tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7533332488409028482024-03-13T21:59:37.048-05:00Theory by FlatfingersDesign commentaries on computer games... mostly.Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.comBlogger566125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-68654128620192464762015-09-23T02:55:00.002-05:002015-09-23T03:04:47.912-05:00The Witcher 3: An Analysis of Tactics and Strategy in GwentLet's talk Gwent!<br />
<br />
If you've been playing <i>The Witcher 3</i>, you almost certainly know what Gwent is: the collectible card game that can be played with many AI characters in the game world. It's like Pazaak in the two <i>Knights of the Old Republic games</i>, only more so.<br />
<br />
I thought it might be fun to share a few ideas about the tactics and strategies for playing Gwent that have made me, part-way through Velen, a moderately successful player. These are things I've found helpful, but I'd like to hear what approaches have worked for you.<br />
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Note: I'll try to keep this as spoiler-free as possible, but if you haven't played The Witcher 3 at all yet there may be some minor spoilers. Nothing that would ruin the game for you, but still, spoilers, so why not play TW3 first? It's a really good game.<br />
<br />
<b>GENERAL OBSERVATIONS</b><br />
<br />
Gwent consists of two parts: acquiring cards for four different deck types, and playing games of Gwent with NPCs.<br />
<br />
One of the Gwent guides floating around the web says that if you want to do well at Gwent, you must embrace it as a lifestyle. Your Geralt will be wandering the world, plaintively begging everyone in sight: "Gwent! Gwent? Gweeeeeeeeent!"<br />
<br />
This is accurate.<br />
<br />
Winning at Gwent, especially in the higher levels, requires you to acquire as many cards as possible, in any way possible. You'll do this in two ways:<br />
<br />
1. Buy cards from merchants. Start in White Orchard: buy every single card you see. Do as many quests and defeat as many opponents as you have to to earn the money to buy every card before leaving White Orchard. (Also play one nobleman in your next stop before moving on.) Later on, there'll be some cards you don't need to buy, such as the weak Poor Fucking Infantry for the Northern Realms deck. But most of the time, if you see a card, you'll want to buy it.<br />
<br />
2. Win cards by defeating AI opponents. Many merchants and blacksmiths/armorers will play Gwent with you, and when you beat them (if you can!), you will gain one of their cards. (Note that which card you get is random, so in the later game you may want to save before playing -- if you don't need or like the card you win, you can try playing again for a different card.) Additionally, there are a couple of quests that involve playing particular NPCs. If you can defeat them, you'll score some really powerful cards... but they are tough opponents.<br />
<br />
Once you've acquired at least one complete deck -- at least 22 numeric cards -- you're ready to start taking on NPCs. Here's how to play.<br />
<br />
<b>GWENT DESCRIBED</b><br />
<br />
There are four different kinds of decks you can build and play in Gwent. The four deck types are:<br />
<br />
<ul><li>Northern Realms</li>
<li>Nilfgaardian Empire</li>
<li>Scoia'tael</li>
<li>Monsters</li>
</ul><br />
I'll talk more about the styles of the different deck types later on in the Tactics and Strategy sections. For now, just note that you'll be building and improving all four of these decks all the time -- firstly to get each deck up to a full playable strength of 22+ Unit and Hero cards, and then to strengthen each deck by replacing weak cards with better ones after the full 22+ card count is achieved. (I say "22+" rather than "22" for reasons explained further on. Gwent is just like that.)<br />
<br />
Cards in each deck type consist of "Unit cards" that have a numeric strength and possibly a special power; "Hero cards" that have a numeric strength and are immune to certain special effects; "Special cards" that apply various effects; and "Leader cards" that have one-time special effects of their own. Finally, each deck has a factional perk that can be applied. Knowing when, why, and how to use each of these cards and effects and powers and perks is what winning at Gwent is all about.<br />
<br />
Before a game starts, both players choose a deck (if they have more than one complete deck type), select which cards to include in that deck and which Leader type to use, randomly draw ten cards from their deck, and optionally replace up to two of the cards they drew with randomly-selected cards from that deck.<br />
<br />
To play Gwent, the two players take turns choosing cards to play onto the field, with whomever gets the first turn decided randomly (except for the Scoia'tael who play first as their factional perk). Unit and Hero cards, and some special cards, are played onto one of three rows: Close Combat, Ranged Combat, and Siege Combat. Each player has these three rows (for six rows total). All Unit and Hero cards are marked with which row they can be played onto. (Many Scoia'tael cards, and some Monster cards, can be played onto one of several possible rows.) Special cards go either onto the side of one's three rows, or into a side area if they affect multiple rows.<br />
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So "playing Gwent" is mostly choosing which cards in your hand you want to play to the field. Whoever has the most points at the end of each round (except for a Nilfgaardian factional perk) wins that round. And the winner of a game is the winner of two rounds out of three.<br />
<br />
Before I get into the details of tactics and strategy in Gwent, let's review the kinds of cards available.<br />
<br />
<b>UNIT CARDS AND HERO CARDS</b><br />
<br />
Unit cards are the most basic and common cards in Gwent. They consist of a character or creature type and have a numeric value ranging from 0 to 10.<br />
<br />
Some Unit cards also have special powers. Because certain decks tend to emphasize Unit cards with particular special powers, I'll describe those in the Tactics section.<br />
<br />
Hero cards are similar to Unit cards in that they have numeric values (shown on the card inside a black-and-gold sunburst circle), and possibly a special power. But they are immune to special effects as noted below, so you must be aware of this when playing Special cards.<br />
<br />
<b>SPECIAL CARDS</b><br />
<br />
These cards, which can be used by any deck and don't count toward the 22+ number of Unit and Hero cards required for a full deck, deserve particular attention because they play such an enormous role in Gwent tactics.<br />
<br />
<ul><li><b>Biting Frost</b>: sets all Close Combat Unit card values to 1</li>
<li><b>Impenetrable Fog</b>: sets all Ranged Combat Unit card values to 1</li>
<li><b>Torrential Rain</b>: sets all Siege Combat Unit card values to 1</li>
<li><b>Clear Weather</b>: removes any/all weather cards and effects from all rows</li>
<li><b>Commander's Horn</b>: doubles the value of all Unit cards on that row</li>
<li><b>Decoy</b>: immediately put one of your Unit cards back into your playable hand</li>
<li><b>Scorch</b>: immediately moves the highest-valued Unit card(s) anywhere on the board into the owner's discard pile</li>
</ul><br />
Note that these effects, positive and negative, apply only to Unit cards. Again, these effects <i>do nothing at all to Hero cards</i>, good or bad, so you'll need to keep that in mind when you play your Special cards.<br />
<br />
<b>TACTICS</b><br />
<br />
<i><b>Unit Powers</b></i><br />
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Before discussing tactics for particular decks, let's first consider the special powers that many of the Unit cards can have. These are important for tactical play applying to all of the decks.<br />
<br />
<b>Agile</b>: Mostly a Scoia'tael power, this allows a card to be played in either of two rows (usually Close and Ranged Combat). Having numerous such cards in your hand allows you to recover (somewhat) during the same round if your opponent played a weather Special card or Scorched some of your units.<br />
<br />
<b>Spy</b>: When you play the Spy card, it's actually played onto <i>your opponent's</i> side of the field, giving your opponent whatever numeric points that card has... but for that price, two cards randomly selected from your deck are added to your hand. These extra cards can be the difference between losing a round and winning it. Note, though, that unlike other Unit cards, the most powerful Spy card is actually the one with the lowest numeric value, since playing it into your opponent's field adds the least to your opponent's total score.<br />
<br />
I recently had the choice, after defeating a merchant a couple of times (after restoring from a save just to see what would happen), of taking either a 3-point Muster card or a 9-point Spy card. I took the Muster. Why in the world would I do that? Because giving my opponent 9 points in return for two cards is just too much. Other players may think the special powers of two extra cards will outweigh giving my opponent 9 points. I'm not convinced of that, in part because those 9 points could become 18 points if they play a Commander's Horn on that row. (On the other end of the scale, there is a Spy card worth 0 points. That is as good as it gets. :))<br />
<br />
Another note on playing Spy cards is that they are most valuable at either the very start of a round (to give you extra cards early for tactical advantage in that round), or at the very end of Round 1 or 2 that you've lost (because giving your opponent more points in that round costs you nothing, but it puts two extra cards in your hand for the next round).<br />
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<b>Morale</b>: This power adds 1 to the value of other Unit cards in the same row.<br />
<br />
This may not seem like much, but what's interesting about this power is that it ignores weather effects! If you have four Siege Combat cards reduced to 1 by Torrential Rain, your total value for that row becomes a measly 4 points. But if you play a Kaedweni Siege Engineer card with the Morale power on that row, it still adds one to each other Unit card so that your total for that row becomes 8. This isn't much, but it may be just enough. (Also, multiple Morale cards on the same row stack... and the +1 they add can be doubled by a Commander's Horn card.)<br />
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<b>Tight Bond</b>: For each similar card with the Tight Bond special power on a row, the basic point value of each card is added to each card.<br />
<br />
(Note: it would be easier to say that "Tight Bond doubles the value of all similar Unit cards on that row," which is what the game itself says, but that's not accurate. Having three Tight Bond cards of basic value 4 does not double their basic value twice for a total of 48 -- it only adds 4 to each card twice for a total value of 36. That's still a nice effect, but it's not "doubling" as advertised.)<br />
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Here's an example of Tight Bond in action. Play one Impera Brigade Guard (Close Combat) with a value of 3, and you get 3 points. Play a second Impera Brigade Guard with the Tight Bond power, and the initial value of three is added to both cards -- they're now both worth 6, for a total of 12 points. Play a third Impera Brigade Guard, and the face value of all three cards is added to all three cards -- each of the three cards is now worth 9 for a total of 27 points. Add yet a fourth Impera Brigade Guard, and all four cards are now worth 12 points, for a total of 48 points! Now play a Commander's Horn on that row for a total of 96 points... from just five cards.<br />
<br />
Obviously this can be a devastating punch, but there are a couple of factors to be aware of if you want to use it. One: having two Tight Bond cards can be useful, but the real value is in having at least three. It will take you a while to find that many similar Tight Bond cards. Two: these are still Unit cards, so the doubling effect makes them highly vulnerable to an applicable weather card (reducing all values to 1) and to the Scorch card (which would almost certainly remove every one of your "doubled" cards). To reduce these vulnerabilities, play these cards last in a round or after you've already been Scorched, and play your Commander's Horn (if you have one) after playing all your Tight Bond cards; also, try to get a Clear Weather card into your hand... just in case.<br />
<br />
<b>Muster</b>: When you play one Unit card with the Muster power, you may immediately play every similar Muster card from your entire deck.<br />
<br />
Did you catch that? "From your entire deck," not just the cards in your hand.<br />
<br />
If you have one Muster card in your hand with a value of 3, and five other similar cards in your deck, when you play your one Muster card it pulls every other similar Muster card onto the playing field for a total of not 3, but 18 points -- in a single turn. Making this (or Tight Bond units) your core tactic is not something you can do when you first start playing Gwent, because you will need to find enough similar Muster (or Tight Bond) cards to make playing them all in one round numerically valuable. But once you've got several of them, this is very nearly a Win Button for a round of Gwent.<br />
<br />
Important strategic note: having Muster cards in your deck is the one time when you want to put more than 22 cards into your deck. Remember that additional Muster cards are pulled from your full deck, not just from your current hand. So the strategic penalty for having more than 22 cards in a deck (because you might get some low-value cards in your initial draw of 10 cards) is reduced as long as those "extra" cards have the Muster special power.<br />
<br />
<b>Medic</b>: Medic cards, when played, immediately allow you to choose one Unit card (not Hero or Special cards!) from your discard pile and play it immediately.<br />
<br />
This can be an extremely powerful ability. Not only do you get the points from the Medic card (if any), as well as the points from the recovered card of your choice, but you get the special powers of the recovered card as well. This can be very powerful if you restore a Tight Bond card with a related Tight Bond card already on the playing field. Interestingly, you can also restore a Spy card previously played onto your field by your opponent, although the point value of that Spy goes into your opponent's total for that round. This means that playing a Medic power potentially gives you the equivalent of putting two extra cards in your hand for no cost other than a turn.<br />
<br />
Even if you don't restore a Spy card, however, an important tactical note for playing a Medic card is to do so early in a round, preferably as your first card -- this maximizes your tactical options in that round. (Important point, though: do not play a Medic card if you have no discards, or no Unit cards in your discard pile! Hero cards and Special cards can't be restored by a Medic. I learned this lesson the hard way.)<br />
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<b>Row-Specific Scorch</b>: Another special power is a limited version of Scorch that at least one Unit card and a couple of Leader cards have. This power destroys the highest-value card(s) in one of the opponent's rows (such as Close Combat) if the combined value of those cards is 10 or more.<br />
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Finally, there are also a few Unit cards that can be added to any deck. These are mostly old friends of Geralt, such as Zoltan Chivay and Vesemir.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Deck-based Tactics</b></i><br />
<br />
Now that we've looked closely at the Unit, Hero, and Special cards, let's (finally!) get to tactics in Gwent.<br />
<br />
Each of the four deck types has Unit cards that are particular to it. So each deck type needs particular tactics to be successful -- you want to know and use the strengths of your deck against the probable weaknesses of your opponent's deck. I'll discuss tactics for each of the four deck types from the perspective of playing that kind of deck against any NPC. In the Strategy section, I'll talk about how to play against certain deck types.<br />
<br />
<b>Northern Realms</b><br />
<br />
This will be your first complete deck, so you'll be using it for a long time. While your Leader card, King Foltest, has several powers, what I found most effective was his ability to function as a Commander's Horn for the Siege Combat row. It can be devastating to lure an opponent into spending cards to reduce your Close Combat and Ranged Combat rows, only to smack them down by doubling 20+ points on the Siege Combat row to over 40 or 50 points by playing your Foltest power. Alternately, if you think you've already got enough actual Commander's Horns in your deck, choosing Foltest's special Clear Weather power when building this deck can win a round for you that otherwise seemed lost.<br />
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Generally speaking, Northern Realms is about straight-up beating your opponent quickly with higher-numbered unit cards. There aren't many hero cards for Northern Realms (at least that I've seen), so it's vital that you find and collect Commander's Horn cards. I keep three in my Northern Realms deck; that way I almost always get at least one in every game, and sometimes get two. Note that depending on a Commander's Horn tactic makes you vulnerable to losing a lot of points if your opponent plays a Scorch card -- if you have three 6-point cards that you've doubled to three 12-point cards, you will instantly lose 36 points if Scorched! So it's almost always best for Northern Realms to play low-valued Unit cards first, let your opponent knock out one or two "high" cards, and then double your highest-valued row with a Commander's Horn as your last move for a round.<br />
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The three negative weather effect cards are less useful to Northern Realms (and Monster) decks because, while they reduce your opponent's score, they frequently also reduce your score. The only weather card I keep (if any) is a Clear Weather card, specifically because I expect to have a lot of points in one row at a time thanks to a Commander's Horn.<br />
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Because the Northern Realms factional perk is to get one extra card after winning a round, your goal should usually be to try to win the first round. Letting your opponent win a round so that you have more cards for a later round -- a typically Nilfgaardian tactic -- makes the Northern Realms factional perk worthless. So a Northern Realms player normally throws a round only if clearly necessary, or if you're pretty sure the later round is a guaranteed win no matter what.<br />
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<b>Nilfgaardian Empire</b><br />
<br />
Will Rogers is credited with saying, "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' until you can find a rock." That is a perfect description of Gwent as played with a Nilfgaard deck. In fact, I would not be surprised if I learned that the deck for Nilfgaard was the main reason why Gwent was invented for The Witcher 3. It is a fantastic representation of how the Nilfgaardian Empire's culture is represented in the world of The Witcher.<br />
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A complete Nilfgaard deck (and playable hand) will probably have several Spy cards, several Medic cards, and several Hero cards. Crucially, the factional perk of the Nilfgaard deck is that the Nilfgaard player (assuming both players aren't using the Nilfgaard deck) wins all rounds that end in a tie. Combine those features and the Nilfgaard player has a clear tactical goal: make your opponent use up every single one of their numeric (Unit and Hero) cards by the end of the second round. As long as you win either of the first or second rounds, and all of your opponents Unit and Hero cards have been played by the end of the second round, you will automatically win the last round as a 0-0 tie.<br />
<br />
See? Nilfgaard. Sneaky bastards.<br />
<br />
(This sounds funny, but just wait until they do it to you several times, as numerous NPCs have to me. You will long for the day when you have a complete Nilfgaard deck of your own.)<br />
<br />
Achieving this tactic usually means playing one round with mostly regular Unit and Hero cards (that don't have special powers) to try to lure your opponent into spending as many of their numeric cards as possible. It's even OK to let them win that round, even by some ludicrous amount, giving them the points of every Spy card you have in exchange for two more cards in your hand, plus a few of your own regular Unit cards for your discard pile. Because next round, you will have something like 12 cards to their 6, plus discards that you can add to your hand with Medic cards. Now play your remaining Unit cards, and Medic cards if necessary, to try to get your opponent to play their last remaining numeric cards. Not only will you win this round, you'll take the third and final round as well as a 0-0 tie, even if you have no numeric cards of your own left to play.<br />
<br />
Because Nilfgaard depends on getting a large number of cards, rather than on high-valued cards, a round for Nilfgaard is usually less susceptible to being Scorched. That's also why you'll probably want to keep a Scorch card yourself to really give your opponent a bad day. Weather cards may also work for Nilfgaard for the same reason, but I prefer Commander's Horn as its effect is more certain.<br />
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Nilfgaard also has some sneaky tricks related to their Leader cards, such as canceling the Leader ability of the other player, but I'll give you a detailed example in the Strategy section.<br />
<br />
<b>Scoia'tael</b><br />
<br />
The great advantage of Scoia'tael in Gwent matches the nature of Scoia'tael in the world of The Witcher: they're nimble. Elves and Dwarves know they're outnumbered, so they rely on being highly maneuverable to survive.<br />
<br />
Most of the Unit cards in a Scoia'tael deck will have the Agile power: many cards can be played in either the Close Combat or Ranged Combat row. The Scoia'tael deck also has more Medic units than any other deck, which maximizes the number of Agile cards that you can play. Finally, they also have some Muster units, so they can also have larger-than-normal decks.<br />
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The most advantageous tactic for you when you play a Scoia'tael deck is thus flexibility -- being able switch within a round to building a high numeric value on a different row or rows than where you started. This emphasis makes the weather effect Special cards most useful for the Scoia'tael deck.<br />
<br />
Suppose you start building on the Close Combat row. Your opponent does the same. You can go for several turns, encouraging your opponent to think it's safe to play more cards there, even with a Commander's Horn, because hey, you're playing there, too. Then you hit them with a Biting Frost Weather card, and all non-Hero Close Combat cards are only worth 1 point. Suddenly they have only five points to your three or four... but where they have only one or two (or no) Ranged Combat cards, you've still got four or five Agile cards you can play on that row. Blam. And when you use your Medic cards in Round 2 or 3 to get some of your discards back, you can once again flow your cards to match the opponent's strongest row (discouraging them from playing a weather card against you). Double-blam.<br />
<br />
The Scoia'tael deck isn't as sneaky as the Nilfgaard deck. But it does share with Nilfgaard a certain tactical style of luring one's opponent into committing to a big score on one row, then making that score meaningless.<br />
<br />
<b>Monsters</b><br />
<br />
Playing the Monsters deck is about one thing: pure, raw, brutal power. Where the Nilfgaard and Scoia'tael decks offer many opportunities for tactical improvisation, the Monsters deck is about overwhelming the opponent with numbers as quickly as possible.<br />
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(Note: I don't have a full Monsters deck myself yet, so the following is just what I've observed from playing against those decks.)<br />
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The main special power of Unit cards in the Monsters deck is the Muster power. These are usually not high-value cards, but that's not their purpose -- they win from sheer numbers. So even when you've finally got your own Monsters deck, you're probably not going to be able to win right away. You need more Muster cards.<br />
<br />
Once you've built your Monsters deck up to 25, 28, 30 cards, with a couple good-sized packs of Muster units, you can be nigh unstoppable. Even if you double the value of a row full of Muster Unit cards with a Commander's Horn, each doubled card will still be low enough in value to be safe from the Scorch card. Bad weather can really hurt you, though, so putting one or two Clear Weather cards in your deck should be a smart strategy when playing a Monsters deck.<br />
<br />
Speaking of strategies....<br />
<br />
<b>STRATEGIES</b><br />
<br />
As you've seen from the above analysis of Gwent tactics, each of the four deck types has a different "flavor" due to the most common special power of the unit cards they have, as well as to their leader's special power and their factional perk. Northern Realms tends to favor straightforward army force, especially siege engines; the Nilfgaardian deck emphasizes devious, clever play to outlast opponents; the Scoia'tael cards can be used in different ways to adapt to one's opponent; and the Monster deck is geared toward overwhelming opponents.<br />
<br />
Strategy in Gwent is thus about two things: maximizing the strengths of your chosen deck while planning to minimize the strengths of the opponent decks you expect to face. You accomplish these goals by choosing which cards to include in each deck (once you have more than 22 unit/hero cards to choose from), and by deciding which kind of deck to use against a particular opponent (once you have more than one full deck type). So let's talk about deck-building, Leader cards, and how to pick a deck to use against particular opponents.<br />
<br />
<b>Northern Realms</b><br />
<br />
Northern Realms is, let's admit it, sort of boring as an opponent. There's nothing all that special about them; you just have to score more points than they do. They will emphasize their siege engines, plus one of the King Foltest Leader card abilities is to play a Commander's Horn on the Siege Combat row, which is like them having an extra Commander's Horn card for the kind of Unit cards they prefer. So it doesn't hurt to have a Torrential Rain card in your deck, or even two. Keeping a Scorch card ready is also great fun when they've doubled the value of several high-value cards -- those Temerian rebels just never learn their lesson.<br />
<br />
Finally, when you can, consider playing a Monster deck against an opponent playing a Northern Realms deck. Since your advantage in overpowering numbers is the same kind of power -- only more so -- than the Northern Realms player depends on, you can usually outnumber him through your Muster cards.<br />
<br />
<b>Nilfgaardian Empire</b><br />
<br />
Playing against a Nilfgaard opponent -- which you will do frequently in the larger cities of Velen -- can be incredibly frustrating. Just when you think you've got them dead to rights, with 60-80 points on your side, they will smile and let you have that round... because you've burned up most of your Unit cards to try to beat them in that round, which they never even planned on winning. They they will add to their pile of cards by throwing multiple Spies at you, draining the rest of your Unit cards to try to keep up with them in Round 2, which you probably won't be able to do. And then they'll take Round 3 by default because you're out of cards.<br />
<br />
To beat a Nilfgaard opponent... play a Nilfgaard deck yourself. If you can't do that, try to have several Medic cards (by playing a Scoia'tael deck if you can). Also be sure to get at least one Decoy Special card in your hand. When your devious opponent drops a Spy Unit card on you in the first or second round, use Decoy on that card to put it in your hand, then play it right back against them to add to your own total number of cards. And then hope you're lucky, because you'll need it.<br />
<br />
<b>Scoia'tael</b><br />
<br />
An opponent playing a Scoia'tael deck can be almost as frustrating as a Nilfgaardian because the tricky devils won't stand still for a solid hit. They'll let you spend your strength swatting them down in one row, then they'll use their Agile special powers to swarm their next cards to a different row to take the round. They're possibly the most well-rounded of all the factional decks. They can be beaten, but you'll have to either crush them (and protect your high cards from bad weather and pray they don't Scorch you), or out-sneaky them with Nilfgaardian cunning.<br />
<br />
One NPC player in particular has an excellent Scoia'tael deck, and was basically unbeatable to me when I used a very good Northern Realms deck. My solution was to switch to a pretty good Nilfgaardian deck and use every tactical advantage I had, including the ability to count. In particular, the last round was the clincher. I'd given him the first round to try to get him to burn through his cards, but he hadn't cooperated. Midway through the second round, I was trying to wear him out again, more successfully, but it was costing me a lot of cards. He had four cards, while I had only three. I was only slightly ahead of him in total points, so it felt like somebody was about to bust things wide open at the end of the second round.<br />
<br />
It was my turn. The factional perk I'd selected for Emperor Emreis was to be able to peek at three of my opponent's cards. I used that perk now. In addition to one card I couldn't see, he had one regular (although Agile) unit for 5 points, plus a Torrential Rain, plus a Scorch. That Scorch freaked me out, but then I realized that my cards, on the board and in my hand, were all pretty low-to-middling value -- nothing higher than a 6. If he had two unit cards that totaled up to 11 points, I could match that. After my peek, he played his card: a 6. Ouch. He now had four cards worth 6 on the board, and he was about to add the one I'd peeked at that was worth 5. I now had one unit card remaining, which was worth 5 points, plus a Commander's Horn I was saving for the right moment, plus a worthless Decoy because I couldn't afford to remove any of my cards from the board this round.<br />
