Theory by Flatfingers

Storybricks + DikuMUD = Balance in MMORPGs

2011-09-29T01:29:00.002-05:00

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.)

Nearly all MMORPGs today are descendants of an early text-based multi-user dungeon (MUD) called DikuMUD. 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:

it emphasized easy-to-understand and action-oriented combat over other forms of interaction
it simplified interactions down to easily-trackable, table-driven statistics, and
it was designed to be easy to modify and install by gameworld creators.

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.

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.

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 noted previously, 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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 36 plots, 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.

Storybricks: The Rehumanization of Roleplaying Games

2011-09-20T02:09:00.007-05:00

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.

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 Explorer and Socializer gamers among us.

This is why I've developed numerous ideas and criticisms around the goal of helping gameworlds feel more "alive." In particular, I've criticized the practice 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.

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 character.

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?

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.

(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 Star Wars: The Old Republic took years to fill with hand-developed content.)

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.

One thought was to enhance gameworlds with specific environmental effects, 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.

The other key suggestion in this area is something I called "multifaction." 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.

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?

There are plenty of games that emphasize points-gathering and loot-collecting and level-raising. And it's good that there are such games.

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?

Well, I have some good news to report on one of these fronts. If the folks at Namaste have their way, NPCs who can express emotionally plausible behaviors may be standing just around the corner, waiting to meet us.

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.

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.)

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.

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?

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?

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.

Storybricks also allows NPCs, like player characters, to have relationships with multiple NPCs. By "relationships" I don't mean romantic alliances (in, say, the Mass Effect/Dragon Age 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

I'll have more to say about the mechanics and internals of the Storybricks system in a later blog entry.

For now... here's looking forward to the rehumanization of roleplaying games.

EA versus Valve: It's All About the DLC

2011-08-18T01:15:00.006-05:00

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.

Valve professes to be terribly puzzled by this unpleasantness. EA grumbles that it's all Valve's fault but won't say why.

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.

Newell is reported to have said:

"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."

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 not 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.

My free advice to EA and Valve: sort this before it snowballs and really starts costing you money.

The PC at 30... and Beyond

2011-08-12T01:29:00.004-05:00

Today is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the IBM PC.

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.

In a blog post, Mark Dean says:

[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.

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." ;)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

And that's exactly what happened.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

The one factor I can't predict is Microsoft. These guys are used to winning, and they are not 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.

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?

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?

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....

BioShock's Assault on Exceptionalism

2011-08-10T23:47:00.001-05:00

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.

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.

Why?

I played BioShock 1 & 2 and enjoyed them for what they were. And I'll probably be able to enjoy BioShock: Infinite.

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?

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?

Again: I expect to play and enjoy BioShock: Infinite. It's no System Shock, but it's closer to that exceptional 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.

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 BIOshock game littered with "gene tonics?" Why instead try to portray exceptionalism, American or otherwise, as threatening?

One day I hope to read a straight news story or interview that explores the real answer to this question.

Hello Again!

2011-07-03T02:59:00.005-05:00

I've been on a little break from commenting lately.
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.
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.
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 (http://en.spaceengine.org/) 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.
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.
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!

My Favorite PC Games

2010-11-09T01:47:00.002-06:00

A little light reading this time, as compared to the "heavy" stuff I usually write.

Everybody has their favorite bits of entertainment, right? Some people like TV shows; my dad is a huge fan of the "Indian" stories by Joseph Altsheler... and I have a short list of PC games that I consider among the best pieces of entertainment ever created.

Adventure (Crowther & Woods, 1976) — originally for the PDP, but came bundled with the original IBM PC and might have even helped sell a few boxes.

Zork I (1979) — Again, adapted from the PDP version, but still helped garner attention for the IBM PC as a gaming system.

Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (Sierra On-Line, 1987) — Yes, the PC went there.

Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (Origin, 1992) — A good story, cool weapons to find, an open world, remarkable level design, quest-giving NPCs, a clever magic system, context-aware music, and even an invented language… and textured full 3D. Wow.

Sim City (Maxis, 1989) — The first great graphical simulation game, since ported to darn near every device on the planet.

Wing Commander (MicroProse, 1990) — Die, Kilrathi scum! A near-perfect blend of flight sim, arcade dogfighter, and space opera.

Civilization (MicroProse, 1991) — If turn-based games never stop being made and played, Civ will be the reason why. How many hours of work have been lost to people still saying, as the sun rose the next morning, “OK, just one more turn…”?

Darklands (MicroProse, 1992) — Combined a near-simulation of medieval weaponry with an implementation of magic through the invocation of saints, and switched from an overworld view when traveling to an isometric view of frozen fields or stone dungeons for combat. Incredibly addictive.

Master of Orion (MicroProse, 1993) — Made more strategic than Civilization by shrinking the playing field and increasing the importance of the technology tree through its effect on planetary development and player-designed starships, MoO defined what Alan Emrich called the new “4X genre”: explore, expand, exploit, exterminate.

DOOM (id, 1993) — How many PCs did this game sell? How many people upgraded from 386DX-based PCs to the 486 because they saw how incredibly smooth the game played? Still the benchmark game for validating the PC as a viable gaming platform.

System Shock (Blue Sky/Looking Glass, 1994) — Perhaps exceeded only by Deus Ex, System Shock fused sensationally clever systems design with solid open-world gameplay and memorable levels, and topped it all off with SHODAN, arguably one of the greatest villains in all of computer gaming.

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (LucasArts, 1997) — Jedi Knight improved on the original Dark Forces with clever Force-based puzzles to solve, highly varied lightsaber battles, and some of the best level designs ever seen in any computer game. In particular, “The Falling Ship” must be counted as one of the greatest levels of all time.

Age of Empires (Ensemble, 1997) — Not quite a real-time tactical game like Warcraft, and not quite a turn-based historical strategy game like Civilization, Age of Empires took the best parts of both genres and created something new and wonderful from them.

Baldur’s Gate (BioWare, 1998) — Introduced BioWare’s Infinity Engine for multi-person isometric RPG play, and built a phenomenally good AD&D-based game with it, mating an excellent story with solid fantasy gameplay, and including some legendary characters (“Go for the eyes, Boo! Go for the eyes!!”).

Half-Life (Valve, 1998) — Between the highly intelligent design of levels and tactical challenges, the thoughtful user interface, brilliant scripted sequences, interesting enemy AI and funny NPC barks, Half-Life permanently raised the bar for what a first-person shooter could be. Valve’s openness to player modding of their games, starting with Half-Life, also makes this an important PC game.

The Sims (Maxis, 2000) — Subversive brilliance, The Sims takes playing with virtual dollhouses (and our willingness to torment little computer people) and uses it to communicate a criticism of materialist consumer culture, but it still manages to be fun to play with just for the crazy things you can do with and to the characters in the game.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Bethesda Softworks, 2006) — Despite the limited number of NPC voice actors, Oblivion signaled a great leap forward for open-world first-person RPGs with high-quality visuals, a large number of quests, and a huge world to explore.

Portal (Valve, 2007) — Portal’s wonderful momentum-based first-person physics puzzles would have made for a good game. The inspired insanity of GLaDOS elevated this good game to an all-time classic.

The Witcher (CD Projekt RED, 2007) — Took the bar for intelligent and mature RPGs and kicked it a mile down the road. The mark of greatness is how many other things are compared to you, and by that measure The Witcher is one of the modern great games.

Minecraft (Mojang Specifications, 2010) — No, it’s not too early to include the alpha version of this game in the list of all-time great PC computer games. It’s already proof that there absolutely is a good market for exploration-oriented games, as well as being a great success story for indie game development.

Runners-up: Wolfenstein 3D, MegaTraveller: The Zhodani Conspiracy, Half-Life 2 & Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, Star Wars: TIE Fighter, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Knights of the Old Republic, The Operative: No One Lives Forever, Redneck Rampage.

Who Owns That Computer Game?

2010-09-19T23:50:00.002-05:00

The latest hot debate in the computer game industry has been the question of how the publishers of a game can make money on used game sales.

GameStop, and now Best Buy, have been making some money on reselling "used" games. But the publisher of a game (and eventually the developer) sees not a dime of this secondary market. To try to offset this, some games are now being designed with an online component that must be activated with a special one-use code that comes with the original game. Once a player uses that code for that copy of the game, it's no longer available. This means that only the original purchaser of a game can get full value for their money -- purchasers of resold games that have this feature are stuck with whatever offline content is provided.

Naturally some gamers have objected to this, arguing that they've bought the game and are entitled to all the features of that game.

At this point many of the discussions on the question of reselling computer games eventually sink to the fundamental legal question: when you go to a store (whether it's a retail store such as Best Buy or a digital download system such as Valve's "Steam") and plunk down cash for a game, what is it that you're really getting for your money?

I believe considering that question reveals a severe disconnect between what a lot of people believe the answer to that question is, and what it actually -- legally, ethically, economically and philosophically -- is.

What a lot of people today seem to think is that when they pay for a game, they're actually buying the game -- that is, that some kind of transfer of ownership of property takes place when they hand over their money. And most sellers promote this by talking about "buying games" from them.

But the reality is that no consumer is actually buying a computer game to play it. As the End User License Agreement in most commercial games states, all that any player is doing is paying for a license to play the game -- no transfer of ownership of any kind takes place.

To understand this, we need to look at where the notion of the "license" comes from and what it's for. (Note: I'm not a lawyer, but I believe the following to be correct from a layman's perspective.)

The concept of the usage license is defined through a series of beliefs and legal articles encoded in our legal/economic system:

1. Created things, whether tangible/moveable objects or organized ones and zeros, are in our economic system considered to be the personal/private property of the entity who created those things. That applies to software developers (game creators) like anyone else.

2. The fact of ownership confers a couple of fundamental rights: the right to sell an owned thing, and -- importantly -- the right to allow others to use a thing without ceding ownership of that thing.

3. The right to sell a thing is pretty clear, but the important bit is that when you sell something, you give up all claims over how that property can be transferred or used by its new owner. Again, that's a requirement for a workable definition of "ownership."

4. The right to allow others to use a thing without giving up ownership of a thing is also hugely important for a functional economic system because (sort of like the concept of capital lending by banks) it dramatically expands the productive use of created things. People can create more things than they can personally use, but those things still get some use because the law says other people can be allowed to use things belonging to someone else without transferring the actual ownership of those things.

5. This concept of use-without-ownership is important enough to get its own specific and accepted legal formalisms: leasing and licensing, of which the latter is what we care about in terms of computer games. As the End User License Agreement for every game says (if unclearly), when you pay to play a game, you are not "buying" the game itself -- ownership of the code doesn't change hands -- you are instead paying the owner of property for the limited use of that property.

NOTE: There is a link to massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) here. Real-money transfers (RMT) for in-game items are considered illegal because of this notion that you don't own the virtual objects in a gameworld. The game's owner licenses you to use the ones and zeroes defining those intangible goods . You don't own them, therefore you're not permitted to "sell" them outside the game for real money to other players.

6. So the confusion is about licensing versus ownership -- people believing they have rights to dispose of some piece of software that they don't actually have. When you agree to license the use of some piece of property from that property's owner, you agree to whatever usage restrictions the property owner may impose... in the case of games, up to and including that you don't get to use the online component for free. (Of course these restrictions should be reasonable, but if you agree to an unreasonable restriction that was your decision, and judges have so held.)

For that matter -- despite the fact that publishers have chosen not to enjoin game retailers from the practice -- it would seem that even "reselling" games is generally not permitted, since the person who paid to play a game never owned that game in the first place. However, this brings us to the notion of selling the medium that the game is stored on (such as a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM). Just as books can be resold even if the content belongs to the author or publisher, can't game software be resold?

7. There are usually two objections to the reasoning that licensed games aren't owned by the player and thus can't be resold. One is that ones and zeros are somehow different from tangible property, that the fact of ones and zeros being relatively easy to clone somehow makes them less a form of property and therefore less deserving of the legal protections for the assertion of ownership rights over property. So far, however, I haven't seen anyone make a principled defense of this argument, which really is nothing more than the "because I wanted it" excuse for theft.

8. The other objection is the slightly more sophisticated "first sale" argument. This appears to be based on people reading Wikipedia (edited by individuals who occasionally exclude facts that don't support their preferred beliefs on some subject) and seeing that one judge ruled that an agreement to let someone use a piece of software (through a license) was exactly the same as selling a physical object to someone, which caused the "first sale" doctrine to apply. This (supposedly) set a precedent that software licenses don't exist (regardless of EULAs), and that once you pay for a piece of software you own it and can do whatever you want with it. (Hence "used game" sales.)

In reality, this "first sale" doctrine says that when you sell a copy of an owned object to someone, you can't dictate what the new owner will do with that copy. That's fine... but the judge then magically decided that licensing a piece of software for someone else's use actually constituted a sale. At a stroke, this one judge (or perhaps judges in several states; the Wikipedia entry is strangely vague on this) bizarrely chose to arbitrarily discard the entire concept of for-use licensing that doesn't convey property ownership. On balance, I think that's clearly a bogus ruling; even if you buy the Wikipedia entry there are still plenty of states where established licensing law -- applying to software like any other kind of intangible property -- still happily applies.

On balance, then, I think the problem here is one of understanding. Gamers need to understand that they don't own games -- they're paying for the opportunity to play a game, just like they'd rent an apartment or a car without actually owning either.

At the same time, End User License Agreements ought to be much clearer, with the point made in plain English: "You don't own this software -- what you're paying for is the opportunity to user our computer software to play a computer game. That means you can't resell this software as a 'used game' because it was never owned by you in the first place."

Whatever publisher does that will probably get to enjoy a legal fight, since it would be a direct blow to resale revenue from GameStop and Best Buy. But it would least help to better define how -- or whether -- the "first sale" doctrine applies to computer game software or not.

On the Varieties of Evil Villains

2010-08-20T20:34:00.005-05:00

[Note: a spoiler for the game Dragon Age: Awakening follows.]

One of the design questions that developers of most computer games usually need to address is how to explain the bad guys. You generally play some kind of hero up against the forces of evil -- well, what makes them evil? Why do they oppose whatever it is you want, and how good are they at their job?

Stupid Evil

In nearly all the computer games I can think of, the choice seems to come down to "Stupid Evil" versus "Misunderstood Evil." For action games, it's almost always Stupid Evil. When Stupid Evil is personified, there's simply some generic bad guy. He doesn't need explanations; he's just eeeeeeevil. This is an offhanded justification for the existence of waves of equally stupid enemies for the player's character to cut down like wheat before a scythe.

Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, which focused on action over story, took this approach. In a Stupid Evil game, the enemies are intended to be disposable challenges with no moral/ethical component; the point is fun through action.

Misunderstood Evil

Some games do try to set the action within a story, where the opposition has a reason for trying to do whatever it does. But in most cases the opposition is almost never driven by a truly malign intelligence -- it's most often painted as Misunderstood Evil, as someone who only does horrible things for nearly-plausible reasons. The darkspawn in Dragon Age: Origins were driven by Stupid Evil; they were simply monsters. In Dragon Age: Awakening we are offered an explanation for the waves of enemy beings we've been slaughtering, but it turns out to be a Misunderstood Evil, a good intention gone wrong.

Sometimes the Misunderstood Evil is even deliberately painted as being no more than an alternative lifestyle, in a moral equivalency that says everyone is equally bad. This was the direction Blizzard went when it adapted the Stupid Evil Horde of the Warcraft real-time strategy games to the massively multiplayer online format. In World of Warcraft, the Horde are depicted as ethically no more good or evil than the Alliance.

To some extent, the Imperial faction in the online game Star Wars Galaxies was given the same Misunderstood Evil treatment. Rather than letting players be consciously evil as the Empire was clearly portrayed in the films, the developers felt it was necessary to allow Imperial players to justify their evil actions as not really evil. "Sorry about that whole blowing-up-Alderaan thing, just a misunderstanding, really."

Smart Evil

Every now and then, though, there's a "Smart Evil." This is a villain (such as GLaDOS in the game Portal) who really does hate you and who actively, intelligently and unapologetically wants to do you harm. These are the truly memorable baddies because they don't make any excuses for choosing to knowingly commit acts of evil. Like Lucifer in Paradise Lost, Smart Evil enemies are more interesting than Stupid Evil or Misunderstood Evil (and possibly even more interesting than Good) because they present a clear alternative to the Good that seems like the choice any rational being would make. We want to know *why* they choose to oppose us, why they hate us so...

...and that search for understanding is the beating heart of a great story.

Why aren't there more games that offer the challenge of Smart Evil?

The Prisoner's Dilemma and Multiplayer Game Design

2010-07-23T02:00:00.005-05:00

One of the most fascinating things about massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) is that, although these games are for the most part designed to promote competitive behavior, cooperation among players frequently emerges.

These games do usually provide some mechanism for four or five players to work together as a temporary "pick-up group," or for up to 100-200 players to form a somewhat longer-lasting organization as a "guild" or "corp." But these forms of cooperative play are always subsidiary to competitive behavior -- ultimately winning means doing better than the other guy.

And yet, in these games there can be remarkable examples of cooperative behavior, which seem to emerge despite the rules of the game that clearly favor looking out mostly for oneself. How does this happen? What are the features of these gameworlds that enable islands of cooperation to emerge out of a sea of advantage-taking?

Understanding this means taking a look at a simple game that allows two players to choose whether to cooperate with each other or to "defect" and take advantage of the other player. From this simple game -- with some tweaks -- it's possible to see how people behave, and from that behavior identify the factors that allow cooperation to become a viable strategy.

What follows is an essay on this game -- the "Prisoner's Dilemma" -- that I wrote in 1998. The principles haven't changed, though, so I thought I'd add that essay to this blog since it offers some useful insights into certain core game design concepts that are interesting to think about.

We begin with the surprising (if you think about it) observation: sometimes people choose to cooperate with each other.

THE EMERGENCE OF COOPERATION

Why do we cooperate with one another?

Don't we do better personally when we take advantage of someone who tries to cooperate with us?

How can we justify cooperating when others don't?

It would seem that cooperation is for suckers. And yet there are examples of cooperation all around us: no single person could build a skyscraper, or fight a war, or agree to an international treaty. For all of these things (and many others) to happen, sufficient numbers of self-interested individual human beings must agree to cooperate even when cheating is easy. But why does this happen?

In the late 1970s a researcher named Robert Axelrod was studying the question of how cooperation can emerge in an uncooperative world. Given that in many real-world situations the payoff for taking advantage of others is greater than the reward for cooperation, how can the observed prevalence of cooperative behavior be explained?

THE PRISONER'S DILEMMA

Axelrod began by considering the "Prisoner's Dilemma" experiment. This is a kind of thought game which examines the rewards and punishments for either cooperating or not. The story usually given runs like this:

Suppose you and an accomplice (whom you barely know) in some crime are arrested. The chief detective visits you. He says, "We know you and your pal did it. And you're both going to jail for it. But we always like to make sure, so you've got a choice. You can tell us what your pal did, or you can keep quiet. (And by the way, we're giving him this same choice you're getting.)"

"If you give us evidence against him, and he keeps quiet about you, then you get one year, and he spends six behind bars. If you keep quiet and he gives us the goods on you, you stay for six and he's out in one. If you both keep quiet, you both get three years; if you both turn each other in, you both get five years. So what'll it be?"

You must select one of two options -- you can either cooperate with your fellow prisoner (by keeping quiet) or defect (by providing evidence). You have no way of passing information between you, and you don't know him well enough to predict what he'll choose based on his personality. So which will you choose?

The table below describes what is called the "payoff matrix" of this classic formulation of the Prisoner's Dilemma:

**Classic Prisoner's Dilemma**
	Accomplice Cooperates	Accomplice Defects
You Cooperate	R = -3	S = -6
You Defect	T = -1	P = -5

Note: In this table the results are the payoffs to you. They are categorized as follows:

T: Temptation for defecting when the other party cooperates

S: "Sucker's payoff" for cooperating when the other party defects

R: Reward to both players for both cooperating

P: Punishment to both players for both defecting

Try it for yourself. Here's a link to an on-line version of the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Looking at the table in a purely rational way, it would seem that your best choice is to defect. The two possible results of your defection mean a chance for jail time of either 1 year (if your compatriot cooperates by keeping quiet about you) or 5 years (if he talks), for an average risk of 3 years. On the other hand, if you cooperate with your accomplice, you get 3 years if he cooperates too and 6 years if he defects, for an average risk of 4.5 years.

What's more, you have to assume that your accomplice is capable of thinking about this just like you did. Since he -- just like you -- is likely to conclude that defection is less risky, he'll probably defect... in which case you have even less incentive to cooperate.

And so you defect. And so does your accomplice. And so you both come away worse off than if you had cooperated with each other.

It appears that as long as the temptation to defect is greater than the reward for cooperating, there's no reason to cooperate. Yet it's clear that in the real world we do cooperate. So could there be some other factor at work, the addition of which to the Prisoner's Dilemma might make its outcomes more realistic?

THE ITERATED PRISONER'S DILEMMA

This is where Robert Axelrod enters the story. He considered a possibility others had suggested: What if instead of a single chance to cooperate or defect, you and an ally had numerous opportunities on an ongoing basis? Would that affect your choice on any single interaction?

Suppose you arrange to sell to a fence some stolen goods you regularly receive. To protect you both, it is agreed that while you are leaving the goods in one place, he will leave the payment in another place. At each exchange, each of you will have to decide whether to cooperate by leaving the goods or the money, or to defect by picking up the goods or the money without leaving anything of your own. Furthermore, each of you knows that this arrangement will continue until some unspecified time; neither of you knows when or if at some future date the exchanges will cease.

Assume that the payoff values remain the same as in the basic Prisoner's Dilemma. Does your strategy of defection in the earlier one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma change in an environment of repeated interactions with the same individual?

In 1979, Axelrod devised an ingenious way of testing this possibility (known as the "iterated" Prisoner's Dilemma). He contacted a number of persons in various fields -- mathematicians, experts in conflict resolution, philosophers -- explained the payoffs, and asked each of them to come up with a strategy for a player in an interated Prisoner's Dilemma tournament that could be encoded in a computer program.

No limitation was placed on strategy length. One strategy might be as simple as "always defect." Others might take into account their memory of what the other player had done on previous turns. "Always cooperate but with a random ten percent chance each encounter of defecting" would be still another strategy, and so on.

Axelrod collected 13 such strategies and encoded each of them in the form of a computer program. (He also added one strategy of his own, which randomly chose cooperation or defection on each turn.) He then began to pit each of the 14 strategies against every other strategy over 200 iterations. This would determine if any one strategy would prove to do well against all other strategies (as measured by average payoffs to that strategy).

The winner was the shortest strategy submitted. It consisted of four lines of BASIC code submitted by psychology and philosophy professor Anatol Rapaport of the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada. In its entirety it consisted of the following: Cooperate on the first turn, then in all subsequent turns do whatever the other player did on its previous turn. This strategy was dubbed "Tit for Tat".

THE "ECOLOGICAL" PRISONER'S DILEMMA

After deriving some preliminary conclusions about this result, Axelrod tried an even more interesting innovation. In this new round, for which Axelrod publicly requested submissions from any source, there were 62 entrants plus one (RANDOM, from Axelrod) for a total of 63. All these strategies were then pitted against one another in a giant free-for-all tournament.

The winner was Tit for Tat, submitted again by Rapaport. (But, oddly, by no one else.) Again, it had the highest average score of payoffs.

Axelrod scored the results of the tournament as a 63x63 matrix which showed how each strategy had fared against every other strategy. An analysis of the strategies played revealed that there were six strategies that best represented all the others. Since the 63x63 matrix showed how each strategy played against all others, Axelrod was able to calculate the results of six hypothetical "replays" in which one of the six representative strategies was initially dominant.

Tit for Tat scored first in five of the six replays, and scored second in the sixth.

Then came the cleverest innovation yet. Suppose, Axelrod's notion had it, we performed a hypothetical replay in which all strategies were pitted against each other, and in each turn the "loser" was replaced by a copy of the "winning" strategy, thus altering the population of players? Each strategy's score -- already known from the 63x63 matrix -- could treated as a measure of "fitness" against other strategies in a kind of "ecological" tournament.

The results left no doubt. The lowest-ranked strategies, which tended to be "not-nice" (in other words, which tried to defect occasionally to see what they could get away with), were extinct within 200 rounds. Only one not-nice strategy (which had been ranked eighth in the original 63x63 competition) lasted past 400 rounds, but by then the population of surviving strategies consisted only of those which replied to defections with immediate retaliation. Because the not-nice strategy had no more strategies which could be taken advantage of, it began a precipitous decline. By the thousandth round, it too was virtually eliminated.

And the winning strategy? Once again it was Tit for Tat, which was not only the most prevalent strategy at the end of 1000 rounds, but the strategy with the highest rate of growth. Tit for Tat was not merely successful, it was robust -- it did well in all kinds of environments.

Why did Tit for Tat do so well? How could such a simple strategy perform so capably in such a broad mix of more complex strategies? More to the essential point, how could Tit for Tat do so well even when surrounded by strategies which depended on defecting and so would supposedly tend to earn better payoffs? It appeared that a strategy which cooperated by default was able to not only survive but actually thrive amidst a sea of defectors.

In other words, cooperation evolved over time in a world dominated by uncooperative players. If this simulation bore any relation to the real world of humans, there could be some important lessons in it for us.

HOW COOPERATION WORKS

What actual, emotion-driven human beings do with individual choices of cooperation or defection is, of course, unpredictable. But in general, rational players will tend to make similar choices. This allows those interested in human behavior to work out some mathematical predictions of behavior.

In this case, it turns out that a careful choice of the four payoffs for cooperation or defection results in being able to say that there exists a rational choice of cooperation, even in the midst of a majority of defectors. Specifically, Axelrod found that if just four conditions were met, cooperation can be the most rational choice -- even in a population consisting almost entirely of defectors. These are the "world" conditions that affect whether a gameworld such as a MMORPG will tend to encourage cooperative behavior to emerge or not.

First, the players must be able to recognize one another. Anonymity, becauses it decreases the penalty for defection in an environment of iterated interactions, tends to work against the evolution of a population of cooperators. This has a direct impact on MMORPGs, in which players are somewhat recognizable by the names they choose for their characters, but because they can play multiple characters on multiple servers, players are for the most part anonymous to each other. (This is why the recent attempt by Blizzard to switch to a "Real Names" system in their online game forum had a chance of promoting more cooperative behaviors there, instead of the flaming and hyperemotional verbal abuse -- "defection" behavior -- that characterizes game forums currently. It's unfortunate that Blizzard's concept was shouted down and not given a chance to be implemented; it would have been useful to see whether changing the rules of the "world" to minimize anonymity would, as suggested here, have encouraged more cooperative discussion.)

Second, the total number of potential opportunities for interaction must be unknown to each player. It is the uncertainty preventing players from calculating just how much defection they can get away with that decreases the long-term reward for defection. If you don't know when your final interaction will be, and thus can't plan to defect on that turn, you must take into your calculations the fact that what you do on this interaction will affect the response to you on the next interaction. This creates an incentive to cooperate.

Third, the payoff for mutual cooperation (that is, both players cooperate with each other) in each interaction must be greater than the average payoff of a cooperation-defection (the payoff to the defector plus the sucker's payoff divided by 2). In mathematical terms, this is the condition in which R > (P + S) / 2.

Fourth and last, there must be a certain minimum proportion of cooperating players in the population... and here was one of the greatest surprises. Axelrod calculated that -- amazingly -- if all the preceding conditions are met, and there is a high probability that players which have interacted before will do so again (specifically, ninety percent), then cooperation can eventually evolve to include the entire population if only five percent of the total initial population consists of cooperators. It's reasonable to expect that there must be enough cooperators so that they can create a sort of island of trust in a sea of defection. What's surprising is that so few are necessary.

