RTS games likeCommand & Conquerand
WarCraft.
I think the technology had gotten to the point where you could have a whole bunch of
little guys running around doing stuff on the screen in real-time. And what you call
“real-time,” it’s kind of a weird term because we’ve done real-time games forever, but
we didn’t think of them as real-time because it just seemed a natural thing. But I guess
when turn-based got to be its own genre, we had to make a distinction. I thinkGettys-
burg!is a game that I wanted to do for a long time, but the technology didn’t really lend
itself to being able to do it until fairly recently. We finally got to the point where we could
have a bunch of guys marching around the screen on a realistic-looking battlefield,
Chapter 2: Interview: Sid Meier 27