<br />
I played my 5. He played his 5. We now both had two cards left: him with his Torrential Rain and Scorch, and me with my Commander's Horn and (useless) Decoy. It was my turn, leading by just a couple of points... and I realized that if I played my next card correctly, I would win both the round and the game.<br />
<br />
Here's why. On the board, he had a Close Combat row with three 6-point units and a Ranged Combat row with another 6-point unit, for a total of four 6-point cards on the table. Meanwhile, I had most of my cards in Close Combat for a total of 22 points on that row, but only three cards worth 6 points on the whole table. In my Ranged combat row I had two cards: one Unit card worth 1 point, and a Hero card worth 10 points. Finally, in my Siege Combat row, I had one card worth exactly 0 points (it had a Medic ability I'd used previously in the round).<br />
<br />
What did this mean? It meant he'd chosen well as a Scoia'tael going up against a Northern Realms player, because his Torrential Rain card would be good against them. But I wasn't playing a Northern Realms deck any more, and his siege engine-confounding Torrential Rain card would do precisely diddly-squat against my 0-point Siege Expert.<br />
<br />
Now I had a choice. My Commander's Horn card wouldn't do any good on my 0-point Siege Combat row. On my Ranged Combat row, it would add just a single point (to a 1-point Unit card plus a 10-point Hero card that couldn't be doubled). If I played Commander's Horn on my Close Combat row, it would double my score there to 44 points, and I would win the game, right? Wrong. If I'd played my Commander's Horn on that row, it would have doubled each of my three 6-point cards to be worth 12 points each... and then my opponent would have Scorched them. I'd have lost 18 points, the round, and the game.<br />
<br />
So I doubled my single 1-point Ranged Combat card. And after forlornly playing his worthless Torrential Rain card, my opponent conceded the round. He had calculated, just as I had, that if he'd played his last card, the Scorch, he would have lost four 6-point cards to my three. So he surrendered the second round to me, with both of us out of Unit and Hero cards. And so for the third round, because we both had scores of 0, I won because of the Nilfgaardian factional perk that tied rounds go to the Nilfgaardian player.<br />
<br />
So even a very powerful Scoia'tael deck can be beaten. But you have to have a good deck that counters Scoia'tael strengths, and you have to use every advantage and consider consequences before playing what might look like an obvious winning move.<br />
<br />
Being lucky in your draw helps, too. :)<br />
<br />
<b>Monsters</b><br />
<br />
Finally, playing against a strong Monsters deck is incredibly frustrating due to their Muster power. They might appear weak in any turn, but in any turn they can easily add 15 or more points to their score. And because each card is low-value, you'd only hurt yourself by playing a Scorch against them. You might try keeping some weather Special cards, but those consume slots that could hold high-value Unit cards and Commander's Horns, and there's no guarantee your weather card would hurt a Monsters row but not you.<br />
<br />
Once again, my experience has been that the solution to a strong Monsters deck is not trying to use brute force against them -- they'll almost always win in a head-to-head challenge of raw numeric power -- but to outmaneuver them. A good Scoia'tael deck might do this... but a good Nilfgaardian deck is a better bet.<br />
<br />
The toughest Gwent fight I've had so far, in playing most of the NPC Gwent players in Velen, was against a Monsters deck player in Novigrad. Every time I played my otherwise strong Northern Realms deck against him, he would smoke me. Five times in a row (no reloads), he did this to me. How? Because he had not one, not two, but three different super-Muster combinations. Even if I somehow won one round, he would win the other two, every single time.<br />
<br />
In one of our contests, I used all five of my siege engines and my Foltest's Commander's Horn for Siege Combat special power (plus other cards) to score over 100 points in that round. He used multiple Musters to score over 120 points.<br />
<br />
But I finally beat him. Yes, with a Nilfgaardian Empire deck... but only by the absolute thinnest of margins.<br />
<br />
I got lucky with the draw, and pulled several Spy and Medic cards. He obliterated me in the first round, as usual, but this time I was counting on that and used several Spy cards to add to my hand for the next round. In the second round, I used those extra cards plus my Medic cards to win, reserving three very special cards for the third round. Obviously he was saving his last big Muster for the final and deciding round.<br />
<br />
We started the third round, and sure enough, he played his third big Muster, piling a bunch of cards on the table, followed by a Commander's Horn in one row. Ultimately he wound up with 54 points, a third-round score that would normally have me chewing my hair and pounding on the desktop in frustration. In fact, at this point, as he concluded his game by standing on his 54 points, I was convinced that he'd won again. But I had four cards left: three Impera Brigade Guards worth 3 measly points each and a Commander's Horn.<br />
<br />
One Impera Brigade Guard: 3 points.<br />
<br />
Two Impera Brigade Guards: 12 points.<br />
<br />
Three Impera Brigade Guards: 27 points.<br />
<br />
One Commander's Horn on that row: 54 points.<br />
<br />
The Nilfgaardian factional perk wins ties.<br />
<br />
Boom.<br />
<br />
Best. Win. Ever. :)<br />
<br />
So again, it can be done. Even a horrendously strong deck can eventually be beaten. But again, it takes thoughtful deck selection strategy, appropriate multi-round tactics, and a healthy dollop of luck.<br />
<br />
<b>CONCLUSIONS</b><br />
<br />
Obviously I've been really enjoying Gwent. I've never been one for collectible card games; I'll never be a player of Pokemon or Magic: The Gathering. Those are against real people. :)<br />
<br />
But I think I do see the allure of these games: that by building a strong enough deck, with the right cards, and getting lucky when needed, it is possible to defeat strong opponents in a contest of skill. Even against AI players (if they're mostly pretty good, as some NPC players are in The Witcher 3), that makes a person feel pretty darn clever.<br />
<br />
I haven't yet entered the Big Stakes Tournament Gwent-playing quest in The Witcher 3. I'm a bit nervous about that. I think I need more and better cards first.<br />
<br />
So if you'll excuse me, I think I know where there are still a few cards to be picked up....Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-92064259321581503292015-03-24T01:12:00.001-05:002015-03-24T01:21:46.884-05:00Utopias in GamesWow. It's been a while since I've had something to say here, hasn't it? Let's fix that.<br />
<br />
Today I'd like to talk about utopias in games. This was sparked by comments from Paul Neurath about the upcoming game <i>Underworld Ascendant</i>, the long-awaited successor to the two <i>Ultima Underworld</i> games by Looking Glass Studios.<br />
<br />
<b>Why Utopias?</b><br />
<br />
Neurath began his <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/othersidegames/underworld-ascendant/posts/1139018">update #13 to the Kickstarter project</a> for <i>Underworld Ascendant</i> by discussing Sir Cabirus's broken dream in <i>Ultima Underworld</i>. This was followed by some personal notes on utopias:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>I've always had a fascination with utopias. How in fiction, as in world history, utopias seem to inevitably fall from their lofty goals, like Icarus flying too close to the sun. The all-too-brief shining moment when Greek democracy blossomed, then swiftly collapsed. In Tolkien's fiction, the short-lived attempt by Balin to reestablish a dwarven colony in Moria. There are myriad stories of utopias fallen. Yet that seems not to discourage each new generation from trying.<br />
...<br />
Either way, there seems to be a universal appeal to stories about those striving to build a grand society. We are fascinated by their hubris. Of their trying to rewrite established rules of how communities function to forge something new. We root for them to succeed, while knowing they are ultimately doomed.</blockquote><br />
It's possible to trace this notion through several of the games from Looking Glass and its descendants.<br />
<br />
<b>The Lineage of Utopias in Games</b><br />
<br />
The original <i>Ultima Underworld</i>, as mentioned, was explicitly set in the debris of Sir Cabirus's beliefs. Here the idea of a utopia is for the most part treated un-ironically -- it was a noble idea that just didn't work. Was it impossible, given the nature of the inhabitants of the Stygian Abyss and the loss of Sir Cabirus? The game doesn't express an opinion on that question, leaving players free to decide that for themselves.<br />
<br />
In <i>System Shock</i>, SHODAN played the role of a twisted Sir Cabirus in the days before constructing a idealized society. Fortunately for humanity, the annoying Hacker persisted in interfering with her plans. Wouldn't it be interesting to see what a world might look like in which SHODAN, like Andrew Ryan, actually succeeded in achieving her dream, only to see it lost as the imperfections of the remaining human elements in her cybernetic paradise began to assert themselves?<br />
<br />
<i>Thief: The Dark Project</i> was not obviously utopian, although with some effort a case might be made that the Hammerites harbored some such dreams. <i>Thief 2: The Metal Age</i>, on the other hand, returned to the utopian notion with Father Karras seeking to extend his mechanical peace to all the inhabitants of The City. This was somewhat less overtly a utopian dream, but I think it's fair to say that Karras himself fit the basic model of a ruthless utopianist.<br />
<br />
In <i>System Shock 2</i>, SHODAN would try again to bring all of existence within the matrix of her will, establishing a perfect chorus of machines... but this time her dreams were countered by the opposing dream of her biological "children" to form a harmony of their own. Intriguingly, the Many might indeed have been able to achieve a truly functional utopian society through the close linkage of minds. But it's also clear that the cost for this bliss would have been the elimination of human individuality and the freedom to cooperate by choice. The Many's utopia could have worked for a while, but been short-lived when faced with a survival crisis from an inability to allow the creativity of individual minds to flourish. In fact, perhaps that inability to adapt to an external reality is exactly what happened in <i>System Shock 2</i>.<br />
<br />
<i>Deus Ex</i> was perhaps the strongest exploration yet of the utopian dream in game form. Beyond the gameplay (although its structure did contribute to the theme) and the story references (including a "character" called Icarus), <i>Deus Ex</i> posed an easily-asked but difficult-to-answer question familiar to the cyberpunk genre: when sensing machines are everywhere, and humans begin to join themselves directly to that world (not unlike the harmony of the Many), is that the path to a utopian security? Or the road to an Orwellian nightmare in which human liberty is lost forever? When you, the player, after playing through the implications of the options, finally must make a choice between the utopia of an ordered security and the chaotic inequalities of freedom, which will you choose? Part of the greatness of <i>Deus Ex</i> is that, despite their personal beliefs, the developers play absolutely fair with that question, dramatizing the consequences of both paths but refusing to tell the player which road to take.<br />
<br />
The BioShock games were increasingly overt in their representation of utopias gone to seed. It wasn't until the ending of the final BioShock game that we could see the central belief exposed: all utopias, whether underground, underwater, or under the sky, are similar in that they all collapse under the weight of human frailty.<br />
<br />
(Curiously, the Looking Glass homages made by Arkane, <i>Arx Fatalis</i> and <i>Dishonored</i>, have little to no element of utopianism to them. Their settings are broken places, but not from anyone's grand dream of forced equal peace -- they're just broken. It'll be interesting to see whether the next game from either of the branches of Arkane rediscover the utopian theme, or if they will continue to do without it.)<br />
<br />
<b>Why the Utopian Theme?</b><br />
<br />
If more than one game has sought to explore this idea, that's because it's a fabulous idea for the theme of a game that means to offer a world to explore that is more than just facades and murder-mechanics.<br />
<br />
Choosing a utopian society as the thematic framework for a game instantly helps define the world of the game. It implies that there will be artistic choices to make about the visual representation of such a world. It suggests social structures that exist in that world and how they regard each other. And it can inspire specific conversations that the player's character can have with people in the world that help gradually reveal its story to the player.<br />
<br />
And in a truly deep game, the player, through words and deeds, is able to assert some level of informed influence over the course of that utopia. As Paul Neurath put it in Update #13:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The player finds themselves in a central role, choosing how they fit into an experiment of a utopia that is being torn ragged. Do they pick up the frayed threads of Cabirus’ dream and try to knit things back together? Do they nudge the Abyss back towards an apparently inevitable state of chaos? Or follow some other path?</blockquote><br />
With the power to drive story and setting and characters and even mechanics that a utopian theme offers, maybe the real question is why more game developers don't use it.<br />
<br />
<b>The Original Utopia</b><br />
<br />
Of course you can't talk seriously about the idea of a Utopia without referencing the book <i>Utopia</i> by Sir Thomas More. The second part of his work described a place that we today would consider somewhat, though not entirely, communistic, with many liberties given up by the people in order to maintain a forced but perfectly fair state of equality. What's not clear is whether More considered this to be a desirable and widely achievable state of social organization, or if it was intended as a satirical criticism of people voluntarily choosing to cede their freedoms to a powerful state.<br />
<br />
The latter view seems to be supported by the very title: <i>Utopia</i>, roughly meaning "no-place." But whether that's no-place because no one has seriously tried to achieve it, or no-place because human nature makes it impossible to maintain over any meaningful size and time span, remains unclear to this day.<br />
<br />
To have written a book like this at all sets Thomas More apart from the typical idealist. It's conceivable that he possessed enough of the cynicism of the experienced observer of humanity to poke a stick at its occasional certainty that perfect fairness can be achieved in this life. On the other hand, to be a serious thinker implies some amount of idealism -- why write a serious work that you know will irritate some people if it doesn't matter? This seriousness could have impelled More to describe an ideal state of being, even if it is not possible to fully attain such a state.<br />
<br />
<b>Utopia and Underworld Ascendant</b><br />
<br />
So which of those interpretations should <i>Underworld Ascendant</i> realize? The idealistic, optimistic view of a utopian society in which people willingly give up personal interests in favor of a powerful central government that makes sure everyone's basic needs are equally met? Or the practical, skeptical view of utopias as systems of human organization that are inherently doomed to failure beyond any trivial size because people are flawed and fallible beings by nature?<br />
<br />
Interestingly, 2016 will mark the 500th anniversary of the first printing (in Latin) of <i>Utopia</i>.<br />
<br />
That would be a fine time to release a game that explicitly takes on the idea of a Utopia. In particular it would be very satisfying to release a game that -- as More's book did -- shows the theory and implementation of this idea, and then leaves it to the player to decide whether the concept of a utopian paradise is a good and achievable vision for a fairly ordered society, or an impossibly flawed and dangerous belief that leads inexorably to oppression and misery and ruin.<br />
<br />
Can OtherSide do that?<br />
<br />
Will the developers of <i>Underworld Ascendant</i> choose a side on this old question, deciding for players what the right answer is to the question Sir Thomas More asked five hundred years ago?<br />
<br />
Or is it possible for them to construct a world that, like its other emergent behaviors generated through the interactions of systems, will allow the player to make a real choice -- to successfully help a utopia succeed (if only for a while), or to bring it crashing back to reality?<br />
<br />
Can a game allow players to discover through play something meaningful about the utopian dream?Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-49923060555778591572014-05-18T14:23:00.002-05:002014-05-18T14:23:37.506-05:00In Defense of Personal GamingI'm not an extrovert.<br />
<p>So it's fascinating to try to imagine being one -- being certain that the only right way to experience life, including playing computer games, is with other people around. That's radically different from my own appreciation for being able to concentrate deeply on system-building, which is virtually impossible to do well with other people around demanding one's attention.<br />
<p>This came to mind recently from seeing two very well-written blog entries at Gamasutra promoting local multiplayer on consoles: "<a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SjorsHoukes/20140516/217878/Play_As_Intended_A_Case_For_Preferring_Local_Multiplayer.php">Play As Intended: A Case For Preferring Local Multiplayer</a>" by Sjors Houkes, and "<a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AustonMontville/20140515/217748/Couchop_is_the_bestop.php">Couch-op is the best-op</a>" by Auston Montville.<br />
<p>These authors feel that games, including computer games, are by their very nature inherently social. If you're playing alone, you're playing wrong. You're failing to get the optimal experience of play. Developers who make games that can't be shared on one board or screen are failing their players.<br />
<p>This means that the best way to play games is together in a room with other people, with everyone sharing the same screen. For computer games, that means the correct way to play games is using some game console, with multiple controllers plugged in, and probably in split-screen mode (or at least separate screen areas, as in Rock Band). It means that developers ought to be designing their games so that this mode of play is the primary mode, or even the only mode.<br />
<p>This excludes linking separate PCs on a local network. It definitely excludes online multiplayer. And single-player games are right out.<br />
<p>In short, if you're not playing with other people in the same room looking at the same interface, then you are Doing It Wrong.<br />
<p>This is really two arguments:<br />
<p><ol><li>Social games are fun.</li>
<li>Social games are inherently <i>more</i> fun than personal games.</li></ol><p>I don't think many people would object in a serious way to the first of those opinions. Social games <i>can</i> be great fun. There's nothing like playing with other people -- in both positive and negative ways. It is a Good Thing that there are lots of such games, computer and otherwise.<br />
<p>It's that second assertion that's questionable -- that must be questioned. All "real" games necessarily privilege social interactions? Really?<br />
<p>Declaring this as though it's a self-evident fact, that any play experience designed without social interaction is defective, that the only right way to play is sitting next to other people... that's a very, very different kind of claim. An assertion that more personally-focused games are by their very nature less fun, less game-like, less worth making, than social games, is one that requires some serious supporting evidence behind it. Otherwise it risks missing the opportunity to create enjoyable entertainment experiences for many people.<br />
<p>The claim that "games are inherently social" is not new. It can be heard from some experienced gamers to thoughtful game developers like Raph Koster (as in his "<a href="http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/agdc07/designing-for-everywhere">Designing For Everywhere</a>" presentation). For various reasons, they say games are activities that are incomplete without the participation of other people.<br />
<p>I disagree. I think it's completely possible and desirable to value both social and personal play. And I think that because I think I can see how each kind of play provides access to a part of expressing life as a human being that the other doesn't.<br />
<p>Being with other people, giving to others and receiving from them, is an important part of fully experiencing life as a human being. So is having the opportunity to think and feel deeply without interruption, to understand, to imagine, to reflect on your own personal experiences as an individual human being.<br />
<p>As games are reflections of human life, they would be as diminished by being purely social as they would be by being purely personal.<br />
<p>We experience a game as fun when it effectively rewards what we're good at and value about ourselves. Not everybody is good at personal interaction. Not everybody is good at focused introspection. Each of us is usually better at one of those than the other, and value it more in ourselves than the other. But both have value. Both are things that can be rewarded and enjoyed through play.<br />
<p>So why describe only one of these as though it's the Only True Way of experiencing the human condition, the only Correct Way of having fun in a game?<br />
<p>Encouraging the development of social games is proper. I'm for that. It can be enormously entertaining to compete against or cooperate with other players, especially if they're right there with you and everyone is looking at the same board or screen. I fully support the development of more social games, including more games that are designed to be played with other people right there in the room with you and where everyone is sharing the same window on the gameworld, even if that's usually more fun for extroverts than for introverts like me.<br />
<p>But it can also be fun to understand and manipulate systems, to concentrate deeply on the structure of a system in order to grasp its fundamental patterns and principles, and then to interact dynamically with such systems to see how they respond to different stimuli. That is a kind of play experience you cannot have when part of your attention must be diverted to interacting with people in real time. Focused awareness, perception, analysis, and planning are personal activities that constitute a fundamental form of human expression unlike any other. Systems-focus, like other human capabilities with real-world utility, can be enjoyed through play, even if that's usually more fun for introverts than extroverts.<br />
<p>Why try to exclude either of these forms of expressive play?<br />
<p>How does trying to deny the validity of either social or personal fun produce more games that are more satisfying to more people?<br />
<p>I fully endorse the creation of more computer games that get people having fun together in a room, even though I'll never be an extrovert.<br />
<p>Why shouldn't extroverts likewise support the development of some games designed to satisfy our equally human need to individually comprehend and creatively engage with deep dynamic systems?<br />
<p>Extroverts are awesome. Introverts need gaming love, too.Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-68952554785427467482014-02-15T13:02:00.001-06:002023-12-18T16:19:41.976-06:00Some Challenges in Designing Games with Emergent ContentI like emergent play. I enjoy games in which surprising things can happen when different aspects of complex systems bump into each other.<br />
<br />
I believe there can also be commercial value in games whose content emerges from system-interactions. Not only is interacting with such content fun for gamers like me, it's also valuable to smaller programming teams who simply can't crank out the vast amount of content needed by a game with pre-determined events and narrative.<br />
<br />
But having this long-standing interest in emergent-content play means that I can also see some of the potential difficulties of this kind of play. There are benefits to designing a game around emergent play. But there are risks and gotchas that need to be understood and addressed as well.<br />
<b></b><br />
<b>1. Emergent content is not for everyone.</b><br />
<br />
Not everyone likes emergent play. A lot of people --maybe most people -- playing games today prefer well-understood rules and outcomes. They don't <em>want</em> to be surprised.<br />
<br />
For example, consider the players who think of "crafting" in a MMORPG as manufacturing lots of identical widgets to compete in a sales game. If you implement crafting to have emergence, you're saying that you won't always know exactly what you're going to get... but that's pure evil to the manufacturing/sales-oriented player because it means that they're "losing" resources every time something gets made that isn't exactly what they expected.<br />
<br />
Another example is Minecraft. Minecraft certainly has emergence -- the time my niece rode a pig into a lava stream and set both of them on fire wasn't something I ever thought I'd see. So Minecraft is great fun for people (like me) who enjoy being surprised. It's also fun for the gamers who enjoy the sensation-oriented survival challenge. What it isn't so much fun for are the gamers who prefer clearly rules-based games with clear win conditions. These are the players who, since Minecraft launched, have expressed unhappiness that "I don't know what I'm supposed to do" and wanted things like character levels and "adventure mode" rules-based play. As Minecraft's developers have added those, Minecraft has now been said to have passed WoW in terms of total revenue... but it might not have done so without understanding that emergent play alone would not be enough to satisfy the gamers who like clear rules and win conditions.<br />
<br />
It's OK to make games with emergence. But it's important to recognize that by doing so, you're limiting the audience for your game. If you're fine with that, awesome; if you think that emergence by itself will make your game broadly popular, though, that might need a re-think.<br />
<b></b><br />
<b>2. Emergent content is hard to balance.</b><br />
<br />
Emergence is optimal for exploratory play. It can also be good for cooperative play. It's not good for competitive play.<br />
<br />
Competitive play demands fairness, or at least the perception of fairness. Emergence works against that because it allows one player to experience content that another player probably won't. Emergent content lets one player "get stuff" that another can't. That creates a perception of unfairness, and that snuffs out any willingness to compete.<br />
<br />
So it's important to understand that if you're determined to make a competitive game, then you either should not try to include emergent content, or at least be extremely careful in how you include it. If the world can generate things that one player might get that another might not, unbalancing the level of challenge for different players, then the typical competitive human player will probably find that extremely annoying.<br />
<br />
There are ways to address this; the important thing is to recognize that it's a potential issue. Then you can think carefully about how to help your players feel they're playing a fair game.<br />
<b></b><br />
<b>3. Emergence isn't enough.</b><br />
<br />
I'm not convinced that increasing emergence is sufficient to increase player engagement.<br />
<br />
The word I usually use for this effect is "investment." Players who stay -- and keep paying -- are those who become invested in the world of a game. It becomes a place they enjoy being in, and want to come back to, and want to see more of. I think emergence can contribute to creating that sense of place; I'm just not sure it's the primary cause of investment. The appearance and sounds of a world also matter, as does the plausibility of the AI of non-player characters.<br />
<br />
So, as one way of increasing the "feeling of place," I could agree with a judicious enhancement to emergent play. But I would suggest looking at emergent content as just one component among several for helping the world of a game feel more dynamic in a distinctive way, and thus increasing its ability to foster investment by more players.<br />
<b></b><br />
<b>4. You only pay once for an emergent game.</b><br />
<br />
By making an emergent game, you're choosing to put all your money-generating eggs in one basket.<br />
<br />
You can either make multiple non-emergent games with static content, or you can make one (or a very few) emergent games with dynamic content. Making just one game that players can happily play in for years (because new content keeps emerging) means you get one shot at their money as an initial sale, versus multiple opportunities if you make a larger number of smaller, fixed-content games.<br />
<br />
This is why I feel pretty strongly that monetizing an emergent-play game needs to be done by putting a price tag not on the base game itself but on additional developer-created system expansions (things that add more dynamic elements into the world) and on player-created content that can be purchased by other players (for which you as the developer get a cut of each transaction).<br />
<br />
If you're just going to sell the one game -- because it has emergent content -- then you need to plan to make your money on long-term, ongoing improvements to that game, not just on initial sales of the game itself. Frankly, I'm inclined to think that the best way to monetize a game like this is to give away the base game for free (to seed it as widely as possible into the general game-playing public) and plan to earn all revenue from nominal charges to download new dynamic elements and scenarios created by you and by other players.<br />