HOW TIT FOR TAT WORKS

Axelrod concluded that Tit for Tat succeeded not by trying to do the absolute best for itself in every transaction, but by trying to maximize the sum of its own and the other player's reward in all transactions combined. In other words, Tit for Tat did well for itself because the effect of its strategy was to allow every player with whom it interacted to do well.

An intriguing aspect of this is found in the raw scores of the various Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments. Looking at the numbers, it quickly becomes obvious that in individual encounters Tit for Tat never did better than strategies which were more "aggressive" (i.e., defected more often) or -- interestingly -- strategies which were more "forgiving" (i.e., didn't always respond immediately to a defection with a defection of its own). In individual transactions, Tit for Tat's numbers were solidly middle-of-the-road.

But over iterated transactions the consequences of defection began to outweigh the benefits. As more players started to resemble Tit for Tat, which always retaliated immediately to a defection but was always open to cooperation, the long-term payoff for defection dropped. Soon there were no players who could be taken advantage of by a defecting strategy. Meanwhile, the Tit for Tat-like cooperating strategies were busy cooperating. Their long-term payoffs were never outstanding... just better than those of the defectors.

THE PRINCIPLES OF TIT FOR TAT

Axelrod distilled several principles from his observation of how well Tit for Tat did against various defecting and cooperating players. Not only do these explain how Tit for Tat did better than even other cooperating players, they have useful implications for real world human interactions.

Be Nice
Don't be the first to defect. Assume cooperativeness on the part of others. If you go into an interaction assuming that you're going to get ripped off, then you might as well try to take advantage of the other person. But if instead the other person turns out to have been willing to cooperate with you, you've just missed a chance for both of you to do well.

Be Forgiving
Don't overreact. When taken advantage of, retaliate once, then stop. Meeting one defection with a harsh response can create a series of echoing mutual defections that prevent cooperation from ever occurring.

Be Provocable
When a defection occurs, always respond in kind. Don't be too forgiving. In the instructions for the second tournament, Axelrod included the two lessons ("be nice" and "be forgiving") that he had drawn from the first tournament. Several of those who submitted second tournament strategies concluded that being forgiving was essential to the evolution of cooperation. Their strategies tended to let a few defections slide. In effect, these strategies tried to elicit cooperation by allowing not-nice players to take advantage of them without penalty. But the actual result was to encourage not-nice strategies to keep defecting. A lesser penalty for defecting made that lack of cooperation more valuable, so cooperation became less valuable. A better choice is to always defect when provoked.

Be Clear
Respond in kind immediately. Strategies that tried to be clever tended to appear unresponsive, which elicited defection. (If your attempts to cooperate are ignored, then you might as well defect to get as much as you can while you can.) Cooperation should meet with immediate cooperation, and a defection should be met with an immediate defection.

THE IMPLICATIONS OF TIT FOR TAT

What if anything does this mean for actual human interactions? There is a strong suggestion that the behaviors that elicit cooperation in this restricted world of the Prisoner's Dilemma do indeed carry over to our real world.

One finding particularly worthy of note was the evidence that too much forgiveness actually works against the evolution of cooperation. The notion of "tolerance" so trendy today turns out to be an invitation to defection, rather than the means to a better society as its proponents claim. While being "nice" is necessary to evoke cooperation in others, it's not enough. Bad behavior requires a proportionate response, or the result will be more bad behavior.

This applies as well to criminal justice. There is a vocal minority today calling for a reduced emphasis on incarceration as societal retribution, and a commensurate greater attention given to rehabilitation. Without disputing the goodness of the impulse, the success of Tit for Tat suggests that it's a bad idea. If an individual member of a society defects (commits a crime), that defection should provoke an immediate retaliation from society. Not an overreaction, but some equivalent reaction nonetheless appears necessary in order to elicit future cooperation from that individual, and to demonstrate to other players the value of cooperation and the price of defection.

The ancient policy of lex talionis -- "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth" -- may be the wisest policy after all.

THE FUTURE OF COOPERATION

For cooperation to evolve, there have to be enough cooperators who interact with one another on a sufficiently regular basis. Such "islands of cooperation," once established, can grow... but too small an island will sink beneath the waves of defectors.

One critical factor not addressed by any other commentator on Axelrod's work I've seen concerns being able to recognize other players. The Tit for Tat strategy depends on remembering what another player did on the immediately previous turn. But if the other player is anonymous, or is encountered only once, it's impossible to associate a history with that player. This leads either to cooperating with an unknown (and possibly being taken advantage of repeatedly) or defecting from lack of trust (and possibly missing an opportunity to create an environment of cooperation).

This takes on added relevance today. Not only are the streets and highways filled with persons whom we'll never see again -- and who thus have no qualms about defecting (in other words, driving like jerks) -- we are spending more time surfing the Web as anonymous entities than we once did sitting in the back yard talking with our neighbors. Our contacts with other players in the game of trust/don't-trust are more likely to be brief encounters with strangers: ephemeral and anonymous. Under such conditions, not only is it unlikely that new clusters of cooperative behavior will evolve, but even the maintenance of what cooperation there is becomes difficult. Trust breaks down.

How long can such a state of affairs last?

Can we find a way to balance legitimate privacy interests with the guaranteed recognition required for cooperation to emerge? Or is anonymity and the Hobbesian, everyone-out-for-himself world imposed by anonymity inevitable?

". . . perhaps the chief thesis of the book on The Fatal Conceit . . . is that the basic morals of property and honesty, which created our civilization and the modern numbers of mankind, was the outcome of a process of selective evolution, in the course of which always those practices prevailed, which allowed the groups which adopted them to multiply most rapidly (mostly at their periphery among people who already profited from them without yet having fully adopted them)."
-- letter from Friedrich A. Hayek to Julian Simon, Nov. 6, 1981.

Game Development and National Tax Policy

2010-06-25T13:21:00.012-05:00

There's been a lot of yelling lately about the UK coalition government's campaign-trail promise to enact a moderate reduction in the rate at which game producers are taxed, and the elimination of that tax break in the national budget the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government has actually proposed.

Let's leave aside for a moment the issue of politicians breaking promises made while campaigning. It's worth stopping for a second to consider the language that's being used in the news stories that gamers are reading to inform themselves about this issue of tax breaks for game development.

As a representative example, here are a couple of quotes from the story as written by the Computer and Video Games website:

"[P]ulling the tax breaks from the budget saves the country £190 million [$283.54 million]."

"Although the body [TIGA] admits that the planned tax break would cost £192 million, it claims over £400m would be recouped in tax receipts."

Both of these statements are misleading; they describe tax policy in terms of "costs" and "savings" that have no connection to the normal meanings of these words.

Reducing the rate at which businesses will be taxed in the future is not a "cost" because the government hasn't taken that money yet and therefore doesn't have it to spend.

And choosing not to reduce a tax rate does not "save" money. All it does is continue to extract money from producers at the existing rate. There is no "savings" in the normal (non-government weenie) sense of preserving money that would otherwise have been spent because, as noted above, no existing money is spent if the rate of future taxation is reduced.

More importantly, this deliberate misuse of language (which is definitely not restricted to the UK government) to portray reducing national taxation as "costs" and preserving existing tax rates as "savings" flows entirely from the assumption that all money belongs to the government to begin with. Only if all money is considered the government's money is it a "cost" to reduce the rate at which government takes that money from the producers who earn it through their labor, or a "savings" to continue taking the existing amount of money from businesses and individuals.

That assumption needs to be questioned.

Seen from the perspective that money belongs to the people and corporations who work together to earn it, a reduction in the rate at which the income of UK games producers is taken by the government would mean several things: a future UK government would have slightly less money available to spend; UK games producers would have more money available to them for investment in game development and publishing projects; and -- importantly -- investment in more games production than otherwise would have happened (because lower tax rates mean more money available for new projects) would potentially result in the government receiving *more* money in tax receipts even at a lower tax rate (though perhaps not as much as £400m as TIGA speculates).

But consider: if a reduction (not "elimination"!) of taxes for games producers could actually help generate slightly higher tax receipts to the government through the increase in business activity prompted by the games producers having more money to invest in new projects, then why not apply that logic across the board? Why make a special deal with games producers, which the government could then turn around and threaten to take away? Instead, why not reduce taxation on all producers to enable revenue-generating capital investment throughout the private sector of the national economy?

And by all accounts, that's precisely what the new budget from the UK coalition government proposes... at least for businesses. As Gamasutra reported in its own story on this issue: "The new budget also raises the value-added tax to 20 percent, makes cuts to National Insurance, and reduces the corporations tax." This is more of a shifting of revenue sources than an actual revenue-generating budget, since the likely benefits of reducing the corporate tax rate will be offset somewhat by hiking the VAT that increases prices everywhere.

Still, it's a step in a better direction than just mindlessly raising tax rates, which fails to maximize taxable new capital because it promotes government spending that is less efficient than private sector investment. Gamers don't need to be upset by the coalition government reneging on its promise of a tax break for the game industry specifically -- *all* industries, including game development, will be getting a break if this budget is enacted. (Gamers and everyone else can certainly be ticked off by politicians breaking promises, but that's an old and separate problem from economic policy.)

It's just a shame that so much of the reporting simply parrots the government spin that reducing tax rates to let people and businesses keep more of the money they work to earn is a "cost," and choosing not to reduce any tax rate constitutes a "savings." Reporters ought to be more careful that the language they use isn't unthinkingly promoting a government's self-interested agenda, and news consumers need to hold journalists to that reasonable standard.

The Hero No One Recognizes

2010-05-27T01:08:00.002-05:00

There's a design question that's been nagging at me for a few years now that I recalled today. Maybe this is a good time to drag it out into the light for a good review.

Although generally an enjoyable game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion had a few quirks. (Not unexpectedly for such a large gameworld with so many non-player characters and quests for the player to follow.) One of these quirks had to do with the various factions that your character could join.

In Oblivion as it originally shipped, there were two public factions -- the Fighters Guild (physical combat) and the Mages Guild (magical combat), two secret factions -- the Thieves Guild (stealing stuff) and the Dark Brotherhood (assassination), and the Imperial Arena (gladiatorial-style combat). Your character was able to join each of these organizations and, by successfully completing various quests for the members and leader of each organization, rise in rank within each organization.

What I found exceedingly peculiar when I stopped to think about it was that the separate plotlines for rising in rank in these organizations allowed your character to take over as leader or undisputed champion in each one.

In other words, your one character could, by completing every factional plotline, be simultaneously the Archmage of the Mages Guild, the Master of the Fighters Guild, the Gray Fox of the Thieves Guild, Listener of the Dark Brotherhood of assassins, and the Grand Champion of the Imperial Arena.

I didn't play Morrowind, the predecessor game to Oblivion, but I understand that there were some restrictions in the prior game on what you could do in one faction based on your relationship with some other faction. I assume those restrictions were excluded in Oblivion simply to allow the player to experience all the factional content, and I understand that from a business perspective... but it just doesn't make any sense from a world-y perspective that a single person (your character or anyone else) would be permitted to control all the resources and personnel of these incredibly powerful organizations.

And this becomes even more problematic if you completed the main questline in the Shivering Isles expansion. Not only do you retain all your factional leadership roles, you become the incarnation of the Daedric god Sheogorath!

This is just too much to swallow. I understand it wouldn't have been much fun to make the reward for mastering a faction to become smothered by bureaucracy, constant second-guessing by underlings, and a never-ending stream of tedious management decisions to make. Even so, why didn't anyone even seem to notice my remarkable public accomplishments? It remains terribly strange to me that no NPC of any station ever expressed a single word of concern, wonder, admiration, fear, or anything else while speaking to someone (my character) who controlled so many of the threads of power in the Empire. How could one person be allowed to be head of all those groups, rivaling or even exceeding the Emperor of Cyrodiil in power, without anyone caring or even noticing?

I should add this didn't "ruin" the game for me. It was just a bit of dialogue programming that Bethesda didn't have time to do.

Even so, it did make the otherwise well-defined gameworld of Oblivion feel less like a plausible world.

Addressing this objection takes us into two related subjects: (NPC) knowledge representation and knowledge application. In other words, how can we define what characters in the gameworld know, and how can we enable them to act in plausible ways on that knowledge?

I'll take that up in a future blog post.

Interactive Fiction: Character Versus Player

2010-04-26T23:53:00.005-05:00

Interactive fiction writer and designer Emily Short recently considered multiple-choice interactive stories, where -- instead of a completely free-form interactive mode where the game parser tries to figure out what the player asked for -- the game supplies a limited set of pre-determined choices for the player to select from, each leading to a different pre-determined event within a particular narrative that defines the story the player experiences.

Her concern is that this type of game doesn't allow the kind of emergent storytelling possible in "open-world" roleplaying games (RPGs) such as Fable 2 or Fallout 3. On the other hand, she notes that RPGs aren't very good at focusing game events on a particular well-paced and engaging story, and she attributes this to the smaller "granularity" of events in an RPG which are harder to tie together into a coherent dramatic narrative.

I think that's a rather good way of analyzing these two approaches to storytelling in story-driven games. I do look at it in a slightly different way, however. The incompatibility I see between character stats and story-relevant possibilities is that each approach puts dramatic choice in a completely different person's hands.

Emphasizing character stats means that attributes of the character, such as intelligence or lockpicking skills, must to some degree condition or even determine story choices, taking gameplay out of the player's hands. Too much of that and you get a simulation that plays like a movie -- you lose the "interactive" part of interactive fiction.

But emphasizing on-the-spot decision-making by the player can make the game about the player, rather than about a character existing inside the secondary world of the fiction and acting in a dramatically appropriate way for that character in that world. The fiction has to constrain choice in some way or it's impossible to tell a coherent and world-appropriate story.

Two approaches to synthesizing these models of play in interactive fiction might be described as The Middle Way and Some Of Each.

In The Middle Way you'd try to pick some in-between spot between the player and the character -- a medium granularity. That's probably relatively simple to implement technically; I'm just not sure how satisfying it would be as story-based gameplay. The character's nature would sort of matter, and the player's imagination would sort of matter, but neither could be strongly activated. I suspect there are already some games like this....

Alternately it might be possible to develop gameplay where you have both small choices (determined by the character's nature) that add up over time and drama-important choices (actively selected by the player) that form the core of a particular story. This sounds a bit to me like a system in which the player decides "what" to do and the character's nature (as encoded in RPG-style statistics) have an impact on "how" each choice is expressed.

I like the sound of that second approach; it feels to me like it might have a "best of both worlds" quality. But I can see a couple of potential gotchas. One is technical: for each major choice you'd have to code multiple ways it could be expressed based on each one of the relevant qualities of a character's nature. That could wind up being pretty cost-intensive, even if the payoff might be significant.

The other possible problem is how players might feel about such a system that takes some choice away from them. If for example I chose to create a character with a roguish nature, should I be unhappy if, when I make a particular choice at a dramatic opportunity, my character twists my choice in a roguish way with consequences I might not have preferred? Or would that help my choice feel even more satisfying than those common in today's story-based games where my "character" is little more than an empty vehicle in which I-the-player ride?

Still, I think the Some Of Each approach probably holds the most promise for interacive fiction that is both satisfying as drama and enjoyable as gameplay. I'll have to think some more about this.

Living in the Living World Game

2010-03-27T14:14:00.011-05:00

Back in June of 2008, I published a blog post describing a game design concept that fascinated me: the Living World game.

Since then I've remained fascinated by the idea of a game that models social dynamics at both a very high and a personal level, and that runs constantly like an online game (simulating changes while the game is turned off). I would still love to see a game consciously developed as a gameworld, where the fun comes not from following some game developer's linear story to a predetermined conclusion but from being a part of and exploring an truly enormous and dynamic open world.

One of the possibilities in my original work-up of this concept was that players would create their own characters who, in typical role-playing game fashion, the player would mold and "level up." Lately, however, I've been thinking it could be much more interesting to eliminate level-based character advancement entirely.

Rather than the standard RPG model of creating a new character out of thin air and then leveling up that character through progressively more difficult challenges, a Living World might not need to copy that model. Instead, the primary gameplay system really ought to be designed to highlight the scope and dynamic features that make the Living World unique.

And what comes most strongly to mind is not giving the player a new character at all, but instead making gameplay about "jumping into" existing NPCs. (Credit Where Credit Is Due Dept.: this line of thinking was inspired in part by some comments made by Owain abArawn to the Gamasutra version of the original Living World essay.)

In this model (which, yes, now that I think about it does somewhat resemble the notion behind "Quantum Leap"), players starting the game would first experience the gameworld from a disembodied perspective. They would be shown the Living World from a great distance; the camera would then zoom in to various regions and then to individual NPCs going about their lives. The player would be shown how to take control of two different NPCs as a tutorial. After returning to the big picture view of the world (to impress on the player the scope of the Living World), they would then be free to begin exploring the world by inhabiting the NPCs of their choice.

This is where the core gameplay of the Living World would be found. Every NPC would be defined to have a particular role. (Role definition would be part of the toolset for building the content of the Living World.) Players would be able to observe or inspect an NPC to see the role he or she has, and then choose whether or not to inhabit that NPC.

Inhabiting an NPC immediately gives the player access to all the skills -- defined as gameplay activities -- that are associated with the role to which that NPC was assigned. So if you want to fight monsters, inhabit a Ranger; if you want to chase thieves, jump into a City Guard NPC; if you want to practice crafting, inhabit a Blacksmith or Baker; if you're looking for economic gameplay, inhabit a Merchant; and if you feel like trying your hand at the very difficult game of city or kingdom management, you would be able to inhabit a town's Mayor or even the King of an entire nation.

As noted above, in each case the kinds of gameplay available to you would depend on the role of the character you choose to inhabit. These gameplay activities would need to be predefined by the developer as selectable actions which use and/or affect objects inside the gameworld. The "Ranger" role, for example, might be defined to optimize skills (gameplay actions) such as Shortbow, Shortsword, Tracking, Herbal Medicine, and Stealth. Meanwhile, the "City Guard" role could be defined as having special training in Shortsword, Tracking, Negotiation, Perception, and the Guard badge which allows that character to summon other Guards. Other roles would have their own appropriate skill optimizations.

In addition to roles having particular skill optimizations, roles would also be keyed to preconstructed gameplay content. In other words, the role of the NPC you choose determines the kind of prescripted gameplay content offered to you. If you choose to inhabit a Ranger, you would not only be free to explore the gameworld while doing Ranger-y things, the act of inhabiting that NPC would also activate any number of world events (either automatically or at the player's discretion) in which Ranger skills could be particularly useful -- say, a monster invasion, or finding a lost child for some villagers. The same would be true for every role. Even highly mundane roles such as Baker would have gameplay events (e.g., baking challenges) scripted for them that would be fun for someone who voluntarily chose to be a Baker. (Note that this design integrates into the "epic storylines" feature of a Living World game.)

The assignment of NPCs to particular roles would need to be integrated into the social dynamics of the gameworld. Because the Living World models the birth, growth, and death of individual NPCs (possibly only at a statistical level except where the player has traveled or currently exists), the mechanism of children maturing into adults would need to be fitted into the role system. For example, a village experiencing dynamic growth would encourage children to fill high-priority roles as openings (due to death, injury, retirement, or possession by the player) occur, then useful roles, then expansion-oriented or support roles as the group's resources and rules permit. A village or social group that can't or doesn't care to continue, on the other hand, would probably find most of its children emigrating to cities or taking on "solo/loner" roles. In other words, the Living World needs to be designed so that role assignments to juveniles are made dynamically based on a determination of whether to maintain/enhance the existing social group or to break it up in favor of forming new groups elsewhere.

One other note on the gameplay design approach of "inhabiting" NPCs: Because the Living World would simulate not just large-scale social movements but personal social structures as well, in many cases the NPC whom the player chooses to inhabit would be part of a social group -- a member of the city guards, or the blacksmith for a village, or a husband or wife who is the parent to some children. This raises the question: should those NPCs realize when someone who is part of their social group is "inhabited" by an entity with the unique power of possessing people's bodies and minds?

I very much like the idea that these NPCs would definitely know when someone in their group is inhabited by the player, and that they would be able to react toward the player according to their beliefs and fears. It seems reasonable that stories of this kind of possession, occurring for thousands of years, would be part of the legends and histories of all the peoples of the Living World. Would you be considered a god? or a demon? or perhaps just a very talented sorceror? If you choose to inhabit an NPC who, in addition to her gameplay role, is a wife and mother, how might her husband and children react to you when they realize that she no longer exists as herself and that you might do anything at all to her, from taking her across the wilderness to getting her killed? These relationships, I think, would also be an excellent opportunity for prescripted gameplay activities to be activated, with the twist that they could have more than the usual amount of emotional resonance -- would you choose to risk the life of an NPC whose children are begging you not to take her away?

I'll be thinking more about this approach to character-based gameplay within the Living World concept. For now, the more I think about it, the better I like it as a system that supports and improves the overall design of the Living World game.

Dear Producers: You Are Not Designers

2010-02-25T21:18:00.006-06:00

Why do game designers allow producers to dictate design choices?

A little background: I'm a systems designer by inclination and a project manager (outside the game development industry) by professional experience. So I appreciate the value of both roles in creating properly functional systems on a budget and a schedule.

But if anything, this is why I'm annoyed every time I discover that some producer -- or worse, an executive -- is dictating design choices for a game. People acting in multiple roles tend to do none of them sufficiently well. And people who aren't designers by choice are probably going to make more incorrect design decisions than those who do choose to be designers.

So why do so many producers seem unable to stop themselves from dabbling in game design? Why is this allowed to happen so frequently in game development?

When a developer blog/chat/interview reveals that it's the producer who is determining core design elements, that suggests two things to me: firstly, that the producer is probably neglecting actual production-related tasks in favor of fiddling with the design. That's a bad sign for delivering a good product on time. Who's monitoring and managing the development process while the Producer is arguing with the Lead Designer over whether the game's hero needs a sidekick character?

And secondly, why the heck did they hire a Lead Designer if they're not going to let that person do their job? The title Lead Designer needs to mean something. That person needs to have the authority to specify the high-level systems of a game, and their creative authority needs to protected from producer encroachment. If the producers or other suits are so concerned about the creative direction of a game that they feel they need to do that person's job for them, then the correct action is to fire that designer and hire a new one because interfering can only reduce the impact of the vision for the game. When the designer does not have the power to enforce a consistent creative vision, when non-designers can impose their preferences solely because the org chart says they have the power to do so, the result will be a game that plays like it was designed by a committee... because it was.

Frankly, I think most producers are not equipped to be designers, and they should not try to fill both roles. A good producer is a valuable person, but that value is diminished when they're not doing their job (producing) because they're trying to do someone else's (designing). If you're a producer, but what you really want is to design, then demonstrate the courage of your convictions: step down as Producer and ask to be hired as the Lead Designer or Creative Director or its equivalent.

Finally, I note that this applies to both internal producers and publisher producers. Personally, I wouldn't want to sign a deal with a publisher that didn't include some text saying that final authority for creative decisions rests with the developer. (Naturally such a contract should also include a provision allowing the publisher to back out of the deal if they feel strongly enough that the creative direction is just too wrong.) I don't see any good in producers dictating design choices, whether those producers are part of the development studio or represent the publisher.

This does not mean that producers (or any other member of the development team) shouldn't be able to offer design ideas. Designers aren't perfect; sometimes it's helpful to hear what others think. What I'm arguing against here is allowing the Lead Producer or Senior Vice President in Charge of Whatever to dictate design choices simply because they sign the team's checks.

Bottom line: Power in a corporate hierarchy does not imply design competence. Let the designers do the designing, and let producers stick to producing.

Of course I recognize that this is wishful thinking on my part, and that producers of whatever ilk will continue to abuse their power by overriding the creative work of the people who supposedly were hired on the strength of their design abilities.

Doesn't mean I can't complain about it as a sub-optimal business process....

MMORPGs: The Evolutionary Dead End

2010-02-18T22:08:00.006-06:00

Brian "Psychochild" Green, in a thoughtful post (MMOs Change Over Time) on his blog, asks the question: Do you enjoy your favorite MMORPG more or less because of the changes that have been applied to it?

Unhappily, my MMORPG experiences since EQ have led me to precisely the opposite conclusion: as a gamer, I’m just not interested in playing any of these games any more because my perception is that they have ceased to change in any meaningful way.

I find it terrifically frustrating to consider the fact that these games, as forms of virtual worlds, could be about anything... and yet the best that their designers today can do is to copy the mechanics that have become conventions of the genre. I recently helped beta test an online game based on a well-known IP, and I was shocked to see that many of the mechanics, far from being designed fresh to fit the IP, were not merely copied from existing MMORPGs -- they were actually called by exactly the same names: root, buff, aggro. But this game’s designers are not alone in seeming to believe that these arbitrary mechanics have become non-negotiable requirements that simply have to be copied wholesale into the core design. So does everyone else.

Even at the next level up, every MMORPG designer seems obsessively fixated on delivering only one kind of entertainment experience: kill mobs and take their stuff. Ask today’s typical MMORPG player to define “MMORPG,” and that’s how they’ll describe the whole genre: combat and loot.

Change? What change?

When I see game after game aping their predecessors (while ads proclaim them to be “revolutionary”), and then think about the possibilities of MMORPG play that are bounded only by human imagination... yes. It’s infuriating.

Why are so many designers willing to put up with such limits to creative expression?

Why are so many gamers willing to tolerate such an unnecessary lack of choice in entertainment experiences?

From my perspective, the problem with MMORPGs is not that there is too much change -- it’s that the genre has already gone into creative rigor mortis long before its time. Whatever changes we perceive are merely various stages of decay and rot.

At this point I’m about ready to declare that monolithic MMORPGs are the shambling dead, and that social games on networks like FaceBook will soon rule the Earth as our new overlords.

Is there any cause to think I’m wrong in that forecast? Is there any hope for the MMORPG?

Let's Pwn Homer, Too!

2010-01-26T22:13:00.008-06:00

Electronic Arts, in the wisdom of its executives, has chosen to fund the conversion of Dante's Inferno, an epic allegorical poem concerning the search for divine love in an impure world, into a God-of-War-like slasher game.

At first I thought this was completely nuts, being both derivative as a game and artistically rude. But no; clearly I Just Don't Get It. What's wrong with strip-mining the classics for some completely irrelevant element that seems roughly similar to a mindless hack-'em-up game someone else has already made money from?

Following the lead of some very highly paid executives at a game publishing corporation, I have been inspired to look for similar development opportunities. Here are some ideas off the top of my head for giving a few more pieces of Classical and Western verse the chainsaws and blood and Adrenaline-Pumping Action! their authors no doubt always intended them to have.

The Road Not Taken: Fire and Ice Edition
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Albatross Hunter 3D
Metamorphoses: Titan vs. Titan Brawling
The Raven: Lenore's Revenge
The Song of Hiawatha: Extreme Canoeing
Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard: Zombie Apocalypse 2

More to come on this subject, no doubt....

The Melancholy of Lost Civilizations in RPGs

2009-11-27T20:46:00.009-06:00

Gamasutra recently reported on a presentation by veteran RPG designer Ken Rolston, in which he noted that world-building often means creating objects and settings from days gone by:

Often, that melancholy comes when exploring the remains of long-dead civilizations, seemingly something of a preoccupation of Rolston, and one that frequently makes its way into his games by way of in-game artifacts.

"Melancholy, I think, is the underlying tone in most of the role-playing games I've done," Rolston said, adding, "I know games are all about fun, but there's an underlying tone I'm always trying to speak to."

That aspect of RPGs never struck me before... but how appropriate that a sense of melancholy is consciously integrated into the design of most RPGs!

By its nature, the typical RPG conventionally contains several things, among which are a relatively well-developed world and characters roaming that world killing each other. Well, what does it say about these worlds that it's considered normal for people to go around killing each other without being clapped in irons immediately as a danger to society?