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<hr />
<br />
I hope it's clear that these comments aren't just objections to designing games to have emergent content. I like emergent content! <br />
<br />
I do think it carries some potential gotchas, though. Those need to be considered along with the possible benefits of making a highly emergent game.Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-50296255144695197592013-08-18T00:26:00.003-05:002013-08-18T00:44:29.406-05:00How System Shock Can Save the Computer Game IndustryThe <a href="http://kotaku.com/leaked-e-mails-suggest-bethesda-misled-gamers-about-pre-1149092622">recent flap</a> over Arkane/Bethesda/Zenimax taking over Prey 2 and possibly turning it into a "spiritual successor" to the original System Shock computer game by Looking Glass got me thinking: why does this matter? What is it about System Shock that makes this news important?<br />
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System Shock, along with Ultima Underworld and Thief (by Looking Glass) and culminating in Deus Ex (by Ion Storm), represented what I believe was a critical branch in the evolutionary tree of computer games. This branch of games took full advantage of the RAM in the PCs of the day to create worlds -- they simulated places filled with things expressing relatively complex interacting behaviors.<br />
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What this meant was that it was possible to create game worlds in which the environment itself allowed multiple viable solutions to gameplay challenges. The world of the game enabled different kinds of players to solve challenges in ways that satisfied their preferred play styles.<br />
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For example, is there a robot blocking your way? A game designed with the Looking Glass interactive-environment philosophy would let you solve that problem in many ways. Off the top of my head, you might:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>destroy the robot by shooting it</li>
<li>destroy the robot by throwing an EMP grenade</li>
<li>sneak up on the robot to use your Deactivate Electronic skill to turn it off</li>
<li>toss a useless object to make a noise that distracts it to a different location</li>
<li>use your Hack skill to switch local robots to an offline state</li>
<li>use your Hack skill to make local robots friendly to you</li>
<li>use your Hack skill to activate a nearby forcefield that traps the robot</li>
<li>use your Hack skill to overload a power conduit that blows up next to the robot</li>
<li>lure some other opponent into the robot's range and let them destroy each other</li>
<li>bypass the robot by activating your Stealth skill</li>
<li>bypass the robot by crawling through a conveniently human-sized airduct</li>
<li>bypass the robot by crawling through the sewers</li>
<li>talk to a nearby human to convince them to give you the robot's shutdown code</li>
</ul>
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Whether you prefer action, or conversation, or stealth, or exploration, the thing that distinguishes a Looking Glass-style game from others is that many or all those play style preferences are supported. The focus was on you, the player, and how <em>you</em> like to have fun.<br />
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That way of thinking about how to design computer games changed drastically after the emergence of the PlayStation and Xbox. Games after 2000 -- perhaps because of the RAM limits on the new (not-PC) primary target platforms -- started to sharply limit what the player could do. The gameworld got a little prettier but much shallower. You were given one path to follow and not much problem-solving freedom beyond one or two ways to just destroy everything along that linear path.<br />
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Modern games have taken away much of your creative liberty in an attempt to guarantee that you always know exactly what you're supposed to do next, and that you never need to introspect about how to do it because there's only one way available. We got fewer games encouraging real interactivity with a dynamic world, and more games consisting of a developer-dictated (and frequently overblown) story punctuated by long theatrical cutscenes. The player-focused System Shock was eventually stripped down to the showy and literally "on rails" BioShock: Infinite, and probably was the Marketing-driven source for the painfully dumbed-down Dead Space.<br />
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In short, AAA computer games became moderately interactive big-budget movies.<br />
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If you happen to be the kind of gamer who defines a game as a set of rules to beat, who hates not knowing what you're "supposed to do" to win as quickly as possible, and who enjoys action over thinking or feeling, then this transition was just giving you more of what you like. And there was nothing wrong with that, as far as it went. The action-oriented playstyle is just as valid as any other, and it is good that there were lots of games made that cater to it...<br />
<br />
...but it was never the only valid playstyle. The only thing wrong with the shift to action games was that the gamers who do enjoy conversation and stealth and exploration -- solving problems by thinking and feeling -- got fewer and fewer of the games that they could enjoy. There certainly wasn't much publisher support for making Looking Glass-type games that were designed to support and reward multiple play styles!<br />
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Beyond Bethesda's open-world Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, and the occasional throwback (STALKER), the evolutionary branch of games implemented as systems generating emergent behaviors seemed to die out. And that was a huge loss to the whole game industry (and gamers) for the important reason that these games used the full power of the computer.<br />
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An interactive movie is an extended cutscene in which you have a little low-level freedom to make some tactical gameplay choices that won't affect the plot of the movie that the developer has decided you're to experience. The consoles have had just enough power to run games like that.<br />
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A true computer game is one that harnesses the power of the general-purpose computer to simulate a world, and then let you solve playful challenges in that world in your own way.<br />
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We need developers who will make more games in the Looking Glass style because those are the products that will distinguish computer games from different/older forms of entertainment such as movies. If computer games are ever going to be their own unique art form, they cannot just copy movies and slap a coat of mildly interactive paint on them. They need to use the full simulationist power of a real computer to create new worlds and unleash the creativity of players to interact in deeply human ways with those worlds.<br />
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It is important that Arkane/Bethesda/Zenimax appear to be ready to make a true spiritual successor to a Looking Glass game like System Shock because making player-centric games is the healthiest course for the whole computer game industry. This is the kind of game that, as other developers follow, will keep the industry alive by giving it its own identity apart from movies. Computer games that are highly responsive environments are something only computers can do. They are what computer games should be.<br />
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I hope Arkane can get past their self-inflicted PR wounds. I hope the next game from Arkane Austin really is the first of many true spiritual successors to System Shock and the other Looking Glass-style games.<br />
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Games that use the power of the computer to simulate dynamic worlds and free players to enjoy their own kind of fun in those worlds will save the game industry. Interactive movies won't.Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-649622993668160002013-05-27T01:54:00.000-05:002013-05-27T02:04:09.064-05:00Player Choices and the Jack-in-the-Box EffectThe idea that player choices in computer games can have consequences generated by the game in reaction to those choices is not a new or outlandish concept. In a way, that's the core of the feedback loop behind all computer games.<br />
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A choice and its consequence are usually jammed as closely to each other as possible. In first-person shooters, things start to happen on-screen as soon as you pull the trigger. The action/result loop can be even shorter in fighting games.<br />
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What happens, though, when choices and consequences are separated in time? What's the effect when the player performs some action or actions, and there's a consequence that pops up unexpectedly (but plausibly) from what the player did in the past?<br />
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<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Jack-in-the-box.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Jack-in-the-box.jpg" /></a><br />
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A jack-in-the-box is a trivial example. The "jack-in-the-box effect" of older tanks bursting explosively after their ammunition was hit has a similarly short-term action/result connection. But computer games can make the jack-in-the-box effect more surprising. When a game presents the consequence some time after the player's action, the experience is less "I made that happen just now" and more "Hey, this game remembered what I did!"<br />
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Doing more to let games appear to remember player actions over longer stretches of in-game time is something I'd like to see used more often.<br />
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This could go in a couple of ways (or both).<br />
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<b>MEMORY AS HISTORY</b><br />
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One way is to let individual player actions be pretty trivial and pass without any special results, but respond to some preset level of accumulated related actions. Getting an achievement for shooting 500 opponents is an example of this, as is being granted access to previously gated content after raising "faction" with some in-game NPC organization. In this mode players usually know exactly what they're doing and what they'll get. And that works for conventional follow-the-rules games.<br />
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But wouldn't it be interesting not to reveal all the possible player actions that the game can observe and count, or the reactions of the game to certain combinations of accumulated player actions?<br />
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This might not be a good fit for conventional "you play it to beat it" designs -- players who enjoy those games will probably find surprises frustrating, rather than pleasant, and developers of such games generally <a href="http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2012/11/player-creativity-considered-harmful.html">don't like player creativity</a>. Unexpected results for additive actions might be a very good fit, though, for a game where much of the pleasure is in the exploration of the gameworld and its internal systems.<br />
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<b>MEMORY AS FLAGS</b><br />
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The other way of "remembering" player actions is simply to set a flag for specifically detectable individual actions, then test that flag sometime later and trigger a consequence if the flag is set. This approach is often seen in computer roleplaying games. In Bethesda's Fallout 3, for example, the game plays out in slightly different ways depending on whether you choose to detonate the warhead in Megaton. A somewhat more exotic example is the way that your choices for Commander Shepard in the first and second Mass Effect games, as preserved in your final savegame files, are reflected in minor options in the second and third installments if you let them start by reading the previous savegames.<br />
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This mode of modeling memory could also be enhanced. Games could take important choices early on and deliver very different gameplay later on based on those choices. This is rare, but a very good recent example is in The Witcher 2. Your choice for Geralt toward the end of Act One dictates which of the two mutually exclusive Act Twos you get to play. (Not everyone was a fan of the specifics of that, but I think the idea itself was worth trying.)<br />
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The important thing about consequences for one-off player choices is that developers almost always want to plant big flashing neon signs around it: "Look! Important Choice Here! This Will Have Consequences!" That's not always a bad thing. In a typically mechanics-driven game where it's considered wrong to ever let the player be confused about anything, signposting an important choice simply meets player expectations.<br />
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Not flagging such choices might be OK (at least sometimes) in a more exploratory game, though. Part of the fun of exploration is figuring things out. This is why puzzles are common in games where the developers want to encourage exploratory play.<br />
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So in a game of discovery, maybe discrete player actions that have later consequences (minor or major) don't always have to be signposted. (There does need to be an obvious connection between the choice and the consequence, though. If the game doesn't clearly explain that the consequence flows from a specific action by the player, then it just looks random. In that case there's no value in implementing this feature. Realizing the connection is what makes a delayed consequence particularly interesting.)<br />
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<b>CHOICES WITH SURPRISING CONSEQUENCES</b><br />
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In both of these cases it's a good idea to be up-front with players that choices they make may sometimes have important effects later on in the game, and players won't always know when they're making such a choice. Developers should be honest about this so that prospective players who absolutely hate not being able to control all outcomes understand that this may not be a game they'll enjoy. If that's done properly, then letting some actions have unexpected (but plausible!) consequences later could be a lot of fun for players who do enjoy interesting surprises.<br />
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Overall, I'm very happy to see games like <a href="http://www.visitproteus.com/">Proteus</a> and <a href="http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=130103919">SoundSelf</a> being made, and I'm looking forward to seeing how they evolve.Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-32677728867116937672013-05-20T00:24:00.000-05:002013-05-20T00:24:43.411-05:00Where Did "Content Locusts" Come From?<img src="http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/388616main_locust%20swarm.jpg" /><br />
<br />
The term "content locusts" came up today in <a href="https://plus.google.com/117691940114975364878/posts/6z12TbM7ppm">a Google+ post by Richard Bartle</a> discussing the direction of "free-to-play" online games.<br />
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This term content locusts has come into use as a shorthand way to decribe the phenomenon that, when a new computer game (especially a multiplayer online game) is released, there is a sizable subset of players who will begin playing that new game as soon as it's available, try to experience its primary content as rapidly as possible, and then move to a new game. The notion is that these players are like locusts -- they swarm a new game, buzzsaw through its content, and then fly away (often complaining that the game was "too short" or "too easy").<br />
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I remember having mentioned a few years back that the Achiever Bartle Type was most closely related to this behavior, mostly because the behavior seems keyed directly to the Achiever motivation that "game" means a challenge to be beaten.<br />
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That got me thinking: what was the earliest use of this term?<br />
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There are several forms of the basic idea. The earliest mention I could find of "locusts" in the context of computer games was <a href="http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/2004-open-letter-to-everquest/">a comment by "Wolfshead"</a> (saved by Google on May 29, 2004) describing player guilds in EQ: "The EQ Devs were caught off guard by the tenacity of the uberguild phenomena. These guilds consumed content like locusts and in many cases actually tested major encounters."<br />
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The next mention showing up is by <a href="http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/06/playing_alone.html#c6214277">Mike Sellers at Terra Nova</a> on June 13, 2005: "As far as I know instancing has been introduced to reduce the immersion-shattering practice of camping, lining up for spawn points, and seeing popular dungeons or hunting grounds having been essentially clear-cut by roving locust-like bands of players."<br />
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The first reference I can find that specifically links content, locusts, and Achievers was my "<a href="http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2006/01/will-real-explorers-please-stand-up.html">Will The Real Explorers Please Stand Up?</a>" blog entry (inspired by the <a href="http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/01/will_the_real_e.html">Terra Nova discussion of the same name</a> from January through July of 2005): "Achievers tend to become bored quickly -- like locusts, they swarm to a new game, burn through anything resembling "content," then zoom off again to consume the Next Big Game."<br />
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According to Google, the first use of the specific term "content locusts" is in the "<a href="http://stylishcorpse.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/time-flies/">Time flies when you're having fun</a>" post by Isabelle Parsley (AKA Ysharros) at the Stylish Corpse blog on November 24, 2009: "It takes work to provide a smorgasbord of content that the content locusts can NOM NOM NOM their blind hungry way through, but that the … let’s call them content slugs can enjoy much more slowly and completely."<br />
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Finally, the use of the term "content locusts" that ignited its widespread usage appears to have been the "<a href="http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/6045/">Content Locusts Killed My MMO</a>" article by the very same Isabelle Parsley at MMORPG.com on January 27, 2012: "I like to blame the content locusts for this, at least to a large extent – that small percentage of players whose goal isn’t to experience content but to consume it as fast as possible as they race inexorably through a game."<br />
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Following that article, 2012 was littered with uses of the phrase "content locusts." And the design of SWTOR seems to have been directly related to how quickly the term entered general usage -- it's what most people who used the term were talking about.<br />
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Assuming anyone else is intrigued by this kind of linguistic archeology, can anyone else find earlier expressions of this idea?Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-54195022534750673772013-03-04T01:32:00.001-06:002013-03-05T00:30:55.125-06:00Breadth and Depth in World DesignLet's say you've taken leave of your senses and have decided to create a computer game. More particularly, let's say this game you've decided to make will have as its setting a particular place in which things exist.<br />
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Congratulations! You've just decided to build a world.<br />
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<b>WORLD-BUILDING 101</b><br />
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Building a world means imagining and implementing stuff. The "stuff" of a new world consists of places, and of objects set within those places.<br />
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Having decided to create a computer game that exists as a world, you now get to decide what kind of world will best suit the sort of game you want to make.<br />
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If you want your newly-created world to emphasize action, you'll want most of the objects in your world to express rule-based behaviors like movement and damage status. You'll also want to provide ways for players to manipulate those behaviors, since having "verbs" that allow players to (usually destructively) manipulate objects is what allows them to feel active.<br />
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If you want your world to emphasize meaning, then you'll need to make some of your stuff look and (to some extent) act like people, or at least be artifacts created by people and imbued with emotional value. The appearance and characteristics of all places and objects should help to express their inner meanings.<br />
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If you want your world to emphasize interaction and problem-solving, then some of the stuff in the world will need to appear to have complex dynamic behaviors. These behaviors can emerge from simple internal behavioral rules, but they need to interact enough to create systems that have patterns but that can't be summed up in a wiki entry by the first person to encounter it.<br />
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These goals aren't mutually exclusive. You can have a game that emphasizes action and interaction (<a href="https://minecraft.net/">Minecraft</a>), or meaning and interaction (<a href="http://www.gog.com/gamecard/myst_masterpiece_edition">Myst</a>), or action and meaning (<a href="http://www.thesims3.com/">The Sims</a>). It's even possible to build a world that provides all three of these modes of play. <a href="http://bethsoft.com/en-us/games/skyrim">The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim</a> is arguably a decent current example of this.<br />
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The pertinent thing about such multi-modal worlds is that they tend to be <em>BIG</em>. Big worlds are large places, and they are full of stuff... or as game developers like to call it, "content." How you choose to structure the content that defines the world of your game is the point of this article.<br />
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<b>THE STRUCTURE OF BIG NEW WORLDS</b><br />
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Most game developers choose to organize a big world either by breadth or by depth.<br />
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Breadth is about making a world whose navigable terrain is large relative to the player's character and that contains many objects. Open-world games such as Skyrim and Minecraft tend to feel like enormous places overflowing with objects.<br />
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A gameworld built for breadth will offer wide expanses of terrain and numerous "inside" locations with their own terrain. And all that terrain and all those interiors will have objects located on and in them (grass, rocks, plants, animals, furniture, tools, weapons, people, etc.). As a side effect of having to build large amounts of stuff, that stuff will mostly exist either as a static texture map (you can see it but you can't do anything with it), or as a usable item with a single, simple, predetermined effect.<br />
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Depth is about making a world whose places and objects have many details. Deep games don't have as many places or objects as in a broad game. But the places that are built are carefully constructed to feel lived-in like a family home in a Spielberg movie. And the pieces of stuff in these places will be tagged with highly relevant information, usually called "lore." The objects in a deep game will also typically be richly dynamic -- they'll have several "verbs," or different but plausible ways for players to interact with them as gameplay activities.<br />
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What most developers don't try to do is make a game that has both breadth and depth. They don't try to make a big world that's both very large (in spatial size and object count) <em>and</em> very detailed.<br />
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There's nothing that forces this as a design choice. But historically there have been two serious practical constraints: time and money.<br />
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Trying to make a big world that contains a lot of content is hard. Trying to make a big world that contains very detailed content is hard. Trying to do both (the thinking goes) doubles or trebles the required development time and money. So most developers of big worlds pick one structural approach and try to do it well.<br />
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<b>BREADTH VERSUS DEPTH: THE CHOICE</b><br />
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Making either of these choices means a tradeoff.<br />
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Games that do breadth well -- they have physically large worlds filled with stuff -- are often critized as "shallow." Games that do depth well -- their places and objects are intricate and filled with meaning -- are criticized as inducing claustrophobia by not enabling the feeling of rapid and frequent motion.<br />
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Bethesda's post-Morrowind console-focused games (Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim) are known for their breadth. The traversable area of these worlds is enormous compared to the linear environments of most games. But this size means they're often condemned as being shallow. The action and meaning and interaction are almost entirely surface-only -- what you can see is pretty much all there is.<br />
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In a couple of ways, that's an unfair criticism. Developers of games that use Bethesda's engine do try to include some depth in their games, in addition to the massive amount of broad content that needs to be created to fill the outdoor spaces and interiors. Objects in rooms, for example, are frequently selected and arranged to tell a kind of micro-story about the person whose place that was. Terminals and books abound, giving some emotional depth to the world through tiny stories.<br />
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Also, while it's true that these are exceptions to simply having lots of stuff, the need to fit a very broad gameworld into the constraints of a console imposes limits on depth. It's simply not possible, even if there were time and money enough to do so, to tag every object with information and to allow every object to be usable in multiple ways. Consoles enforce simplicity, which favors zone-loading breadth over information-dense depth. (Obsidian's <a href="http://eternity.obsidian.net/">Project Eternity</a> and Chris Roberts's <a href="http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/">Star Citizen</a> are two Kickstarted games that are meant to be both big and developed specifically for the PC. It will be interesting to see whether the removal of the console limits allows these games to be both broad and deep.)<br />
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Those defenses noted, the reality is that there just aren't many games that do depth well, even as the design emphasis.<br />
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<b>THE CASE AGAINST DEPTH</b><br />
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Adventure games used to try for depth. Things in adventure games had stories, and behaviors, that you could discover if you took the time to click on them. Exploring this depth was often a necessity, in fact. The depth was built into the core game design; you could not win the game (without cheats) except by reading and interacting with the details of the world.<br />
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But this structural choice -- gameplay through investigating a small but information-rich space -- means less sensation of movement. There is vastly less of a kinesthetic sensation of energetic action in a deep game. Most of the "motion" is in one's mind. Designing that kind of game takes a very different kind of effort than designing a broad but shallow world.<br />
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Sometimes this led to simply clicking on pretty pictures, as in Myst. Later adventure games were dismissed as "hunt the pixel games" when they tried to make interaction with objects more of a gameplay activity requiring a physical challenge, rather than following a path toward greater exploratory or narrative depth.<br />
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In addition to feeling constrictive for gamers whose main playstyle interest is motion and activity, the work curve in deep games feels more like a sequence of high stairsteps. Every new place that is created in a deep game needs to be constructed with numerous very detailed and active objects. These objects must work on their own, they must contribute to the intended purpose of that particular space, and they have to support the theme of the overall world of the game. That's not a mechanical function that someone can be trained to do -- you need someone who can feel, and who is creative, and who can combine those talents to make moments that other people can feel. So adding even a single new space becomes a major undertaking in a deep game.<br />