As worlds in which the player character can run around killing people, that naturally suggests some kind of breakdown of order. This makes it almost inevitable that the created history of the world of a computer-based roleplaying game must include lost civilizations, in which a Golden Age of the past was more civilized than the Hobbesian present.

It's virtually commonplace to see cultural and architectural fragments of former civilizations in a fantasy milieu. Michael Moorcock's Elric, last emperor of languid Melniboné, is regularly described as melancholic. In computer RPGs, there were the Ayleid Empire of The Elder Scrolls and the Tevinter Imperium of BioWare's new Dragon Age. But a more aesthetically advanced past is almost always part of other well-developed RPG settings as well -- the mythically idyllic pre-invasion past of the Fallout series, for example, or the Republic before Palpatine corrupted it, or the pre-catastrophe world before The Computer took over Alpha Complex in Paranoia (another game Ken Rolston worked on).

In such worlds, where you can't swing a sword or fire a bullet without hitting some burnt-out ruin, any character capable of thinking beyond moment-to-moment survival must feel some sense of melancholy for a life that might have been. It's a natural way of lending some emotional depth to what otherwise could have been a simple action-oriented killfest.

Consider the choices and placement of objects in Bethesda's Fallout 3. The use of artifacts in Fallout 3 are a graduate-level course in how the objects placed in a gameworld can define the narrative of that world.

Fallout 3 was filled with what might be called "microstories." Open a door to a bathroom and see a skeleton in a bathtub, surrounded by empty bottles of booze and a pistol. Look into a small bedroom and find an array of children's toys, seemingly abandoned in the moment of play. Peer into a closet in a tunnel and discover a rat's-nest of useful items guarded by a lone teddy bear. (And let's not forget the "plunger room" or the Rube Goldberg-style trapped grocery store....)

In every place where people lived, there are artifacts posed in ways that tell a small story of the moments just before The Big One... or the grim and hopeless days after. I can't imagine even the most hardcore gamer, who cares only for how many Super Mutants he can kill, being insensitive to the pathos of the little stories and the overall sense of lives meaninglessly snuffed out that they tell.

Is that "fun" in and of itself? I suppose not. "Experience feelings of loss!" will probably never be part of the advertising materials for a game. But did the care that went into telling those sad microstories make Fallout 3 more memorable -- more fun -- for me?

Absolutely yes. More generally, I would say they contributed to making Fallout 3 a more satisfying game for many gamers.

But should that sense of melancholy be a part of every RPG with aspirations of worldiness?

The question for RPG designers is, do they want to continue to create worlds in which emotional heft is supplied by an elegiac regret over the remnants of lost civilizations?

Or is it possible to build a deep RPG world that includes all the lethal conflict that gamers seem to want, but that takes its emotional depth from some place other than comparison to "a more civilized age?"

What Kind of Team Player Are You?

2009-11-19T19:57:00.008-06:00

As a software project manager, I frequently have to interact with people filling different roles in the development process.

Over the years I've often been in the position of needing to work with these people to accomplish some goal. Usually they possess information I have to have in order to determine whether something can be done, or what specific steps need to be taken in order to get the job done right.

A few people have been helpful. Most are... less so.

In fact, I was eventually able to categorize the kinds of answers I can expect to get when I ask a "can I do X?" kind of question:

"Yes."
Translation: "You can do whatever you want, but you'll have to figure it out yourself; I'm clearly too busy/important to help you. Oh, and don't get it wrong, or else."
"No."
Translation: "I am a human roadblock. You will follow my required process. I will not tell you what that process is. If you ask, I will assume the attitude that it's something you should (somehow) already know."
"Yes, but."
Translation: "Progress is dangerous. Do you not realize just how many things might go wrong? It's my job to object continuously to every little thing you will ever propose, and to write emails to your manager disclaiming all responsibility if anything bad ever happens."
"No, but."
Translation: "No, that won't work, but here's some information that might help you find another way to accomplish your goal."

I love the "no, but" people. The "no, but" people understand that we all play for the same team, and that by taking a few extra seconds to help me be productive, they help themselves, too.

The only bad thing about the "no, but" people is that there aren't nearly enough of them.

Which kind are you?

Casually Hardcore

2009-11-07T01:29:00.002-06:00

Two terms that consistently show up when talking about playstyles are "Hardcore" and "Casual." But what do these words mean?

Lewis Pulsipher, in a blog post on Gamasutra, provided a list of examples of how Hardcore gameplay (and gamers) differ from a Casual style. Many of these examples are frequently cited when this Hardcore/Casual split is discussed. "Plays a long time" versus "prefers quick play sessions" is often mentioned, as is preferring challenging (Hardcore) over easy (Casual) games.

Chris Bateman has proposed some interesting definitions as well. For example, Hardcore = "gamer hobbyists" while Casual = "mass market," or Hardcore = "prefers a 'punishing' game" while Casual = "prefers a 'forgiving' game."

For my part, the one word I keep finding myself using in discussing Hardcore/Casual is "investment." The typical Hardcore player (as I see it) invests personally in the gameworld, while the classic Casual player is mostly or fully divested.

The Hardcore gamer is willing and able to talk about the gameworld as though it matters, and doesn't mind being seen as caring about the characters and places and internal rules of the gameworld. By contrast, it's almost always a Casual gamer who declares "it's just a game" and prefers to be perceived as holding it at (emotional) arms-length.

I suspect this notion of "investment" is one of the fundamental motivations that drive the actual behaviors of play that we see. It would explain why different gamers spend more or less playing time per session, and why they prefer deeper and more challenging games or simpler and easier-to-put-down games.

The Very Model of a Good Game Designer

2009-11-01T00:08:00.006-05:00

So what makes someone a good game designer?

Is it innate? Or can it be taught? What makes one game designer more effective than another? What the heck is "game design," anyway? What distinguishes it from, say, simulation design or bridge design or graphic design?

Here's my one-line definition of game design: game design is high-level systems design in an entertainment context.

To put it another way, a good game designer is someone who's good at creating core designs for systems intended to entertain people. And if that's true, then by implication the way to become a better game designer is to become better at high-level systems design.

A systems designer surrounds himself with knowledge about systems -- how they work, and how they fail to work. Because people love to create systems, that means studying human systems: economics, philosophy, history, politics, psychology. What enables a government to function, and under what conditions will it cease to function? What are the fundamental motivators of human behavior? Why do we call the notion of supply and demand a "law?" Are there patterns to the emergence, growth, and extinction of civilizations? Unlike most people, the systems designer never gets bored studying these things because all of them help to explain how systems satisfy their intended purpose(s) and how they fail to do so.

The good systems designer also studies science in order to understand the greatest of all creators of systems: nature.

Look at the head of a sunflower, and consider: why do the number of spirals of pips correspond specifically to numbers on the Fibonacci sequence? How do ecosystems maintain equilibrium? How do the strong nuclear force and gravity produce stable dynamic systems in a chaotic universe? I think what relates all these and other natural phenomena is simple to express: when you've got millions and billions of years to experiment, and you're not emotionally attached to any solution, eventually the systems you wind up with are going to be extremely efficient at satisfying their purpose because all the less efficient solutions were discarded.

The good systems designer is thus a student of natural science because nature is all about highly functional systems. They also study human organizational systems precisely because they are far less functional most of the time than natural systems -- human-designed systems provide powerful lessons on what doesn't work.

That's most of what a good game designer needs, I think. But the entertainment context matters, too. So I'd specify that a good game designer is a good systems designer who's played enough different kinds of games to understand "play" at a systemic level.

A couple of the best resources I've encountered on practical systems design are The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman and Systemantics by John Gall. Again, the true game designer, as a systems designer, studies all systems. They'll have read hundreds of books to try to glean practical rules of effective systems design. But anyone who thoroughly groks these two works in particular and has played enough games to perceive most of the patterns within the "game" context is probably as ready to be a successful game designer as anyone can be.

Ultimately, then, to find a good game designer, first find someone who understands systems at a deep level and who's familiar with game design patterns.

And then give that person a clear high-level vision document that says "what" but not "how," a list of resource constraints, and all the caffeinated beverages they can drink, and say to that person, "Yeah, I don't know, all the experts say it can't be done...."

Bartle, Keirsey, and Chris Bateman's DGD1 Gamer Demographic Model

2009-10-23T00:19:00.009-05:00

Introduction

On the advice of Richard Bartle, I picked up the book 21st-Century Game Design edited by Chris Bateman.

This book, in addition to later chapters on general game design, begins with a section that discusses playstyles. More specifically, it explores a "demographic game design" model (DGD1) of gameplay preferences and suggests how this model relates not only to the original four Bartle Types, but to Myers-Briggs personality types and Keirseian temperaments as well.

After working through the concepts, I believe I've been able to how the DGD1 model of play fits into the Myers-Briggs/Keirsey model of general personality. And if my notion that the Bartle types are an alternative formulation of the playstyle theories and models of Caillois, Lazzaro, and Edwards (among others), then the DGD1 model can be seen to integrate with those explanatory systems as well.

Before I go any further with this, I should note that I'm not forcibly wedging the DGD1 model into my own current articles of faith regarding a sort of One True Model of playstyles. Chris Bateman himself has provided the Myers-Briggs types and Keirseian temperament associations with the four proposed DGD1 playstyles -- in what follows, I am simply providing a visual representation of those claims.

Later on I'll have some comments that might fall into the category of original research; when that happens I'll clearly flag them as such.

The Demographic Game Design (DGD1) Model

Chris Bateman's DGD1 model begins by noting that certain Myers-Briggs types seem to cluster with respect to the behavior of players in games -- certain kinds of people like certain kinds of gameplay.

Based on demographic research, combined with the research of game publishers, Bateman's model starts with Hardcore and Casual players. From there, his model is expanded to recognize the existence of a second axis of play interests between freedom and what he calls "structure," and which he associates with the FP and TJ Myers-Briggs type combinations respectively. Finally, Bateman infers the existence of two additional styles associated with the FJ and TP type combinations.

The result of this data reduction is a model consisting of four playstyles, along with two general modes of play (Hardcore and Casual). Each of the four DGD1 playstyles is associated with four of the sixteen Myers-Briggs types, as well as with combinations of the four general temperaments defined by Keirsey. (Actually, Bateman uses the terms Tactical, Logistical, Strategic, and Diplomatic, each of which is treated by Bateman as an expression of playstyle associated with one of the four Keirsey temperaments.) And the Hardcore and Casual play modes are said to be associated with the Intuitive and Sensing preferences defined by Carl Jung, from whose work the Myers-Briggs types were developed.

In tabular form, the DGD1 model can be rendered as follows:

DGD1 STYLE	MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE	KEIRSEY "PLAYSTYLES"	KEIRSEY TEMPERAMENTS
1. Conqueror	INTJ, ENTJ, ISTJ, ESTJ	Strategic-Logistical	Rational (NT) - Guardian (SJ)
2. Manager	INTP, ENTP, ISTP, ESTP	Strategic-Tactical	Rational (NT) - Artisan (SP)
3. Wanderer	INFP, ENFP, ISFP, ESFP	Diplomatic-Tactical	Idealist (NF) - Artisan (SP)
4. Participant	INFJ, ENFJ, ISFJ, ESFJ	Diplomatic-Logistical	Idealist (NF) - Guardian (SJ)

The DGD1 Model Meets The "Big Model"

Based on these associations, it is possible to construct a diagram showing all of the elements that Bateman defined for his four playstyles as well as for the Hardcore and Casual modes. As I'll explain, the DGD1 elements fit naturally into the diagram of the four Keirseian temperaments as mapped onto the four Bartle types that I've been exploring, which (because I think the models of play developed by Roger Caillois, Nicole Lazzaro, and Ron Edwards are alternative versions of the same larger model of human personality) I've taken to calling the "big model":

The brief description of the DGD1 model, then, is that it neatly provides descriptions for the six possible modes of play formed by the six intersections among the four Keirsey temperaments -- or the four Bartle types and the other associated models of play if you accept my theory that all these models are analogous.

To say this another way, I believe the DGD1 model maps with extremely high fidelity onto my own four-quadrant "big model" that associates the four-quadrant original Bartle types with the four-quadrant general temperament model of David Keirsey (although my version of the four-quadrant temperament model is modified from Keirsey's version). In particular, I find it highly supportive of the suggested mapping of DGD1 onto the "big model" that the bottommost line on my diagram, which corresponds with the TJ Myers-Briggs type combination, is explicitly called "structure" by Bateman -- and that is precisely how I refer to that end of the vertical axis on my four-quadrant model. Similarly, the other end of that axis I refer to as "freedom," and Bateman seems to think of it in the same way, thus the DGD1 player "Wanderer" player type most closely associated with that FP type combination.

In a broader sense, the value of the DGD1 model (beyond any specific utility it can be shown to have in and of itself) is that it provides a direct response to one of the most common criticisms of the Bartle types model, which is that "no one is ever just one 'type' of player."

Without going into the details of why that charge is somewhat true and yet misleading (I favor a theory that most of us have one primary preference, two secondary preferences, and one avoided preference), the DGD1 model fills in the gaps between Bartle types. A player who knows that their preferred style of play is balanced between exploration and achievement, who was told they "didn't fit" the Bartle model, can now understand themselves to be representative of the Conqueror playstyle as described by the interstitial DGD1 model. Rather than invalidating the Bartle types, the DGD1 model helps to refine that model.

How the Hardcore/Casual Preferences Fit Into the "Big Model"

One final note regarding the DGD1 model (and this is where I get into my own interpretation of Chris Bateman's work, rather just giving an enhanced representation of what he provided in 21st-Century Game Design) concerns the Hardcore and Casual modes of play.

One of the most important distinctions in temperament theory is the difference between the preference for Intuition or Sensing. This preference describes whether a person prefers to check inside themselves (Intuition) or outside in the world (Sensing) for what really matters. So if the other elements of the DGD1 model are valid, then the assignment of the "Hardcore" players to the purely Intuition-oriented preference and "Casual" players to the purely Sensing-oriented preference can actually be read as relatively pure cases of Intuition-expressed gameplay or Sensing-expressed gameplay.

To test this, let's first consider the Casual gamer. These gamers, with their Sensing preference for what the world says, are likely to have world-oriented interests -- not only will their gameplay tend to be in shorter bursts because they have less time for games (because they're busy doing world-oriented things), when the conventions of society say that "playing games" is childish, Sensing persons are likely to accept that convention. Not surprisingly, then, Casual gamers take a casual attitude toward playing games out of concern that someone might discover their childish pleasure. Dipping only casually into games provides Sensing-oriented players with plausible deniability; they can claim that they never invested any real time or care in the game. Of all types, this is the one most likely to declare with utter conviction, "It's just a game."

By contrast, "investment" is precisely the word that best characterizes the Hardcore gamer. Where the Casual gamer is willing to "play in" a gameworld, the Hardcore gamer is eager to "live in" the gameworld. Where the Casual gamer objects to complex rules because it means they have to put in more time to learn the dynamics of game systems, the Hardcore gamer rejoices in complex game systems because they are interesting and feel more like a living environment. However, while Hardcore players may be willing to accept minor changes to the world of the game, they are much more likely to object strongly to major changes in the gameworld. Hardcore players put down roots; they come to understand a gameworld as a kind of home and invest in it as a familiar place... so if that sense of place is uprooted, the Hardcore player will never forgive those responsible, while the Casual player can shrug and move on to the next game.

One complicating factor here is that according to Myers-Briggs research, about 70% of the general population prefer Sensing. While this also supports the observation that the marketplace of Casual gamers is considerably larger than that of Hardcore gamers, this also means that the number of each kind of gamer is likely to be well-represented in online forums dedicated to particular games. This frequently leads to intense debates between Hardcore gamers who assume that their style of play will be respected by the game's designers and who expect the game to make intellectual and emotional sense, and Casual gamers who are equally certain that, because there are many more of them, the game's designers must cater to their interests which revolve around pure rules-based play: "it's just a game." Again, though, these arguments so often observed in game forums can be taken as supporting evidence for the existence of a Sensing/Intuition split among gamer attitudes that manifests as Casual or Hardcore expectations respectively.

Wait... Achievers Are Casual Gamers?

Having pointed out the apparent goodness of fit of the Hardcore/Casual divide with the Intuition/Sensing preference, there's one apparently glaring contradiction here: how can anyone say that an Achiever -- who usually has a strong preference for Sensing over Intuition -- is in any way a "Casual" gamer? Aren't these the people who will play a game for hours, weeks, months, until they've beaten it? Isn't that a form of investment?

I would say that it is... but it's not Hardcore investment in the gameworld, it's "beat the game" investment in generic competitive activity. In much the same way that Sensing-preferring individuals are more likely to enjoy playing team sports for the competitive challenge, while those who prefer Intuition -- if they enjoy sports at all -- are more likely to enjoy challenges that test their mettle as individuals. For example, while an Intuitive is more likely to enjoy climbing a mountain to enjoy the view from the summit, the Sensor is more likely to view the climb either as a race to see who can reach the top the fastest, or to see who can climb the most mountains.

In a gameplay context, this means that the Achiever who spends many hours every week playing the same game is not doing it in a Hardcore way because he feels a need to savor the experience internally -- he's doing it to beat the game, at which point (as a Casual gamer who doesn't invest in a game as a place) he's done with it. "Beating the game" may come in several forms for the Killers/Manipulators and Achievers on the Casual end of the spectrum. It may be literally reaching the end of a story-based game, or the end-game of a persistent-world game such as a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG). It may also be expressed through smaller competitive challenges, such as being the first player to obtain a particular rare item or to collect a certain number of such items; it may be to collect more of some item than any other player (such as currency); it may be to have the top entry on a leaderboard; it may be to "kill" new player characters until doing so no longer offers a sufficient adrenaline rush. In all these and similar cases, however, once the Casually competitive player's dominance has been accepted -- once the game of choice has been "won" -- the Casual player begins to lose interest and (unlike the Hardcore gamer) will rapidly disengage with that game, often without a backward glance.

Conclusion

In summary, then, while it bears repeating that no model of human behavior can ever be considered perfect, the real question is only whether a given model provides sufficient explanatory and predictive power to allow game designers to communicate usefully about what gamers in the aggregate want and why. Under that measure, I believe the combination of the Bartle/Lazzaro/Edwards+Keirsey model I've suggested with the DGD1 model of Chris Bateman produces an overall model of gamer preferences that does offer good explanatory and predictive power. The model adequately explains why different kinds of gamers consistently demonstrate specific kinds of preferences for certain gameplay forms. Although less evidence exists to support this conclusion, I believe this model can also reliably predict which large groups of gamers (not necessarily individual gamers) are likely to be attracted to particular gameplay forms.

Bearing always in mind that no model is perfect (and thus that perfect explanation or prediction are not reasonable standards against which to hold any model of gameplay preferences), this one seems sufficiently effective to me to warrant continued exploration. But as Richard Bartle says, if some other model can be shown to have better explanatory and predictive power, then I'll enthusiastically set this one aside in favor of the new model. What matters is not that I'm personally "right," but that all of us who are interested in making better games (and making games better) have the best possible tools at hand for that task. If someone can come up with a better model of gamer preferences, we all win.

Until then... this one seems to work.

An Alternative to Aggro

2009-09-02T01:29:00.001-05:00

I'm on record as opposing the mindless cloning of the "aggro" mechanic into new MMORPGs.

The expense of real-time collision detection was why the aggro hack was invented. Without it, NPCs could simply walk through burly front-line player characters in order to get at the chewy nougat center of the weaker characters behind them. So "aggro" was created as a quick and dirty gameplay mechanic that would allow front-line players to get NPCs to focus on them. It solved a problem by adding active gameplay content -- what could go wrong?

What went wrong was that the concept of the "fighter" was transmogrified into the tank role. Once that decision was made, it seemed perfectly natural to convert mages into damage-dealers and clerics into healers with crowd-control and buff/debuff support abilities.

And then other developers copied this mechanic for their games. They even "improved" on it to the point that aggro management has come to dominate not only character class/ability designs, it's now the default model for the combat play experience. A PvE fight in one of today's MMORPGs is not about smart tactical use of the local gameworld environment; it's about using character skills (like /taunt) that were explicitly created to "manage aggro."

So how does implementing this system in every new MMORPG make sense now that the technical limitations that led to that mechanic no longer exist? I believe it doesn't. With today's technology, proper collision detection and, more importantly, better combat AI can be implemented. The aggro mechanic survives now only through cargo cult game design, copying it because other developers have copies it, then rationalizing that decision by pointing to gamers who -- because they've been offered nothing else -- now believe and assert (loudly) that it's mandatory.

It's not. It's a convention, nothing more.

All that said, opposing something is easy. If I'm against aggro, what am I for? If I favor getting rid of it, what should replace it?

Until now I haven't really taken the time to suggest an alternative, which I think is a necessary element of constructive criticism. So this essay is an attempt to draft such an alternative. I don't think it's a complete solution, and I know it's not perfect. It's just one possible starting point.

AGGRO MANAGEMENT IS NOT COMBAT

"Aggro," for those new to this issue, is a combat AI mechanic used in most online games (MMORPGs in particular) to allow non-player characters (NPCs) to decide which player character to attack.

Aggro (defined as "hate" on Wikipedia) works basically like this: when an NPC needs to choose which character should be attacked next from a group of player characters, it consults an internal list of "aggression" values. For each player character in the group, the attacking NPC calculates an aggression value based on various qualities of and/or actions by that PC. It then aims its next attack at the PC with the highest aggression value. That player character is then said to have "aggro'ed" the attacking NPC.

The natural outgrowth of this aggro concept is that players will want to be able to do things to "manage" the aggro of attacking NPCs. The "tank" role comes first, because it's obvious that if players can control who gets aggro'ed, they'll want that aggro to stick to the character with the best defenses, leaving weaker characters unharmed and free to do other things like apply damage to the NPC or heal the tank. Group combat, then, gets defined in terms of role-based aggro management -- carefully choosing and timing actions to do as much harm to the enemy or as much help to one's group as possible without shifting aggro away from the tank PC.

My question is: when did people start confusing "managing aggro" with having an interesting tactical combat experience?

What in the world does "managing aggro" have to do with letting a group of players make intelligent and cooperative use of a rich set of environmental phenomena to achieve tactical superiority? How does the artificial and arbitrary gameplay of "aggro management" make any use whatsoever of the IP, the setting, on which a MMORPG is based? How is "performing actions intended to control the internal aggro calculation of an NPC" anything like "combat?"

If people think they like the aggro game, that's fine. People are free to like what they like. But the fact that some people like one particular solution to a game design question does not imply that it's the only possible solution. As gamers, we should be expecting game developers to look for more enjoyable solutions to game design questions, to try to create new and better solutions, not to merely clone mechanics that might work for some other gameworld. Importing the "aggro" mechanic from ground-based fantasy combat games into new games -- including even science fiction games -- presents the appearance of laziness.

So instead of aggro, I'd like to propose an alternative approach to NPC combat decision-making, which for lack of a better name I'm calling "cultural tactics."

CULTURAL TACTICS

Cultural tactics assumes the existence of a story. When there's a background story providing opportunities for narrative development, that story can and should be used to inform the behaviors of intelligent NPCs.

This is done by assigning cultural qualities to every non-player aggressor (NPA), such a non-player character or a tank or a spaceship. All individual NPAs will be defined as belonging to a primary culture. While some individual variation may be possible, those cultural qualities will tend to determine the choices that an individual NPA makes in any situation. Those choices may be about combat actions, or they may be about diplomatic actions or anything else the NPA is able to do. All possible forms of interaction with player characters would be produced by a goal-generating system whose rules would take as inputs the cultural attributes of the decision-making NPA, unique (probably randomized) attributes of the NPA, relevant aspects of the local environment (including perceptions of player character resources), and a desired goal state.

What's important to see here is what's not listed as an input to this decision-making system: player character actions. Getting good combat behavior out of an NPA actor does not require allowing players to directly manipulate that decision-making process. It might benefit from it in extended interactions, such as strategic-level conflict, but the typical short tactical fight does not require NPAs to use player actions as decision-making inputs.

As for offering that capability because it provides gameplay (e.g., aggro management), that's true, it does... but when that gameplay takes over, completely shifting the attention of players from interacting with elements of the gameworld to the manipulation of arbitrary rules that have nothing whatsoever to do with combat, then if that mechanic isn't required, it does not need to be implemented.

Cultural tactics would allow NPAs to have an appropriate and interesting degree of autonomy. Instead of being the pawns of players in gameplay that distracts from the gameworld, NPAs whose actions are based on attributes of the story-based culture to which they belong would choose combat targets in a way that tells us something interesting about who they are.

In a space game, for example, an NPA from a mindlessly aggressive culture might simply target the nearest ship. (Maneuvering into and out of an NPA enemy's range would thus be a viable combat tactic for groups of player characters up against ships commanded by members of such cultures.) An NPA honor culture might always try to target and destroy the strongest (however that's defined) player ship; a ship commanded by an NPA from a victory-at-any-cost culture might seek to destroy the weakest ships first.

A nasty pirate might go after the ship that appears to have the most/best weapons. A daring privateer could be culturally inclined to attack the ship that might carry the most interesting advanced technology. Members of a cybernetically enhanced culture that shares a hive-mind (you know who you are!) might simply attack randomly -- they're big enough not to care what the typical opponent looks like -- or they might look for whichever ship acted like the leader in order to disable the target group's command hierarchy.

LIFE AFTER AGGRO

The point behind all these examples is to show that aggro is irrelevant. Aggro is not necessary for non-player aggressors to be able to make interesting choices about whom to target. And getting rid of aggro serves the useful function of eliminating the bizarre focus of players on withholding their gameplay actions in order to avoid being noticed by a vastly stronger NPA foe, who then hammers their characters into pulp most instantly.

Without being forced to play the Aggro Management Game, players are free to engage in actual combat-relevant tactical decision-making: should I try to maneuver to my target's rear facing, or would it be better to try an alpha strike now? Can I use the particles in the nearby nebula in some interesting way? Is there something cool I can do with one of my weapons right now instead of having to hold my fire because it might make an NPA mad at me?

In summary, if the aggro mechanic works for other games, fine, but it is not required for every game. It can be discarded with no loss, and with considerable gain, since not having to withhold one's combat actions for fear of attracting damage-dealing attention allows more players to participate more frequently in the fun.

It also means they don't have to have all of their actions squeezed into the subset considered appropriate by some developer for a particular and narrowly-defined combat role like "tank" or "crowd control." That permits players much more freedom to play the combat game in the way that's most enjoyable to them.

Roles are still possible; the beauty of getting rid of aggro is that those roles can then be defined in ways that make more sense for the setting of a particular MMORPG. And even without aggro, NPAs are fully capable of selecting their targets in fun and meaningful ways.

If all that is accepted, then yes, I find it disappointing that MMORPG designers continue to clone the aggro mechanic for their games. If they really believe it's necessary, that's a shame. If they don't, it's a wasted opportunity to do something better. Either way, the concept of "aggro" is long overdue for retirement.

CONCLUSION

I'm under no illusion at this point that the producers/designers of any MMORPG under development will read this and think, "Say, you know, he has a point -- right, everybody stop what you're doing; we're going to re-do combat even if it means shipping four months later than planned!" I assume that the aggro mechanic and its tank/DPS/support handmaidens will be the default choice for the core combat model of every new MMORPG for years to come.

The point of proposing and explaining this alternative is therefore not to try to change the minds of big-studio game designers who clone MMORPG conventions as a risk-reduction technique, but to suggest to the newcomers that there's room for innovation here. By all means, look closely at the aggro management model of combat, analyze it, consider its first-order features and second-order effects within the context of your other game design choices, and use it if it makes sense for you... but also feel free to go with something else if aggro management doesn't feel right for your game.