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Compared to the generally smooth slope of the work to be done for a game with breadth, with many similar objects scattered over a large area, development of deep content is simply harder to produce.<br />
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<b>BREADTH WINS</b><br />
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The practical result of these structural effects is that big worlds tend to be broad (but shallow) because breadth is easier.<br />
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A small but deep world, by its nature, requires hand-crafting. When there are only a few places and only a few things in those places, every place and every thing will be seen and assessed on its merits. For the game to feel right, designers and storytellers need to carefully stage all the visible pieces.<br />
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A broad world can be filled with content using programmatic tools, then given a relatively simpler hand-crafting pass or two. Large swaths of terrain can be sculpted using terrain generation tools; vegetation can be "planted" automatically according to exposed terrain type; buildings and dungeons can be selected from a few pre-built models; and so on. There's still a lot to do, but the broad strokes on the canvas can be filled in by code that applies generative rules.<br />
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Another important reason why breadth is easier is that depth is about meaning. Programatically "planting" a tree object in a particular location in an open-world game might have some meaning if someone takes the time to go into that space and tweak the location and type of the tree to give it meaning in that place.<br />
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But it's just a tree -- just a nice-looking texture. And there are many thousands of such nice-looking objects to be placed in addition to all the other objects that need to be placed... and trying to give all such things emotional value takes time that just doesn't exist. (And let's be honest, the number of people who enjoy and are good at choosing and placing gameworld objects in ways that express meaning to gamers is probably extremely small.)<br />
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It's simply faster and easier to make a big space with lots of things in it that don't have any particular emotional content.<br />
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<b>BUILDING DEEP WORLDS ANYWAY</b><br />
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Not everyone has given up on depth as a viable structural option in games, however.<br />
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Richard Cobbett recently made a plea for more depth in a Eurogamer article, <a href="http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-10-saturday-soapbox-hollow-worlds-looking-for-look-at">Saturday Soapbox: Hollow Worlds - Looking for "Look At"</a>. In this piece, he laments what today's games miss by not including the "Look At" feature. This ability to learn more about the details of places and objects was once common in text-based and point-and-click adventure games. But games increasingly emphasized action and excitement and motion. As they did, the very idea of stopping the action to learn more about the nature of the things in the gameworld became harder even to imagine.<br />
<br />
Assuming it's implemented in any serious way, designing a look-at capability into a game creates the opportunity for more depth than is found in most of today's games. Games with exploratory and narrative depth are worth making. It will be interesting to see if anyone takes up Cobbett's challenge.<br />
<br />
Another example of wishing for games that emphasize depth is the "<a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/10/31/will-we-ever-get-to-play-one-city-block/">One City Block</a>" concept, as evangelized occasionally by Warren Spector. This is a game that is deliberately designed to limit the existing space of motion in the gameworld to just a single block of a city. In place of constant action and new sights, the variety and interest in a One City Block game would be found in the people and objects existing in this small patch of reality and the deep connections among them.<br />
<br />
A potential example of this kind of design may be found in <i><a href="http://thefullbrightcompany.com/gonehome/">Gone Home</a></i>, currently being developed by the small team that created the "Minerva's Den" DLC for BioShock 2. As in the best of the mature adventure games, Gone Home promises to reward players not for using physical dexterity to "beat" the game as quickly as possible (which is a perfectly valid playstyle satisfied by many current games), but for engaging with the deep world of the game at an emotional and intellectual level. This doesn't guarantee it will be a good game -- but it will be a different game than most of what's released today, and a deeper game, and that makes it worth watching.<br />
<br />
<b>BREADTH AND DEPTH IN ONE GAME -- CHALLENGES</b><br />
<br />
Finally, is it possible to have both breadth and depth in a single game? Are there any work-organizing processes and technical capabilities by which a gameworld could be created within some reasonable time frame (say a year or two) that is both large and detailed?<br />
<br />
One step in a positive direction is procedural content generation (PCG). To have both breadth and depth, developers need help with one of those two forms of content so that they have time to focus on the other. Since it's so much harder to define rules for meaning-filled (depth) content compared to expansive (breadth) content, having lots of both would seem to depend on creating tools that generate lots of good content.<br />
<br />
Really large (broad) games already do this. Huge chunks of land can be generated randomly to an arbitrary level of complexity. This can be done by the developers, then hand-tweaked, in order to create a world (such as Skyrim) that is common to all players. Or it can be done dynamically, as in Minecraft -- this approach restricts placement of large, detailed structures, but it requires less data storage if world details are generated only when the player actually approaches that part of the world.<br />
<br />
Random generation of fixed content can help greatly with providing a large amount of physical terrain. Once the first and second passes through the terrain generator are done, developers can then edit this base structure to individually adjust the look of key locations. They can then add objects (many, many objects) for yet more breadth of content. Finally, they can tag objects with meaningful deep content.<br />
<br />
This is basically how Bethesda creates its Elder Scrolls and Fallout open-world games. Bethesda come as close as anyone to the ideal of a game that is both broad and deep... but in an ironic twist, it is the very breadth of these games that points out the shallowness of the characters and objects relative to how many of them there are. If these games were considerably smaller, the many small details of object placement and NPC behaviors would be better recognized and appreciated.<br />
<br />
The downside to this method for trying to have both breadth and depth is that it's still almost as expensive as making a big, deep game purely by hand. Although random terrain generation helps, it's not really enough to reduce the number of people needed to hand-tweak the thousands of places and objects and actors.<br />
<br />
Games that dynamically generate content have it even worse. While this approach makes it possible to enjoy spaces that are very large and that have lots of naturalistic "stuff" in them (rocks, trees, etc.), not generating content until the player is ready to experience it makes it impossible for the developer to hand-edit that content to add depth.<br />
<br />
<b>BREADTH AND DEPTH IN ONE GAME -- POSSIBILITIES</b><br />
<br />
Handling both of these cases seems to drive at one question: is it possible to programmatically create depth?<br />
<br />
Programmatically creating breadth is valuable. The more breadth that can be added using automatic systems, the more time is available for adding depth.<br />
<br />
But the degree of difficulty is lower for breadth-creation rules. That's not to say it's easy; it's just easi<em>er</em> to define rules that determine where and how to plop down places and objects (including people-shaped objects) than it is to imagine and apply the contextually-plausible information that gives those places and things and people emotional value.<br />
<br />
As a general rule, anything to do with simulating people and people-related artifacts is hard. Automatically generating a forest is (relatively) easy; it's terrain and plants. There are even third-party tools like SpeedTree that help with this. If you're feeling energetic, you might add animals as well, whose impact on their environment is generally negligible. You can tweak those content elements for aesthetic or simulationist value, but it's still reasonably simple to generate lots of them according to predetermined and encoded rules.<br />
<br />
Add people, though, and now you have the task of creatively imagining and representing the effects of human intentions and actions -- for example: roads (what kind? how should they run?), buildings (architectural style? size? purpose? proximity to other buildings? clean or filthy?), tools (what kinds of tools would different cultures use? where should they be placed outside or in a home? does the owner take care of them? does the owner have special feelings toward any of these objects?), and of course people themselves (who are they? what do they want? how do they feel about other characters? what actions are they capable of taking? what actions do they take given specific environmental phenomena?).<br />
<br />
In a very broad game, adding people-related depth is an epic undertaking. When you have a cast of thousands, what are the rules that will let all those people behave like unique but still plausible individuals? An army of developers could hand-tweak each NPC, but that's expensive... and what if you want your game to add new characters over the course of play?<br />
<br />
Some developers are working with the physical aspect of supplying meaningful depth to human-related content. <a href="http://procworld.blogspot.com/">Miguel Cepero</a>, for example, is already doing some very interesting work with procedural generation of architecture. I expect commenters can provide plenty of examples of other efforts along these lines.<br />
<br />
And the good folks at Storybricks are still working on ways to allow interactive emotional connections and behaviors to be dynamically generated among NPCs. This remains very much a work in progress, but it's one of the steps in the direction of games that can be both broad and deep.<br />
<br />
For now, though, the problem remains: how do you encode the creativity and aesthetics of game developers as generative rules so that the people and things in a game can dynamically produce their own depth?<br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
I may come back to this in a future blog post. For now... suggestions and ruminations are welcome.Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-63415777218673716542013-02-14T01:07:00.000-06:002013-02-14T01:20:52.041-06:00All My Cyborg Friends<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In appreciation of the wonderful System Shock 2 finally being released once again, this time by the good people at <a href="http://www.gog.com/">GOG.com</a>, I thought I would also re-release a bit of fan commentary I wrote at the time. This piece celebrated the setting of the original System Shock while looking forward to the new game.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">This is from May 9, 1999.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span><br />
<hr />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><strong>ALL MY CYBORG FRIENDS</strong><br />-------------------------------------------------<br />(sung more or less to the beat of of Hank Williams, Jr.'s "All My Rowdy Friends")</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qv7WlHicZE8/URyP8NQeRvI/AAAAAAAAAG0/PCaqCK0ghKE/s1600/screenshot3.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qv7WlHicZE8/URyP8NQeRvI/AAAAAAAAAG0/PCaqCK0ghKE/s640/screenshot3.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br />-------------------------------------------------</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Well, I woke up this morning with a pain in my head<br />All the crew on Citadel Station are dead<br />The messages they left make it plain to see<br />That whatever got them is gonna come after me</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">I'm heading down the hallways, picking up clues<br />Trying to survive while I assimilate the news<br />That on Citadel Station all the exits are blocked<br />And it looks like I'm gonna get my system shocked, uh-oh</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">We got humanoid mutants in the Medical bay<br />And the cyborgs in Research are headed my way<br />There's a crazy computer yelling for all she's worth<br />She keeps calling me "insect" and threatening Earth</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">But cyberspace is full of security codes<br />And the Reactor's linked to Shodan's processing nodes<br />If I find that the door to the armory's locked<br />I'll either open it up or get my system shocked, uh-huh</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"> -- bridge --</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Maintenance, Storage, and the Flight Deck too<br />Are crawling with drones looking for you-know-who<br />They're in Exec, Engineering and Security <br />And what's in the Groves needs some DDT</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Security robots are all over the place<br />And Edward Diego keeps getting in my face<br />So my Mark Three is loaded with the hammer cocked<br />If it gets in my way, it gets its system shocked, that's right</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"> (up a semitone)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Now it's forty years later and I'm back on the scene<br />As a psionic, hardware hacking, space marine<br />It's irrational to peer through the looking-glass<br />Instead of taking names and kicking cyborg ass</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">It's time to get moving, to get on with the show<br />And those security cameras are the first things to go<br />I'm on the Rickenbacker and I'm ready to rock<br />I had to come back again... to get my system shocked</span>Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-17918115242509729852013-01-12T04:44:00.000-06:002013-01-12T04:44:18.844-06:00The Central Problem of Computer Roleplaying GamesRoleplaying games on a tabletop, where you and friends play characters having adventures in a gameworld, are a lot of creative fun. You can invent stories as you go.<br />
<br />
Computer games, which can actually show you what created worlds look and sound like, are also fun to experience.<br />
<br />
But roleplaying games on a computer? There's a problem. And it's a big one. And not many game developers seem much interested in trying to fix that problem, with serious consequences for gamers who want to play interactive stories where their choices matter.<br />
<br />
So what's this problem I somehow think I can see that others can't?<br />
<br />
<b>THE CREATIVE FREEDOM OF TABLETOP ROLEPLAYING</b><br />
<br />
Consider the following experience of playing a table-top roleplaying game (RPG).<br />
<br />
You and your friend are roleplaying as a warrior and a thief, respectively. The character you're playing is a barbarian warrior who has been able to learn some magic spells. Your friend is playing as a thief who's remarkably good with a short bow.<br />
<br />
Your two characters enter a dungeon that your other friend, the Game Master (GM), has prepared for you. Before you got together, the Game Master spent time mapping out all the rooms and secrets and filling them appropriately with enemies and puzzles and traps and wonderful loot. And the whole dungeon is just one segment of an intricately designed campaign that will involve you and your friends in a deep and engaging story.<br />
<br />
As the barbarian and thief characters of you and your friend enter the first room of the dungeon, your Game Master has noticed that you (the barbarian character) are walking a few steps ahead of your nimble thief friend. He rolls a die, and tells you that you've inadvertently stepped on a trap -- and the room is now filling with smoke.<br />
<br />
Being a relatively clever warrior, you announce to the GM that you are lying on the floor to see if the air is clear there. The GM wasn't really expecting that, but he rolls a die and tells you that, yes, you can see the mail-shod feet of what appear to be five enemies striding toward you.<br />
<br />
This removes the element of surprise from the bad guys, and you and your friend are able to prepare for battle.<br />
<br />
Out of the smoke, enemies attack the two of you. Despite your preparations, the dice are against you tonight and you both take a lot of damage very quickly. Your barbarian character, and the thief character of your friend, are probably about to die. It won't be the end of the world; you'll just roll up new characters. But it would be less fun than keeping your current characters.<br />
<br />
You look at your friend, he looks at you... and both your characters turn as one, bolt from the smoky room, run out of the dungeon, and flee at maximum speed to the village down the road.<br />
<br />
<b>THE GAME MASTER RESPONDS</b><br />
<br />
The GM looks a little puzzled that you've completely ducked the adventure he had designed for you. But he shrugs and lets you keep running. You fall over yourselves getting into the tavern, where the GM tells you that the locals and traveling patrons stare at you for a moment, then shake their heads and mutter "some heroes" into their mugs.<br />
<br />
After a bit of quick dice-rolling, your Game Master friend tells you that you stick around the village for a day or so, with nothing much happening. The next night, though, while you're back in the tavern trying to drink away the memory of your brush with non-existence, a well-dressed stranger introduces himself politely, mentions that he couldn't help but notice that you both must have come from the nearby ruins -- "We get a lot of that here," he chuckles -- and suggests that he might have some easier work for you... if you're interested. Nothing dangerous, just a bit of guard duty for some merchants.<br />
<br />
You and your friend accept. It turns out to be a set-up; you were hired because word of your flight from the dungeon got around and the stranger needed a couple of patsies who would run from a fight. Then he'd steal the merchants' goods for himself and blame it on you. Your characters are no longer welcome here, and you'll need to choose whether to fight to restore your good names or seek adventure elsewhere.<br />
<br />
What's important to notice here is that the Game Master was able to adapt quickly and effectively to your surprising choice to bail on the dungeon adventure that he had set up for you. Your choices mattered, and had consequences, but because of the GM's creativity your actions in that individual story could still be worked into the overall narrative.<br />
<br />
In a later adventure, you would learn that the GM used your unexpected actions (and the consequences) to deepen the emotional theme of the overarching story. That would never have happened without your choice of actions, even if they weren't what had been plotted out to start with.<br />
<br />
<b>THE COMPUTER AS GAME MASTER</b><br />
<br />
Now consider an example of what it's like to play a Computer RolePlaying Game (CRPG), and in particular one of the variants of CRPGs known as a Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Game (MMORPG) that are played with lots of other people over the Internet.<br />
<br />
You and your friend are roleplaying as a warrior and a thief, respectively. You're a level 38 Warrior, so you have the exact same warrior-specific skills defined by the developers for every person in the game who is playing a level 38 Warrior. Your friend is a level 33 Thief, with the same abilities as everyone else playing a level 33 Thief.<br />
<br />
Your characters enter a dungeon that the developers have coded for the many thousands of people playing the game. You can't all play at the same time, of course; this dungeon like all the others is "instanced" so that you and your friend are the only players there. The dungeon is laid out as rooms filled with enemies and loot, and it's in a part of the map that's pre-defined as having a degree of challenge appropriate for mid-40-level characters.<br />
<br />
You walk into the first room of the dungeon. You enter the range (hard-coded at 10 meters) at which one of the enemies standing there is programmed to detect a player character. All of the enemies in the room immediately attack you. You die. Then they attack your friend, and he dies.<br />
<br />
You both respawn outside the entrance to the dungeon. You go back in. The dungeon is exactly the same, with the same enemies in the same room. You both die again.<br />
<br />
You both respawn outside the entrance to the dungeon. You go back in, and get a little further in, then both die again. You repeat this several times, getting better at it with each run-through, until you finally reach the end of the dungeon and collect the nice loot.<br />
<br />
<b>MORE OF THE SAME</b><br />
<br />
Several days later, after you've both improved your characters a few times so that they're level 40-ish, you go back to this dungeon.<br />
<br />
Everything is still the same. The same enemies are standing in roughly the same locations; the same kind of loot drops when you kill them (though more quickly this time).<br />
<br />
You go through this dungeon a few more times, grinding without much risk through the now-easy enemies to collect loot and and earn experience points for leveling up your characters again.<br />
<br />
The next night you go into a different prebuilt dungeon with somewhat more powerful enemies and slightly better loot. You grind through this dungeon, too. If there's a "story" to the elements of either dungeon, they aren't connected to each other in any way. Nor are the stories of either dungeon related thematically to the challenges that deliver the main story line, which you can only do in order. Also, you can't advance your character abilities past certain levels until until you've successfully completed these developer-designed core challenges.<br />
<br />
Other people you know played the same dungeons and challenges, and had the same kind of stories to tell about them. You like that this common experience gives you something to share with all those other players. But you also find yourself wishing you had some stories to tell that were uniquely your own.<br />
<br />
You've made thousands of choices. But they all resulted in your character experiencing the same story as everyone else who played your kind of character. Despite playing an interactive game, where the computer is programmed to detect your actions and change the world of the game according to encoded rules, your choices ultimately didn't seem to matter. And you wonder why.<br />
<br />
If you're playing a unique character in an interesting world -- which is the promise a roleplaying game makes -- shouldn't what your character does have more effect on your personal story as it helps define the story of that world?<br />
<br />
<b>THE CENTRAL PROBLEM DEFINED</b><br />
<br />
The obvious difference between these two scenarios is that there is no human Game Master in roleplaying games that are presented completely by a computer.<br />
<br />
I believe this is the central problem in all computer-based roleplaying games developed so far. Every feature in a computer RPG is an attempt to program a computer to do some of what a human Gamemaster (GM) can do. And they're all unsatisfying compared to tabletop RPGs because there is no computer program yet written that can do what a human being can do.<br />
<br />
There is no computer-based roleplaying game that can perceive what each individual player chooses to do and why they make that choice, that can understand the kind of game that each player wants to play, and that can respond to those unique desires by using their choices to help tell a good story for each player.<br />
<br />
The computer game has not been written that can adapt any or all of its existing content elements -- or create new features on the fly -- to satisfy the play interests of one or more human gamers while dynamically weaving their choices and consequences into a larger story unique to that gameworld.<br />
<br />
People still enjoy roleplaying games, though. And it would be great to be able to play these games even when a human Game Master's not around. Computers are the obvious solution to this wish. Let them handle the generation and presentation of gameplay features and events, and especially let computers do the tedious calculation chores for table-driven outcomes.<br />
<br />
So computers have been programmed to do those things. They can generate pseudorandom numbers, and render pictures of places and objects. They can process inputs according to simple rules and select outcomes from lists or calculations. They can even cause objects within the gameworld to perform specific behaviors in response to a small set of player-activated trigger events.<br />
<br />
As a result, there have been computer roleplaying games for years now. Some of them are a lot of fun. But none of them would claim to be as perceptive and understanding and creatively effective as a human Game Master, or as deeply satisfying as a game whose character-focused content is tailored on the fly to what a player enjoys by a responsive human GM.<br />
<br />
Computers remain bad at portraying interesting characters who demonstrate human-like behaviors and communications. Despite the welcome recent interest in procedural generation, computers are still not good at dynamically generating new content that responds plausibly to a wide range of human player inputs. And they are almost completely hopeless at figuring out how to weave individual events into a logically and emotionally engaging high-level story.<br />
<br />
The result is that for all the effort spent thus far, something wonderful has been lost in the conversion of roleplaying games from the tabletop to the computer. From the expressive richness of worlds that adapt to all your unique actions, we get play experiences that are simplified to one-size-fits-all movies with limited interactivity so that a computer program can deliver a story that has been predetermined by the developer.<br />
<br />
<b>MASS EFFECT AND A TASTE OF MEANINGFUL CHOICES</b><br />
<br />
There is reason for hope that this can improve. Some efforts have been made to allow more player choice, and to support consequences for those choices.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, there's some evidence that if you choose to make this kind of roleplaying game, you have to be prepared to give up the need to tightly control the full story. If the choices of the players don't really determine how the story ends, players will recognize that the limited interactive freedom you gave them is just an illusion.<br />
<br />
I think this is precisely what we saw in the respose of many gamers to the end of the last game in the Mass Effect trilogy.<br />
<br />
Players who were unhappy that the ending(s) of the final game didn't reflect the roleplaying choices of their character were both right and wrong. They were right that the player agency EA/BioWare implicitly promised -- by letting them develop the character of their Shepard through their gameplay choices -- wasn't delivered in the epic ending of the story. They were right to want and expect their choices to be respected, because EA/BioWare designed Mass Effect to solicit choices almost continuously throughout all three games.<br />
<br />
But players were wrong to think that Mass Effect, which was designed from Day One as a world and a story created entirely by EA/BioWare, would ever permit an epic story to have a less-than-epic ending. What happens to the galaxy, and to Shepard, were built into the Mass Effect story from the very start because it was conceived as a developer-directed story.<br />
<br />
The presence of choice-permitting gameplay mechanics (some of which were severely curbed in Mass Effect 2's RPG system, which should have been a heads-up) was never going to shift any of the core storytelling to the player. Mass Effect was EA/BioWare's story, and the conclusion to it had to be -- was always going to be -- dictated by the game's developer, not the player.<br />
<br />
The relative absence of some form of adaptive/creative human storyteller in Mass Effect, either a real person or a computer simulacrum, meant that players were going to get a single predetermined core story designed for a mass audience. Perversely, it was EA/BioWare's attempt to allow a small amount of human storytelling adaptability in these games that caused the ruckus: having only the appearance of meaningful choice turned out to be insufficient.<br />
<br />
The convention in computer-based roleplaying games has been that these games must tell an epic core story. This renders these games into books or movies that happen to offer some moment-to-moment interactivity. Mass Effect seemed to promise more; it broke with the games-as-interactive-novels convention by implying that the player's choices of how Shepard behaved in emotionally-weighted moments would change the story.<br />
<br />
And ultimately the story of the world was affected. Multiple endings were keyed to Shepard's overall nature. But for most players, the story of their Shepard failed no matter what choices they had made within the Mass Effect CRPGs... and that was the story that mattered.<br />
<br />
Players who care about story in a roleplaying game want their choices to matter for the character into which they've invested so many roleplaying hours. Without that personal responsiveness, computer-based roleplaying games will remain interactive novels. And even if they can't explain why, players will continue to feel puzzled and disappointed that that some vital and unique benefit of roleplaying games is missing from the computerized version, and that some part of the promise of interactivity is being wasted.<br />
<br />
I think they are exactly right to feel that way. The central problem of computer roleplaying games so far is that they don't have the ability to respond creatively to the vast range of possibilities of what characters ought to be able to do in a gameworld.<br />