Big-budget games that try to play it safe don't always succeed. So why not take a few carefully-considered risks and try something different, such as deep-sixing aggro in favor of a combat model that's actually related to combat? It's not like your odds of success will be much worse than those of the play-it-safe developer. :)

In fact, given the wealth of conventional MMORPGs available currently, this might be exactly the right time to break away from the pack in a few key areas of design.

Why not start with aggro?

The Archetypal Origins of MMORPG Group-Combat Roles

2009-08-27T19:27:00.010-05:00

In thinking about designing character classes in a MMORPG around the group-combat roles of tank/DPS/support, one of the things that's been lost is the relationship of these roles to distinct playstyles.

Each of these "holy trinity" roles is based on one of the basic functional classes of the original Dungeons & Dragons: fighter, mage, and cleric (healer) respectively. But we've forgotten that all of these roles were distilled from archetypes in fantasy fiction and heroic myths... and those archetypes were used to dramatize real differences between how people see the world.

So I'd like to take a look back at D&D to show how its classes, on which the roles and classes of most modern MMORPGs are based, are actually derived from mythical archetypes which recognize that people have distinctively different worldviews. And I'll then show how that understanding of gameplay roles as archetypes points the way toward designing better gameplay around those roles.

Back to the Past

The effectiveness of each of D&D's four basic types was determined in large part by one character attribute -- a different attribute for each type. I contend that this attribute was in fact a gameplay-driven abstraction of an archetypal pattern of behavior of characters in fantasy literature, which was based on heroic mythology, which in turn was a way of highlighting the behavioral styles of real people and their distinctively different ways of understanding and living in the world.

The correspondences between the four fundamental character classes and their controlling attributes are as follows:

Fighter	--	Strength
Mage	--	Intelligence
Cleric	--	Wisdom
Thief	--	Dexterity

(Constitution and Charisma were the two other primary attributes of characters in D&D, but they were not used as defining/controlling attributes for any class.)

It's easy to see how representing each of these four attributes with a number leads immediately to gameplay. But it's important to also see that each of these four attributes is an abstraction of a different personality style, and that part of the fun of playing a character whose abilities are determined by their "class" is playing with the stereotypical (but fundamentally realistic) patterns of behavior we all recognize in those styles.

A Question of Style

Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Dexterity each signify a different way of understanding -- and thus interacting with -- the world.

Strength represents the preference for attacking problems head-on, for directly pitting force against force. The archetypal Fighter prefers to keep things simple -- follow the rules, do your job, be compensated fairly, enjoy the rewards of success.

Intelligence is the hallmark of the Mage, whose prefers to solve problems by understanding them and applying the correct tool in the correct way to their resolution. Knowledge and understanding, represented in fantasy literature by mastery of the arcane arts, are the mage's preferred way of approaching the world.

Wisdom is the Cleric's goal. Wisdom, perhaps best understood as intuitively living in harmony with the world, wants all the beings in that world to live in harmony with their nature and with the overarching principles of rightness. The ability to heal others in both body and soul is a natural interest of this archetype.

Dexterity in any situation is the distinguishing feature of characters representing the Thief. Not only does this permit them to use tools with surpassing skill, it also defines a particular kind of worldview in which plans and rules are unnecessary. They're not nearly as much fun as making things up as you go and counting on your nimbleness and adaptability to get you out of any trouble.

By closely keying each of the abilities associated with a class to the archetypal features of the character attribute that defines that class, D&D accomplished two things.

First, it made roleplaying easy and fun. In a purely utilitarian sense, having characters with distinctively different kinds of abilities made the whole group better able to deal with different kinds of problems that could be encountered in the gameworld. But perhaps more importantly for a roleplaying game, when you played a mage character, the abilities of that class encouraged you and helped you to play that character in a way that "felt" like pretending to be an exemplar of that kind of personality style. Recognizing the distinct personal style that was represented by the class helped one to enjoy playing a character of that class.

Where We Are Now

That brings us back to today. In the decades-long process of transitioning from Strength/Intelligence/Wisdom/Dexterity to Fighter/Mage/Cleric/Thief, and thence to tank/DPS/support, we've lost several important things.

Most obvious is the loss of the Thief class, which represents the Rogue archetype. While letting players express this kind of "loose cannon" archetypal behavior through their character abilities might appear to be problematic in a PvP setting, eliminating it means losing access to both the fun of playing this risk-taking kind of character as well as dexterity-focused problem-solving techniques that can get your group out of a jam when nothing else will. What would Star Wars have been without Han Solo?

There is a more important loss, however, which is the understanding that these roles were once archetypal. Without that understanding, the implementations of these roles no longer link as strongly to the mythic archetypes. They can still be fun in a surface-level, number-crunching, mechanical kind of way -- tank attracts aggro, mage does damage, support class provides healing and crowd-control. But the deep joy of playing a "role" in the artistic, literary sense of expressing the behavior patterns of an archetypal pattern represented over several millennia of human mythology, is gone.

Into the Future

MMORPG developers can retrieve some of this fun by recognizing the human archetypes on which roles and classes are based, and by consciously designing the character abilities and gameplay content of their gameworld to once again express those archetypal styles of understanding and interacting with the world.

Tank/Fighter types and the game content associated with that style can be focused on the direct application of force, on collecting loot and badges, on simple leveling, and generally on the enjoyment of knowing the basic rules of play and following them for profit.

DPS/Mage characters and the content created for them can be developed to apply knowledge and perception to solving problems. The character's level of capability should be affected by how much the character knows about the gameworld and how well they're able to integrate that knowledge to respond to novel situations.

Support/Cleric characters and their content can be designed to highlight the importance to this archetype of wisdom in resolving problems of body and soul. Beyond healing and crowd control, this role could be much more interesting to play with the restoration of the understanding that it's based on an archetypal representation of the personality style that cares about other people.

And bring back the Rogue role! :)

Conclusion

The mythological bases of the tank/DPS/support roles prominent in today's MMORPGs appear to have been forgotten by their designers. While this is fine for a purely mechanical, numbers-based, follow-the-arbitrary-rules kind of game, it should be understood that the price tag for this approach to MMORPG design is high: players lose the joy of expressing their in-game actions as heroically distinctive characters. It's just about doing a job.

Archetypes link player behaviors to the heroic myths and legends of human history. The archetypes (along, of course, with the game's setting) should drive the abilities created, rather than abilities being generated without thought for consistency with playstyles. Recognizable patterns of behavior and diversity of problem-solving modes are directly connected to perceiving differences among playstyles as reflections of archetypal preferences. When roles aren't understood as reflecting distinctive playstyles, the abilities created for those roles feel generic; they're not as much fun.

Abilities should instead be designed to help players express archetypal behaviors. By returning to the roots of character ability design, in which the things that characters can be good at are structured around the fundamentally distinct attributes of legendary heroes, MMORPG designers can restore to players the pleasure of heroic play beyond mere number-crunching.

And once character abilities are focused on playstyles, the roles derived from those abilities will feel vastly more satisfying. The better that game designers can tap into those fundamental heroic archetypes, which haven't changed since the days of Homer's Iliad, the better their game will resonate with gamers looking for a heroic experience.

Game Development as Customer Satisfaction

2009-07-03T19:14:00.004-05:00

The Philosophy of Customer Retention

The creative side of game development is fun to talk about. A commercial game, however, whether a one-time product or a service like a MMORPG, has additional needs. In particular, it has to persuade people to choose to part with their money. And a development studio for commercial games, or for an online game, needs to make this persuasive case not just once, but repeatedly.

When it comes to repeat sales, I think successful non-game businesses may have something useful to offer game developers, and that's the concept of customer satisfaction as a conscious focus of daily business practices.

For commercial games, it's easy to think that "customer satisfaction" is some financial metric that can be left to the bean-counters: if a lot of units changed hands, if it made a lot of money, then customers must be satisfied. Making a game is just about doing your job of creating functional gameplay or art or audio; it's not about interacting with customers... right? Isn't that Marketing's job?

That might work. You could get lucky and wind up with a hit game, bringing you to the attention of many new customers. But what happens when you try to sell those customers another game product, or when you ask them to continue subscribing to (or microtransacting with) your game service?

What are you doing to keep customers once you get them so that your game development studio achieves a long-lasting state of continuous success instead of being remembered as a one-hit wonder?

Customer Satisfaction Defined

That's where customer satisfaction comes in. Far from being an after-the-fact affair, customer satisfaction works best when it's like water to a fish, when attention to satisfying customers is such an integral part of the organization's culture that no one even notices it any more.

So what does "customer satisfaction" mean? There's a simple functional definition: setting and meeting expectations.

Customers are satisfied when they understand what to expect from you, and when they get what they expected. An effective business, then, will take pains to define customer expectations properly, and then to meet those expectations consistently.

The Andy Unedited blog suggests four expectations that are common to all customers. I found them particularly interesting because each of them has direct application within the context of game development:

Customers expect accuracy. Visible bugs are the fastest and easiest excuse for rejecting your product. Don't give a potential customer that excuse.

Customers expect availability. For online games especially, you're providing a service in a competitive marketplace. If people can't access your service when it's convenient for them, they'll turn to someone else's. But even new single-player games need to become available on a regular basis from you so that customers can trust that you intend to meet their gaming interests over the long term.

Customers expect partnerships. Customers who sign up for a service want you to value their experience and listen to their opinions regarding that service. Customers know they have choices, and they expect you to remind them occasionally why you're still their best choice.

Customers expect advice. Gamers tend to object to feeling "forced" to do anything in a game, but they do expect you to guideposts that help them find the content that matters most to them.

So which of these expectations are being met where you work, and which aren't? Which of these things are you treating as a personal responsibility to increase customer satisfaction? Before you say, "that's not my job," are you sure there's nothing you can do to contribute to it?

In short, what have you added that communicates to everyone who spends their hard-earned money on your game that you value them as a customer and you want their business in the future?

On the Virtues of Plussing

A "thank you" screen at the end of a credit sequence (especially the ones that are twenty minutes long) is not sufficient. Focusing on making functional gameplay or art or audio is not enough. All your competitors are doing those things.

A memorable product -- a product whose creators, from bizops to programming, were consciously focused on customer satisfaction -- is one that has been made just a little bit better in every single feature. There's even a term for this, which comes from Walt Disney and has been picked up by such successful creative houses as Industrial Light & Magic and Pixar: "plussing." Everything gets created to meet its functional requirements... and then everything gets plussed in some way.

This isn't just some feel-good, buzzword-bingo "quality" statement that everyone just winks at. It's a proven tool for achieving customer satisfaction because it doesn't take the customer for granted. Plussing as a corporate policy is an understanding that customers will notice and appreciate extra effort.

When plussing is practiced by everyone in a creative shop, when it's so deeply embedded in the corporate culture that people actually compete to see who can most effectively plus their contributions to every product, customers notice. They may not recognize individual contributions, but the product as a whole will shine... and that, they do notice. Assuming the product meets their functional expectations, customers will remember that developer positively when considering whose future games are likely to meet their expectations of getting value for their money.

Summary

To sum up, the ultimate responsibility of everyone making a commercial game is to customer satisfaction. And everyone in the group can contribute to that goal by committing to making everything they do just a little bit better than it has to be.

Given the choice between a game whose developers did only what was necessary, and a game whose developers took personal responsibility for making everything they did a little better, which do you think you'd be likely to find more satisfying?

Breeding Better NPC Opponents

2009-04-23T15:33:00.004-05:00

During the course of a discussion on specific gameplay mechanics that could be used to define the challenge level of NPC opponents in a space combat game, one of the ideas involved eliminating NPC ships that don't perform well. That got me thinking -- how interesting would it be to work out a more-or-less evolutionary model for letting NPC opponents get better over time?

What follows is a first cut at a system for letting NPC ships "breed" themselves into combat excellence. It's not intended to be The Perfect Solution -- it's just some starter ideas to beat up on.

It's In Your Genes

The first step is to define the "genes" of NPC ships. These would be a set of fields corresponding to types of actions that an NPC ship could take, where each action type could have several possible values corresponding to specific kinds of actions of that type.

Here's one possible set of NPC ship genes:

maneuver

1 = maintain close range
2 = kite (circle opponent at medium range)
3 = maintain long range
4 = hide behind cover between attacks
5 = randomly jink

offense

1 = fire when 3 or more weapons are ready
2 = fire any weapon as soon as it's ready
3 = fire only when facing opponent's weakest shield

focus

1 = review targeting every ten seconds
2 = review targeting every minute
3 = never change active target

aggressiveness

1 = maximize power to life support
2 = maximize power to auxiliary systems
3 = maximize power to engines
4 = maximize power to shields
5 = maximize power to weapons

mercy

1 = allow opponent to run away
2 = allow opponent to surrender
3 = no quarter asked or given

defense

1 = turn to keep all shields evenly charged
2 = turn to keep forward shield overcharged and facing strongest opponent
3 = turn to keep weakest shield away from strongest opponent

targeting_focus

1 = personal targeting only
2 = if grouped and internal damage = 0%, group targeting, else personal targeting
3 = if grouped and internal damage < 75%, group targeting, else personal targeting
4 = group targeting only

personal_targeting

1 = target strongest opponent
2 = target weakest opponent
3 = target nearest opponent

group_targeting

1 = target same shield of same opponent targeted by nearest allied ship
2 = target weakest opponent firing at weakest group member
3 = target strongest opponent firing at weakest group member
4 = target nearest opponent firing at weakest group member

self_preservation

1 = take defensive action when internal damage > 25%
2 = take defensive action when internal damage > 75%
3 = fight until victory or destruction

defensive_action

1 = run
2 = surrender

crew_morale (not really a gene... exactly)

1 = 25% bonus to effectiveness
2 = 50% bonus to effectiveness
3 = 75% bonus to effectiveness
4 = 100% bonus to effectiveness

What other genes would be appropriate/useful/fun? Code Is Law The next step is to define the code that uses these genes to select the "fittest" NPC ships for future generations. Since NPC ships will always need to actively exist in the gameworld, it's not possible to follow the usual GA approach of performing all genetic actions on the entire current population in clear-cut "generations." Instead, breeding new ships will have to occur in an asynchronous way, and the only way to determine the population's characteristics will be to take a snapshot at some arbitrary moment in time.

#POOL = 10000 #MUTATION_RATE = 95 fight(): // do combat stuff according to genetic predispositions with some random variance as appropriate // for example, "close in" maneuvering would have the ship randomly move to remain within a short range of the target ship if NPC ship survived the fight increment "winner" field in ship table for this ship if crew_morale gene < 4 increment crew_morale gene by 1 else if crew_morale gene > 1 decrement crew_morale gene by 1 spawn_new_ship(type, tier): select into temp table the #POOL ships from the desired type/tier table with the largest "winner" field value randomly select first_ship from temp table if random > #MUTATION_RATE% new_ship = mutation(first_ship) else randomly select second_ship from temp table new_ship = crossover(first_ship, second_ship) add new_ship to NPC ship table with "winner" field value set to 0 spawn new_ship mutation(ship): create newship randomly pick one gene of "ship" randomly change the selected gene's current value to a different value return(newship) crossover(ship1, ship2): create newship, newship1, newship2 randomly select the number of genes to swap (any number from 1 to 1/2 [rounded down] of the total number of genes) randomly select the specific genes to swap newship1 = selected genes from ship1 + selected genes from ship2 newship2 = unselected genes from ship1 + unselected genes from ship2 newship = randomly pick either newship1 or newship2 return(newship)

Questions On Genetics Naturally there'll be questions about some/all of this! I have some myself, such as: how would the usual "culling" function work in an asynchronous breeding model? Would it happen naturally as a side-effect of allowing only the most successful #POOL of ships to "breed" new ships? (I suspect so, but I'm open to other opinions.) Is 10,000 ships too small a number for a breeding pool given the number of fights with NPC ships that are likely in a normal day's worth of many people playing the game? What's the right number to create a fitness metric that leads to a satisfying rate of breeding better (not just different) ships? Should this number be one thing when the game launches and change to something else later? Is a 5% mutation rate too high or too low? Should this number be one thing when the game launches and change later? Would this system eventually lead to too few different types of ships? How long would it take to reach that point? How could this system be tweaked to avoid this problem? Do non-Tactical ships need any special bonuses in order to avoid becoming extinct? Should there be some fitness metric other than "combat winner" that non-Tactical ships would use to allow them to breed better new ships? What genes should non-Tactical ships have, and what version of the fight() function would test their fitness? At what point should the breeding process be stopped? When will opponent ships be "good enough?" Could they ever become "too good?" Application of an NPC Opponent Breeding Program Having considered just the core mechanics of an "opponent breeding program," it's also true that while a gameplay mechanic might be cool on its own merits, in an actual game it needs to be fun for anyone who's likely to experience it. So let's consider now some of the meta-level design possibilities for how to make a "ship-breeder" mechanic like the one we've been knocking around here fun for all players who engage in ship combat. There might actually be a simple solution: impose a rule that new kinds of ships get created through breeding only 5% of the time. In other words, most of the time when the game needs to spawn a new hostile NPC ship, it can randomly instance a ship of the appropriate tier, win/loss ratio, and (perhaps) type from the current table of ships. (Did I not mention that each ship would store the numbers of times it has won and lost battles with players? Silly me. ) This would satisfy the usual "appropriate for your ability level" requirement for spawning opponents. Note, however, that this is still pretty simplistic. For one thing, it assumes that only one opponent is being spawned, rather than considering how multiple opponents could produce a desired challenge level. And it doesn't address at all the issue that spawning a new kind of ship through breeding might sometimes produce a ship that's either bizarrely stupid or unexpectedly clever -- that's a problem if one of the high-level design goals for challenges is that they always be close to the ability level of the character/player for whom those challenges are being spawned. (Side note: by "ability level" I mean a general capability of the player/character/ship/crew combination in combat -- I am NOT talking about some magical "character level" or "mob level," two things I hope with great enthusiasm never to see anywhere in any online game I'm otherwise looking forward to playing. Dynamically generating a numeric challenge rating from multiple sources -- character rank and skills + (ship tier/type * current_readiness) + (crew skills * crew morale), for example -- is appropriate in order to be able to create/select appropriate challenges on the fly. I even support providing a text designation roughly describing any combatant's challenge/capability level, such as "Commander-level" or "Admiral-level." But to turn those into static numbers... "I'm a Level 37 -- ooh, look, there's a Level 28 mob!" I don't believe it would feel right for this particular game for that to be the standard way that every player thinks of and talks about the difficulty level of problems, whether tactical or engineering or scientific in nature. OK, side note over. ) Another possible issue with the ship-breeding mechanic is that over a long time the population of "successful" ships stored in the ships table might become much larger than the number of average- or poor-performing ships. At that point the only "dumb" ships (i.e., really easy challenges) that players would ever see would be the 5% spawned by genetic chance (and a small number of those might turn out to be really smart). So if most ships at various tiers/types are generally "smart" (in other words, good opponents at any challenge level), would be be a problem? Or a win? Are there other issues that should be considered when thinking about how to actually integrate into a MMORPG a genetic mechanic for breeding better opponents? Thanks for considering these ideas!

Timmy, Johnny, and Spike Meet the Bartle Types

2009-04-15T13:48:00.004-05:00

I recently noticed an article by Mark Rosewater for Magic: The Gathering in which he discussed player types (or, as Rosewater calls them, psychographic profiles).

This was a December 2006 expansion of a previous article, which proposed three types of playing styles -- that is, three player types -- for Magic: The Gathering: Timmy, Johnny, and Spike. As Rosewater describes these types in the updated article:

Timmy wants to experience something. Timmy plays Magic because he enjoys the feeling he gets when he plays. What that feeling is will vary from Timmy to Timmy, but what all Timmies have in common is that they enjoy the visceral experience of playing.

... Johnny wants to express something. To Johnny, Magic is an opportunity to show the world something about himself, be it how creative he is or how clever he is or how offbeat he is. As such, Johnny is very focused on the customizability of the game. Deck building isn't an aspect of the game to Johnny; it's the aspect.

Spike plays to prove something, primarily to prove how good he is. You see, Spike sees the game as a mental challenge by which he can define and demonstrate his abilities. Spike gets his greatest joy from winning because his motivation is using the game to show what he is capable of. Anything less than success is a failure because that is the yardstick he is judging himself against.

In the update, Rosewater goes on to further break down each of these three styles into four subgroups:

Timmy: Adrenaline Gamers, Power Gamers, Diversity Gamers, Social Gamers

Johnny: Uber Johnnies, Combo Players, Offbeat Designers, Deck Artists

Spike: Analysts, Tuners, Innovators, Nuts & Bolts

Reading the names and descriptions of these subgroups, I had that very familiar feeling of seeing another iteration on the four original player types proposed by Richard Bartle. Each of the four subgroups for all three MtG styles sounded very much like one of the Bartle types, simply zoomed in a bit to be specific to each of the MtG styles.

Based on Rosewater's effectively characterized descriptions of all twelve subgroups, it was surprisingly easy to see each one aligned with one of the Bartle types. (Naturally, that's "Bartle types as I understand them." None of this has been endorsed by Richard; all interpretations and extensions of his player types model described in this blog are my own and should not be blamed on anyone else.)

Bartle	Timmy	Johnny	Spike	Goal of Play
Killer [Manipulator]	Adrenaline Gamers	Uber Johnnies	Analysts	plays for the sensation
Achiever	Power Gamers	Combo Players	Tuners	plays for the win
Explorer	Diversity Gamers	Offbeat Designers	Innovators	plays for mastery
Socializer	Social Gamers	Deck Artists	Nuts & Bolts	plays for self-expression

(Note that this chart should be considered an extension of Styles of Play: The Full Chart showing the deep correspondences I believe exist between several theories of personality and player styles.)

As always, it's possible that I'm seeing just what I want to see here. But considering how very neatly each of the four subgroups for the Timmy, Johnny and Spike styles matched up with the four Bartle types (at least to my perception), I have to wonder whether Rosewater deliberately drew from the Bartle types to create the various subgroups.

Whether he consciously adapted the Bartle types to his three-style psychographic model or not, I thought the juxtaposition of these models was interesting enough to be worth mentioning. There are many styles of play for many kinds of games and gamers; I'm fascinated by the possibility that there might be some utility in recognizing four deep patterns of play in particular.

Is Mark Rosewater's assessment of styles of play in Magic: The Gathering yet another confirming instance for this theory?

Is There Now a Language of Game Design?

2009-04-02T10:41:00.001-05:00

In "Analysis: The 5 Major Trends of GDC 2009," Gamasutra editor Chris Remo mentions a particular exchange between veteran game creators Will Wright and Warren Spector:

Warren Spector and Will Wright observed that indie developers are exploring design avenues that are nearly impossible for older designers to have conceived, because younger indies are building on a lifelong fluency.

"It’s like we developed this language we had to learn as non-native speakers," said Wright of his generation of designers. "They grew up with that language."

"They're almost like commentary on the games that have come before," Spector offered.

As I read it, this is the notion that today's game designers are inheriting (and fluently speaking as natives) an immediately usable language of gameplay mechanics that until now has had to be invented on the fly.

That's a wonderfully provocative comment. (Actually, I suspect it explains not only a good deal about the success of W.W. and W.S., but also why it's great to have them on conference panels!)

Some random reflections:

1. The "language" W.W. mentions seems to be more at the level of design patterns than the atomic-level game grammar that Raph Koster, among others, has been exploring. That's not to undercut the potential value of being able to reduce gameplay to low-level factors; it's more a recognition that the working language of a designer may usually be at the higher chunking level of patterns.

2. In terms of expressive capability and maturity, how does this game design language compare to the language of film direction? After a hundred years of movie-making, film directors today have a rich, specific, and broadly-understood vocabulary of verbs and nouns to work with -- how near or distant to that standard is today's language of game design?

3. How dependent on the computing, networking, and presentation technologies is the language of game design? Do non-computer games (such as tabletop RPGs) have useful "words" that today's computer game designers might not be aware of? Or is most of the utility of computer game design patterns driven by what the technology allows, in which case, what happens to a language of game design when the technology changes radically (as OnLive may do, which W.S. noted)?

4. As the flip side of the previous question, do some words in the language of game design ever die? That is, are there some game design patterns that are permanently abandoned? If so, why and how does that happen?

5. What's left to invent? Considered solely on its own merits, how complete is the current language of game design? Are there any obvious gaps; are there useful intentions and directions that are currently hard to communicate even between experienced designers?

6. Can new words in the functional language of game design simply be made up through conversation or general writing? Or must each new word prove its utility by being implemented in a game or games? Does the popularity of a game have anything to do with whether a new game design word is perceived to have enough value to enter the lexicon? Should it?

7. To put the above question in a different context, who invents new words in the language of game design? Game designers? Or non-designing game players?

In My Ideal Star Trek MMORPG....

2009-03-31T15:21:00.002-05:00

The question came up on the official Star Trek Online forum of what our "ideal Star Trek Online experience" would look like.

After some thought, I realized that I did, in fact, have some fairly specific items on my wish list for this particular online gameworld. This essay is an enhanced version of the items I noted in that original list.

Before I go any further, it's important for those reading this to understand that the things I ask for describe only the gameplay experience I consider personally optimal. They're not necessarily what I think the play experience should be for all players... though I do believe -- and numerous comments on the STO forum confirm -- that I'm not the only person who'd enjoy playing the Star Trek MMORPG whose key features are outlined below.

So, that being said: in my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, I'd like to be able to log in and enjoy gameplay that engages my head and my heart as much as my hands.

In my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, the iconic elements of Star Trek would be the starting point for developing gameplay. Conventional MMORPG mechanics (such as the class/level model of character advancement or the combat-centric tank/DPS/support+aggro roles) would under no circumstances be mindlessly cloned from other games and simply renamed with Star Trek terms. Let the mechanics of this game be inspired by what's uniquely fun about Star Trek. If it's fun gameplay, then it's fun gameplay regardless of whether other games do it or not.

In my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, the game would launch with a balance of combat and non-combat content, and the developers would commit to sustaining that balance throughout the lifespan of the game in all of the patches and expansions released. The gameworld would be designed to be experienced through the functional disciplines of Science/Medical, Tactical/Security, Engineering/Ops, and Command/Helm (and their non-Starfleet faction equivalents). There would always be roughly equal amounts of content available for every one of these four distinctively Star Trek modes of play throughout the entire advancement path of a character.

In my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, the rules of play for Starfleet-faction characters would actively promote the emergence of cooperative, creative, perceptive, thoughtful, and supportive behaviors in my fellow players. I'm tired of games that are nothing but nonstop killing and mindless chest-thumping competition; the gameplay in my ideal Star Trek Online would reward Starfleet characters in proportion to the degree to which they work with each other to defend and promote their factional values of reason, tolerance, curiosity and cooperation.

In my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, Starfleet is the primary faction, and the core principles of the Federation (including tolerance and respect for the individual person and for other cultures) are unreservedly and unapologetically presented as the "right" principles when they are forced to come into conflict with competing principles. Non-Starfleet factions, beginning with the Klingon Defense Force, will be presented as having their own distinctive and consistent internal logic, and faction-related content will be created to be fun for those players who create characters in those factions. But Star Trek always focused on Starfleet, and my ideal Star Trek MMORPG would do likewise.

In my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, exploration would be the primary gameplay motivator for Starfleet characters. Physical exploration would be supported by a large or semi-infinite number of star systems and worlds (whether pregenerated or generated on the fly). Intellectual and emotional discovery would be provided by a profusion of lifeforms and civilizations that can be discovered on new worlds and in space, all of which have highly varied characteristics, and the process of cataloguing these characteristics would be implemented as enjoyable gameplay. These variations would also be used to spark story-based gameplay in the Star Trek mode. The quest to expand knowledge would be valued as fun in and of itself, and not solely for its value in economic competition.

In my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, many of the places and objects, lifeforms and cultures, and looks and sounds from Star Trek episodes will be replicated with reasonable fidelity and respect. The art and the lore -- the "feel" of Star Trek -- would be treated as though it was important to get it right. The "worldiness" of a MMORPG is no less important to me than the rules-based play set within that world, and in my ideal Star Trek MMORPG world content will not always be the loser in any conflict between the needs of "live in" and "play in."

In my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, both space and planetary surfaces would be rich in environmental phenomena. These phenomena would be the particles, energies and other natural and artificial effects mentioned in the many episodes of Star Trek, most or all of which would have specific action-oriented functional effects on the characters and objects in the gameworld. Making these phenomena an active part of all environments in a Star Trek MMORPG would provide outstanding support for multiple forms of play: visual beauty, surveying and cataloguing, storytelling, puzzle-solving, and tactical combat.

In my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, the characters matter as people. Understanding them as people, discovering their similarities to us as well as their differences, would be recognized as being both good Star Trek and good gameplay. Accordingly, this game would allow me to explore those similarities and differences through emotionally engaging stories. The stories in my ideal Star Trek MMORPG would be about things that matter. They would never be didactic, telling players what to think or feel, nor would the NPCs through whom these stories are told ever be used as mouthpieces for some developer's personal political opinions. The storytelling in my ideal Star Trek MMORPG would treat players as adults who are capable of feeling and thinking like adults, and giving us opportunities to do so through interacting with well-characterized NPCs in storylines that resonate with all of us as human beings.

In my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, science and engineering in particular would be treated with respect and appreciation. Gameplay involving the Science and Engineering divisions of Starfleet (and their non-Starfleet counterparts) would be created by people who understand science and engineering and appreciate their importance in the Star Trek universe. The developers assigned the task of designing and building gameplay around the Science and Engineering divisions would be enthusiastic about the opportunity to create constructive, creative, logic- and technology-based gameplay in a massively multiplayer persistent-world environment.

In my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, the starship is the central mechanism through which the content of the gameworld is accessed and experienced. Starships would be implemented with some key locations rendered as interiors; players would experience shipboard activities as an avatar interacting with other avatars in 1st- or 3rd-person perspective; and while no player would be forced into a support role on someone else's ship, friends who want to play together on one ship in specific roles would be able to do so. Away team missions would let players enjoy highly varied environments as a way to break up the shipboard play experience, but one's starship (of which there should be only three or perhaps four during a character's lifespan) should always feel like "home."

In my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, starships would be implemented as complex systems. That doesn't mean complicated interfaces, nor does it imply constant micromanagement -- it means that there would be depth in the functional behaviors of the subsystems and interconnections between subsystems that comprise the incredible artifact of advanced technology that is a working starship. Implementing starships as complex functional systems would create opportunities to solve problems in thoughtful and clever ways through the perceptive and creative use of those technological systems.

In my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, the high-level design of all combat systems would be assigned to someone who actually understands the military arts, preferably in both personal and theoretical settings. "Combat" would be understood to be not merely the artificial one-versus-one duels or small-group "boss fights" of other MMORPGs, but as tactical, operational, and strategic levels of lethal conflict in which each level requires and rewards very different playstyle interests. Combat in my ideal Star Trek MMORPG would be designed from the ground up to distinguish between these styles of conflict resolution and make each one a distinct area of gameplay that supports and enhances the others.

In my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, operational gameplay (helping to lead groups and player fleets) and strategic gameplay (long-term, wide-area management of resources valuable to one's faction) would be gameplay modes that are consciously designed to be distinct from tactical gameplay. The ranks in each faction would be keyed to each of these three gameplay modes, with the rank of Captain being the normal endpoint for advanced tactical play. Players would never be forced to accept promotion beyond Captain, which would shift them out of tactical play and into operational or strategic play, but those players who wished to take on greater levels of responsibility for the fun of other players would be supported by the rank structure and the overall design of conflict-based gameplay.

In my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, starship combat would be designed to play out over a span of several minutes, with many opportunities for true tactical gameplay through applying the various technological systems and crew capabilities of a mighty starship to the environmental phenomena that exist in a particular location. Engagements would last long enough for smart decision-making to play a much more meaningful role in resolving combat situations than just who's got the bigger stick (as in current MMORPGs).

In my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, crafting would be implemented as a game of constructive creativity that is fun in and of itself, not as a game of manufacturing and sales where your gameplay products only have whatever value other players give them. While it can make perfect sense for other games, in my ideal Star Trek MMORPG crafting would absolutely not be a game of using fleet resources to crank out thousands of identical products to try to "win" some economic competition. Instead, there would be a limited game economy in which players are encouraged to use their personal creativity and the skills of their characters to individually handcraft new things for trade to other player characters.

In my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, all of these things would be designed and implemented to create a total gameplay experience that is highly satisfying to people with different playstyles. Those who enjoy the simple competition/accumulation-oriented play so prominent in current MMORPGs would definitely be able to enjoy that kind of content in my ideal Star Trek MMORPG. Competition and the (limited) accumulation of value items are important aspects of the human condition and deserve a place in a well-developed gameworld. But in my ideal Star Trek MMORPG, competitive/destructive gameplay will never be allowed to dominate the gameworld to the exclusion of cooperative/constructive content. Both are fun; and in the game I'd like to play, both would be energetically supported with a long-lasting balance of enjoyable content.

Those are the main things I personally would like to see in Star Trek Online.

Am I going to be disappointed to some degree when the Star Trek MMORPG that Cryptic is making finally ships? Sure. But I expect there'll also be plenty of things from this list that do appear in their game.

Hey, I can take "yes" for an answer. :)

Does Every Gamer Really Want WoW's "Directed Gameplay?"

2009-03-30T14:45:00.003-05:00

In a presentation at GDC 2009 [note: this links to some salty language], Wrath of the Lich King gameplay director Jeffrey Kaplan discussed a number of issues in quest design that the Lich King team considered to be problems. Kaplan says that all of these issues are things that Blizzard will be actively avoiding in all future quest designs.

Examples of these perceived quest design defects are:

The Christmas tree effect: quest hubs activate lots of quests, which players take in any order that they like.

Too long, didn't read: most WoW players skip even the 511 characters Blizzard allows for quest text, so why bother?

Medium Envy: "Art, literature, drama, film, song have all embraced story" but gamers don't care about any of that artsy stuff.

Mystery: "[E]ven if you're on a mystery story, we should never going to put you on quest where we say 'Something's wrong in [the forest]. Go figure it out.' At the end of the day it needs to say 'go kill this dude, go get this item.'"

Why am I collecting this [stuff]? "You never want the player to even think somebody made the game. You want the player to think only of himself."

My reaction is that all the things Kaplan describes as problems probably make sense for Blizzard. Blizzard has enthusiastically embraced the "directed gameplay" notion of game design, in which no player at any time ever lacks a blindingly obvious answer to the question, "What do I do next?" All of Blizzard's new content, including quests, is being designed to be consistent with that assumption that everyone who plays World of Warcraft needs their moment-to-moment gameplay to be strongly directed by Blizzard.

Is that really a good assumption for all other MMORPGs?

Should all of the quests and other content of every MMORPG be designed so that no player at any moment in time is ever in any doubt about what they're "supposed" to do next?

Or is there room in the MMORPG industry for games that provide guidance and assistance but not constant direction?

For my part, I think of these two service models as similar to those of the late Circuit City and Ikea, respectively. Forget for a moment about the products sold: think about the shopping experience.

I used to hate going into a Circuit City, so much so that I simply stopped going there years ago, because I detested being swarmed by vulture-like "sales associates" who wanted to direct my consumer experience. They treated everyone as uninformed, and they pushed their ideas of what was desirable on every consumer. No sale, thanks.

By contrast, I love the Ikea shopping experience -- there is an incredible wealth of products to explore, each of which is clearly described. On the rare occasion when a customer needs assistance, it's easy to find the centrally-located customer service area. When I shopped at Ikea, the low-pressure environment allowed me to find specific things that I wanted in my own time, and through exploration I often found (and bought) things I didn't even know I wanted.

I'm not suggesting that following the "we'll tell you what you really want" Circuit City approach will cause WoW to fold like Circuit City did. Obviously there are a lot of gamers who are perfectly happy being told one place to go and one thing to do at a time.

What about the gamers who value choice and freedom and the ability to explore a gameworld in their own way and at their own speed?

WoW already exists for the gamers who like lots of direction.

Why should every MMORPG try to compete with that service delivery model when there's an alternative model that can satisfy gamers who are willing and able to direct themselves?

Engineering Crafting Modes in a Star Trek MMORPG 2

2009-03-26T12:13:00.003-05:00

As a result of some discussions, I've updated my design concepts for Engineering-oriented crafting in Star Trek Online.

REVISIONS

There are two key changes:

added Fabrication mode -- how do devices get created in the first place?
changed Maintenance mode to Optimization mdoe -- "maintenance" implied "recover from item decay"

To help keep these modes clear, I turned to my industry experience -- I came with an acronym. :)

Fabrication
Optimization
Repair
Enhancement

FORE!

So the overall model for how Engineering crafting might work in a MMORPG based on Star Trek is as follows:

Fabrication: create a device with standard capabilities using standard components
Optimization: modify the internal connections between components to improve the numeric performance of a device's or system's current capabilities
Repair: fix or replace damaged or destroyed components to restore basic functionality of a device or system
Enhancement: replace standard components with exotics or add optional components to give a device or system non-standard capabilities

PRESENTATION

To allow the player to easily learn and perform all of these gameplay functions, a single presentation system would be used.

The main window would display an aesthetic dark gray representation of the type of device being created or device/system being modified. This representation would be surrounded by numerous slots for the components of which that device or system is comprised. Any fully functional components already placed into component slots would be displayed with a green background; damaged components would be shown in yellow; and destroyed components would appear with a red background.

A side window would display a tree-structured hierarchy of device types and components, which can be double-clicked or dragged into the main window to be displayed there. Existing components in the character's personal inventory will be visually distinguished from standard components that can be replicated.

The main window would also display connections between components. (It will be useful if every device/system always requires at least two or three connections so that the player will understand that they exist.) Players will be able to click on the ends of connections between components to move those ends to different components.

Finally, there should also be two display-only subwindows. One would present a graphical depiction of the device as it will look when the crafting process is complete, and the other will display textual and numeric information describing the device's functional characteristics.

GAMEPLAY

In practice, several of the Engineering crafting modes would interlace. A character wanting to create, modify or repair a device would bring up the crafting interface, which would consist of four subwindows within one overall window.

For example, maybe your character, who has specialized in Engineering, is asked to provide to a newly-encountered culture a genetic sequencing analyzer for medical research that is capable of an 93% level of codon discrimination. If you weren't an Engineer, you could look to buy or contract for the creation of such a device. But since you're an Engineer, you figure you'll try to create such a device yourself.

You check your manifest and find that you don't have an existing analyzer that you could Enhance or Optimize to a 93% discrimination level. So you decide to Fabricate one from scratch. You pull the schematic from the Federation Engineering database, and replicate the standard components you need... but the resulting analyzer provides only an 89% level of codon discrimination.

So you start Optimizing the device by tweaking the internal connections between the components of the analyzer, trying to find a combination that improves the codon discrimination level (preferably without degrading any other feature too badly). Eventually you're able to see the pattern, and your analyzer develops a 95% discrimination level. Now you can give the analyzer to the appropriate NPC.

Alternately, you might have chosen to try to Enhance a standard genetic analyzer with non-standard components, some of which could provide a bonus to codon discrimination (though possibly to the detriment of some other operational capability).

Should the analyzer break for some reason, a character could attempt to Repair it. The player would right-click on the device and select "crafting" (or a more Star Trek-y term) to bring up the crafting window. The standard window would appear, and any damaged or destroyed components would be easily visible through the color-coding described above. The player would then be able to attempt to repair damaged components (perhaps via some minigame). Alternately, the player could choose to replace damaged or destroyed components by replicating standard components and dragging them into the appropriate component slots, or to replace damaged or destroyed components with non-standard components from the character's personal inventory. (Another way to look at this is as Fabrication or Enhancement mode gameplay, just on an existing device or system rather than a new device.)

Note: in this system, I'm assuming that players would be able to Fabricate new devices, but not new systems. I'm thinking of "systems" as large fixed installations, either on the ground, in a starbase, or mounted on a starship. Players would be able to Optimize, Enhance, and Repair such systems, but creating large systems from scratch should probably not be part of player crafting -- new systems should, I think, come from a different gameplay interface. For ships, this would be a "ship customization" interface. Once a ship system is installed, a character would then be able to attempt to Optimize, Enhance, or (when necessary) Repair it.

DESIGN NOTES

"Surprise"

One of the goals of this design is to support both the reliable crafting of specific objects as well as "creative" crafting.

Reliability depends on the same inputs, connected in the same ways, always producing the same output -- that is, devices that always have the same functional characteristics. Since there's nothing random about this model of Engineering crafting, reliability is guaranteed. The internal rules by which specific inputs lead to specific outputs may be quite complex, but they would be invariant.

At the same time, the complexity -- or "depth" -- of those internal transformation rules would, in combination with having a very wide range of input components and component characteristics, allow for the possibility of surprise. Trying a new component or a new way of connecting components should produce new results (that is, new functional capabilities or new levels of performance of specific capabilities). These things should be comprehensible. Certain types of components should usually lead to certain recognizable kinds of capabilities in the devices constructed from those components, and connecting certain types of components together should generally lead to roughly consistent optimization results.

So there would be some level of predictability in a player's crafting choices. It's OK for a system to appear complex as long as it doesn't appear to be random. But that internal transformational complexity coupled with the large number of possible inputs would still allow for surprise, which should keep the crafting system fresh and interesting while still allowing reliable production.

It would be possible using this system to intentionally make a specific device to achieve a specific purpose. But those gamers who enjoy tinkering would also be able to use this system to explore creative possibilities.

...

More to come on this subject, I suspect. :)

Designs for Permanent Character Death

2009-03-23T12:21:00.001-05:00

How could the permanent death of a character be made more palatable to gamers?

The main problem of game-ending character death stems from the player's perception of the return on their investment of time and effort. The more time and effort the player puts into improving a character's intrinsic assets (abilities, knowledge, relationships, progress), the higher the perceived cost of the loss of that character.

So the key questions related to permadeath are all related to the amount/number of personal assets that a character can accumulate in a game:

How long does a typical game last?
How much can a player invest in a character? (In other words, how much "character" can a character have?)
Can accumulated player character assets be transferred upon death to another character?

These questions suggest ways that games can be designed to make character death, if not desirable, at least tolerable: 1. Make the game so short that reloading feels acceptable. In a game that's short enough to minimize the sting of permadeath, it probably won't be possible to have a character who's well-developed enough to be interesting. But very clever writing might make this possible. 2. Minimize the number and importance of assets that the player character can accumulate. Multiplayer shooters take this approach. Again, the "character" is not developed as such. Characters are essentially vehicles intended to be occupied temporarily; they're never given names or opportunities to collect assets that are intrinsic to them as people. (Players may be awarded badges for achievement, but player != character.) Another example of this would be a game I imagined a few years back (before Spore was announced, incidentally): you'd be a cellular lifeform in a tidal pool trying to support the development of a particular kind of complex lifeform. (This would be similar to teams in an online shooter or factions in a MMORPG.) In this world, cells die all the time, so the gameplay would support players jumping into and out of cells at will, including into complex cells already hosting other players. The "character" of a cell (i.e., its abilities) would be intrinsic to the type of cell the player chooses to inhabit. So the death of an individual cell would be relatively trivial; the player would simply jump to a new cell. Again, though, this severely restricts the opportunity to create a fully-rounded "character." 3. Allow accumulated assets to be transferred to a new character. In this model, characters can be fully developed with both intrinsic assets (names, personalities, skills, story progress) and extrinsic assets (money, equipment), some or most of which can be transferred to a new character if the player's existing character dies. In a complex gameworld, it should be possible to provide some minimally plausible explanation for this: the magical restoration of souls in a fantasy gameworld, cloning or the transfer of minds in a science fiction setting, and so on. One special note applies to roleplaying games in which "leveling" progress is a special type of intrinsic asset. In an RPG (including an MMORPG) that follows the usual class/level model, players invest considerable time increasing the level of their characters. This investment radically reduces the acceptability of permadeath. So eliminating leveling as an intrinsic asset would tend to reduce the perceived cost of permadeath. This isn't as crazy as it might sound to people who've only played today's MMORPGs. There have been successful RPGs that offered virtually no leveling-driven character advancement as core gameplay -- the science fiction RPG Traveller might be among the best-known such game. In Traveller you don't spend any in-game time leveling up your character; all of your character's skills are generated before playing. The cost of losing a level-free character in a game like Traveller is thus considerably less than losing a character in a MMORPG whom you've spent months leveling up. Only gear tends to be lost... and that could be "willed" to a new character.

Engineering Crafting Modes in a Star Trek MMORPG

2009-03-20T01:10:00.002-05:00

INTRODUCTION

What might Engineering-specific crafting look like as actual gameplay in Star Trek Online?

To put it another way, if he encountered a technological problem, what would Scotty do? In a game set in the Star Trek universe, what might those gamers who want to play an Engineer character like Scotty want to be able to do as gameplay?

To get a handle on that, we need to define what we mean by "Engineering" in a Star Trek MMORPG. As a rough definition, I'd say that means wanting to be able to change the functionality of technological systems in ways that are fun as pure gameplay, and to experience mission and story content from that technology-manipulating perspective as set in the distinctive Star Trek universe.

On that basis, I suggest that Engineering in Star Trek Online should be focused on the repair, maintenance, and enhancement of technological devices. In essence, STO Engineering would be three games in one. (There'd also be a special fourth game for Engineers... but I'll get to that in a bit. Keep reading!)

So which of these is truly "crafting?" Enhancement is an obvious possibility... but what if all three activities, while distinctively different in their results, were so similar in presentation that we might talk about "repair crafting," "maintenance crafting," and "enhancement crafting" of devices?

First we need to consider the question: what is a device?

"DEVICES" DEFINED

Devices would have several design features suitable for Engineering-oriented gameplay activities:

1. Every device would be an example of a device type, where each device type has a distinctly different predefined primary effect.

2. Device types would be part of a hierarchy of objects. For example, a Starfleet-issue Type 2 hand phaser would be a type of device at the end of the hierarchy: Personal Devices -> Tools -> Personal Weapons -> Pistols -> Energy Pistols -> Hand Phaser, Type 2.

3. Every device would be "complex," not in the sense of being hard to understand, but rather in that it's composed of multiple elemental components.

4. The types of elemental components used would determine the precise nature of the device's primary effect. Changing one kind of component for another component of the same kind but a different type -- with a different effect -- would be "enhancement crafting."

5. The quality of individual components would determine the basic effectiveness of that device. Repairing a damaged component or replacing a destroyed component with a similar component would be "repair crafting."

6. The connections between components would determine the extra effectiveness of that device. Rearranging and reweighting connections between components would be "maintenance crafting."

7. Elemental components would also belong to a specific hierarchy, allowing them to be grouped into families of components with similar purposes and form factors, but moderately different effects. For example, the hierarchy: Components -> Energy Sources -> Power Cells -> Power Cell, Small -> Small Plasma Power Cell would mean that any Small Plasma Power Cell could be plugged into a device whose schematic requires a "Power Cell, Small", but a Small Fusion Power Cell (as another child of the "Power Cell, Small" family of components) would also work, albeit with some moderate change in the device's behavior.

A DEVICE EXAMPLE

To see how those gameplay modes might work in Star Trek Online, let's take a look at an example of a device which an Engineering-oriented character might want to repair, enhance, and maintain: a Starfleet-issue Type 2 hand phaser.

If we wanted to make these things really fun to play with, we'd let them have an interesting number of elemental components:

barrel
receiver
grip
trigger
power cell
prefire chamber
phase emitter crystal
output controls
phasing regulator (programmable)

Standard versions of each of these components would be available from replicators (at whatever cost is normal for each type of component), while advanced and exotic versions could potentially be crafted or obtained as gifts or through trade (or, perhaps, as loot from destroyed foes). "Engineering crafting" (of any variety) would consist of breaking down the Type 2 hand phaser into its components. I imagine this being done through a rag-doll interface much like that used in many games for equipping characters. The main window would display the slots corresponding to all possible components for that device, and each slot would be filled with whatever component is currently being used in that device. Another window would display an image of the completed device (which could be affected by the nature of the components used), while yet another window would show the various text and numeric information that describes that device and its effective characteristics. ENGINEERING CRAFTING MODES Repair Crafting For repair crafting, an Engineer would first need to disassemble the dysfunctional device in order to expose the faulty component(s). Let's say the prefire chamber of a Type 2 hand phaser has become corroded. The Engineer might want to try to repair the damaged component. If successful, the phaser could be restored to fully operational functionality. If the component is too badly damaged to be repaired, a replacement would need to be obtained. On an operational starship or starbase, a new component could simply be replicated. But if such an advanced source of stock components isn't available, the Engineer might be reduced to trying to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone knives and bearskins. :) In that case, the Engineer would have the option of playing the enhancement crafting minigame. Enhancement Crafting For enhancement crafting, an Engineer would deliberately replace existing components with different components, or add components to empty slots. Rather than trying to restore a device to standard functionality, enhancement crafting would be more exploratory -- the Engineer would be experimenting to see what happens when unexpected components are used, or attempting to compensate for necessary but unavailable components with improvised versions. Using different components than the "stock" components, an Engineer could significantly alter the primary effect of a device. The device would retain its basic function -- a weapon would still be a weapon; a sensor would still be a sensor; and so on -- but the specific form of that effect could be changed greatly. For example, by replacing the stock Small Plasma Power Cell in a standard Type 2 hand phaser with a Small Fusion Power Cell, a directed-fire effect similar to (though differing from) that of a Klingon disruptor pistol could be produced. Perhaps such a weapon, if it were also modified to replace the stock phase emitter crystal with an exceptionally rare modified crystal from Varos IX (and had some unusual maintenance changes made as well), could become a rare and terrible Varon-T disruptor. Maintenance Crafting Finally, rather than restoring standard functionality or producing new functionality, an Engineer might want to try to optimize or maximize the existing functionality of a device -- this is where maintenance crafting would be useful. In this mode, an Engineer would manipulate the connections between the components of a device. This would simulate adjusting the fittings and tweaking the notional "glue" that holds together a device's various components. I imagine this looking something like lines drawn between some -- but not all -- of the components existing in the Component Window of the Engineering Crafting screen for a given device, with each line drawn in green, yellow, or red to indicate the strength of that connection. The player of an Engineering character would be able to change which components are connected by moving the lines between components. And the strength of connections could also be modified. In either case, the gameplay in this mode would come from two design features: first, the specific connections between the specific components in a device would be filtered through a complex calculation to produce an efficiency rating for that device. And second, moving a line (i.e., taking away a connection between two components to make a different connection) would, through a related calculation, adjust the weightings of all other existing connections. The combination of these two rules would create an interesting minigame of efficiency maximization for devices as players attempt to find the optimal combination of connections and connection strengths for a device. (This would be similar to the kinds of efforts Geordie made in TNG: "Force of Nature" as he competed with an old classmate to see who could achieve the highest warp power conversion level.) Note 1: In most technologically advanced (Information Age and later) devices, at least one component should always be a programmable component (such as the "phasing regulator" I proposed for the Type 2 hand phaser above). Including a programmable component would allow Science-oriented characters (or Engineers with the appropriate Science skills) to create and modify subroutines that condition the inputs or alter the outputs of devices in useful ways. If playing with components is "Scotty crafting," modifying a device's subroutines might be considered "Spock crafting." Perhaps I'll write another essay soon on that subject.... :D Note 2: The suggestions I've made for an Engineering crafting interface might need to be tweaked somewhat to allow users of console controllers to easily perform the kinds of component manipulations I've described. CHARACTER SKILLS Some players are uncomfortable with gameplay that relies heavily on player skills. There are gamers who enjoy being able to play any part of the game to a high level of effectiveness as long as the attributes and skills of their character allow that level of effectiveness, even if they themselves don't personally possess the requisite attributes and/or skills. So it's useful to think about how character skills might play a role in each of the three Engineering Crafting modes I've suggested above. An obvious skill for a repair crafting mode is a Repair skill. Perhaps a higher level of skill in Repair might allow an Engineer a better chance of restoring a damaged component to its stock state. As another possibility, we might imagine a Logistics skill that allows a character to improve their odds of successfully using their faction's requisitioning system to obtain needed replacement components. (A character with a high Logistics skill level could be fantastically useful as a "scrounger.") Enhancement crafting might benefit from a character skill such as Improvisation, which would allow the use of more kinds of components in a component slot. Even simpler might be to disable some components slots for a device for any character without an Improvisation skill -- earning subsequent levels in this skill could switch on additional component slots in a device, allowing the player of an Engineering character with this skill to produce a much wider range of novel device functions than a character who chooses not to acquire levels in that skill. As for maintenance crafting, this mode has a more apparent opportunity for character skills: increasing levels in a Maintenance skill (perhaps under some other more interesting name) would allow a character to add more connections between the components of a device, and/or could reduce the amount to which changing a connection reduces the strength of other connections. In other words, there could be a character skill that allows any player to become very good at tuning any device to its highest possible level of functionality. HEY, WHAT ABOUT THAT FOURTH GAME?! What, you didn't think I'd forgotten about that, did you? ;) In addition to individual devices (both portable and ship-mounted) that an Engineer might enjoy repairing, enhancing, and maintaining, there's one device in particular that is special: a starship. In a similar way to how devices are made up of elemental components (and their functionality determined in large part by the nature of those components and their interconnections), a starship could be thought of as being a collection of interconnected complex devices. So: what if Engineers could play the same sorts of repair, enhancement, and maintenance games with the devices that make up a starship as they could with the individual devices themselves? What if starships could be treated by Engineers as big devices, and the subsystems that comprise a starship -- hull, engines, sensors, computer, weapons, etc. -- could be manipulated as the "components" of that starship-device? How would the repair, enhancement, and maintenance modes work in this special Engineering gameplay environment? Well, it's worth noting that the "enhancement" game with respect to starships has already been confirmed by Cryptic: it's the "ship customization" game! From what's been said, it seems that players will be able to trade out existing ship systems for new ones. If so, I think it's not unreasonable to believe that we might be able not only to improve existing capabilities in this way, by trading out different systems for new kinds of systems we could be able to give our ships new capabilities. Doesn't that sound like the enhancement crafting I described above for individual devices? I think it's also pretty likely -- although to my knowledge no details have been mentioned on this subject yet -- that Engineering-oriented characters will be able to perform damage control (i.e., repair) on ship systems. If so, would that use the same ship systems interface as the "ship customization" feature? And if that's the case, then would something like the "maintenance crafting" concept I described above (which similarly reuses one crafting interface for devices) make some sense as gameplay for maximizing the effectiveness of starships themselves? LIMITATIONS Obviously this proposed gameplay feature has a number of detailed requirements. It could be a lot of work. Is it worth the effort? If something had to be cut in order to get any part of this idea, what's negotiable? If the constraints of time until Launch Day prevent implementing all three of these modes of Engineering-oriented gameplay, I would suggest that the most important to implement is repair crafting, followed by enhancement crafting, followed in turn by maintenance crafting. This doesn't mean I think maintenance crafting wouldn't be fun for many players naturally drawn to Engineering gameplay. I believe there are gamers who enjoy optimization minigames, which is essentially what a maintenance crafting mode is all about. This mode just isn't quite as valuable in a massively multiplayer game based on a technologically advanced IP as a gameplay activity based on repairing devices. Repair is both a very visible activity of engineers in Star Trek and a highly useful ability in a game that's obviously going to offer lots of combat gameplay, so if anything would make the cut, I'd think it would be a repair capability. Another element I didn't cover in this proposal is how Engineers as commanders of their own vessels would use their skills when in space grouped with other ships. Repairing, enhancing and maintaining devices is relatively easy to understand as an avatar on an away team. And crafting the features of one's own ship seems equally desirable. But how should an Engineering-specialized character be allowed to affect the ships or devices of other players? This needs to be considered further. CONCLUSION Taken all together, these three modes of Engineering crafting -- repair, enhancement and maintenance -- would each offer a different but related set of gameplay opportunities. Each gameplay mode would not only provide pure rules-based Engineering-oriented gameplay activities, these three modes would also be fun for the knowledgeable Star Trek fan who has seen all three types of Engineering activities in the various TV shows and films. Finally, because all three modes would share the same interface, some code reuse could be achieved (as opposed to developing three completely dissimilar systems). I believe this outline for a "Scotty crafting" system captures many of the wishes I've heard mentioned by those who've expressed an interest in this kind of gameplay. But I certainly don't expect it will satisfy everyone!