<br />
<b>STEPS TOWARD SOLVING THE CENTRAL PROBLEM</b><br />
<br />
So let's say you're willing to accept my theory that this lack of a responsive, interactive storyteller is the real source of the unsatisfyingness of today's computer-based roleplaying games. If that's the problem, what's the answer?<br />
<br />
I don't know exactly. (If I did, I'd be doing that.) But I do feel pretty confident that there are a couple of design approaches that could improve CRPGs. They might be separate, and surely will be at first, or they might work together, but there are two paths I can see that lead toward better CRPGs:<br />
<br />
1. Catalog and evaluate what human GMs do, encode many more of those abilities as rules that computers can process, and design CRPGs that can apply those rules.<br />
<br />
2. Accept that sentient human beings can be really good at providing creative and adaptive storyplay opportunities, and design CRPGs that give some players powerful tools to act as GMs for other players.<br />
<br />
Let's consider that second possibility first: how can a CRPG be designed so that real people can act as GMs for other players?<br />
<br />
<b>ALTERNATIVE 1: ENABLE HUMAN GAME MASTERS</b><br />
<br />
Obviously this isn't really optimal for a single-player CRPG.<br />
<br />
Players may create and share content as objects, as Spore demonstrated. (And why hasn't any game developer followed up on the massive success of this aspect of Spore, which saw millions of creatures created before the game itself was even released?) But a single-player game has no one outside the player actively guiding the dynamic generation of immediate action or strategic story progression.<br />
<br />
Integrating a person as a kind of GM is a more natural possibility for games that are designed from the ground up to be multiplayer games. Instead of spending so much time and effort trying (unsuccessfully) to replicate various human abilities to create and organize events, why not design the game to support human GMs doing what they do so well?<br />
<br />
A hint that this is possible can already be seen in the <a href="http://www.artemis.eochu.com/">Artemis Starship Bridge Simulator</a>.<br />
<br />
This is a game that allows several players, using personal computers linked in a local network, to play as the different roles (such as Chief Engineer, Weapons Officer, Communications Officer) aboard a Star Trek-like starship. The player in the Captain's role doesn't drive a computer, but instead gives direction to the other players, suggesting where to go and how to respond to the various pre-written encounters.<br />
<br />
Currently there's little opportunity for the Captain in an Artemis simulation to generate playable content on the fly as a Game Master does in a tabletop game. Perhaps future versions will include some story management features that the Captain can select as an encounter progresses. Even now, though, this is still a useful step toward allowing an imaginative individual to dynamically guide gameplay for other players.<br />
<br />
<b>GAME MASTERS IN MMORPGS</b><br />
<br />
There's no reason why something like this couldn't also be done in an online roleplaying game like a MMORPG. Several online games already offer players the ability to script missions for other players as pre-constructed stories. Why not extend this with features that allow the mission creator to select and insert choices and consequences while a mission is being performed?<br />
<br />
In a game like that, something closer to the example given at the top of this article might be possible. The story creator, faced with an unexpected choice by the players of his story, could pop up a screen allowing pregenerated NPCs to be selected. A slightly randomized Generic Person could be dropped into the bar, and the storyteller could either write text or actually speak to the players in character over voice chat.<br />
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While doing this, the storyteller could bring up a drop-down list of planned alternative adventures, and activate one that seemed like something the players would find more fun. He could then guide the players to this new play opportunity. To the players, all this would appear narratively seamless -- they would not know (nor would they need to know unless they wanted to) that this flow of events wasn't exactly what the storyteller had in mind for them from the start... just as a good GM in a tabletop RPG can do.<br />
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By designing a MMORPG to have real-time features for paging story elements (including NPCs, objects, and text/voice information) into and out of the local gameworld, players would enjoy an entertainment experience that is much more personalized to their interests.<br />
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Naturally there are practical questions to such a design. There would have to be enough people willing to be "virtual GMs" for all the players who just want to be entertained. The numeric progression mechanics would have to be controlled so that standings couldn't be manipulated by storytellers building "Monty Haul" missions for their friends or customers. The experience with current MMORPGs that allow static mission building suggests that these concerns can be overcome... but someone will have to try extending this to dynamic storytelling for us to find out if that scales.<br />
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<b>ALTERNATIVE 2: BUILDING BETTER NPCS</b><br />
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But maybe it's not completely necessary to require a live human Game Master dreaming up content on the fly for a computer-based RPG to enjoy better stories. What about that first option -- what if computer code could be written that does a much better job of allowing stories to modify themselves to adapt in an enjoyable way to the unpredictable choices of one or many players?<br />
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The <a href="http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2011/09/storybricks-rehumanization-of.html">Storybricks</a> team has talked about this possibility in a <a href="http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/12/27/exclusive-storybricks-dev-diary-expounds-on-bringing-npcs-to-li/">developer diary</a> at Massively.com. [Note: I'm part of the Storybricks team and helped edit the source of this article.] To summarize it: why not design NPCs to have emotional states, and allow them access to actions that can detect and alter the emotional states of other characters?<br />
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The notion here is that "story" is about what people do for emotional reasons. By building emotion-altering mechanics that the characters of a game can use, the game itself can invent new stories for players to experience. As NPCs interact with player characters and with each other, player actions begin to have ripple effects -- friendships and antagonisms, alliances and emnities, come into existence and then change because of what players choose to do.<br />
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This effect is different than a game with a GM. It's not under one person's direct control. No one knows where the story will go. That's both scary and liberating!<br />
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This approach is also limited strategically for now. Although the current technology (like that of Storybricks) is getting better at the low-level story beats, weaving those individual moments into a thematically coherent saga still requires a human storyteller. Dynamically changing a story to achieve a unified artistic vision from the sum of many individual parts still requires the human touch... but there's no reason to think we can't start to come closer to that capability in computer RPGs as well.<br />
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<b>CRPGS BEYOND THE CENTRAL PROBLEM</b><br />
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Computer-based roleplaying games have reached a capability plateau. The graphics are excellent. The worlds are detailed. The core mechanics have been refined and polished. Now it's time to allow all that in-game activity to <em>mean</em> something, to let player choices really matter by making the story more of a collaboration between the developer and each player and the gameworld itself.<br />
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Giving creative players tools to adapt stories on the fly for other players is one way to get there. Building emotional intelligence into NPCs and letting them generate satisfying story opportunities is another way. There may be (probably are) other ways. What's important is to start.<br />
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It won't always go smoothly. The first steps are likely to be hard, as Mass Effect demonstrated. But it's the right direction to go. Computer-based roleplaying games need more emotional plausibility.<br />
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Computer RPGs are good enough now at letting characters fight each other. For this genre to survive and thrive, though, it needs to mature by letting gamers, acting through their characters, express more of the kinds of things we can do that make us human.<br />
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When game designers finally acknowledge and start to directly solve the central problem of computer-based roleplaying games -- the absence of some form of creative, adaptive mind interactively creating stories with individual players -- these games will begin to express their real potential as a distinctive and worthwhile entertainment experience.Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-83774651210175340272012-12-05T01:05:00.000-06:002012-12-05T01:17:39.626-06:00Exploration, Interrupted<p>Some games are about exploration. In these games, the pleasure of discovering and understanding is the central form of play. The mechanics of the game all encourage and reward exploratory play.</p><p>Other games are about something else, such as excitement or accumulating stuff, and just happen to have some exploration in them. Most games fall into this category.</p><p>I bring this up because I'm reading more comments these days calling some game that doesn't emphasize exploration an "exploration game." It's not. Just having some exploration content in it does not make it an exploration game.</p><p><b>SOMETIMES TERMINOLOGY MATTERS</B></P><p>It's good that some developers are willing to wedge a little exploration content into their games. I appreciate it when someone offers content that respects the <a href="http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2005/01/bartles-player-types-and-keirseys.html">Rational/Explorer/Simulationist</a> playstyle.</p><p>It's also understandable (if a bit sad) that, for the gamers who are starved for exploration-specific content, a game with even a little exploration in it can be considered an "exploration game."</p><p>But it isn't, not really. To say that a thing is a member of some distinctive group when it functionally is not is to destroy the meaning of the words used to name that group. That makes it harder to communicate usefully.</p><p>In the case of a game, the descriptive term "exploration game" loses its value for both marketing and critical discussion when it's applied to games that aren't actually about exploration play. It's misleading to gamers.</p><p>More importantly from the design perspective of this blog, to say that a game is an exploration game just because it can sort of be played that way occasionally confuses the set of possibilities that new game designers can even form in their heads of what an "exploration game" contains. If you grow up thinking that a game about exciting non-stop action and loot collecting counts as an exploration game just because there's some optional terrain to view or variation in loot drops, what are the odds that you will really understand what Explorer gamers actually want?</p><p><b>INTERRUPTIONS INHIBIT EXPLORATION</B></P><p>In particular, I've come to think that action-focused games that have as a primary play mechanic some kind of ticking clock or other (often mobile) threat that disrupts planned play behaviors are almost certainly not exploration games, and shouldn't be called that.</p><p>In short: mechanics that interrupt exploration actively oppose exploration play.</p><p>If you're a game designer, it doesn't matter how many goodies you hide, or how big the world is, or if you provide the occasional alternate track off the Direct Path To Fastest Victory. If your game persistently interrupts the perception and thinking process of the player with some kind of threat, then it's not an exploration game. That game is explicitly telling players that exploration is not your highest priority for them.</p><p>Interrupt threats are great for action games. Unexpected survival challenges generate excitement and the immediate requirement to <em>do</em> things. <em>Doom 3</em>, for example, was all about interrupt threats. Something similar is true of <em>Minecraft</em> in Survival mode -- getting jumped by a giant spider in the dark tends to distract one from sightseeing.</p><p>That's why I play Minecraft in Peaceful mode. Even without the ability to save at will, Peaceful mode at least allows exploration of the generated gameworld without having to worry constantly about being interrupted by a mobile survival threat.</p><p>On the other hand, Peaceful mode is not an option in Doom 3. Doom 3 was all about interrupt threats. Doom 3 was not an exploration game.</p><p><b>THE GAME DESIGN FUNCTION OF INTERRUPTS</B></P><p>Is the primary design intention of your game is to deliver an action-filled play experience? If so, then by all means, implement some speed-related interruption threats such as a limited amount of time in which to observe and plan, or enemies that come looking for you to attack you after a certain time, or ever-decreasing amounts of time in which to plan your next move.</p><p>Those are great for ramping up tension. You might even choose to deliberately prevent players from quicksaving all of their game state, or give them only one save slot. (Both of which are precisely what the PC version of <i>Far Cry 3</i> does.)</p><p>All these are valid design choices for making a high-intensity action game...</p><p>...and every one of them directly opposes exploratory play. Survival interruptions significantly increase the difficulty of obtaining knowledge of the gameworld. Restrictions on saving game state significantly increase the risk of losing some of that knowledge. Interruptive mechanics and save restrictions penalize exploration. They send the unmistakable message that exploring the gameworld is not what you're supposed to be doing. Anyone who tries to get that kind of enjoyment out of such a game is clearly not playing it the right way.</p><p>It's only when exploration is designed to matter most that the description "exploration game" is appropriate.</p><p>Survival interruptions and save restrictions very clearly tell the player that the point of a game is not exploration, that things to discover are only there to add some "content" or to provide a brief contrast to the action moments. If exploration actually mattered as primary gameplay, then the designer wouldn't emphasize gameplay elements that constantly interfere with perception and pattern recognition or that make it difficult to accumulate and organize knowledge.</p><p><b>ACTION <em>AND</EM> EXPLORATION? YES!</B></P><p>An obvious question at this point is whether a game that has lots of combat can ever be considered a true exploration game. My feeling is that combat, by its nature, tends to be interruptive, and so almost always works against exploration. But it's entirely possible to have an exploration game with some combat in it.</p><p><em>System Shock 2</em> is a good example of this. Unlike many games with combat, the combat system of System Shock 2 was systemically deep enough to be something interesting to explore in its own right. And it's telling that one of the few complaints about SS2 was the "respawning enemies." As in Doom 3, this worked against being able to concentrate on perceiving and understanding the patterns of the gameworld. When those interruptions didn't occur, System Shock 2 was extremely rewarding to explore, not in spite of having a strong combat element but partly because its combat element was a richly designed system.</p><p>A true exploration game asks the player to observe, and think, and understand. Not in an "oh god, oh god, we're all gonna die if you don't get it right instantly!" kind of way, but in a contemplative, creative, and strategic way. Success in a true exploration game, and the rewards for that success, go not to the player with the most well-developed fast-twitch muscles, nor to the most tactically adaptable player, nor even to the player who can bring out the best in other people. Success in a good exploration game -- most likely designed by someone who understands and values the joy of discovering interesting things -- goes to the player who sees the patterns in complex systems, and who can conceive long-range plans for applying available forces to those patterns to create new, more desirable configurations.</p><p>Players just don't get to do that when you're putting them in life-termination scenarios every few seconds. Games that are about interruptive excitement are not about exploration.</p><p><b>THE TRUE PLEASURE OF EXPLORATION GAMES</B></P><p>Games that are about exploration have mechanics and content that promote the different but equally valid kind of satisfaction that comes from realizing the governing pattern in a complex system, or from devising a new system that is both functional and elegant.</p><p>Not everybody likes that kind of gameplay. Great! There's plenty of room for different kinds of games that offer different kinds of fun. And there are plenty of games available that emphasize action and token-collection.</p><p>But being designed to offer a primary gameplay experience of something other than adrenaline-pumping excitement does not make a game flawed or bad. Not delivering eyeball kicks every ten seconds does not make a game buggy or broken.</p><p>That's a game that could, if its mechanics emphasize the pleasure of discovery and understanding, be a game that deserves to be called an "exploration game."</p>Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-90056507141985328782012-11-24T02:05:00.001-06:002013-05-27T01:29:50.909-05:00Player Creativity Considered HarmfulIs player creativity desirable in games?<br />
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There's a subset of developers who seem to think so. They like the idea that players should be able to express behaviors and create objects in a gameworld that they (the developers) never thought of.<br />
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But these appear to be a distinct minority. Most games are deliberately designed and developed to prevent any truly creative play. In particular, the number of in-game effects that characters and objects can demonstrate are cut back as much as possible.<br />
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Why take such pains? Why are most developers so determined to strictly limit player verbs or possible system interactions if player creativity is such a great thing?<br />
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There are several not entirely bad reasons why. Unfortunately for the game industry, I believe the combination of these justifications winds up leading to a severe majority of games that are so tightly controlled as to nearly play themselves.<br />
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<strong>OFFENSIVE CONTENT</strong><br />
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One problem with allowing player creativity is rude content.<br />
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If you let players do things that modify the gameworld, particularly if they can interact with other players in any way, they are guaranteed to spell out naughty words, erect enormous genitalia, and build penisauruses. (Google "Sporn" for NSFW examples of how gamers immediately used Spore's creativity tools.)<br />
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Developers can accept this if they're OK with a mature rating for their game, but creativity tools make it tough to sell a multiplayer game that's kid-safe.<br />
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<strong>ANYTHING UNPLANNED IS A BUG</strong><br />
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Another problem is that emergent behaviors can look to some gamers like bugs.<br />
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That doesn't mean they <em>are</em> actual bugs, defined for games as behavior that opposes the intended play experience. Just because it was unintended doesn't mean it opposes the desired play experience.<br />
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The developers of Dishonored, for example, were surprised to see their playtesters possess a target while plummeting from a great height, thus avoiding deceleration trauma. It wasn't intended -- it emerged from the interaction of systems -- but it made sense within the play experience Arkane had in mind. So it wasn't a bug, it was a feature... and it got to stay in the game. That appears to be a rare exception to standard practice, though.<br />
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<strong>NO CRAFT IN CRAFTING</strong><br />
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Crafting in MMORPGs is not creative. Crafting -- making objects -- in MMORPGs has nothing to do with "craft" or being "crafty"; it's about mass-producing widgets to win economic competition play. That's a perfect valid kind of play. But it isn't creative.<br />
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An argument might be made that some creativity is needed to sell a lot of stuff. But that's not related to crafting as a process of imagining new kinds of objects that meet specific purposes and elegantly bringing them into existence within a gameworld. That's "craftsmanship," and it's what a crafting system worthy of the name would be... but that's not what crafting in MMORPGs ever actually is.<br />
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A truly creative crafting system would allow the internal economy of a gameworld to grow through the invention of new IP. Wouldn't that be an interesting way to counter mudflation?<br />
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To be fair, a creative crafting system would probably far outshine the rest of most MMORPGs. Part of the crafting system in the late Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) MMORPG was highly regarded, but in an odd way it was so much fun that it didn't ever really fit into a Star Wars game.<br />
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So what might a MMORPG (i.e., not Second Life) with a truly creativity-encouraging crafting system look like? In what kind of gameworld would the ability for players to imagine and implement entirely new kinds of things be appropriate?<br />
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<strong>CLASSES VERSUS SKILLS</strong><br />
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Yet another reason to deprecate player creativity is game balance. Especially in multiplayer games, developers not unreasonably want to try to keep the playing field level for players using (marginally) different playstyles.<br />
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A common way this gets expressed is by organizing character skills in level-controlled classes. It's more interesting to key character abilities to skills, and let players pick and choose the skills they want. But this (developers have decided) allows the emergence of character ability combinations that may be either unexpectedly "overpowered" or too "weak" to compete effectively with players of similar skill levels.<br />
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This perspective that "interacting systems allow emergent effects that interfere with the intended play experience and therefore must be minimized" explains (as one example) why Sony Online Entertainment completely deleted the extensive individual skills system of the original Star Wars Galaxies and replaced it with a few static classes with specific abilities at developer-determined levels, just like pretty much every other MMORPG out there.<br />
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The New Gameplay Experience was well-regarded by some of SWG's new players. But many long-time players felt that the original SWG's unique skills-based ability model was much more creatively satisfying. When it was changed so radically to a class-based model, eliminating their ability to express themselves in a detailed way through their character's abilities, they left the game.<br />
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EVE Online also allows skill selection, but in practice most people wind up with the same skills. So is it possible any longer to offer a major MMORPG that encodes player abilities in mix-and-match skills, rather than a small set of classes in which my Level 80 Rogue is functionally identical to your Level 80 Rogue?<br />
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<strong>CODING TO THE TEST CASES</strong><br />
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One more reason why emergence gets locked down in games starts, ironically, with sensibly trying to use more mature software development practices.<br />
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Test case driven software development is the process of documenting what your code is supposed to do through well-defined requirements, then writing test cases that describe how to find out whether the software you actually write meets those requirements.<br />
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That's often a Good Thing. It helps to insure that you deliver will be what your customers are expecting. But there is a dark side to this process, as there can be for any process, which is that if your organization starts getting top-heavy, with a lot of layers between the people running things and those doing the actual game development, the process eventually tends to become the deliverable. Reality becomes whatever the process says it is. Process is easier to measure than the meaning of some development action: "How many lines of code did you write today?"<br />
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The practical result of enforcing the "everything must have a test case" process is that every feature must have a test case. That's actually pretty handy for testing to a well-defined set of expectations.<br />
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Unfortunately, the all-too-common corollary is: if we didn't write a test case for it, you're not allowed to have that feature. At that point, the process has become your deliverable, and your game is very unlikely to tolerate any creativity from its players. It might be a good game by some standard. But it probably won't be memorable.<br />
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Still, a process for reliably catching real bugs is valuable. So how can the desire to allow some creativity and the need to deliver measureably high quality coexist?<br />
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<strong>EPIC STORY MUST BE TOLD AS-IS</strong><br />
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Finally, there is the problem of the Epic Story.<br />
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Emergent gameplay invites exploratory creativty. But broadly emergent gameplay interferes with a carefully-crafted narrative. The more epic and detailed the story -- which translates to more development money spent on that content -- the less freedom you can permit players to go do their own wacky things, because then they might not see that expensive content. The Witcher 2 fought this somewhat, but it's emphatically the exception.<br />
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Is there a middle ground between developer story and player freedom? Or is there a way to design a game so that both of these can be expressed strongly?<br />
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<hr /><br />
To sum up: from the perspective of many game developers, especially in the AAA realm, "emergent" automatically equals "bug" in all cases. A mindset that only the developers know how the game is meant to be played, rather than a respect for what players themselves enjoy doing, is leading many developers to design against creativity. The idea of of actually increasing the number of systems or permitted system interactions seems to be something that just will not be permitted.<br />
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The result is that player creativity in these games is so constrained as to be nonexistent. You're just mashing buttons until you solve each challenge, in proper order, in the one way the developers intended.<br />
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Is there any sign that this might be changing, perhaps as the success of some indie games demonstrates that there is a real desire for games that encourage player creativity?Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-85048986541867308502012-11-12T01:48:00.001-06:002013-03-13T10:31:04.279-05:00Plausibility Versus RealismEvery now and then, a forward-thinking, open, courteous, kind, thrifty and generally very attractive group of developers will choose to let gamers see a little of their design thinking for a game in development.<br />
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For roleplaying games such as the recently very well Kickstarted <a href="http://eternity.obsidian.net/"><i>Project Eternity</i></a> by Obsidian Entertainment, the conversation can be informed and thoughtful. Not all of the ideas suggested by enthusiastic armchair designers will be right for a particular game, but the level of discussion is frequently very high.<br />
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However, in the years since I've observed such forums, there is inevitably a conversational glitch that appears. It doesn't take long before even very knowledgeable commenters will begin to argue in favor of gameplay systems that replicate real-world physical effects.<br />
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<b>THE DESERT OF THE REAL</b><br />