Economics in a Star Trek MMORPG +

2009-03-16T16:17:00.002-05:00

In trying to reconcile real-world economics and what's been said in and observed in Star Trek, the best I've ever been able to come up with is the notion of "intellectual capital."

So my theory of Trekonomics -- and, by extension, the kind of gameplay economy I'd hope to see in a MMORPG based on Star Trekk -- depends on how we get from the production-oriented society we still have today to a society in which intellectual capital is by far the primary source of economic value.

Human technological and economic history has been a progression from the immediate and tangible to the long-term and abstract. We've gone from pure moment-to-moment survival mode (hunter-gatherer) to subsistence permitting cities and codes of law (Agricultural Revolution) to complex societies (Industrial Revolution) to a world of interconnected individuals (Information Revolution).

That last change is the one we're in the middle of today. Yesterday, capital was created by smokestack industries cranking out tangible mass-produced products. Today, we're experiencing the initial shocks of what I call "virtualization" -- the process of transforming the information that defines real, tangible objects into ones and zeros. The legal wrangling we see today over copying music; Kindle letting you read thousands of books; services for creating 3D sculptures of species that you create in Spore... all of these things and more are examples of the ongoing process of shifting from an economy based on mass-production and physical distribution to one based on the generation of unique ideas that can be duplicated and spread world-wide in mere minutes as virtualized concepts.

Now take that process and shift it forward two or three centuries, adding to it technologies such as anti-gravity, fusion and anti-matter power, faster-than-light travel, matter transporters, and matter replicators.

Question: In a society like that, where does "value" come from?

When basic material needs are all cheaply/easily met, when physical capital has lost most of its value, when mass-produced goods are no longer as desirable as individually-tailored services, what's left as a source of value that a person can contribute to a society in order to receive the advantages of participation in that society? (That is, assuming we want to try to set the Federation inside any kind of capitalistic economic environment, and not just give up and call it a full-blown Marxian communist utopia.)

All I can come up with is intellectual capital.

I guess that in the United Federation of Planets, your social rewards are somehow made proportional to the intellectual capital you contribute to that society. If you want to sleep all day, you can do that, and you'll get the essentials of life you need to do it: food, water, shelter. If however you create new things, if you demonstrate an aptitude for and interest in generating intellectual capital of some kind, then you're provided with whatever tools and services you can use to support your creative efforts.

And that would hold true whether you're an artist or a scientist or a starship captain. If you can demonstrate that you'll effectively use those tools and services to generate intellectual capital for the Federation, the Federation will allocate resources to you to insure that you're able to contribute to the maximum extent possible. Both you and Federation society (i.e., every other Federation citizen) win when the full creative potential of every individual is nurtured.

So that's the theory, which tries to explain Star Trek within something like a plausible real-world framework of economic behavior (albeit one extrapolated into a technologically-advanced future).

What about the practice? I have severe doubts that this could actually work.

My guess is that the trend toward replacing physical capital with intellectual capital is real, and that virtualization will not only continue but intensify. (The legal battles over who owns easily-distributable virtual assets are only going to intensify.) So intellectual capital could indeed become the basis for a new economic expansion -- in fact, I believe this process is already underway as an Information Revolution -- that will lead to a vastly better quality of life for most people on our planet. (Though it will also widen the gap between those who embrace the democratic capitalism that enables an Information Revolution and those still trapped in more repressive communistic, socialistic, and despotic cultures that promote statist power over individual rights, including the right to personally profit from one's creative labor.)

But even in Star Trek we still have that age-old practical problem of coercive power: who decides? If I labor creating works of art or doing science or flying a starship, who decides whether that creative effort is good enough to warrant handing me the keys to an efficiency apartment or a luxury home in the mountains? Who controls the rewards for achievement? Who judges what the creative effort of an individual is worth? And who's in charge over the people making these decisions, insuring that their decisions are fair and accurate?

This is where I see the "humanity has changed" argument (which Picard made a couple of times) as a necessary condition for Star Trek to work as an economic system. Without some critical change to what it means to be a human being, I see no reason to believe that Lord Acton's observation -- power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely -- has suddenly ceased to apply to us as a species.

Maybe the mostly-global transition to an Information Society will be enough to cause a dramatic shift toward altruism and trust, allowing a distribution-of-rewards system like that seen in Star Trek to work.

Maybe.

Finally, it seems to me that this theory of intellectual capital, which distinguishes between Industrial Age mass-production of physical capital and Information Age creative expression of intellectual capital, is very -- and not coincidentally -- similar to the difference between the manufacturing/sales and creative/exploratory models of "crafting" in MMORPGs.

It seems to me that many MMORPG designers are satisfied with simple pre-Industrial Age economic systems. For the feudal-era games set in fantasy milieux they usually crank out, that's perhaps not a problem. (A bit boring, but not a real problem.)

For a game set in a science fiction milieu, however... that's a problem. In what way does it make any sense at all that a technologically advanced society would still be using a barter-based economic model that's already antiquated today in 2009? Shouldn't the currency of a science fiction game be intellectual capital created by characters in the gameworld? Shouldn't letting players add to the total of wealth inside the gameworld be baked into the design of a game set in a near-term star-spanning future?

This is part of the reason why I advocate a crafting system for Star Trek Online that's based on players creating new kinds of objects and subroutines. It's a system based on the production of intellectual capital, rather than on the consumption of physical goods. I think this not only fits better in any science fiction MMORPG than mere barter, it fits much better into a MMORPG based on Star Trek for all the reasons described above.

For the truly hardcore gameplay designers still reading this novel :), I go into this subject in more game-specific detail in my essay Economic Stages in MMORPGs. For now, though, suffice it to say that I'd enjoy seeing Star Trek Online offer some gameplay more appropriate for its futuristic setting than just another medieval-era barter economy in which the concept of "banking" is considered far too advanced to implement....

This Is How the World Ends

2009-03-02T12:58:00.005-06:00

In his gaming blog today, Brian "Psychochild" Green offers a thoughtful discussion of the difference in "feel" between how the lights went out for earlier games versus today's games, prompted by the termination on Saturday of Tabula Rasa.

In considering Brian's reflections, I can't help but see this difference in feel as yet another expression of the difference between the "play in" and "live in" preferences of gamers.

I've described this theory here before, but to put it another way: some people naturally look to MMOGs for their rules-based gameplay. Their focus is on the mechanics of play in a MMOG; their rallying cry is "it's just a game!" To the extent that they see a MMOG as a place, it's just a location to "play in."

Others see a MMOG for its worldy qualities. They talk about "immersion"; they like having houses and emotes and complex systems to discover over time. The rules-based play of a MMOG is less important to these gamers than that it feel plausible as a place they can pretend to "live in."

Where this intersects with shutting down gameworlds is that the latter kind of gamer, who tend to form the deeper and longer-lasting communities within one particular world, were more prominent in the dawn of MMOGs than in today's gameworlds. More of the few MMOGs there were catered more to the interests of "live in" players than today's games do.

Maybe there were always more people who wanted "play in" than live in, and game developers just got better at satisfying the former group. Or maybe game developers started making more "play in" games, creating more of those gamers as kids get old enough to start playing. (I suspect that both processes occurred.)

Either way, MMOGs shifted from being about "live in" to focusing more on "play in." Thus, when earlier "live in" games shut down, their players wanted to come together as a community to say goodbye to the world in which they'd lived. Later "play in" games, which focused less on supporting that type of emotional investment in a sense of place, saw a different kind of send-off. For the "play in" gamer, gameplay is gameplay; if one game shuts down, you just find a new game.

I think this theory not only explains the different feel of turning off a M59 versus a TR, it also puts the "New Gameplay Experience" of Star Wars Galaxies in perspective. If the goodbye for M59 felt like a wake, the NGE seems to have felt to the "live in" players of SWG like a doctor pulling the plug without giving the family members a chance to say their farewells. For the "live in" gamers, the worldiness of pre-NGE SWG has become a Paradise Lost -- it was the last, best expression of a theory of MMOG design that says "live in" is as important as "play in." Losing that unique place for scratching the "live in" itch generated intensely emotional reactions that some players are still expressing to this day.

Perhaps if they'd been given a chance to say goodbye -- "closure" as we call it today -- the gamers who most enjoy the feeling of "living in" a secondary reality would have been able to let go with less drama. They'd have felt more free to look for some new gameworld in which they could put down roots.

... Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

SWG's dispossessed have never found their Happy Isles, since the MMOG developer gods in our age have elected not to create anything like pre-NGE SWG's worldiness. But that's another topic. :)

The point here is that MMOG sendoffs today may feel different than they once did because games -- and the majority gamer type these games attract -- have shifted from "live in" to "play in."

Game Mechanics for Faster-Than-Light Travel

2009-02-13T15:28:00.007-06:00

Some time back while working on a game design, I toyed with some ideas for an interstellar travel mechanism that didn't copy the hyperspace/warp or "folding" metaphors of well-known science fiction.

One approach, though perhaps a little too close to Douglas Adams's "infinite improbability drive," was based on the quantum-mechanical notion of particles existing as packets of probability: locations where something has merely a high probability of existing, but bumped up to the macro level similar to the box where Schrödinger's cat lives (or doesn't live).

In this model, "moving" is a matter of minimizing the probability that a macro-level-sized object (and everything on or inside that object) exists in one location and maximizing the probability that it exists in another, desired location. If the universe can be made to believe that rather than being where I seem to be right now, I'm much more likely to be in Paris, or on Mars, or somewhere deep within the Messier 13 globular cluster, who's going to argue with what the universe says is true?

This was sort of cute, and could work as written fiction, but I didn't feel it was quite right for a game in which the theory behind superluminal travel should be a bit more mechanistic, allowing it to be translatable into functional gameplay effects.

So another idea I liked better was something I called "temporal space," or "t-space," wherein the dimension of time essentially doesn't exist. To put it another way, anything that exists anywhere in t-space can exist everywhere in t-space simultaneously. Since t-space maps onto our normal space (albeit in an extremely complex way), if you could move an object from our space into t-space, then determine the point in normal space at which this object could be made to exit t-space, you should be able to travel between any two points in real space in only the time it would take you to perform the entry and exit transitions.

The limits to this were three: interface junctions between normal space and temporal space are rare and hard to find; calculating the precise flow of energies necessary to exit t-space at the desired location is extremely difficult at best; and normal space momentum is preserved within t-space, meaning that the further away you exit t-space from your entry point, the greater the delta between your velocity and that of objects at your target position.

Obviously all this stuff is what the wonderful rulebook for Paranoia would likely have called examples of "pseudoscientific gibberish." It's utter rubbish, but there are enough scientific-sounding phrases to create an illusion of plausibility sufficient for literary or gaming purposes.

Fun to invent and play around with, though. :)

Five Ways MMORPGs Can Be Fixed

2009-02-10T17:13:00.003-06:00

Tom Chick, over at fidgit.com, put together a very interesting list of his "Five reasons MMOs are broken." He concludes by saying, "MMOs have failed me and I have no idea how they can get me back into their good graces."

Like Tom, I also feel that the MMOGs available today (and most of the ones known to be in development) have failed me. He mentions some of the reasons why I feel that way; I have others. (*cough*balance of content for different playstyles*cough*)

But before I launch into my own suggested "solutions," I'd like to express the optimistic view that this journey to discover new frontiers in online game design is worth making. These online game things have only been around for a few years now; we have only just dipped our toes into the ocean of possibilities awaiting us.

This is because online games, in addition to having rules of play, can be worlds. There are certainly going to be limits to the size and depth of a gameworld -- in a commercial game particularly, time and budget are always constraints. But in terms of creative expression, there are no limits. Designers of MMOGs get to create entire universes!

In which case, how can we reasonably assert that the few online games created so far have already exhausted all the possibilities?

I go into this in more detail (and offer a visual guide to what hasn't been tried yet) in my essay, "It's All Been Done? No Way!" Recommended reading if you need a fast way to get to sleep. :)

So with that said, let's get to the five problems that the author sees in MMOGs (or, more accurately, MMORPGs) today.

5) The problem: subscription fees

What needs to be done to fix it: The subscription fee is brilliant, insidious, and tremendously effective. It is single-handedly responsible for the immense success of MMOs. I have no idea how to overcome that sort of fiscal momentum. I have no answers here.

I think the tremendous success of paying the equivalent of fifteen dollars a month for unlimited play time is a pretty good clue that this revenue model is not a problem requiring a solution.

To the extent that it forces game developers to be creative in finding gameplay that's so much fun that it discourages subscribers from canceling their accounts... how is that a bad thing?

4) The problem: aggro

What needs to be done to fix it: Search me. Someone hurry and invent a new gameplay model that doesn't rely on aggro.

I've agreed with this one before. As pure gameplay it's not inherently evil. But as an attempt to model interestingly aggressive conflict resolution methods, "aggro" is a cheap hack applied to avoid implementing environmental depth.

A sufficiently complex environment creates opportunities for competitive success that don't require abitrary and artificial gimmicks like "pulling" and "taunting," not to mention having to jam the entire play experience into a few stovepiped classes based entirely on bizarrely restrictive roles like "tank" and "DPS." The fact that some people mistake this stuff for actual tactical gameplay does not mean that MMORPG developers must mindlessly copy these tropes in every single game from now unto eternity.

3) The problem: button lock

What needs to be done to fix it: Can someone replace all the math with action? Is there some way to do this? Is it even possible? Or should I just stick to Diablo?

See above re: environmental depth. Button-mashing is not, never has been, and never will be "tactics." And the problem with button-mashing isn't that it involves math -- it's that the mathematical calculations are being applied to the intersection of character-inherent "special moves" instead of to how each character interacts with functional elements of their local environment.

So I conclude that MMORPGs won't support interesting tactical gameplay until their developers abandon this belief that cheap game-rule gimmicks are an adequate substitute for environmental depth. For example, an environment whose features are selected to highlight visibility and detection would enable stealthy play as a viable alternative to the silly special-move-spamming slapfights that pass for "combat" in today's MMORPGs.

Bottom line: spending the time to build a gameworld with a broad spectrum of environmental phenomena that can be detected, created, and countered by characters will reduce mindless button-mashing intended to game some mathematical calculation in favor of action that rewards perceptiveness, adaptability and creativity.

2) The problem: static worlds

What needs to be done to fix it: Beats me. You can't very well have evil get vanquished by the first hero to come along. Is this just an innate problem by virtue of the word "massively" in the genre?

Actually... yes. I think it is. Fairness mandates that everyone have exactly the same opportunity to enjoy exactly the same content. Most MMORPG developers interpret that requirement by implementing the "respawn" mechanic.

But what does "same" mean? Exactly the same in every inherent respect? Or just the same kind of content?

If being able to experience the same kind of content is (in some cases) acceptable, then one solution to static worlds is to rethink how content is generated. Rather than hardcoding every piece of content to specifically reference some existing physical object within the game world, developers could try instead to create "fill-in-the-blanks" content. Content that references a specific NPC could instead reference any appropriate NPC, allowing NPCs who have different qualities and goals to come and go. Rather than specifying particular objects as targets of quests/missions, different objects from one specific class of objects could be permitted as targets of a mission, allowing many players to have a highly similar but still distinct play experience.

In effect, a fill-in-the-blanks approach would allow some aspects of a massively shared world to change over time while preserving the general actions defined in each piece of quest content.

Another -- and possibly better -- solution to the problem of a massively multiplayer gameworld that doesn't change: give up. Stop trying to allow multiple people to share the unchanging assets of a gameworld. Switch to making massively single-player games, whose worlds can and should change over time depending the actions of the player's character and the NPCs in that world.

I explore the possibilities of this option in my "Living World" essay, also guaranteed to cure insomnia.

1) The problem: you can't play with the people you want to play with

What needs to be done to fix it: Something. Anything. For pete's sake, if I can't play with my friends, I'm just going to go mess around with horde mode in Gears of War 2.

I think this is not quite as bad a problem as the author makes it out to be, but it certainly wouldn't hurt if playing with friends could be made easier.

One possibility may be found in the gradual transition away from hardcore games to games with a more casual set of rules. More granular gameplay makes it easier for friends to drop in and drop out with a minimum of negative consequences.

Another possibility, albeit one much more difficult to contemplate or implement, might come from a greater level of integration among all MMORPGs. Imagine if one game-building system were to completely dominate all MMORPG development -- in that case, it might be possible to design every game on the same foundation, making it relatively much easier to jump between gameworlds. That way if you're playing Game A but your friends are over on Game B, it's quick and easy for you to join them.

There could be some severe creative problems in that kind of environment. I'm not convinced it would be a good thing to have One Platform To Rule Them All, and I certainly don't want to see one company controlling the means of (game) production. But maybe that's what it would take to lower the perceived barriers to friends playing with friends.

...

To sum up, I'd say all of these perceived problems with MMORPGs are symptoms of a more systemic disease, which is that their designers are much, much too focused on providing Achiever-oriented play to the exclusion of other content. The "play" in these games is wrapped almost entirely around formal rules enshrining zero-sum competitive/acquisitive economics. In other words, they're mostly about "winning" by killing others and taking their stuff.

It should be noted: there is nothing inherently wrong with Achiever-oriented play! The only problem with it is the degree to which this one playstyle is permitted to overwhelm every other possible kind of fun. At best, narrative and exploration play get implemented as mere support systems for combat and object-collection. But without treating those other playstyles as worthy of actual content, attracting other kinds of gamers and creating a healthy diversity of player types within a gameworld, the fun of the competitive/acquisitive style of play gets concentrated down into mere grinding: fun for a while, but eventually stale.

Aggro, button lock, static worlds, and content so hardcore that it's necessary to schedule one's fun time... all these things are typical of highly Achieverish designs. If they're perceived as problems, they can't be fixed by going after them piecemeal. They are -- and they need to be understood as -- part of an overall pattern of design. And the solution to them is to change the pattern. It's to stop making yet more excessively-Achieverish gameworlds, and instead design gameworlds to have a broader appeal by offering richer physical and emotional environments, creating a gameworld with a far better balance of gameplay opportunities for more potential players.

To put it another way, most of the things that Tom Chick describes as problems are artifacts -- side-effects -- of focusing the design of MMORPGs too much on the hands of players, and not enough on their hearts and minds. When developers finally decide to change that pattern, then the problems mentioned here will begin to recede...

...to be replaced with other problems. :) But that's just how it goes when trying to make any system in which lots of people can interact in relative anonymity. There is no perfect solution for imperfect human beings.

Which is probably just as well.

Player Ship Interiors and Star Trek Online... Again

2009-02-09T17:30:00.006-06:00

Well, here we go again.

Cryptic, the current developer of the Star Trek Online MMORPG, has mentioned in an interview that player ship interiors would probably be viewable only as instances during certain missions. The potential feature of letting characters walk around and interact with key locations of starships, such as the Bridge and Engineering, is now being described as unlikely to be included in Star Trek Online when it launches.

From the interview with Craig Zinkievich conducted by Irdnova on behalf of Hailing Frequency:

HF: We know from the Vegas trailer and from discussion on the STO Forums that ship interiors are going to be available, however we still do not have many details on these, so can you tell us how much freedom will players be allowed in their ships – are we just going to see key areas like the bridge and engineering available, or will corridors and turbolifts and all of the other locations that are typically on a ship, be available?

CZ: At launch, we are probably only going to have ship interiors available during mission instances, however we hope to add the ability to players to freely walk around their ship and host gatherings in an expansion pack.

Over on Cryptic's official Star Trek Online forum, this comment has already spawned the same responses and counter-responses and failures to listen to what anyone else says that went on for months when Perpetual, the former developer of Star Trek Online, made its similar announcement.

These responses come in a few distinct forms:

1. This feature was absolutely critical for me. The developers are a bunch of liars; they obviously don't understand Star Trek or value Star Trek fans. They're just rushing a WoW-clone to market to make a quick buck. If the game that ships doesn't implement key locations of our personal starships that we can walk around in whenever we want, I'm not going to play it, period.

2. This feature was very important to me personally, and its loss is a severe disappointment to me. I don't mind rules-based gameplay, but I really wanted a Star Trek MMORPG that created the world of Star Trek for me to "live in." For me, a richly detailed (and graphically semi-realistic) world isn't an alternative to gameplay, it is gameplay -- it's just not the arbitrary following of formal win/lose rules that other people enjoy. I was really hoping to get to do things like perform sensor sweeps and align phasers and have detailed diplomatic negotiations with alien races, so a ship that's just a "mount" is pretty upsetting. Without being able to walk around as my character through the key locations of the starship I command, this game just won't feel enough like the world of Star Trek. I'm considerably less likely to play it now as a result of this design decision.

3. This feature was important for a Star Trek MMORPG and for the MMORPG industry as a whole. Starships were virtually starring characters in Star Trek. So cutting both the player crew feature and player ship interiors (outside of some mission instances) is a failure to understand that this is one of the most iconic elements of the entire Star Trek IP. Not richly rendering starships is a failure to take advantage of what's probably the last major opportunity to create a richly realized IP as a major MMORPG. I'm somewhat less likely to play this game now.

4. This would have been nice to have, and I wish they'd included it, but I figure the developers know what they're doing. Maybe not implementing key locations on player ships makes sense given their previous design decision (such as Cryptic's decision not to allow players to work together as crew on one ship). Without that capability, there's probably not enough value in letting individual players walk around key locations of their own ship. So I suppose cutting this feature is just the developer being realistic. I guess I'll probably still play it as long as they don't cut anything else.

5. Huh? I don't care about walking around on some ship, I just want to start shooting stuff. What's all the complaining about? Where can I download this game? Can I be in the beta, like, right now?

6. The developer is going to give us interiors as instances for missions. So for you few oddballs who claim to like that kind of thing, you can do all the walking around and staring at consoles you want -- you'll just have to do it as part of a developer-provided mission. I'll definitely buy this game, and I'll probably play it for at least a year or so while I level up my main character and alts.

7. All you people who say you want interiors are just a bunch of whiners. IT'S NOT GOING TO BE A SIMULATOR! SHUT UP! The only valid definition of "gameplay" is flying places and shooting people and taking their stuff. All that other stuff like stories and sandboxes and how long a day lasts is just a distraction from real gameplay content. The devs aren't going to spend a single minute making that crap that only a few weirdos want, and I'm glad. SHUT UP! Go back to your mommy's basement, you retard trekkie losers! This is MY game! MINE! MINE! I'll buy this game, but I want to play for free forever, or at least until I beat it in a couple of months and quit.

8. Everything this developer does is wonderful! Anyone saying anything negative about this or any other decision they make about Star Trek Online's design should go away. We should only talk about the things we're all happy to see announced. The only way I would not buy the Collector's Edition of this game is if it gets cancelled.

I'm probably around a 2.5 in my reaction. I understand that things get cut when making a game; I just don't think it should always be the features that make the gameworld more interesting and that are iconic to a licensed IP that lose that contest.

The Star Trek IP would have been a terrific basis for a major AAA-quality MMORPG that deliberately gives equal weight to story and world and rules-based play.

It's too bad Cryptic aren't going to be the ones who profit by making that balanced gameworld.

Who will?

Warren Spector, Andrew Stanton, and Barsoom

2009-01-21T13:54:00.005-06:00

Stop me if you've heard this one before: I have a great idea for a game.

For those whose eyes haven't glazed over already, let me explain... but I need to backtrack a bit first.

In 1992 I brought home a computer game that changed forever my ideas of what a game could be. It was Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, and it has never gotten the positive notice it deserves for the features it offered.

Here's a partial list off the top of my head:

true three-dimensional environments and objects
numerous characters to interact with
hundreds of places to explore in eight large levels
thousands of objects to find and use
open-world design allowing the player to follow the game story at his own pace
intricate storyline set in the popular Ultima universe
branching dialogue system
"constructive" magic system with undocumented spells that could be discovered
music that changed depending on the player character's context (walking or combat)
a simple but completely new language to learn, with meaningful gameplay value

Bear in mind: this was 1992. A lot of these things seem obvious today in games like Oblivion, but they were astonishing innovations at the time.

It's also worth noting that Ultima Underworld shipped before Wolfenstein 3D. Where Wolf3D offered only a 2-1/2-dimensional world, players of UU were already enjoying a true three-dimensional gameworld. Of course the system requirements for UU were higher than those for Wolf3D, despite UU's relatively simple 3D graphics. id absolutely deserves credit for (among other things) Wolf3D's remarkable optimizations that allowed it to run on many more of the personal computers of 1992 than UU. (John Carmack, in fact, has said that Wolf3D's graphical engine was based on his seeing an early version of Ultima Underworld's graphics and feeling he could do better.) But in terms of providing a rich and highly immersive space to explore, UU blew the doors off that goal well before anything else.

(An in-joke reference to Wolf3d's greater success despite having far less depth might have been found in UU's sequel, Ultima Underworld 2: The Labyrinth of Worlds. In a section of the game rendered in a 3D wireframe style, the player character encounters a hostile goblin named C.I. Crunchowicz whose name bears a certain resemblance to that of the hero of the Wolfenstein games, B.J. Blazkowicz.)

If Ultima Underworld 2 improved on the features of the original, Looking Glass's next game, System Shock, came close to perfecting them.

Then came Thief.

Then, from Ion Storm, came Deus Ex.

So what do all of these games have in common besides setting their absorbing and intelligent gameplay mechanics inside huge and deeply-realized worlds?

Warren Spector.

Which brings me (finally) to the aforementioned great idea for a game, which depends on two facts I just put together today.

1. After Ion Storm, Warren Spector formed his own development company, Junction Point Studios. JPS was acquired in 2007 by Disney, and we were told that this would give JPS access to Disney's and Pixar's stable of characters and worlds.

2. Andrew Stanton, a long-time writer, producer and director with Pixar, has acknowledged that he's mostly done with a screenplay for Disney for a live-action film. This movie will be based on Edgar Rice Burroughs's first novel, A Princess of Mars, the first in the "John Carter, Warlord of Mars" series of adventure tales set on the Red Planet.

See where I'm going with this?

I've been suggesting for several years now that Burroughs's Barsoom novels would make a fine basis for a MMORPG. But there's no reason why -- in the right hands -- they couldn't also be translated into a superb single-player game.

Since both the movie and Junction Point Studios are Disney properties, why not take advantage of that synergy?

JPS is apparently already working on a game for Disney (the so-called "Steampunk Willie" concept). But aside from that admittedly large impediment, am I the only person who thinks a collaboration between two creative and smart people like Andrew Stanton and Warren Spector to bring Barsoom to life as a gameworld is worth pursuing as a rare commercial and artistic opportunity?

I could happily wait until 2012 for a game like that.

Distribution > Content?

2009-01-14T14:05:00.002-06:00

Gamasutra reported today on the comments by game business analyst Mitch Lasky that distribution power is more valuable than developing good game content.

I think content matters more than that, but even so it's nice to see the value of a smart distribution model getting the attention it deserves.

I've been saying for years that id's success -- and the enormous kick-start their success gave to all PC gaming -- was due in large part to how the game design and distribution model for Wolfenstein 3D (not DOOM, which simply reused this model) were deeply intertwined. The game was built as a collection of levels with a boss fight at the end... and only the first collection was essentially free. Once you'd played the initial shareware levels, then discovered that there were two more collections of levels, each more over-the-top than the last, paying for "the rest of the game" seemed absolutely justifiable.

It was brilliant then, and it's still brilliant. All that remains to be seen is which developers and publishers will embrace it in its new "episodic content" form to work with the new broadband-enabled digital distribution portals coming into being, and reap the rewards thereby.

Some will naturally believe that retail sales of physical boxes have some special power that allows them to resist the allure of digital distribution. I think this misses what may be by seeing only what currently is. (The danger of straight-line projections, etc.)

Retail currently has two advantages over the ones and zeros of online distribution: one, it lets potential customers look at the game art and review blurbs on a physical box when deciding whether to buy a game, and two, it's still more comfortable than online shopping to older customers who buy games for their kids or grandchildren.

The second advantage is going to resolve itself with the passage of time.

The first advantage is one that digital distributors can counter in multiple ways, and some of those ways are unique to digital distribution. The obvious is to release each game with its own Web site full of glossy promotional content, and publishers are already doing that. I expect they'll become even more sophisticated at it over time.

Less obvious but perhaps ultimately more important will be the shift to design games for online distribution from the very start, allowing them to be designed to provide a small part of the game that can be downloaded and test-driven for free... which brings us back to the Wolf3D fusion of game design and distribution.

So who's going to control this brave new world of digital distribution of games?

I would be very surprised if the larger publishers like EA weren't already building their own portals. Their deal with Steam shows they're willing to test whether the retail channel retains its value.

In fact, I think it's a process that's already in progress across the computer game industry. Valve's Steam is just an easy-to-see example of the new "e-tailers" that are emerging as product accumulators. Sony Online Entertainment has been turning itself into precisely the same kind of one-stop-shop for MMORPGs for the past several years, either buying online games outright or making publishing/distribution deals with developers (through their "Platform Publishing" program) and making all the games available through their "Station Pass" system. CD Projekt recently introduced their GOG.com portal. Even Amazon.com can be seen as an important player in this emerging business environment of product accumulators -- the choice of Amazon.com as the target soapbox for opponents of EA's DRM protection of Spore suggests something of its growing importance as a game source.

The visible scramble by each of the big three console makers to provide their own online game distribution portals is another important thread in this pattern.

Within the next year or two I expect to see announcements from EA, Vivendi/Activision, and Infogrames/Atari of their own online distribution networks to try to compete with Valve. If their stables of games (and whoever else they can get to sign up) can be made large enough without becoming shovelware, that's probably going to be a successful line of business for the next decade or so at least, especially for those which value-add most effectively.

Whether all these will eventually shake down to just two or three big players, I can't guess yet.

Exploration as Survey Gameplay in Star Trek Online

2009-01-07T18:20:00.003-06:00

INTRODUCTION

With Cryptic's various statements that they intend for exploration-focused gameplay to play a meaningful role in Star Trek Online, I thought it might be fun to come up with some of my own notions for how exploration might work in this game. To keep from getting too high-level, I'll focus my suggestions on a specific practical gameplay activity that encompasses exploratory play: namely, Survey.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I consider "exploration" to be about more than just mapping physical terrain -- the true explorer is someone who enjoys discovering new knowledge about any system, whether physical or abstract. The point is not the excitement of travel or the stimulation of constant variety, nor is it racing to see who can visit the most new locations in the shortest amount of time; the point of exploration is adding to the sum of knowledge about the universe. To define exploration in some other way is to miss the point of what makes exploration uniquely valuable to a society and satisfying to the individuals who do it.

Jean-Luc Picard did not choose to remain captain of the Enterprise, seeking out new life and new civilizations, because he thought that racing from one new world to the next was a good way to accumulate XP for leveling up.

That said, drawing a chart of a star system or a map of a new planet is certainly one kind of exploration. As I suggest below, that's gameplay content I'd enjoy seeing in Star Trek Online. But cataloging the diversity of life on a newly-encountered world, and assessing the level of development of an alien civilization in several spheres of social activity -- those are also valid forms of exploration in a science fiction universe like that of Star Trek. They could also become fun gameplay features.

So what I'd like to attempt here is the outline of a gameplay system that wraps all those activities together in a coherent way as "Survey" content. I'll first provide simple descriptions of possible gameplay features in four areas of survey-related gameplay. Then I'll examine how the entire Survey feature could fit usefully into Star Trek Online's gameplay as a whole (as we currently understand it).

(Please note that I'm not saying I think every one of the ideas given below should be implemented in Star Trek Online. These ideas are intended as possibilities for a limited set of actual features -- just the things that would be fun if exploration in this game were to be designed around the concept that players are asked by their factions to survey new worlds.)

SURVEY SPECIALIZATIONS

SYSTEM: "This system contains seven planets orbiting a G-type primary star."

The System-level survey consists of determining the nature of the stars bound together by gravity into a system and the non-stellar bodies orbiting those stars.

The basic information about the stars of a system themselves may already be known through high-powered telescopes. Most of the information obtained by a system survey will come from warping into a new system to gain first-hand knowledge of the various bodies orbiting the star or stars comprising a system.

A system survey will normally begin when a vessel drops out of warp above the ecliptic of a system (or the primary ecliptic if the system is composed of multiple stars). (The ecliptic -- more precisely, the invariable ecliptic plane of a star system -- is the imaginary two-dimensional plane along which the planets of a star orbit that star.) If a system contains space-faring lifeforms traveling among the worlds of that system, they will almost always move along the plane of the ecliptic for efficiency in fuel and time. So a survey vessel that drops out of warp well above (or below) the ecliptic will be well-positioned to detect local space vessels before the survey vessel itself is detected, or, if detected, before hostile ships can intercept it.

Once out of warp, if no anomalies or immediate threats are observed, the survey vessel can begin conducting passive scans across all bands of energy and radiation. This will provide simple information on the number and general types of all major orbital bodies in the system, as well as their orbital element data. If there are artificial bodies in space, they too will be detected by a passive scan if they are radiating any kind of energy or broadcasting an omnidirectional communication signal.

[Note: For more information on how a ship might use its sensors for active and passive scans in Star Trek Online, as well as for a detailed listing of the kinds of particles and energies that have been referenced in Star Trek, please see my essay Sensors and Star Trek Online.]

Examples of the kind of data that a System survey could collect include:

Stars
- number of stars
- class and spectral type of each star
- luminosity of each star
- orbital elements if multiple stars
Local Phenomena
- gas/dust clouds -- location and composition
- subspace anomalies -- location and type
- temporal anomalies -- location and type
- wormholes -- location (it is suggested that exploration of wormholes be left to specialized exploration vessels)
- space-based lifeforms [special -- see World-Biological section below]
Natural Bodies
- number of planetary bodies orbiting each star
- general type of each planetary body (gas giant, rocky planet, planetoid belt)
- orbit number of each planetary body
- mean distance from the star they orbit
- eccentricity of their orbit
- size/density of Oort cloud
Artificial Bodies
- location and characteristics of relatively stationary space-based artifacts (space stations/starbases, communication arrays)

WORLD-PHYSICAL: "It's an M-class world with rich deposits of dilithium."

Once the system survey is completed, if the survey vessel is properly equipped and any of the planetary bodies seems worth a closer look, the survey vessel can proceed to the next stage, the World-Physical survey.

Depending on personal style, natural hazards, or Prime Directive concerns (if applicable), a survey vessel may choose to begin a closer inspection of individual worlds either in order from innermost to outermost (or vice versa), or starting with the worlds that seem most interesting for some reason, such as a planet orbiting within the habitable zone of a star.

[Note: One possible mission type in Star Trek Online might be to travel to a newly cataloged star system to collect basic scan data for each of the planets in that system. The player would need to warp to the system, travel using impulse drive to within some reasonable distance of each planet, and perform the sensor scans necessary to "fill in the blanks" of a short list of planet features taken from the list given below. Another mission type might be to collect detailed survey information for a specific planet. In that case, most or all of the applicable items from the list below would be presented to the player, to be filled in by performing the appropriate sensor scans. Yet another mission could be to visit a number of star systems and scan all their orbiting worlds until a sufficiently high concentration of some specific mineral resource is detected on one of those worlds.]

Information that a World-Physical survey could reveal might include:

world type (large gas giant, small gas giant, rocky, planetoid belt)
Gas Giants:
- number, orbital distance, and composition of moons
- equatorial diameter
- average density
- general composition (hydrogen/helium, water/ammonia/methane ["ice giants">)
- location and strength of natural field effects (magnetic, polaric, radio, etc.)
- rotation speed (length of local "day")
- axial tilt relative to orbital plane
- surface feature map
Planets:
- number, orbital distance, and composition of moons
- location, size and composition of planetary ring(s), if any
- equatorial diameter
- average mass
- average surface gravity
- rotation speed (length of local "day")
- axial tilt relative to orbital plane
- general composition (iron-rich, silicate-rich, carbon-rich, watery/icy, carbon monoxide, hydrogen)
- interior structure
- tectonic/seismic activity (none, one continent, a few large continents, many volcanic islands)
- surface topography map
- albedo
- location and strength of natural field effects (magnetic, polaric, radio, etc.)
- atmosphere composition (nitrogen/oxygen, nitrogen/chlorine, methane, etc.)
- atmosphere density
- mean surface temperature
- surface temperature bands (annual average)
- average wind speeds
- surface/subcrustal liquid composition
- surface/subcrustal liquid coverage extents
- average tidal height/frequency (if significant coverage by surface liquid and a sufficiently large/close moon is present)
- detailed composition (including central location of concentrations of key elemental and mineral resources)
Planetoid belts:
- width of belt along ecliptic plane
- height of belt
- estimated number of planetesimals
- size distribution of planetesimals
- orbital element data for the handful of largest planetesimals
- composition distribution (carbonaceous %, stony %, metallic %, other %)

WORLD-BIOLOGICAL: "I just love scanning for lifeforms!"

On some occasions, a world will be scanned that has the potential to support life as we know it.

When a world is found that appears to be capable of supporting life, then a World-Biological survey may be initiated. This will normally begin by entering a parking orbit around the world to be scanned. Once in orbit, the survey vessel may begin performing both passive scans (such as infrared) and active scans (such as cloud-piercing radar) for identifying the types of lifeforms and their extent across the world.

Be aware, however, that if at any point at any time in a survey of a star system intelligent life is detected, all survey operations will be suspended and First Contact protocols will be in force.

[Note: it's possible that we may on rare occasions encounter forms of space-based life. If so, then this part of the system survey will be focused on filling in the "Photonic/Other Life" section of the information fields given below, rather than being down to a planet's surface... although it might be possible to beam into a sufficiently large space-based lifeform, such as "Tin Man."]

Assuming that no intelligent life has yet been detected, if there is interest in or need for a detailed World-Biological survey then the survey vessel may continue to perform scans from orbit to collect aggregate data on lifeforms. This process will normally require several days to complete [game time, not real time] for worlds on which life is abundant.

After careful review of the World-Biological survey data, the commander of the survey vessel may decide that a first-hand visit to the newly discovered world is desirable (usually to collect more detailed data on certain lifeforms). In this case, an appropriately outfitted away team or teams will be formed to travel to the planet's surface. There they will use science and medical tricorders to detect and classify specific aspects of the lifeforms they encounter.

Once the desired scans are complete, the away team will return to the survey vessel. At that time, each member of the away team -- without exception -- will submit to whatever decontamination procedures are deemed appropriate by the ship's Medical Officer.

[Note: as with World-Physical surveys, there are several different kinds of missions that players of Star Trek Online could take related to collecting World-Biological data. These could be to locate 5 new worlds within the habitable zone of a star, to take general scan data from 3 worlds capable of supporting humanoid life, or to take detailed scans of a new lifeform with a handheld medical tricorder. Again, items from the list below could be presented to players in a "fill in the blanks" format, where performing the appropriate sensor scans will insert the scan results into each field of the form. This could a very simple process that always succeeds the first time, or, depending on how energetic the folks at Cryptic are feeling, such fill-in-the-blank scans could be designed as a minigame.]

Information collected through a World-Biological survey could include:

general planetary ecosphere (desert, tundra, swamp, grassland, forest [boreal, temperate, jungle], sargasso, world-city)
mapping of individual ecospheres by location and extent
Viral "Life":
- number and diversity of forms
- number and distribution of individuals of each form
- structure of each form
- method of propagation
- effects of each form on known sentient lifeforms (human, Vulcan, Klingon, etc.)
Plant/Algal/Fungal/Microbial Life:
- number and diversity of forms
- number and distribution of individuals of each form
- physical characteristics of each form
- chemical/molecular composition of each form
- primary life-sustaining processes for each form (photosynthesis, absorption)
- method of propagation
- effects of each form on known sentient lifeforms (human, Vulcan, Klingon, etc.)
Animal Life:
- number and diversity of forms
- number and distribution of individuals of each form
- method of propagation
- physical characteristics of each form
- intelligence level of each form
- prefered habitat of each form
Photonic/Other Life:
- number and diversity of forms
- number and distribution of individuals of each form
- internal structure
- method of propagation
- special characteristics of each form (structural basis, intelligence level, etc.)

WORLD-CIVILIZATION: "Veridian IV supports a pre-industrial humanoid society."

In some very rare cases, a survey vessel will encounter new life and new civilizations in a newly charted star system. As noted above, First Contact protocols will go into force the moment any new form of intelligent life is detected during the survey of a new system.

If those protocols (as defined by the applicable factional command) permit it, a general World-Civilization survey may be initiated. This may occur under either of two circumstances:

if the newly-discovered intelligent lifeform is observed to be warp-capable, and the survey vessel is authorized and able to conduct First Contact operations, or
if the new lifeform is intelligent but not warp-capable, and the survey vessel is authorized and equipped to conduct short-term covert surveillance and study operations.

Survey teams will collect general physical and sociological data related to the following key forms of intelligent behavior:

Military: aggressiveness, level of development of tactical/operational/strategic principles
Political: types and extents of governments (anarchy, democracy, republic, feudalism, bureaucracy, dictatorship, police state)
Economic: level of development of economic principles (money, currency, trade, banking, capitalism, ethovalunomics)
Social: individual/group orientation, xenophilia/xenophobia, altruism, level of health, level of education
Religious: atheism, agnosticism, deism, individual worship, communal worship, organized worship, missionary zeal
Ethical: philosophies, moral/ethical principles, art/architectural styles
Technological: inventiveness, development of military, transportation, communication, energy-generation, and medical artifacts
Intellectual: curiosity, level of development in mathematics, scientific principles, and universe-knowledge

Other general information useful to gaining an understanding of new intelligent lifeforms and civilizations includes:

number, boundaries, and forms of political entities
location and size of population clusters (villages, cities, megalopoli)
location and output of power generation facilities
transportation grid (types, locations)
communications (types, frequencies, modulations, formats)
planetary shielding/cloaking

Be aware that, as part of a standard survey team, you are not expected to obtain highly detailed World-Civilization data. Collecting that data requires the placement of long-term assets, who will consist of teams of specialists in the fields of diplomacy and long-term covert assessments [or just plain intimidation if you happen to be a Klingon ;)]. [Note: One special aspect of dealing with newly discovered intelligent lifeforms is the possibility Cryptic has mentioned that we'll be able to "hire" new NPC bridge officers from them. This might allow us to fill in more World-Civilization survey details about a particular world by having conversations with a hired NPC bridge officer. It could be an interesting way to integrate NPC interactions, bridge operations, storytelling, and survey gameplay.] PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER Some examples have already been given (in the notes for each survey specialization) for how players of Star Trek Online might enjoy Survey content. At this point, I'd like to consider some possibilities for how the Survey feature might help support the rest of the game and vice versa. While we still don't know much at the present writing (January 2009) about what the normal course of gameplay will be like in Star Trek Online, we've been told that there'll be things to do in space in a starship, things to do on planetary surfaces (and perhaps artificial locations in space such as starbases), that these things will include combat and exploration, that we'll have NPC "pets" serving as our bridge crew for operating our ship's systems, and that we will be able to group with other players in their own personal starships. Based on this very rough description of the gameplay environment, it might be fun for exploration to be given some gameplay structure for players who want it. A Survey system like the one whose elements are described here would create numerous possibilities for gameplay, including (but not limited to) the following:

every player who finds new habitable worlds is allowed a one-time opportunity to name a new world
groups of ships could pool their survey data to more rapidly complete detailed surveys
talking with bridge NPCs hired from a new civilization could unlock new NPC abilities by revealing special world survey data
completing some number of detailed world surveys could provide some kind of Achievement
completing a detailed survey optionally spawns random events (valuable new resource, appearance of hostile claimant, etc.)
factional expansion as Realm vs. Realm (RvR) competition by identifying systems with useful resources or colonizable worlds
discovering habitable worlds permits colonization gameplay (if Cryptic feels that's worth implementing)
survey data about a system could provide a tactical advantage in combat in that system
survey data could be an economic commodity (probably not for Federation players, however)
survey data could be a diplomatic commodity (e.g., gifting star charts as a show of good faith)

As always when I unleash one of these novels, the patience of readers is appreciated. :)

The Mechanics of Immersion

2008-12-19T13:57:00.006-06:00

In an opinion piece at Gamasutra, the usually practical Lewis Pulsipher lurched off into the fever swamp of "only mechanics-driven play is real gameplay" advocacy today.

As he put it:

"Immersion" is an illusion of another reality. The danger with this Holy Grail is that we’ll forget gameplay while trying to improve immersion. Games are games: gameplay, not "Art", is what counts.

I find this very strange. Why do some people, including some experienced game designers, feel that any expression of interest in seeing more simulationist or narrativist elements in major games is such a threat to mechanics-driven play that it must be aggressively countered by claiming that simulationism and narrativism are will-o'-the-wisps that should not be followed? What's wrong with wanting games to be more immersive?

Maybe my puzzlement comes from thinking of immersion as being less specific to 3D graphics and more related to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's concept of "flow": when you're "in the zone," when your concentration is so fully engaged by a game (or other form of entertainment) that you're no longer consciously aware of most aspects of the real world... that's immersion.

As a game design goal, this kind of effect ought to be strongly desired. It's what elevates a good game into a great and memorable game. A highly immersive game creates a distinctive experience that people want to tell their friends about.

What's important to note about this definition of immersion is that it doesn't restrict immersion to being the product of mere dynamics or aesthetics -- it's also possible for mechanics to be so absorbing as to blot out the real world for a player. All of these forms of play content can and do contribute to creating gripping "flow" experiences.

Dr. Pulsipher, however, seems determined to join the strange new breed of gamers who feel compelled to argue (as though it were an obvious fact that only the ignorant or willfully obtuse could deny) that simulation and story are less valid forms of play than rules-emergence, that games with strong simulationist or narrative elements somehow aren't really "games." They try to dismiss statements of interest in deep and well-realized worlds or engaging characters and stories by exaggerating such requests as foolishly extreme demands from a socially inept minority for a "holodeck" or a "chat room" -- or as "Ultimate Escape" or "High Art."

If they're right, and all that most gamers really care about are pure mechanics, then why aren't very popular games rendered with simple abstract shapes or even text? Why spend any time and money on simulationist/narrativist elements if they add no value?

Rather than promoting mechanics-based play by denigrating simulationist or narrativist play, it seems to me that the smart designer tries to engage gamers on all fronts: world-depth and scene-setting, audio-visual style, and sound rules of play. Of course the exact proportion of effort expended on these should depend on the needs of the game being designed. But to suggest that any content other than pure mechanical rules-following actually fails to qualify as "gameplay" and thus deserves less attention from a game designer, is I think to willingly choose to dump all screwdrivers and saws out of one's toolbox so that all that remains is a hammer.

Sure, you can build things with just a hammer... but what kind of working professional actually practices such self-gimpage?

Not every game needs to be a "dream" exclusively. But making the effort to wrap good gameplay inside an appropriate and satisfying dream will make most games more immersive (in the sense of the term given above) than they otherwise would be. That's not a foolish quest for some illusory Holy Grail; it's a practical approach to making games more fun for more gamers.

Pitfalls of Project Processes

2008-11-26T12:50:00.007-06:00

Gamasutra today posted an excellent article by the experienced game Design Director Mike Lopez on a process for insuring great pacing in game level design.

As a long-time software developer and software project manager, I'm a believer in having sensible processes. ("Sensible" == "adaptable plan.") That said, however, it seems to me that the team scenarios painted in this article are somewhat best-case. That's not wrong for a short article -- it does no harm to promote the benefits of improving the pacing design process. If focusing on the benefits will encourage some project leads to try the process ideas suggested, that's a Good Thing.

But it's worth bearing in mind that, as with any intersection between neatly defined processes and messy, individualistic human beings, there are numerous ways in which the locomotive can start to go off the tracks. Here are just a couple.

Brainstorming: Some people are naturally hardwired to prefer seeing the problems with other people's ideas, as opposed to generating ideas of their own. These folks are valuable, but they're more valuable later in the process. When coming up with an initial set of ideas, it can be useful to make it clear to everyone that the time for applying critical judgement will come later -- the "idea assassins" need to hold their fire during the brainstorming phase in order to encourage the more sensitive members of a team to participate. This improves the odds that there'll be enough distinct ideas generated to cover the range of intensities required in level design.

Buy-in: While teambuilding is useful, buy-in (i.e., enthusiasm management) often needs to be handled on a individual basis in order to effectively address the "ownership problem." In any development project, some members are likely to be the type of person whose sense of self-worth is intimately connected to the work they do. In these cases, it can be hard to walk the fine line between encouraging these often highly productive individuals to fully invest, and allowing them to feel they (and not the project) "own" whatever work they're assigned. While investment is desirable, these individuals will often believe that their agreeing to invest in some task constitutes an agreement on your part to let them perform that task however they want to do it. Any subsequent effort on your part to change or cut that task for intensity or pacing needs will be considered a betrayal of that supposed contract, and can result in persistent arguments, emotional confrontations, sullenness (and substandard work), denigration of your competence (creating an "us versus them" atmosphere among team members), and potentially the loss of a productive worker. It's not always possible to manage these individuals; what's important is recognizing that they exist and that they make achieving the goal of buy-in more complex than simply getting everyone to be enthusiastic about the project.

I'm completely on board with the goals described in this article, particularly the top-level goal of using a well-defined process for achieving emotionally satisfying pacing in level design. Following some form of the process suggested is indeed likely to yield better results, both artistically and commercially, than proceeding directly to implementation and hoping to iterate toward quality in time to meet a scheduled ship date.

It's just useful to recognize that some people seem to enjoy sticking their thumbs in the metaphorical eye of processes, no matter how good those processes may be. (Creative types may be especially prone to this.)

So by all means, follow the process ideas described. Just be ready to handle the many forms of resistance, both overt and covert, that always occur when trying to persuade actual human beings to follow a process.

Fallout 3 Mini-Review

2008-11-20T14:31:00.002-06:00

Overall, I'm really enjoying Fallout 3. I think I can best sum up my reaction by noting that I look forward to getting home so that I can return to wandering through the devastation of the Capital Wasteland.

I've got some other games lined up after Fallout 3 that I'm looking forward to playing. But I already know I'm going to feel a sense of loss (probably mixed with a little relief) when I've finished poking my current character's nose into every single ruined office building, Metro tunnel and cave complex in this game.

It's just that absorbing to me.

That's not to say I've found it to be a perfect game. Right now I've got two major complaints and one minor peeve.

Major complaints:

* Crash to desktop errors after VATS slowdown when encountering multiple raiders. Completely turning off antialiasing is a workaround for this particular bug, but after what I paid for my gaming rig I'm not happy about accepting jaggies in my gameworld just to be able to play it without crashing.

* Only halfway through exploring the world (and halfway, I think, through the main quest), I hit the level cap. This just stuns me. The gameworld is still interesting to explore, but I miss getting a little XP and the occasional fun perk. The thing is, if this bothers me, how must other, more leveling-oriented gamers be feeling about it? Months from now, when I start a new game with a new character, I can change this overly-rapid progression through the game using player-created mods to reduce some kinds of earned XP... but why in the world should Bethesda have balanced normal progression so that I'd need to apply a mod?

Minor gripe:

* The patriotism and anti-Communist concerns of 1950s USA are persistently lampooned as mere mindless jingoism. I don't mind poking some fun at this, and it's not inconsistent with the vibe of previous Fallout games, but the constant "oh, weren't they so silly" is getting on my nerves.

Those things noted, there are some things that I find I'm particularly enjoying:

* Large world with massive amounts of content. Bethedsa said they'd make the world of Fallout 3 smaller than that in Oblivion, but with more content per unit area, and that this would keep the action going more consistently. I think they succeeded.

* Generally interesting locations. I lived near DC for ten years, so perhaps more than some other players I found it a real hoot to visit locations I knew personally and see how Bethesda had twisted them. Other, made-up locations were (with a few standout exceptions like Rivet City) considerably less interesting -- why, for example, is nearly every house that's still standing built to almost exactly the same plan? And the office/tunnel/cave "dungeon construction kit" for F3 is obviously congruent with the tomb/mine/cave dungeon texture-map system used in Oblivion. Even so, the overall design of locations was good, and occasionally rose to excellence.

* Consistent aesthetic vision. The Capital Wasteland is grim, which is exactly as it should be, both for any post-nuclear-apocalypse game and for one that's inspired by the two previous Fallout games. The occasional bit of dark humor (check out the logs of the hotel next to the hospital, for example) only emphasizes how much has been lost. The few NPCs who are optimists seem crazy. The "tone" is just really well done.

* Much more satisfying voice acting than in Oblivion. The quality of the voice acting isn't that much better; it's that F3 used a lot more actors than the four (other than Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean) they used in Oblivion. It's surprising how much this variety in voices makes interacting with F3's NPCs more enjoyable.

* Dialog (quest and otherwise) is generally well-written. I can't think of any NPC interactions that I'd call badly done, and there are a couple that I thought were absolutely brilliant. (Go talk to Cerberus in Underworld, for example -- great stuff!)

* Many different weapons with perceptibly different charactersistics. This creates interesting choices: should I try to one-shot that giant radscorpion from afar with one of my precious .308 rounds, or would it be better to risk injury by getting up-close and personal with the Chinese assault rifle for which I have lots of ammo? That's fun gameplay, that is. (There's also lots of different armor, but I didn't find it to be as distinctive. I've basically only worn two types through the entire game so far.)

* As in most games, there's not really enough variety of enemy types for my taste (I count only eleven basic types), and group AI among enemies is not outstanding. But VATS is a hoot! As other reviewers have noted, you might think that using VATS to make someone explode in slow motion would get old fast, but it never does.

* Integration of character attributes, skills, and perks with dynamic gameplay is generally good. Pretty much all of them matter, if only in a few NPC dialog options. But some of them (such as charisma) would have benefited from being amped up and more uses found for them.

* The use of "karma" to define one's character as "good" or "evil" is handled pretty well... as far as I can tell, having played only a "good" character. There do seem to be some consequences, but they're minor. I'll have a better idea of whether karma really matters once I've played through F3 again, only next time as the most vicious, hard-bitten scum imaginable.

* The hacking and lockpicking minigames are competently implemented. They're both too simple and too frequently encountered to be enjoyable for long, but they're not so complex or so frequent that they get too annoying.

* There are companion NPCs, which is a really nice touch. Not only does this also echo previous Fallout games, one NPC in particular creates an astonishingly compelling "Mad Max"-like experience.