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They might be asking for armor that has weight and thus restricts physically weak characters from equipping it at all. Or maybe it's for weapons that require specialized training, so that a character must have obtained a particular skill to use certain weapons. Sometimes there's a request for a detailed list of damage types, or for complex formulas for calculating damage amounts, or that environmental conditions like rain or snow should reduce movement rates or make it harder to hit opponents.<br />
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What all these and similar design ideas share (other than an enthusiasm for functionally rich environments) is an unspoken assumption that the RPG in question needs more realism.<br />
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Later on I'll go into where I think this assumption comes from. For now, I'd like to consider why I think there's a better approach when trying to contribute to a game's design -- instead of realism, the better metric is plausibility.<br />
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<b>PLAUSIBILILITY DEFINED</b><br />
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The difference between realism and plausibility is a little subtle, but it's not just semantic. Realism is about selecting certain physical aspects of our real world and simulating them within the constructed reality of the game world; plausibility is about designing systems that specifically feel appropriate to that particular game world. Plausibility is better than realism in designing a game with a created world -- what Tolkien called a "secondary reality" -- because realism crosses the boundary of the magic circle separating the real world from the logic of the constructed world while plausible features are 100% contained within the lore of the created world.<br />
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To put it another way, plausibility is a better goal than realism because designing a game-complete set of internally consistent systems delivers more fun than achieving limited consistency with real-world qualities and processes. Making this distinction is crucial when it comes to designing actual game systems. Every plausible feature makes the invented world better; the same isn't true of all realistic features imported into the gameworld. Being realistic doesn't necessarily improve the world of the game.<br />
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Despite this, a design idea based on realism often sounds reasonable at first. We're accustomed to objects having physical properties like size and weight, for example, as well as dynamic properties such as destructibility and combustibility. So when objects are to be implemented in a game world, it's natural to assume that those objects should be implemented to express those physical characteristics.<br />
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But there are practical and creative reasons not to make that assumption.<br />
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<b>WHY NOT REALISM?</b><br />
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Creating simulations of physical systems -- which is the goal of realism -- requires money and time to get those systems substantially right relative to how the real world works. Not only must the specific system be researched, designed and tested, but all the combinations of simulated systems that interface with each other must be tested -- all the emergent behaviors have to seem realistic, too.<br />
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Trying to meet a standard of operation substantially similar to something that exists outside the imaginary world of the game is just harder than creating a system that only needs to be consistent with other internal game systems.<br />
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Maybe worst of all, there are so many real-world physical processes that it's impossible to mimic even a fraction of them in a game. Something will always be left out. And the more you've worked to faithfully model many processes, the more obvious it will be that some process is "missing." This will therefore be the very first thing that any reviewer or player notices. "This game claims to be realistic, but I was able to mix oil and water. Broken! Unplayable! False advertising!"<br />
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This isn't to say that all simulation of physical processes is hard/expensive, or that there can never be a good justification for including certain processes (gravity, for example). Depending on your game, it might be justifiable to license a physics simulation library such as Havok.<br />
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But the value of implementing any feature always has to be assessed by comparing the likely cost to the prospective benefits. For many games (especially those being made on a tight budget), realism should almost always be secondary to plausibility because realism costs more without necessarily delivering more fun for more players.<br />
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<b>SOME GAMES ARE MORE REAL THAN OTHERS</b><br />
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Knowing when to apply either realism or plausibility as the design standard depends on understanding what kind of game you're making. If it's core to your gameplay, such as throwing objects in a 3D space, then the value of simulating some realistic effects like gravity increases because the benefits of those effects are high for that particular game. Otherwise, you're better off implementing only a plausible solution or excluding that effect entirely.<br />
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Let's say you're making a 3D tennis game. The core of tennis is how the ball behaves, and the fun comes from how players are able to affect that behavior. So it makes sense for your game design to emphasize in a reasonably realistic way the motion of a ball in an Earth-normal gravity field (a parabola), as well as how the angle and speed of a racquet's elastic collision with a ball alters the ball's movement. If it's meant to be a serious sports simulation, you might also choose to model some carefully selected material properties (clay court versus grass) and weather conditions (humidity, rain).<br />
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But you probably wouldn't want to try to simulate things like the Earth's curvature, or solar radiation, or spectator psychology. They don't have enough impact on the core fun to justify the cost to simulate them. And for a simple social console game, ball movement and racquet impact are probably the only things that need limited realism. The better standard for everything else that has to be implemented as the world of the game is plausibility. If it doesn't help the overall game feel logically and emotionally real in and of itself, then it doesn't meet the standard and probably should not be implemented.<br />
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<b>A ROLEPLAYING GAME NEEDS ITS OWN REALITY</b><br />
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This is even more true for a character-based game, which requires a world in which those characters have a history and relationships and actions they can take with consequences that make sense. In designing a 3D computer role-playing game, the urge to add realistic qualities and processes to the world of that game can be very hard to resist.<br />
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Action-oriented Achiever gamers are usually OK with abstracted systems; the fun for them comes in winning through following the rules, whatever those rules might be. But for some gamers -- I'm looking at you, Idealist/Narrativists and my fellow Rational/Explorers -- the emotional meanings and logical patterns of those rules matter a great deal.<br />
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Characters who behave like real people, and dynamic world-systems that behave like real-world systems, make the game more fun for us. We find pleasure in treating the gameworld like it's a real place inhabited by real people, not just a collection of arbitrary rules to be beaten. For us, games (and 3D worlds with NPCs in particular) are more fun when they offer believable Thinking and Feeling content in addition to Doing and Having content.<br />
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Providing that kind of content for Narrativist gamers is non-trivial. "Realistic" NPC AI is hard because, as humans, we know intimately what sensible behavior looks like. So while there are often calls for NPCs to seem "smarter," meaning that they're more emotionally or logically realistic as people, it's tough for game developers to sell to publishers the value of the time (i.e., money) that would be required to add realistic AI as another feature. Developers of RPGs usually have a <em>lot</em> of systems to design and code and test. So working on AI systems that give NPCs the appearance of a realistic level of behavioral depth, in addition to all the other features, is very hard to justify. (The <a href="http://www.storybricks.com/">Storybricks</a> technology is intended to help with building more plausible NPCs. But that's the whole point of that technology.)<br />
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Another argument against realism in a gameworld is complexity. Most developers prefer to build simple, highly constrained, testable cause/effect functions rather than the kinds of complex and interacting systems that can produce the kinds of surprising emergent behaviors found in the real world. Explorers find that hard to accept. Explorers aren't just mappers of physical terrain; they are discoverers of dynamic systems -- they love studying and tinkering with moving parts, all interacting as part of a logically coherent whole.<br />
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Explorers also tend to know a little about a lot of such systems in the real world, from geologic weathering to macroeconomics to the history of arms and armor and beyond. So it's natural for them to want to apply that knowledge of real systems to game systems. Since you're building a world anyway (they reason), you might as well just add this one little dynamic system that will make the game feel totally right.<br />
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Now multiply that by a hundred, or a thousand. And then make all those systems play nicely together, and cohere to support the core vision for the intended play experience. "Hard to do well" is an understatement.<br />
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<b>A CREATED WORLD DOESN'T NEED OUR WORLD'S REALISM</b><br />
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That's the practical reason why, for most systems in a worldy game, plausibility will usually be the better standard. If the game is meant to emphasize melee combat, for example, then having specific damage types caused by particular weapons and mitigated by certain armors might sound good. Moderate simulation of damage delivery and effects might be justifiable. Those action features will, if they're paced well and reward active play, satisfy most gamers.<br />
<br />
But a role-playing game must emphasize character relationships in an invented society, where personal interactions with characters and and the lore of the world are core gameplay and combat is just one form of "interaction" among several. For that kind of game, the better choice is probably to limit the design of that game's combat system to what feels plausible -- get hit, lose some health -- and to abstract away the details.<br />
<br />
Plausible systems are especially desirable in roleplaying games because they meet the needs of Explorers and Narrativists. Intellectually and emotionally plausible elements of the game feel right. They satisfy our expectations for how things and people should appear to behave <em>in that created world</em>.<br />
<br />
A plausible combat system deals and mitigates damage; it can but doesn't need to distinguish between damage types. A plausible "weather" system has day/night cycles and maybe localized rain; it doesn't require the modeling of cold fronts and ocean temperatures and terrain elevation. A plausible economy has faucets and drains, and prices generally determined by supply and demand; it doesn't have to be a closed system. Plausibility insures that every feature fits the world of the game without doing more than is necessary.<br />
<br />
This is the best of both worlds. Making plausibility the standard gives players lots of different kinds of things to do, and it makes the implementation of those systems simple enough for them to be worth implementing and feasible to implement by mere mortals.<br />
<br />
<b>CONCLUSION</b><br />
<br />
So, to gamers enthusiastic about adding realistic interactive capabilities to a brand-new gameworld, I say: whoa, there! Before you ask the designers to add this one additional little thing that would help make the game more "realistic," stop and think about that idea from a game designer's perspective.<br />
<br />
Developers can't add every great idea, even if they're still in the design phase. But the chances of seeing some feature suggestion implemented improve if you can explain how it makes the unique world of that game feel more plausible at minimal development cost.Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-1803970692251021352012-10-30T01:43:00.000-05:002012-10-30T01:52:42.261-05:00They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait<blockquote>
"[T]housands at his bidding speed, <br />
And post o'er land and ocean without rest; <br />
They also serve who only stand and wait."<br />
-- John Milton, "On His Blindness"</blockquote>
<br />
There's a belief I've seen expressed by a number of developers that can be paraphrased as: "All players want to be The Hero. Every gamer expects to be the all-powerful savior, prime mover of all action, star of the show, center of all attention. Therefore every game that personifies the player as a character in a world must to be designed to allow the player to be the hero. And that goes for multiplayer games, too."<br />
<br />
Not to pick on Emily Short, who is a respected creator of Interactive Fiction games, but an example of this perspective can be found in a talk she gave at GDC Online in 2012, as summarized on Gamasutra: <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/179096/Making_everyone_feel_like_a_star_in_a_multiplayer_game.php">Making Everyone Feel Like a Star in a Multiplayer Game</a>. As Gamasutra's Frank Cifaldi summarized it: "Even in a multiplayer game, every player has to feel as if they are playing out their own personal, unique story. They cannot feel as if they are in a supporting role, or their investment in the narrative will fall apart."<br />
<br />
It's a nice theory. Is it true?<br />
<br />
<b>I'm Ready For My Close-Up</b><br />
<br />
For some gamers, it is true. They do want to be the hero, and they do expect any and every personification game (where you play as a character) to cater to that desire. Character-based games, they feel, are essentially power fantasies where the world is supposed to revolve around them. Although they are unlikely to say it this way, these gamers expect every feature in a game to be about letting them express dominance, either "physical" (as through combat in a three-dimensional game world) or emotional (as in much interactive fiction).<br />
<br />
Even if a desire to follow some version of Campbell's "Hero's Journey" isn't baked into people, gamers today have grown up with games in which you are the hero who saves the world. So many games follow this pattern that it would be surprising if many gamers have not come to expect it as a natural, even required, element of all personification games.<br />
<br />
The problem is that this expectation of epic centrality is demonstrably not true for all gamers. Despite the pattern, not every gamer wants to be the hero. There's evidence of a meaningful minority of gamers who are happiest when a game gives them ways to help other players succeed. These gamers truly do not want to be the star -- they prefer a supporting role.<br />
<br />
<b>The Cleric as Un-Hero</b><br />
<br />
Consider the four <a href="http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2009/08/archetypal-origins-of-mmorpg-group.html">archetypal classes</a>: warrior, wizard, rogue, cleric. Warriors deal mêlée damage and are pack mules; wizards cast ranged spells and know lots of lore; rogues backstab, detect traps and steal shiny things. All of these are heroic in their own way -- their gameplay content is about acting for themselves. The actions the game is designed to allow them to take are all focused on their own self-enhancement.<br />
<br />
But clerics, while they can sometimes do divinely-inspired damage, are mostly about healing the wounds or diseases of other characters, along with protecting ("buffing") other characters. That's been the traditional functional definition of the cleric role in roleplaying games dating back to Dungeons & Dragons (and probably before that). A modern addition is some form of "crowd-control" feature, but the function is the same: providing support to the actively heroic characters.<br />
<br />
That style of play is not about indulging power fantasies. The game actions that a cleric is built to perform aren't centered on the person playing the character, but on other players. So why are cleric roles implemented in games at all? Why do developers even bother implementing a cleric role if character-based games are supposed to be all about letting the player feel like a hero?<br />
<br />
<b>The World Needs a Healer</b><br />
<br />
One explanation is that the healer role is included simply as a matter of utility. If a game is pretty much all about killing (as most computer games are), then to make it interesting there needs to be some risk of being injured yourself. If there's no way to heal your own injuries, then you need someone else to do the healing. And in a typical fantasy setting, that character is the cleric. In a modern setting, this role is often called a "medic," as in Valve's <i>Team Fortress 2</i> multiplayer game, but it's pretty much the same other-focused functionality.<br />
<br />
But of course it's not a hard design requirement in any constructed computer game to have some other person heal your character. It's simple enough to provide the healing function through potions or stimpaks that magically undo character damage. And yet game developers keep implementing character class roles whose abilities are focused on helping other characters.<br />
<br />
Perhaps developers do this because enough gamers like playing clerics to justify moving those abilities to a separate class role. But that begs the question: if a roleplaying game offers a role whose primary function is to support other players, why are there so many gamers who are happy to fill that role? If everyone really expects to be the star, who are all these people looking to be part of the supporting cast?<br />
<br />
<b>The Craft of Helping</b><br />
<br />
In fact, clerics aren't the only source of supportive abilities in roleplaying games, particularly in the massively multiplayer online variety (MMORPGs). A popular alternative activity in these games is "crafting," which involves creating objects that are usable and useful inside the game world.<br />
<br />
Although there is pleasure in the crafting of new things (though, from my Explorer perspective, that reason for crafting is almost never emphasized), most crafting in MMORPGs is there to provide useful objects for other players. Often these are specific to combat gameplay -- weapons or ammunition -- but crafting can also be defined as a source of tools such as fishing poles or resource detectors.<br />
<br />
Either way, in a game where usable objects can be looted from defeated enemies, implementing crafting gameplay insures that combat players don't have to hope and wait for certain items to drop as loot. Crafting also allows some players to serve a useful role in a game without forcing them to participate in direct combat gameplay. This allows more people to play the game (and pay for the privilege) than would have been the case in a combat-only game.<br />
<br />
One of the best-known descriptions of this playstyle preference is the article posted to Stratics in 2001 by Lloyd Sommerer (as "Sie Ming"): <a href="http://laurenandlloyd.com/lloyd-stuff/i-want-to-bake-bread/">I Want to Bake Bread</a>. In this plea for game developer understanding, Lloyd ably points out the kinds of supportive behaviors that some gamers enjoy providing, and wonders why developers don't seem interested in the benefits a game can obtain from including features that attract gamers like these.<br />
<br />
It's still a good question.<br />
<br />
<b>Supportive Play is Good Gameplay</b><br />
<br />
To sum up: some people enjoy helping other people, but few games reward that playstyle. That's a missed opportunity, both in terms of revenue and of including people in your gaming community who are genuinely helpful. If they don't play the hero, that's OK, and smart developers will create gameplay for them instead of trying to force them into the hero's boots (which won't work).<br />
<br />
The people who come to a computer game wanting to play a healer, or a maker of things, are there specifically because they want to play a character-filled game that does not force them into the spotlight. Being able to play a supporting role satisfies a deeply held need of some people to be of service to others. These helpful souls are not only content to let others have the limelight, they actually prefer it that way. Their pleasure comes from helping others succeed.<br />
<br />
That kind of character is in direct contradiction to how pretty much every personification game is designed. Whether you like it or not, you're forced to be the star, to make all the big decisions for yourself and maybe others, too.<br />
<br />
But by assuming that every game has to be designed that way, developers are telling many would-be gamers that their playstyle interests aren't wanted. That's a shame both artistically and commercially.<br />
<br />
Games don't need to be <em>only</em> about support roles. You could create a game where the player can only be a healer or a crafter, and those might be fun -- but it's not necessary to go that far.<br />
<br />
A game that offers the option of rewarding players for being supportive, for helping out NPCs or other players in ways that don't involve saving the world or being put on a stage for it, would be one that more people would find enjoyable. It would be more fun for more people, and would bring more cooperative play to gameworlds that are often harshly contentious.<br />
<br />
As game design goals go, that's not a bad one.Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-26678991264693678802012-10-18T01:15:00.002-05:002012-10-18T01:16:37.248-05:00Squeal vs. Squee: How Game Sequels are ReceivedThe recent release of Resident Evil 6 generated a fair bit of discussion regarding how some players of previous installations of the the survival horror franchise are not happy with RE6's new, more action-oriented direction.<br />
<br />
That raises an interesting general question. What makes a new game in a series welcomed, tolerated, or reviled by fans of previous entries?<br />
<br />
Assuming the later games are of the same or better quality as the first, what makes one game "a welcome update to a series getting stale" and another "a betrayal of everything that fans of this series have come to expect?"<br />
<br />
Bearing in mind that love and hate for particular games are often highly subjective responses (to put it politely), I think it's possible to make some broad but useful observations. Here are some suggested categories of gamer sentiment regarding sequels:<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>A GOOD THING MADE BETTER</b><br />
<ul>
<li>Wing Commander 1 & 2 => Wing Commander 3 & 4</li>
<li>System Shock => System Shock 2</li>
<li>Thief => Thief 2: The Metal Age</li>
<li>Uncharted: Drake's Fortune => Uncharted 2: Among Thieves</li>
<li>TES IV: Oblivion => TES V: Skyrim</li>
</ul>
<br />
<b>NOT THE SAME, BUT SURPRISINGLY GOOD</b><br />
<ul>
<li>Deus Ex => Deus Ex: Human Revolution</li>
<li>UFO: Enemy Unknown (X-COM) => XCOM: Enemy Unknown by Firaxis</li>
</ul>
<br />
<b>THEY DUMBED IT DOWN</b><br />
<ul>
<li>TES III: Morrowind => TES IV: Oblivion</li>
<li>Deus Ex => Deus Ex: Invisible War</li>
<li>System Shock 1/2 => BioShock</li>
<li>Mass Effect => Mass Effect 2</li>
</ul>
<br />
<b>YOU KILLED MY PUPPY</b><br />
<ul>
<li>Fallout 1/2 => Fallout 3</li>
<li>UFO: Enemy Unknown (X-COM) => XCOM by 2K Games [tentative]</li>
<li>Resident Evil 1-4 => Resident Evil 6</li>
</ul>
<br />
All of these are debatable in their details. I don't agree personally with all of them, and some of them many not even be accurate in an objective sense. But they do, I think, accurately reflect how these games are assessed by gamers generally. So for now, let's assume that you're willing to accept most of the category assignments I've proposed here. Some sequels are loved, some are accepted, and some get mostly bad press.<br />
<br />
What do the games in each category have in common with each other? And what sets them apart from the games in the other categories?<br />
<br />
One fairly obvious difference is time -- specifically, how much time has passed from one entry in a series to the next. Games that are perceived as improvements on their predecessors tend to be released fairly soon after the prior game, while games made much later tend to be judged more severely. Skepticism probably colors beliefs before a late sequel is released, and nostalgia for a very highly regarded earlier game makes a fair comparison harder for any follow-up. This suggests that it's a good idea to have a design for a fairly similar sequel ready to implement if the initial game in a new franchise takes off.<br />
<br />
Slightly less obvious, and related to time, is who makes the follow-up game. A sequel made by the original game's creator (or members of the team that made the original game) is likely to be perceived more positively than a game made by a completely different developer.<br />
<br />
(There are exceptions for a few studios. Knights of the Old Republic 2 and Fallout: New Vegas, developed by Obsidian Entertainment, while less appealing to some players of KOTOR and Fallout 3, received higher marks from many gamers. And Eidos's respectful handling of its Deus Ex prequel muted much of the negative discussion of its in-development Thief sequel. At worst, sequel games made by studios that early game fans feel they can trust fall somewhere between positive and mixed reception.)<br />
<br />
Changing the display engine or target platform often generates some disapproval. This showed up in particular after 2000 when primary development shifted from the PC to the new generation of game consoles. Deus Ex and The Elder Scrolls are examples of franchises that suffered from this perception; Deus Ex: Invisible War and TES IV: Oblivion were developed first for consoles then ported to the PC platform of their original games, and are frequently given the "dumbed down" criticism by fans of the earlier games.<br />
<br />
BioShock, though not a direct sequel to the PC-based System Shock games, also met with some of this criticism, but overcame it by creating a new and strongly-realized setting for the fairly similar game mechanics. BioShock also shows that falling into this category doesn't imply that the later games must be "bad," either artistically or commercially. Gamers lost to the "dumbed down" problem may be replaced by those who gravitate to or grow up using the newer target platforms.<br />
<br />
A final factor appears to be whether a sequel makes significant alterations to the primary gameplay mechanics (and often the player visual perspective) associated with a popular franchise. The X-COM and Fallout franchises went through this -- fans of the pausable, tactical third-person format of the earlier games reacted very negatively to the shift to real-time, first-person shooter gameplay of the later games. Fans of Fallout 1/2 can still be found grousing about the change in Fallout 3 despite the later game's evident quality and popularity. Mass Effect 2 was criticized for significantly reducing the number of character skill options from the more RPG-like orginal Mass Effect. And 2K's as-yet-unreleased first-person shooter take on X-COM (which was recently revealed as having been changed to third-person perspective) generated more negative comment than Firaxis's more faithful recreation.<br />
<br />
These effects are understandable, and maybe unavoidable. It's impossible for a sequel to perfectly please every gamer who enjoyed the initial game(s) while at the same time changing to attract new players. Gamers as a group are notorious for wanting "the same, only different." If it's too different, you lose the fans who liked the original game. But if it's too similar, you'll be criticized for "charging for the same game twice."<br />
<br />
It's also creatively and financially risky to make too many trips to the same well without perking things up somehow -- consumers of any kind of entertainment will eventually tune out. Finally, from a developer's viewpoint it's just less fun to iterate on a well-known formula than to make a new game that stretches some different developer muscles.<br />
<br />
Those realities acknowledged, it's also true (as Simon Ludgate recently pointed out) that if you're going to make a game that purports to be a new entry in a popular series, then your new game's design ought to at least include some core elements from the games that made the series popular. This is both a matter of courtesy and business: it does not pay to antagonize the people who are the biggest (and often most vocal) fans of the franchise you're trying to extend.<br />
<br />
Finding the balance point between respecting the past while meeting new modern expectations is hard. But the reward for doing it well is gamer trust that translates directly into future sales.<br />
<br />
Otherwise, just call it a "spiritual successor"....Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-58329024840966618072012-07-05T14:26:00.000-05:002012-10-18T00:48:54.137-05:00Game Design and the Two Cultures of Art and EngineeringA recent article on the computer game development website Gamasutra -- "<a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/173545/fun_is_boring.php">Fun Is Boring</a>" by Niels Clark -- takes a verbal bat to the recent uptick in arguments that start off as theory and turn into semantic quibbling over the Real Meaning of words like "game" and "fun."
<p>
I didn't disagree. But as I kept reading, this not-unreasonable rant seemed to turn into a jeremiad against theories of game design in general.
<p>
As the writer of one piece of theory (which I was brazen enough to call a "<a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6474/personality_and_play_styles_a_.php">Unified Model</a>" of personality-based gameplay styles), that bothered me greatly.
<p>
I grew up reading and loving science fiction and fantasy, as well as making music of all kinds, and vividly recall being mocked once for the mistake of saying of a remarkable sunset, "That's beautiful." The artistry of meaning has mattered to me.
<p>
I also learned to love science and engineering, and the processes by which real things can be efficiently created to accomplish intended purposes. I took to computer programming like a mammal to oxygen, and get paid to manage software development projects. So I also know something about the practicality of production.
<p>
And that's why articles that appear to denigrate either art or engineering -- in general, and in computer game design particularly -- seem self-evidently counter-productive to me.
<p>
Consider the design of computer games (which is what this blog is about, mostly). Is "fun" an ineffable, Platonic quality that strikes randomly like lightning? Or is it a specifically definable Thing that, with the right planning and execution, can be produced reliably and whose fitness can be measured?
<p>
Why are some designers unwilling to accept that making a broadly enjoyable game depends on <i>both</i> artistry and engineering?
<p>
A professional computer game development website like <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/">Gamasutra</a> is full of how-to articles -- but why have those if making "fun" is random? Why tell aspiring developers to study how games get made? Why bother trying to have or use a vocabulary for expressing the nature of fun at any level if successfully applying that vocabulary is a complete crapshoot? Even if it's not perfect, having some shared language of design increases the likelihood that a particular gameplay mechanic will suit its intended design purpose.
<p>
At the same time, it's obvious that engineering isn't enough, either. There are plenty of games that follow sound software development methodologies for both schedule and cost that somehow miss capturing the spark of enjoyability. There is no perfect recipe for fun; if there were, everyone could and would be doing it. (That cake really is a lie.)
<p>
Articles and blog comments pushing (or putting down) either the Artist or the Engineer -- as though they're mutually exclusive -- always feel like yet another rehash of C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" observation. Even game design veteran Raph Koster commented on July 6 (<a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/173735/Opinion_Two_cultures_and_games.php">on his blog</a> and <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/173735/Opinion_Two_cultures_and_games.php">reposted to Gamasutra</a>) on the "two cultures" divide in game design.
<p>
I'm never going to quite understand the need some people seem to have to dismiss or disparage any style of understanding the world that isn't theirs. All I can see are the anti-examples where both art and engineering are respected as equally necessary to bring into existence a complex new thing that engenders joy.
<p>
A Pixar movie, to take one good example, is both a real thing and a joyful thing. It's a product that got made according to a schedule with budgets, and that resolved a massive number of functional/technical considerations. It's also a glorious exploration of human feeling that's fun for many people. Something like that doesn't happen despite engineering or artistry. It happens <i>because</i> both creative modes are applied. Both are necessary, but neither is sufficient.
<p>
So why is there so much resistance to believing the same is true for computer games? Why can't we talk about the theory of making games as well as the practice, while at the same time acknowledging that a truly enjoyable gameplay concept whose creators care about its expression is required for all the process and theory to mean anything?
<p>
Artistry is expressed in conceiving ideas for experiences that different kinds of people can find satisfying. Engineering is about turning ideas into reality efficiently enough to make such creative projects achievable.
<p>
Why does anyone think that favoring one over the other is necessary?Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-47280367123893901512012-05-05T11:42:00.002-05:002012-05-05T23:31:11.934-05:00The Uncheatable Puzzle GamePuzzle games have become notorious for having the solution to every puzzle posted online. If you never have to think about a puzzle, but can just look up every answer, is that "cheating?"
<p>
Well, what's the point of playing a single-player puzzle game? If it's the pleasure of perceiving elegant (or at least correct) solutions to a series of puzzles, then looking up answers online is, in a way, cheating yourself of that pleasurable experience.
<p>
If on the other hand the point of playing a game is to win -- to conquer and get past challenges -- then looking up the answers to puzzles is not cheating at all; it's simply being efficient in reaching the "win" state.
<p>
The point here is that different people are going to approach games in different ways, and it's to be expected that they'll respond to any particular game based on their preferred style of play. Someone who enjoys exploring a complex problem-space will spend hours tinkering with just one puzzle in <a href="http://www.spacechemthegame.com/">SpaceChem</a>, while someone who enjoys simple and pleasantly repetitive activities will turn to YouTube a few times before deciding that it's a terrible game, not even really a game at all. (Of course it is a game; it's just not <i>their</i> preferred kind of game.)
<p>
So the first thing in designing a puzzle game is to understand that even if you design it for people who enjoy thinking about how to solve puzzles, it's going to be played by people who just want to win. And those latter folks are going to share the answers with the world to prove they won. This is why things like "thottbot" came into existence.
<p>
This means the puzzle game designer has a choice: build the game knowing that people will share the answers to every puzzle and hope that the people who enjoy solving puzzles won't be put off by that, or design the game's puzzles in such a way that the solution to each one is unique to that player at that moment.
<p>
People have been trying that first approach for a long time now. It doesn't work too well for keeping computer games interesting when it's so easy to share and read solutions.
<p>
The second approach is harder. It cuts way back on the number of puzzle types that you can imagine (or borrow from Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Recreations" column in <i>Scientific American</i>). It also has the downside -- a significant one for a commercial game -- that it excludes the "I just want to win" gamer almost entirely. They're not into puzzle games to start with; thinking and imagining and perceiving are not their preferred forms of fun, and when those are the only way to win they won't play.
<p>
If you as a game designer are OK with that, then how do you make a puzzle whose solution is unique to each player?
<p>
A starting point can be found in SpaceChem. Rather than defining a single perfect solution to each challenge, SpaceChem's "convert these inputs to those outputs" puzzle style allows for multiple ways to accomplish each goal. This means the player can either accept the first solution that meets the requirements, or keep thinking and looking for ways to solve the challenge using either the fewest number of symbols or the shortest number of cycles.
<P>
In a way, this design creates two games in one. One game is about finding any solution. This works for the "just want to win" players, who as soon as they beaten the current puzzle can move on to the next one until the whole game is finished. The other game is one of optimization, where the goal is to figure out an optimal solution. The "perception is fun" gamers can still enjoy this kind of puzzle even after the "win" gamer has moved on.
<p>
(In a way, this non-binary, "multiple solutions to challenges" design approach is also the theme behind the Looking Glass school of gameplay, as found in games like System Shock and Thief and Deus Ex. I believe this is why these games appeal to the thoughtful/imaginative player as well as the dextrous action gamer.)
<p>
SpaceChem's isn't quite the "unique solution for each gamer" kind of puzzle, though. "Win" gamers can still brute-force solutions, and they'll still upload to YouTube the most efficient solutions (in both cycles and symbols) for every challenge.
<p>
Something close enough to unique might be a puzzle design where the puzzles are procedurally generated, and where the number of possible puzzles is something like a hundred million or more. A game might consist of a set of 30 puzzles randomly selected from the full set of possible puzzles. Even working together, gamers will not figure out all the solutions and post them online. Of course, in this case you have to be sure that no one can figure out the procedural generation algorithm! (Good luck with that.)
<p>
Finally, there's the puzzle design where each puzzle really is unique to each player so that the solutions can't be looked up but must be solved personally. The "elapsed time since the start of play" puzzle in <a href="http://polytroncorporation.com/what-is-fez">Fez</a> comes close to this form. Taken to its final form, it might be possible to design a game where the kind of puzzle you get in one round depends on some elements of the puzzles presented in previous rounds.
<p>
Even for this kind of game, the solutions to the first few puzzles would still be posted online. (Actually, that might not be a bad thing as it would help new players ease into the game.) But the further into the game, the less likely it would be that someone else would have gotten the same puzzle, solved it, and posted the solution. In a way, this is really a variation on the "massive solution space" approach, but it does have the virtue of including the player's actions in the generation algorithm.
<p>
There are almost certainly other ways of designing a puzzle game so that each puzzle has more than one correct solution. The overall point is that if you really want puzzles that remain as much fun for the perceptive gamer as for the persistent player, then you need to find a puzzle design that emphasizes perceptiveness and creativity over persistence.Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-82408158453127640162012-04-04T13:21:00.002-05:002012-04-04T13:35:04.768-05:00Programming the DCPU-16 Simulated Computer in Notch's New 0x10c GameNotch (creator of the wonderful computer game Minecraft), has released the specs for the DCPU-16 simulated computer that will be programmable by players of his recently-announced space game <a href="http://0x10c.com/">0x10<sup>c</sup></a>.<br />
<br />
The <a href="http://0x10c.com/doc/dcpu-16.txt">DCPU-16</a> is interesting in a number of ways. ("Interesting" in the sense of "abstract symbol-systems that can represent other things are interesting." This may not apply to you.)<br />
<br />
In capability it's stronger than the PDP-8 but not as advanced as the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004. (Not completely unreasonable since the story of the game is that it uses 1988-era technology in some ways, although the 4004 was actually released in the early '70s.) The simulated CPU supports indexed addressing in all registers, rather than having separate accumulator and index registers as the old CPUs did, which is nice.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, currently there's no support for interrupts, code/data share memory with the stack, and there's no support I can see yet for indirect addressing (as the Motorola 6809 and even the PDP-8 had). There's also only one conditional instruction, which just makes coding more tedious. A macro facility may help there, however.<br />
<br />
Naturally, some industrious souls have already written simple emulators for this imaginary processor. :)<br />
<br />
Other than some promised "engineering," the rest of the game (fly through space, shoot people) sounds pretty conventional. The ability to do things to ships through clever programming of a simple computer, though -- that elevates this new game to something potentially remarkable.Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-44661293588929699092012-02-27T02:25:00.000-06:002012-02-27T02:25:13.730-06:00Joining the TeamSince writing the previous entries on the Storybricks system, I've been invited to join the Storybricks team as Community Manager.<br />
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Since I'm now affiliated with Storybricks in a direct way, I wanted to be sure to point out here that this site is my personal game design blogging site. All of the opinions expressed here are my own and don't represent any official positions of the Storybricks organization.<br />
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From time to time I may have some thoughts on game design or the game industry that I feel I need to unleash. :) When that happens, again, those will just be my personal views, and they should not be considered to reflect any official statement from or regarding Storybricks.<br />
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That said, I certainly encourage you to join us in the <a href="http://forums.storybricks.com/">Storybricks forums</a>!Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-76691034729898316112011-09-29T01:29:00.002-05:002011-09-29T01:34:45.532-05:00Storybricks + DikuMUD = Balance in MMORPGs<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>To follow my previous comments about Storybricks, this time I'd like to get into the nuts and bolts of how Storybricks works. (Note that this is based on what has been revealed of Storybricks at this time -- things can and will change as Namaste continues to develop the concepts and implementation.)<br />
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Nearly all MMORPGs today are descendants of an early text-based multi-user dungeon (MUD) called <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=dikumud&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CCwQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FDikuMUD&ei=dQ2ETq2jBPDjsQKnneWJDw&usg=AFQjCNFAZG8KPv2uUND6khGlhmCYgdqnlA">DikuMUD</a>. There are three interrelated reasons why DikuMUD proved to be genetically superior to other MUDs, and why it became the progenitor for nearly all modern graphical MMORPGs:<br />
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<ul><li>it emphasized easy-to-understand and action-oriented combat over other forms of interaction</li>
<li>it simplified interactions down to easily-trackable, table-driven statistics, and</li>
<li>it was designed to be easy to modify and install by gameworld creators.</li>
</ul><br />
These elements combined to catapult DikuMUD and its successors to prominence in the world of computer-based roleplaying games. As other forms of MUDs became less visible, and as new gamers arrived and saw only DikuMUD-derived MMORPGs, eventually only DikuMUD-descended MMORPGs remained.<br />
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This wasn't inherently wrong. Obviously a lot of people enjoy the focus on simple fighting, and DikuMUD-derived MMORPGs have prospered because they satisfy that desire. It's also easier for developers to manage table-driven, numbers-oriented content than features that highlight emotional interactions or logical exploration, so that's the kind of game they tend to make and the kind of features they prefer to add to existing games.<br />
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But I think it's also true -- and there seem to be at least a few other gamers who agree -- that something important has been lost in the Cataclysm that is World of Warcraft and its close MMORPG siblings. In particular, and as I <a href="http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2011/09/storybricks-rehumanization-of.html">noted previously</a>, these stat-driven games have dehumanized roleplaying. While there are some dedicated souls who try to enjoy what little roleplaying and exploration content exists in today's MMORPGs, for the most part you're only as useful as whatever combat capabilities your character brings to a group. You're not a person with an interesting history, living in a richly detailed world filled with fascinating people -- you're the equivalent of a car with a gun strapped to the hood, useful only for how much destruction your character can help the group do per second.<br />
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In the DikuMUD-based MMORPGs available today, story is dead. (Again, with respect to BioWare and the story emphasis they're trying to offer in Star Wars: The Old Republic, while I'm glad to see that they're trying to inject some story into the combat, in the end it's still going to be about the numbers-driven combat. I expect that over this this will be what gets the most developer attention in SW:TOR, just like in every other MMORPG.)<br />
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What's so refreshing about Namaste's Storybricks is that it restores the power of character creation -- thus reviving the power of human-oriented storytelling -- to roleplaying games and to the gamers who enjoy them.<br />
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Most content creation tools for computer games are created by developers for developers. Sometimes, versions of these tools are released to gamers. Examples include the Neverwinter Nights story creation tool, the GECK tool for Fallout 3, and the quest creation toolkits in the Champions Online/Star Trek Online MMORPGs. Standalone content creation systems such as Unity and RPG Maker are also becoming more widely available. And support for user-made modications ("mods") such as Notch is adding for Minecraft is also provided occasionally.<br />
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Having these tools available has been exciting for gamers who enjoy creating their own content, and I salute the developers who have taken this step. But all these tools been limited in some way -- either by creating content that can only be used locally, or by tightly limiting multiplayer content, or by exposing so much power that the would-be content creator is overwhelmed.<br />
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Storybricks -- by design -- addresses all of these impediments to user content generation by including players as creators of game content right from the very start and by making the content creation interface simple but expressive.<br />
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Of course it's natural to try to understand new technologies in terms of what can be done using today's tools. This has led some, hearing about Storybricks for the first time, to wonder whether it's simply another iteration on the content creation tools currently available. So it's worth taking a moment to try to address some of these questions and concerns.<br />
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First, the current plan (as I understand it) is that when you create characters and place them in the gameworld, other players can play with them as well. This way you can build your own stories and then allow others to join you in discovering where those stories lead. This ability of players to create content for each other appears to be a central goal of Storybricks.<br />
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As for being just an improvement on quest creation tools like those for Neverwinter Nights or Champions Online/Star Trek Online, there are some mechanical similarities in that all these allow the content creator to establish connections between characters and objects. But Storybricks is more focused on creating and expressing personal relationships among multiple characters (PCs and NPCs alike) than on associating experience points with object-based player actions. The core of Storybricks is not so much a system for detecting the completion of certain player actions (although it must do that, too) as an AI engine for storing and reflecting personal drives and multi-character relationships.<br />
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And unlike powerful quest-generation tools like the NWN toolset or general content builders such as Unity, Storybricks is very simple to use while being extremely expressive. You simply drag nouns and verbs and adverbs from a context-sensitive list and snap them together. In the same way that a few natural-language sentences can express powerful thoughts, the linguistic construction model for relationships in Storybricks is capable of defining a remarkable amount of communication with just a few clicks.<br />
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By design, however, the real power of this system is encapsulated in the AI engine that carries the load of emotional interpretation. The building system that is exposed to the player is really simple to use, and Namaste seem determined to keep it that way even as they add useful new features.<br />
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Another concern I've heard is that in a Storybricks gameworld, you'll be forced to make your own content or somehow pushed into giving developers "free labor." I think I'm safe in asserting that no one will ever be forced to participate in content creation in a Storybricks gameworld. All the details of how user-generated story material gets used and distributed have not been worked out yet, but the developers of Storybricks have made it absolutely clear that their goal is creative freedom for players, not player control. I'm confident that adding your own story material will be completely optional; those who only want to play in a story-friendly game world will be free to do so.<br />
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Finally, it's important to bear in mind that the Storybricks system is not at this time being developed as some kind of external engine-plus-user-interface that can be plugged into an existing MMORPG like World of Warcraft or EVE Online. The degree to which the relationship AI has to be keyed to everything -- objects, places, factional states, movement animations, available interactions with other characters -- means that you pretty much have to build the entire gameworld around this relationship engine. Playing with Storybricks will mean playing in a Storybricks gameworld.<br />
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That's admittedly a limitation of the Storybricks idea. To have immediate impact, it would need to be easily implementable in existing gameworlds. But the association of emotional states with character animations and interaction options, not to mention character awareness of objects and places, is so pervasive in Storybricks that it would be extremely difficult to retrofit to an existing gameworld. Such an extensive web of connections basically has to be baked into a game from the very start.<br />
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This doesn't mean that the Storybricks idea can't have wide consequences, however. It only means it will take time for elements of the Storybricks approach to character design -- once the kinks are ironed out in practice -- to be integrated into new MMORPGs.<br />
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Not every new MMORPG will need or want emotionally plausible NPCs. Some will continue to implement NPCs as quest dispensers and mobile targets. There's nothing wrong with that in itself; it's fine and even desirable for there to be games that follow the path laid down by DikuMUD and its descendants.<br />
<br />
But to do well over the long term, I think MMORPGs can't afford to neglect the storytelling and world-discovering interests that gamers also have. And that's why I'm excited about Storybricks.<br />
<br />
For the MMORPGs that aspire to being narratively rich places, whose creators care about letting gamers create and interact with interesting characters who are capable of driving stories of intrigue and passion and revenge and all the rest of Georges Polti's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations">36 plots</a>, I believe that Storybricks truly does have the potential to give the MMORPG evolutionary tree the strong new branch it needs as a counterbalance to the old stats-and-combat-focused DikuMUD branch.Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-75210679316710845092011-09-20T02:09:00.007-05:002011-09-20T19:47:07.234-05:00Storybricks: The Rehumanization of Roleplaying Games<style type="text/css">
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</style>Anyone who has followed this blog for any length of time will know that I tend to look at game design (like everything else) from a fairly high-level perspective.<br />
<br />
Other people are good at speaking to the mechanics of specific games, or at advocating for concrete gameplay content. My interest is usually directed toward the design of core gameplay systems that could help make interactive worlds more engaging for people who enjoy simulation and narrative -- that is, for the <a href="http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2006/01/will-real-explorers-please-stand-up.html">Explorer</a> and Socializer gamers among us.<br />
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This is why I've developed numerous ideas and criticisms around the goal of helping gameworlds feel more "alive." In particular, I've <a href="http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2006/01/improving-npc-ai.html">criticized the practice</a> of building Non-Player Characters (NPCs) as nothing more than loot piñatas (pop them for goodies!) or static props handing out quests and dispensing pellets of experience points. They look like people, but they don't act like people. Their inhuman behavior leaves a gameworld feeling more like a wind-up toy than a world filled with interesting people -- once you've seen its limited repertoire of behaviors, you're done with it.<br />
<br />
This is radically different than -- and a serious step back from -- interacting with the complex, fascinating, frustrating, dangerous, and lovable non-player characters found in tabletop roleplaying games. In these games, where NPCs are played by humans, characters have <em>character</em>.<br />
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The roleplaying part of tabletop roleplaying games was a remarkably humanizing play activity. Pretending to be a person with abilities and desires other than your own could reveal unexpected abilities and motivations in yourself. How many areas of human experience can say that?<br />
<br />
But in translating roleplaying games to computers, much of the human touch was lost. With so many other systems to develop (especially the systems for character leveling and combat), the developers of most computer-based RPGs somehow never got around to recreating what was arguably the most important part of a roleplaying game: interacting in interesting ways with interesting characters.<br />
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(BioWare deserves credit for trying to bring interesting characters to life in their computer RPGs. No one forgets Minsc. But massively multiplayer online role-playing games -- called MMORPGs for the obvious reason -- have not yet given anywhere near the same level of attention to NPCs, and BioWare's <em>Star Wars: The Old Republic</em> took years to fill with hand-developed content.)<br />
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In a way, many of the concepts I've suggested over the past decade have been attempts to address this problem of characterless characters. A couple of notions in particular are specifically meant to help NPCs feel more interesting by building into them a greater range of perceptive and expressive capabilities.<br />
<br />
One thought was to enhance gameworlds with specific <a href="http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2004/10/stealthy-play-in-mmorpgs.html">environmental effects</a>, such as day/night cycles and sound propagation, while also allowing NPCs to perceive these environmental effects and respond to them in reasonable ways. An NPC who can realize that some meaningful event is happening and respond to it is a much more interesting character than one who just stands there oblivious to local reality.<br />
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The other key suggestion in this area is something I called "<a href="http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2007/10/diplomacy-in-star-trek-mmorpg.html">multifaction</a>." In today's MMORPGs, when you do something for a particular NPC, that character may be able to "remember" that your action helped the one group to which that NPC belongs. This notion of "faction" is good for creating a very limited social fabric -- members of the Rebel Alliance love me, but I'm shoot-on-sight to Imperial stormtroopers -- but it's inexplicably underused.<br />
<br />
Why can't I have faction with individuals rather than just groups? Why can't individuals and groups have factional standings with each other so that when I do something nice for Person A, who is disliked by Person B but loved by Person C, Person B likes me less while Person C likes me more? Why isn't faction used to enable persistent-world computer RPGs to store and express the complex webs of social relationships that give human existence its emotional richness?<br />
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There are plenty of games that emphasize points-gathering and loot-collecting and level-raising. And it's good that there are such games.<br />
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But where are the games that support internally complex and logically consistent worlds filled with characters who act like people because they can perceive their environment and can form and attempt to satisfy emotional goals?<br />
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Well, I have some good news to report on one of these fronts. If the folks at <a href="http://www.namaste.vg/home/">Namaste</a> have their way, NPCs who can express emotionally plausible behaviors may be standing just around the corner, waiting to meet us.<br />
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I was recently given the opportunity to see an early build of Namaste's "Storybricks" system in action. If any of what I've said so far is of interest to you, you should visit Namaste's Web site to see for yourself what they're doing.<br />
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In the meantime, here's a brief description: Storybricks is a set of systems integrated into a gameplay environment that allows NPCs to have emotional goals and states and to act on those goals and states in plausible ways through their relationships with players and with each other. (Note: this statement and all that follows here are purely my personal interpretation of Storybricks. For the official facts about Storybricks as it is developed, please refer to Namaste's site.)<br />
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Initially, Storybricks allows players to create characters who have particular motivations and goals ("drives"), some of which may come from a role-based template (Peasant, Shopkeeper, Guard, etc.), and others which are added to particular characters by their creator. All drives implemented in a Storybricks gameworld have in-game actions through which they can be expressed, as actions (along with objects and places) are all linked through the central AI system at the heart of a Storybricks gameworld. This allows characters to have plausible emotional goals and states based on their role, but also to have unique sets of interior motivations, some of which may actually oppose each other.<br />
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Cuthbert the Guard Captain, for example, may be designed to be motivated by duty and honor, but also by avarice and impatience. Under normal circumstances, all that a player may see of Cuthbert is his upholding the law... but what might happen if the player presents Cuthbert with a bribe?<br />
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Another possibility: Cuthbert the Guard Captain believes that order is important, and that it is necessary to defend the king in order to maintain order. But Cuthbert hates Baldwin the Noble... so how does Cuthbert behave when Baldwin usurps the throne and becomes king?<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Canv9CFilEM/TngvRf7iS_I/AAAAAAAAAEc/2V9TnpGRS4w/s1600/Storybricks-0.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="529" rba="true" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Canv9CFilEM/TngvRf7iS_I/AAAAAAAAAEc/2V9TnpGRS4w/s640/Storybricks-0.PNG" width="640" /></a></div><br />
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This ability for NPCs to have conflicting internal states immediately makes Storybrick's NPCs vastly more interesting as characters than the people-shaped automatons standing in for NPCs in today's MMORPGs.<br />
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Storybricks also allows NPCs, like player characters, to have relationships with multiple NPCs. By "relationships" I don't mean romantic alliances (in, say, the <em>Mass Effect</em>/<em>Dragon Age</em> sense). I mean relationships in the sense of holding various kinds of feelings in differing degrees toward players and other NPCs. Alfgar the Citizen may like you, while Edward the Brigand may despise you, and these NPCs would be able to act on these relationships in appropriate ways.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Y-9h5t_Blko/TngvYfIH6SI/AAAAAAAAAEg/99WWScNthcc/s1600/Storybricks-1.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="348" rba="true" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Y-9h5t_Blko/TngvYfIH6SI/AAAAAAAAAEg/99WWScNthcc/s640/Storybricks-1.PNG" width="640" /></a></div><br />
Further -- and approaching the "multifaction" concept -- perhaps Baldwin the Noble likes you, while Ethelred the Peasant likes Baldwin. If Ethelred observes that you have done some harm to Baldwin, this may change your relationship with Ethelred even if you don't directly do anything to Ethelred.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_S7S_8YEGEc/TngvgwM4HbI/AAAAAAAAAEk/WH_uyjqX9so/s1600/Storybricks-2.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="318" rba="true" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_S7S_8YEGEc/TngvgwM4HbI/AAAAAAAAAEk/WH_uyjqX9so/s640/Storybricks-2.PNG" width="640" /></a></div><br />
Taken to its full extent in a gameworld, this capability for second-order effects instantly propels MMORPGs toward becoming games that can tell interactive stories as good as those of their tabletop progenitors. Instead of forming (and farming) isolated factional standings with faceless groups, players in a gameworld designed around the Storybricks system swim in a chaotic sea of ever-shifting personal alliances and emnities, where actions over time can lead to consequences that are hard to predict. At last, computer-based NPCs may soon have what characters in tabletop RPGs have always had: the power to surprise.<br />
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People yield interesting stories not when they do what we expect of them, but when they shock us by revealing hitherto unknown aspects of themselves. We expect Sarah Connor to protect her child, but we don't expect her to do it by aggressively hunting down those whom she considers threats. We expect Sam Gamgee to care for his friend Frodo, but we don't expect him to become an action hero in taking on the horrible spider Shelob. The twist is plausible but unexpected, the result of putting a person with complex internal emotions in a stressful situation that reveals something of the character's true nature. And that depth of character is the engine behind every great story.<br />
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Storybricks is important -- perhaps the most important new technology in MMORPG development in many years -- because it provides the technological foundation for creating characters with emotional depth in computer-mediated gameworlds. This enables the crafting and emergence of captivating stories, a vital source of gameplay that's been absent from online persistent-world computer RPGs (including the few now allowing players to create quests).<br />
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It's always tempting to try to understand new things in terms of what we currently have. But there really hasn't been anything like Storybricks before. The possibilities it offers for experiencing a gameworld in which NPCs feel like people instead of quest pellet dispensers is tremendous.<br />
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Not everyone will want this, and that's fine. There are games available today for those who prefer to always know where to go and what to do, as there should be. But for those who have been wanting NPCs to play a more compelling role in building gameworlds as satisfying secondary realities, Namaste's Storybricks is by far the most exciting concept in a very long time.<br />
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I'll have more to say about the mechanics and internals of the Storybricks system in a later blog entry.<br />
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For now... here's looking forward to the rehumanization of roleplaying games.Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-75181188555299104712011-08-18T01:15:00.006-05:002011-09-20T19:45:21.220-05:00EA versus Valve: It's All About the DLC<style type="text/css">
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Electronic Arts (EA) has until lately sold many of their hit games through Valve's "Steam" digital game distribution system (as well as in retail stores). Suddenly EA have started pulling their games from Steam. EA are selling these games on their own internal digital distribution system called "Origin," as well as on other digital distributors -- just not Steam.<br />
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Valve professes to be terribly puzzled by this unpleasantness. EA grumbles that it's all Valve's fault but won't say why.<br />
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The latest: Today, Gabe Newell, head of Valve and its Steam money-printing machine, emerged from his den to say that he's a little puzzled by all this, but he hopes EA will realize that it can make more money keeping its games on Steam, and gosh, he sure hopes all this unpleasantness can get sorted out soon.<br />
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Newell <a href="http://www.develop-online.net/news/38470/Newell-We-have-to-convince-EA-to-come-back">is reported</a> to have said:<br />
<blockquote>"We really want to show there's a lot of value having EA titles on Steam. We want EA's games on Steam and we have to show them that's a smart thing to do. I think at the end of the day we're going to prove to Electronic Arts they have happier customers, a higher quality service, and will make more money if they have their titles on Steam. It's our duty to demonstrate that to them. We don't have a natural right to publish their games."</blockquote><br />
Everything I've read so far says that this slapfight is not about the Main Game at all. It's about the follow-on sales of "downloadable content," or DLC, which is gameplay that's added to a game after it's initially released for sale.<br />
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Based on comments from EA, it appears that Valve are insisting that if the Main Game is sold through Steam, then any/all DLC for that game also has to be available through Steam. For their part, EA apparently (again, this is just my reading of the public comments from all involved) feel it would be a bad idea to allow Valve to dictate to them any terms of how their (EA's) game content will be distributed, so they are taking their Main Game and going home (to Origin).<br />
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If that is an accurate reading, then Gabe Newell is being a little disingenuous. The things he's quoted here as saying are all perfectly sensible, but he's (deliberately?) not saying anything at all about the actual source of contention.<br />
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I'm not even suggesting Newell's position on DLC is wrong. I can see the possible point that it is necessary for a digital distributor to be able to to provide the DLC along with the patches for a game in order to properly support that game, and to insist on that as a matter of effective business practices. The problem I have is with the principals in this little drama not simply coming out and saying so, if that is in fact what's going on here.<br />
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What makes this rather fuzzier is that it makes sense for EA to stand up their own digital distribution system. Even without the comments made by EA during their investor calls to describe their "forward-looking" intentions for digital distribution as part of their overall five-year strategy, it's simply smart for EA to not only distribute its own games digitally but to try to elbow its way onto the playing field as a distributor for other peoples' games as well. EA is big, but Steam is getting big; EA can't afford <em>not</em> to get into that game. The only thing that's been holding them back has been retailers, with whom EA has maintained a happy monogamous relationship in public... until now. I guess somebody at EA finally decided Steam was getting too successful and pulled the trigger on Origin.<br />
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My free advice to EA and Valve: sort this before it snowballs and <em>really</em> starts costing you money.Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-16568260941799185012011-08-12T01:29:00.004-05:002011-09-20T19:45:43.615-05:00The PC at 30... and Beyond<style type="text/css">
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Today is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the IBM PC.<br />
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As we rightly look back on that as the opening of the gates to mass ownership of computing systems, it's interesting to read that one of the original creators of the IBM PC has essentially declared it to be obsolete.<br />
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In a <a href="http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2011/08/ibm-leads-the-way-in-the-post-pc-era.html">blog post</a>, Mark Dean says:<br />
<blockquote>[W]hile PCs will continue to be much-used devices, they're no longer at the leading edge of computing. They're going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs. ... [I]t's becoming clear that innovation flourishes best not on devices but in the social spaces between them, where people and ideas meet and interact. It is there that computing can have the most powerful impact on economy, society and people's lives.</blockquote><br />
Of course the Way of the Weasel teaches us to simply declare that any man-portable computing device shall henceforth be known as a "PC." ;) <br />
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Actually, I agree with Dean's larger point: the proliferation of computing devices was a necessary foundational step -- it's what has been built on that foundation that is where the real value lives. PCs are valuable, not in and of themselves, but for what they do: they connect people to knowledge.<br />
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I've said for a number of years now that the economic boom in the US in the mid-1990s was due not to any government policy (that would give credit to bureaucrats that they did nothing to deserve) but rather to that being the Time of the WAN -- more specifically, the Internet. Businesses had been hooking their computers together using LANs during the first half of the '90s, and that was helpful in sharing local knowledge. But the productivity explosion really occurred in the mid-'90s when businesses starting linking their intranets to each other via the Internet. Suddenly knowledge that resided anywhere was available everywhere.<br />
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That knowledge was, and remains, terribly diffuse for the most part. We still haven't implemented the necessary systems that automatically store knowledge in a structured way allowing for high-quality search-and-retrieval. That process is maturing slowly, but we're now finally starting to see the kinds of systems being built that will enable access not just to general knowledge but to the specific knowledge that can ignite another burst of increased productivity.<br />
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Looking at this process a little more closely, I believe we can see that the key to the Information Revolution is mediating human access to knowledge. In other words, the pivot point is the interface between individuals and knowledge. Whoever controls the interface between people and knowledge gets rich because they make a product that lots of people want.<br />
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This pattern can be seen to have three (modern) phases so far. The first phase was Microsoft's. When PCs began to proliferate in the late '70s, and in particular when the IBM PC arrived in 1981, knowledge (better described as just "data" since it wasn't well organized) lived on computer disks and hard drives. So the intermediary between that data and the people who wanted it was the operating system. Microsoft owned that, so they prospered.<br />
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This monopoly was challenged (as monopolies always are) by a new technology. In this case it was the local-area network. As more (business) computers got hooked into LANs, data increasingly became stored not on individual PCs but somewhere out on "the LAN." Because Novell owned the premier Network OS (NetWare), Microsoft could see their dominance of the human/data interface slipping away. So they cranked out a LAN software package of their own... and nobody bought it. NetWare was established as the new primary interface, and Novell was riding high.<br />
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With egg on their faces after the Microsoft LAN Manager debacle, Microsoft stepped back and said (essentially), "Well, OK, the fight for today's human/data interface is pretty much lost. What's tomorrow's interface going to be? We've heard about this thing called 'the Internet,' and this guy named Marc Andreesen has written some communications software that lets people use the Internet pretty easily to access data anywhere. He's also written something called a 'browser,' which works sort of like Windows only with less hardware dependence and more knowledge-awareness. If we act now, we can totally own that segment. We'll do an end-run around Novell."<br />
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And that's exactly what happened.<br />
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Novell, like Microsoft before them, thought their interface would rule the world forever, forgetting that changing technology changes the environment. And a product adapted for success in one environment doesn't necessarily fit well in a new world.<br />
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So Novell kept pushing NetWare. Meanwhile, Microsoft created Internet Explorer, which they then bundled with the PC operating system they were still selling as a foundational technology. It wasn't long before IE displaced Netscape as the dominant browser -- which is to say, as the world's dominant interface between people and data. NetWare became perceived as an evolutionary dead end, reducing Novell almost overnight to a shadow of its former glory. And so Microsoft climbed back on top again.<br />
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But there was still the problem that data was disorganized. Yes, knowledge was out there, but you could drive yourself mad trying to find it in time to make productive use of it. Some new kind of intermediary was needed -- something that could take the sagans of info-bits, categorize them, and quickly deliver only the most relevant items to users.<br />
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Thus began the rise of the search engines. There was a lot of competition early on, which was good. Eventually Google became the search engine of choice. Their success has allowed them to begin to experiment with new ways of hooking people to data. It's still early in the process, but already we can dimly perceive the form of the third phase. Namely, the social Information Revolution, wherein what's really being hooked together are the actual sources of data: people themselves.<br />
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This is where Google, along with social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, stands to replace Microsoft as the gatekeeper of the interface between people and data. This, I think, explains certain things we read about in the news. It's why Google desperately wanted to buy Facebook, as well as Skype and Twitter. It's why the valuation of LinkedIn shares doubled on the first day of its IPO. It's why the median price of single-family homes in Palo Alto (home of Facebook) is now $1.3 million dollars during a serious housing industry downturn. Whoever is seen as controlling the most effective interface between people and knowledge wins.<br />
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Barring some kind of catastrophe, I fully expect this process to continue, leading to a nice mini-boom in the mid-'10s. Unlike the mid-'90s, this one should be more gradual, but it'll still be good times for most people within that economic environment. As JFK said, a rising tide lifts all boats. (This does, however, assume that the present popular demand for politicians to deal seriously with ever-rising national debt finally sees some victories. If the current tax-and-spend binging is allowed to continue, all bets are off; we will be looking at economic catastrophe. I'm hopeful we'll collectively do the right thing, though.)<br />
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The one factor I can't predict is Microsoft. These guys are used to winning, and they are <em>not</em> going to give up control over the human/data interface without a fight. The question is whether Google is now in the same position that Novell was in previously. Google don't seem to be as complacent as Novell -- they keep coming up with new product concepts, even if they are much too quick to drop those concepts if they don't go viral in a few months. So that's an argument against Microsoft wresting control of the human/data interface away from the new owner.<br />
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On the other hand, Microsoft have proven in the past that they're capable of looking beyond today to see what tomorrow's crucial interface technology is likely to be. I would not be at all surprised if tomorrow Microsoft announced that the next version of IE would feature a new built-in (probably cloud-based) data/social search facility. Snark at Microsoft all you want; they are capable of building sufficiently good products and marketing the hell out of them. Would such a system be perceived as good enough to shove a separate Google and Facebook out of the way, reestablishing Microsoft as the owner of the human/data interface?<br />
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I don't know. I will say that I think that if Google had been able to buy Facebook, Microsoft would probably have fallen to second place by 2015 and into 2020. Beyond that, they might still find a way to do an end-run around a GoogleFacebook, but I can't imagine at this time what kind of disruptive new technology would be necessary for that to happen -- neural interfaces, maybe?<br />
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Of course, then we have the fun scenario of a software developer writing code that connects to your brain. "Blue screen of death" could take on a whole new meaning....Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-38836411183489286512011-08-10T23:47:00.001-05:002011-09-20T19:45:53.558-05:00BioShock's Assault on Exceptionalism<style type="text/css">
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The computer game BioShock (and its sequel) was set in what the developers called a "failed underwater Utopia." The game's story was based on the concept of Ayn Rand's exceptionalist philosophy of Objectivism, but did its best to paint that philosophy as so irredeemably broken that it could hold only the power-mad bigots who espoused it and the power-mad opportunists who exploited it.<br />
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Now BioShock: Infinite is being discussed by its creators. And the horrible principle animating the story this time? Exceptionalism again... only this time it's American exceptionalism (as imagined at the dawn of the 20th century) that's scheduled to be demonized.<br />
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Why? <br />
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I played BioShock 1 & 2 and enjoyed them for what they were. And I'll probably be able to enjoy BioShock: Infinite.<br />
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But why do these games now have a pattern of making exceptionalism their bête noire? Why continue to focus on wrapping the story setting around a grossly negative portrayal of exceptionalism? Did the notion of a culture that works hard to accomplish great things just happen to be one concept among several that the designers felt could safely be caricatured as villainous, like eeeeeeevil corporations? Or does someone have a special reason for wanting to try to smear the highly successful American experiment in freedom in particular as some kind of dangerous aberration?<br />
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Was there really no other historical social philosophy that could have served as a satisfying and effective narrative backdrop for shooting lots of simulated people? Really?<br />
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Again: I expect to play and enjoy BioShock: Infinite. It's no System Shock, but it's closer to that <em>exceptional</em> game than a lot of others. That doesn't mean I can't wonder why the striving for exceptionalism -- of all things -- is chosen to be the designated horror story in the BioShock universe when so many other human notions have had demonstrably worse consequences for humanity.<br />
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As just one possibility that springs to mind, does no one recall the popularity of eugenics in certain "progressive" circles around the very time period in which BioShock: Infinite is set? Why would that not have been an even more appropriate social-narrative hook for a <em>BIO</em>shock game littered with "gene tonics?" Why instead try to portray exceptionalism, American or otherwise, as threatening?<br />
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One day I hope to read a straight news story or interview that explores the real answer to this question.Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753333248840902848.post-51610238385804877312011-07-03T02:59:00.005-05:002014-02-24T01:12:57.513-06:00Hello Again!<style type="text/css">
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I've been on a little break from commenting lately.<br />
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This has been due to a number of things, including just flat being tired. But it's also due to my spending time working on a "galaxy engine" intended to serve as the base for two game concepts I've developed.<br />
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This engine ("engine" really overdignifies what I'm creating, but it's standard usage) will ultimately display millions of stars, from some 100,000 real stars we know to many more procedurally generated stars. Each star will have a chance of having planets, which will be appropriately textured; some planets will have life; and some planets with life will have sentient civilizations living there. In the current version, I have some 40,000 real stars that you can fly among in accurate locations, so that well-known constellations can be recognized from the general location of our Sun.<br />
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The version I have running at this point is so hideously ugly that it does not bear posting a screen capture of it here. I am currently banging my head against the wall trying to figure out how to display spherical objects at a specific size based on the apparent magnitude of a star seen at varying distances, but without breaking the bank in the number of objects that must be created in a limited amount of system memory. I know it can be done. The SpaceEngine (<a href="http://en.spaceengine.org/">http://en.spaceengine.org/</a>) from Russian developer Vladimir Romanuk accomplishes this (and much, much more) in an eye-poppingly beautiful way. But it's no fun feeling too stupid to be able to figure out how to do it myself.<br />
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At any rate, if I can ever develop the necessary technology to resolve the "dynamic apparent magnitude" problem that also allows me to have millions of procedurally generated stars and planets, then I can start working on the actual gameplay bits I've had design documents on for years now. And that'll be nice; I'm looking forward to actually implementing some of the game ideas I've been yapping about for so long. I'm really feeling that that's necessary if I'm to have any credibility when I suggest to professional game developers how they should design their games.<br />
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I'll keep you posted on that. (I know you're anxiously awaiting that information. :) ) Meanwhile, I think I may soon resume having general comments to make on game design, so watch this space!<br />
<span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 85%;"></span><br />Flatfingershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04883676416000369594noreply@blogger.com0