* There's even a minor crafting subgame!

On balance, I'm definitely getting my money's worth from this game (unlike other games, such as the brilliant but far too short COD4). Fallout 3 is not the greatest game I've ever played -- Deus Ex still owns that title.

But it's darned close. With mods and eventual expansions, it might come even closer.

All I really have to complain about is that Bethesda has decided to make their official downloadable content available only through Microsoft's Games for Windows Live client. Grrrrrrrrr....

Full-Spectrum Games

2008-11-18T14:58:00.003-06:00

Brandon Sheffield, editor-in-chief at Game Developer magazine, recently offered an interesting editorial on "Social Responsibility And Why Games Should Grow Up" (reprinted at Gamasutra).

I agree with the premise of this opinion piece, although I think the title is a bit misleading -- "social responsibility" and "broader appeal" aren't necessarily the same thing.

Setting aside the question of games as instruments of political persuasion, the question of expanding the appeal of games is one that's on my mind most of the time these days, too. Most games today are focused on mechanics. That's understandable; by far the most common understanding of "game" involves action-oriented, competitive rules-based play, so the primacy of mechanics as the focus of design makes some sense.

But as numerous theorists of play have pointed out, action and competitive resource-acquisition aren't the only kinds of activities that people enjoy -- there are also intellectual (puzzle, strategy) and emotional (social, story) forms of play.

I think the intellectual and emotional play experiences are represented by the "dynamics" and "aesthetics" portions of the MDA design model, and give games the virtues of those design concepts. Great dynamics create highly interactive and internally plausible worlds to explore, delivering an intellectually stimulating play experience. Great aesthetics give the player's choices meaning, illuminating emotional resonances within our personal lives.

In short, human beings are capable of enjoying forms of play that involve not just action but intellect and emotion as well. (We can think of these respectively as hands/mind/heart, or mechanics/dynamics/aesthetics, or gamism/simulationism/narrativism, or any of the other models of play which I've previously suggested are isomorphic.) All of these are valid forms of play. And thus they all are appropriate targets for game design.

Does anyone believe that Deus Ex continues to receive critical praise, and has inspired one sequel and another currently in the works, solely for its mechanics?

Where discussions on this subject of full-spectrum game design often go astray is that someone who personally prefers action-oriented play reads comments like mine and reacts, "Oh noes -- they're trying to make all games artsy with no commercial value!" That's usually followed by a response strongly endorsing mechanics-focused game design.

The problem is that this reacts to an argument that no one has proposed. What I favor, and what I believe Brandon Sheffield was encouraging, is not that all games must from now on be designed to appeal equally to action and intellect and emotion -- it's only that there be some games made that hit on all these cylinders. It's perfectly OK -- desirable, even -- to offer some games that focus only on providing great mechanics, so long as we support other developers when they try to make games that aspire to simultaneous greatness of mechanics and dynamics and aesthetics.

Games with great mechanics alone are enough for some people all of the time, and perhaps all people some of the time. They're not enough for all people all of the time.

There are game consumers who want more, who long for games that engage not only their hands but their hearts and minds as well. When all of these elements are present and focused, games, like other creative media forms, will have the expressive power to speak about the human condition. But they'll do so in a way that's unique to games as an interactive entertainment medium. And that uniqueness, beyond its artistic value, gives such games potential commercial value.

Whether the game industry moneylenders can be persuaded of this, and that it's in their best long-term interest to seed the marketplace with such games that exercise more than our fast-twitch muscles, is a problem that will solve itself as soon as there's a full-spectrum game that unexpectedly grabs the attention of the masses and makes a zillion bucks.

Then all we'll have to complain about are the crappy knock-offs that suddenly get funded. :)

Aggro Considered Harmful

2008-10-24T17:10:00.010-05:00

I find all the various debates about "aggro" and "tanking" and "taunting" very strange, regardless of whether they're related to PvE or PvP.

From my perspective, aggro was a relatively simple/quick coding hack invented back in the days of slow computers to avoid having to spend precious CPU cycles doing collision testing. Tanking and taunting showed up soon thereafter as natural extensions of the aggro concept. So why in the world does anyone talk today about aggro and tanking and taunting as though they're a permanent and even desirable design goal in and of themselves, rather than artifacts of an arbitrary solution to a temporary problem?

I love the idea of competitive encounters (combat and otherwise) being opportunities to intelligently select and skillfully execute offensive and defensive actions from a rich assortment of tactical options. But if that's an appropriate goal, is "aggro control" really the only possible way to get there? Why should gamers be satisfied with (much less demand) that "combat" be defined in terms of "managing" an abstract value like "aggro"? How are pulling and taunting adequate substitutes for stealth and formation and maneuver and cover and camouflage and ambuscade and overlapping fields of fire and occupying the high ground and shock/surprise and all the other well-known forms of tactical action?

I truly don't mind if some people enjoy playing the aggro game. People are free to like what they like. And it's true that even aggro and its attendant functions (tanking, taunting) can be made complex enough to support tactical decision-making.

What bugs me is the notion that some gamers, because they've never seen and can't imagine anything different, now actually resist suggestions that other rules for combat in online games might even be more fun than aggro management and are worth trying. I'm not saying, "all games must immediately cease and desist using aggro rules"; I'm saying, "hey, can't we have just a few games that, instead of cloning some other game's aggro rules, try something that's possibly even more tactically interesting?"

So my intention here is not to try to kill aggro as the starting point of a model for combat content. As the title of this piece indicates, I don't think much of it as a basis for combat rules in MMOGs today, but if some people really like it, I support their having games that provide it. All I want to do here is express the view that, in addition to there being games where the combat rules are wrapped around the notion of aggro management, I'd like to see some games that define combat content using different rules. I'd hope they're as diverse and interesting as the examples of tactical action I gave earlier, but just "different" would be worth trying at this point.

Third-Person, No-Save, and Consolitis 3

2008-10-16T13:14:00.004-05:00

In addition to Bethesda, I'm happy to note that there's another developer/publisher who "gets it": Stardock.

From another story at Gamasutra today:

One thing the company doesn't plan on doing? Moving to other personal computing platforms. Stardock "does not, nor does it plan to, support the Mac or Linux markets," the report states. "Our focus is to help make the Windows platform as successful as possible. Stardock’s entertainment group may eventually make console games as well, but when it comes to application software, Windows is the platform."

Hallelujah! Apparently there are still some development houses where the Reality Distortion Field effect has not yet won the day.

Interestingly, Stardock also released its latest "Gamer's Bill of Rights." I usually think such efforts, while well-meaning, are a bit silly as they fail my test of a "right" being something which is inherent to a person and as such cannot be granted, but can only be recognized.

That said, Stardock's list of (what I would characterize as) "corporate intentions" is absolutely brilliant. It directly and specifically addresses the concerns in my "Consolitis" blog posts, and its provisions deserve to be highlighted:

1. Gamers shall have the right to return games that are incompatible or do not function at a reasonable level of performance for a full refund within a reasonable amount of time.
2. Gamers shall have the right that games they purchase shall function as designed without defects that would materially affect the player experience.
3. Gamers shall have the right that games will receive updates that address minor defects as well as improves gameplay based on player feedback within reason.
4. Gamers shall have the right to have their games not require a third-party download manager installed in order for the game to function.
5. Gamers shall have the right to have their games perform adequately if their hardware meets the posted recommended requirements.
6. Gamers shall have the right not to have any of their games install hidden drivers.
7. Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest version of the games they purchase.
8. Gamers whose computers meet the posted minimum requirements shall have the right to use their games without being materially inconvenienced due to copy protection or digital rights management.
9. Gamers shall have the right to play single player games without having to have an Internet connection.
10. Gamers shall have the right to sell or transfer the ownership of a physical copy of a game they own to another person.

I didn't care much for Sins of a Solar Empire. (As an RTS game it's not "strategic," and even if it were the real-time aspect would kill any hope for any strategic thinking.)

That said, I bought a copy of Sins (and played it), and I'll buy pretty much anything Stardock publishes. Because I so strongly support their positions on being PC-focused, on DRM, on performing as advertised, on being able to play a single-player game without an Internet leash, and on not restricting secondary sales, I'm ready to do my small bit to support not just their individual games but Stardock as a company.

Having those rules doesn't guarantee that every game developed or published by Stardock will be a winner. It just improves the odds.

These days, that's worth supporting.

Third-Person, No-Save, and Consolitis 2

2008-10-16T13:08:00.002-05:00

Apparently matters are worse at EA than I thought.

Here are a couple of quotes from an extensive interview given by EA boss John Riccitiello to Gamasutra regarding Mirror's Edge from DICE:

... Riccitiello says that at first, the idea of a first-person game with no shooting seemed risky and made him "a little freaked out" as a concept. In a particular meeting on the title, he was "pushing the bejesus" out of the idea that the game should be a third-person title.

"I was totally convinced that game needed to be third-person and not first-person, because I wanted to see Faith," Riccitiello says. Hence the DICE-developed game’s titular mirrors. "It didn’t have mirrors in it before the meeting -- I got mirrors so you can see her."

And now that he’s seen the end result, Riccitiello admits, “I was really wrong about the third-person thing.”

This raises a bunch of questions. For example, what in the world is the CEO of EA doing pushing any particular creative decision on the people designing a game? If he's so certain that their game design judgement is completely wrong on a matter as fundamental as the game's perspective, why fund their game at all? Did he also insist that Mass Effect be third-person? Did he also insist that Dead Space be third-person? And while he's busy interfering in creative decision-making, what's not getting done at the actual CEO level of business, which is what he's presumably being paid to do?

I respect Riccitiello's willingness to admit error on a creative choice. It's good to see that he's willing to give developers a chance to show him their ideas even when they conflict with his own; it's good that he's able to decide that he was wrong about a design feature and take appropriate action; and it's good that he's ready to acknowledge that error even in a public statement.

But why is he interfering in the creative side of game design in the first place? Yes, of course that sort of thing happens all the time; Riccitiello is not alone in this. And yes, of course when you make a big financial investment you want to exercise some level of control over the product being made with that cash.

The thing is, how far should that level of control extend? Can EA tell a developer what to do? Sure -- it's their money. But "do they have the power" is not the right question -- the right question is "is it wise?" Should John Riccitiello be telling creative leads what to do, especially after recently insisting that EA was backing off from trying to tell third-party developers how to do their jobs? Why, after all that, is EA's CEO still substituting his creative design judgement for that of professional game designers? After giving money to those folks on the basis of their creative capability, is it wise to assume that their judgement is wrong? What message does that send to game designers?

Finally, if Riccitiello was wrong to substitute his creative judgement for that of the developers at DICE, and if in particular he was wrong to insist that they use third-person perspective, does that mean he could be wrong to force that perspective on other games such as Dead Space?

I would hope that this experience would teach John Riccitiello two things: first, that third-person perspective is not right for every game and he should quit pushing it, and second (and more importantly), that he needs to stop interfering with creative decision-making and trust the talented people he's paying to do that stuff.

Third-Person, No-Save, and Consolitis 1

2008-10-15T14:17:00.013-05:00

The infection of consolitis is spreading within the population of PC games.

I noticed today that Dead Space, which I had been looking forward to as another take on the wonderful System Shock, is not only third-person-only, but apparently the developers also decided to impose a checkpointing "feature" instead of allowing players to save their game when and where they choose.

So now I'm forced to reconsider buying this game. Now I have to miss out on what otherwise could have been a great game because its developers -- for whatever reason -- chose to impose game design concepts from some cramped console spec onto a PC version of the game that doesn't need them (with Dead Space being the latest example of such a game).

As a gamer, I'm really unhappy about the particular trends toward third-person and no-save designs. I do not find them immersive, which is what I want from a character-based game in a detailed gameworld.

I'm aware that some people claim it feels more "immersive" to them when they can see their character. I want to find these people and say to them, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

To me immersiveness is about suspending disbelief in a high-bandwidth gameworld to the point that I identify with my character and can easily pretend that the gameworld is a plausibly real place. Seeing the gameworld through the eyes of my character helps me to achieve that suspension of belief. That makes my gameplay experience of a very world-y game much more enjoyable.

Getting to watch my character's back as I move him or her through some landscape for fifty hours is not immersive -- no one's back (or other body part) is that interesting. All this forced third-person perspective does for me is prevent me from enjoying the more direct, personal, visceral experience of the gameworld that I enjoy.

Being able to save my game whenever I choose to do so also enhances my enjoyment of a detailed gameworld with a branching storyline by allowing me to back up and try different options. As I previously noted, I can cope with a checkpoint system in a game like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare because it's intended (in most parts) to be a very fast-paced, adrenaline-pumping action game, and saving/loading/replaying does slow down the action.

But in a more thoughtful game, such as a narrative-based or puzzle-rich game where thinking about options and exploring alternatives is the primary form of fun, a checkpointing-only system is unnecessary to the point of abusiveness. After promising a game with lots of conversational or interactive possibilities, the game then takes them away from you by not permitting you to save and restore in order to try out alternative approaches. How does that make any sense?

In some checkpoint games, the only way to see more of the game's content is to restart the whole damn level from the last point at which you were generously permitted to save. Maybe that works for the kind of mindless Mario/Kratos cotton candy that constitutes most console games, but it's absolutely wrong for a detailed-world game that takes advantage of a PC's capabilities. Here the developers have gone to so much trouble to make a detailed world full of interesting characters, ripe for exploration... and then they lock down the gameworld with a heavy-handed "we know what's best for you" checkpoint system that marginalizes the urge to explore.

If Dead Space is an example of a trend toward this kind of developer obtuseness, I guess maybe my gaming days are coming to an end.

...

Of course I know that the days are long gone when good games were made first for PCs and then ported (maybe) in reduced form to consoles. Now they're built pre-crippled for consoles and ported (maybe, or maybe not) to PCs.

That doesn't seem like progress to me. It feels more like "we don't want your filthy PC gamer money."

Too bad.

And why is EA so often the offender here? Madden NFL 2009... console-only. Mass Effect... console-only for months, and third-person-only. Dead Space... third-person-only, no save. Has EA under John Riccitiello really given up its lust to control game designers? Or is EA already back to its old tricks by insisting that all its third-party developers distort their games to meet some corporate "design-for-consoles-first" demand? (Of course it's possible that the developers of games published by EA all happen to be following a consoles-first design choice independently and voluntarily, and EA has nothing to do with it. But what fun would that be?)

Meanwhile, thank you, Todd Howard and Bethesda for resisting this stupid trend. Oblivion demonstrated (and I expect that Fallout 3 will follow suit) that it's possible to design and launch a game for the PC that supports console SKUs as well, and without having to be massively dumbed down in the process with third-person-only and no-save restrictions that degrade the immersiveness of the game.

Maybe there's still a glimmer of hope left for PC gamers....

EDIT 2009/01/23:
There is yet another utterly stupid issue occuring to PC games designed first for consoles: PC gamers using widescreen monitors actually lose big chunks of the gameworld as displayed on the top and bottom of their screens compared to gamers still using 4:3 glass monitors.

Instead of displaying more of the gameworld to the left and right (to fill the greater area available on a widescreen monitor) by increasing the horizontal field of view (FOV), designers who take the console-first approach actually zoom in on the gameworld and clip the top and bottom sections of the screen.

According to the invaluable Widescreen Gaming Forum, the reasons for this seems to be that many console games today are designed for a default display with an aspect ratio of 16:9. When they port their game to the PC, they simply don't bother messing with a FOV setting that would allow PC widescreen users to see the same amount of world vertically and more of the world horizontally as a 4:3 PC user.

This laziness afflicted BioShock until a clever gamer created a solution. (Months later, Take Two finally issued a patch of its own.) It afflicts Far Cry 2. It afflicts STALKER: Clear Sky. It afflicted Spore until the 1.001 patch. Strangely, it does not afflict Assassin's Creed or Dead Space, but those games (especially Dead Space) are so cripped by the other common symptoms of consolitis -- lousy controls, no quicksave/quickload/3rd-person only -- that while they may look good on a widescreen monitor, my experience of trying to play them on a PC was an non-stop exercise in boredom punctuated only by frustration.

So poor widescreen support for PC gamers isn't as common as the other aspects of the dread malady of consolitis. But it's bad enough to warrant a mention here.

Dynamic Assistance

2008-09-16T15:15:00.002-05:00

When thinking of ways to let players define for themselves how hard a level is, most folks come up with the idea of a "difficulty slider" or its equivalent. (Pick one: "hard", "normal", "easy".) There's nothing especially wrong with this approach... but what about some other approaches? Has game technology progressed to a point where there are now viable alternatives to a static difficulty system?

How about this: What if the game itself could detect that you were having trouble and respond appropriately with help? What if instead of being balanced for "easy" and made harder by a slider, the game was balanced for "hard" and players were dynamically helped through tough spots?

As an example of how this might work, let's take the big strider battle from Half-Life2 Episode 2.

For those who haven't played this game, this is a big fight sequence between the player as the scientist-protagonist Gordon Freeman and several slow but huge and deadly three-legged "strider" tripods, each with several attendant "hunters," which are fast, agile and aggressive. To counter the striders, which spawn with their hunters every few minutes and all of which must be destroyed before they reach a key location on a large map, the player is given a number of tools: an explosive device that can be launched at and sticks to a strider and which will destroy the strider when hit by fire from one of the player's weapons; several buildings containing stockpiles of various kinds of ammunition for the player's weapons; numerous NPCs who provide minor fire support; and a fast vehicle that includes a simple "radar" showing the location of striders on the local map.

This fight generated a certain amount of controversy on Valve's user forum. While some gamers (typically the self-described hardcore FPS gamers) claimed to have found this section of the game trivially easy, many other gamers reported finding it frustratingly difficult. They reported frequent deaths and reloads, in some cases quitting the game without finishing it. The most common analytical complaint was that the difficulty of this section wasn't just harder than previous sections (an earlier section of the game included a major firefight), but that it was hard in a different way from the rest of the game which "taught" the player that all challenges had at least one relatively simple solution, although you might have to think laterally to realize it. The strider battle, because it had to be solved quickly and often contained multiple challenges (striders plus hunters) which required challenge prioritization, seemed to demand a shift from the leisurely tactical puzzle-solving typical to Half-Life generally to frenetic twitch gameplay.

Shifting the requirements for success from the intelligent use of environmental features to mere speed and accuracy seemed to make this part of the game much harder for many players. Many suggestions thus concerned the perceived difficulty level of this section of the game. By far the most common suggestion for improvement was some variation on "reduce the difficulty." The "slider" approach (already available in HL2 Episode 2) was a popular suggestion.

Instead, what if we turned that around? Rather than maintaining the utility of all the tools given to the player and reducing the difficulty, let's instead consider leaving the high difficulty level where it is but increasing the value of the assistance given by tools.

Imagine two gamers, A and B. A has played some action games before, but mostly enjoys solving problems through planning and creative use of resources. B, meanwhile, is a veteran gamer with great coordination who enjoys the adrenaline rush of solving problems by tackling them head-on with massive firepower and agile movement.

Player B goes through the strider battle, and it plays pretty much like it does for most people who nailed it without breaking a sweat.

Player A then tries it, and the first two hunters kill him immediately; he keeps trying to shoot them and missing most of the time; he doesn't realize he can use his vehicle to ram the hunters; he has trouble getting the explosive device to stick to the strider; and so on. He dies and reloads a lot. He feels frustrated that none of the skills honed by previous parts of the game seem to be helping him here.

Suppose the game notices Player A's many deaths on that level due to the hunters. What if instead of expecting the player to turn a dial to make the game easier somehow (and lose some of the intended fun), the game could give Player A some useful assistance? How about if the game started spawning NPCs who were effective at engaging the hunters? "I'll take care of these hunters, Freeman -- you concentrate on taking down that strider!"

Now suppose you figured out how to ram the hunters but you keep missing the strider with the explosive device. The Half-Life2 game engine could, I think, pretty easily spawn humans who would form a convoy to bring more of these devices to you so that you wouldn't have to keep racing back to the nearest building for a fresh one, thereby losing time against the striders. You'd still have to do the shooting because you've got the only gravity gun, but wouldn't it be helpful if the game itself noticed that you could use some help in this area and offered it to you?

This "dynamic assistance" feature would work for other challenges as well. For example, if some gamers were being killed repeatedly by the antlion guardian in the tunnels, the game could pop up a notice reminding them to use the Shift key to run. If that didn't seem to help, it could start spawning antlions for the guardian to "chase," distracting it long enough to give you a little more time to sprint to the next safe location.

You get the idea. Instead of (or perhaps in addition to) static difficulty sliders, today's games should and could be smart enough to notice when a player is having problems and offer some kind of dynamic, in-game, context-appropriate help. Help would be provided only when and where needed, rather than "dumbing down" the entire game through a global difficulty setting.

It should be noted that this is not the same thing as a "dynamic difficulty adjustment" system. Such approaches (like the automatically scaling opponents in Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion) have been criticized for not allowing players to experience very difficult challenges early on in a game. A dynamic assistance feature would allow such challenges to be designed hard and remain hard; the difference is that gamers who persist in trying to take on these challenges would eventually get a little game-supplied help in doing so. Anyone who didn't want the help could simply move on to some other challenge, then come back later when they're more powerful. This combines the advantage of having hard content to come back to with a way to help more persistent gamers not to feel frustrated and discouraged at being unable to progress.

Finally, not only would a dynamic assistance feature improve the playability of challenge-based games for more people, it would be a great way to get even more value out of a developer's investment in NPC AI, since NPCs can be a particularly valuable tool for helping players in that they also help contribute to a game's story.

Technology Levels in a Star Trek MMORPG +

2008-09-11T22:56:00.003-05:00

With development on Star Trek Online progressing over at Cryptic, I'd like to take another look at the notion of "technology levels" as a gameplay feature.

As we fly through the galaxy in our mighty starships, we're likely to encounter civilizations at differing stages of technological development. Some will be less advanced than our faction (Federation and Klingon to start), while some are likely to be more advanced.

Should being able to classify the technology levels of the different civilizations we know and discover be part of the gameplay of Star Trek Online?

Classification systems are not foreign to Star Trek. For example, there's the well-known (in the Trekiverse) system for planetary classification that describes the habitability of planets, in which planets like Earth are described as "Minshara-class" or just "M-class." So why not offer something similar for classifying the level of technological sophistication of the inhabitants of a planet?

Let's say the answer is a tentative "maybe" and consider some possible ways to classify the level of technology of both known and alien civilizations in the Star Trek universe.

A BASIC TECHNOLOGY CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM

The first and most obvious classification (from the Federation point of view, anyway) is whether or not a civilization has made its first faster-than-light journey. In fact, distinguishing between pre-warp and warp-capable civilizations is considered so important to Starfleet that it forms the basis of their Prime Directive. So if the Prime Directive is part of the gameplay of Star Trek Online, then being able to classify a civilization according to the following scheme:

0. Pre-warp
1. Warp-capable

is a minimum requirement.

We could, however, be a bit more creative than that. If exploration is to be a meaningful part of this game, then it's not unreasonable that players ought to be able to study new civilizations in order to properly classify them. Doing so might even provide in-game rewards. (I'd be careful not to take that too far. however. Not every gamer is an Achiever, and not every gamer wants the kinds of accumulable in-game rewards that are valued by Achievers.)

For that to work as interesting gameplay, a more detailed classification system is probably in order. Players would need to spend some time (and perhaps, through their characters, use some kind of Survey skill) to determine the most likely technology level classification code for a newly-encountered civilization.

A DETAILED TECHNOLOGY CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM

The usual way of doing this is to identify key technologies whose widespread adoption within a civilization signals a critical point in that civilization's progress. (Note: Some people dispute whether the development of increasingly advanced technology should always be considered "progress." That's not an unfair concern, but it's outside the scope of this thread which is intended to be a relatively simple look at possible gameplay in an MMORPG. I'm not against exploring the notion of other ways of defining "progress," but I'd prefer to wait on that until we've considered the simple version of this question first.)

So here's a starter suggestion for a short list of technological advances that could serve to define the level of development of civilizations in Star Trek Online:

0. pre-civilization (no sentient lifeforms)
1. simple hand tools
2. machine tools
3. nuclear power
4. networked computers
5. warp drive
6. matter/energy conversion
7. subspace power
8. intergalactic travel
9. non-corporeal sentience

For purposes of MMORPG gameplay, we might even want to consider a more detailed classification system:

0. pre-civilization (no sentient lifeforms)
1. fire/wheel
2. roads
3. printing press
4. combustion engine
5. nuclear power
6. networked computers
7. fusion power
8. warp drive
9. antimatter power
A. matter/energy conversion
B. sentient programs (incl. androids)
C. subspace power
D. Dyson spheres
E. intergalactic travel
F. non-corporeal sentience

Some notes on these suggested technologies: first, they're all applied technologies; they don't include theoretical/intellectual advances such as mathematics, Newton's laws of gravity, or the general theory of relativity. Those things absolutely are important, but they're harder to see when you're assessing some alien civilization than a practically applied technology like a hammer or a nuclear power plant. (The same holds for other kinds of civilizational advancement, but I'll get to that in the "Non-Technological Scales" section below.)

Also, while I've tried to stay true to what's been seen in Star Trek, there seems to be a gap between the technology of A.D. 2400 and the tech level needed to build something as monumental as a Dyson sphere. So I've tried to suggest a couple of "new" technologies that seem to fit into the Star Trek universe, such as "subspace power" and "intergalactic travel." Also, there seem to be a lot of lifeforms based on energy in the Star Trek universe, some of which definitely evolved from "lower" life forms... so that seems like a natural end-point for technological progress.

Once the members of your civilization can turn at will into amorphous blobs of glowiness that can go anywhere and become anything, you're pretty much done with conventional measures of technological progress....

AN ENERGY-BASED CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM

Another way of classifying the technology level of a society was proposed by the Russian cosmologist Nikolai Kardashev.

This Kardashev scale, while probably not based directly on the ideas of anthropologist Leslie White, does expand on White's notion that a culture's technological capability is directly proportional to the amount of energy it consumes.

Kardashev proposed three tiers of civilizations -- Types I, II, and III -- each of which uses about 10¹⁰ (ten to the tenth power) more power than the previous tier. Others who followed Kardashev added Type 0 and Type IV classifications, leading to a system as follows:

Type 0 can harness only some of the power available on a planet (about a megawatt)
Type I can harness all the power available on a planet (about 10¹⁶ watts)
Type II can harness all the power available from a star (about 10²⁶ W)
Type III can harness all the power available from a galaxy (about 10³⁶ W)
Type IV can harness all the power available throughout a universe (roughly 10⁴⁶ W)

To give you an idea of how this energy-technology scale might be applied, Carl Sagan once calculated that the most advanced portions of humanity (as of about 1980) were about seven-tenths of the way toward becoming a Type I civilization.

Warp capability probably occurs about a third of the way past attaining Type I status. So the major races of the Star Trek universe might be said to be just a couple of clicks before entering the Type II tech level.

Type III civilizations, Type IV, and beyond are essentially beyond our speculative comprehension. It's impossible to know with any certainty what a human could do -- or become -- with so much power.

Join the Q continuum, maybe...?

NON-TECHNOLOGICAL SCALES

Finally, it needs to be acknowledged that technology is not the only -- or best -- measure of the degree of "advancement" of a civilization.

The late Georgetown University historian Carroll Quigley, in his excellent book The Evolution of Civilizations (about which I've written more here in a Star Trek Online context), discussed how different civilizations might be distinguished from one another. Quigley, while noting that any division of characteristic high-level qualities is arbitrary and imperfect, suggested six key qualities against which the development of civilizations could be measured: Intellectual, Religious, Social, Economic, Political, and Military.

For various reasons, I actually prefer to extend this classification system to span eight characteristic qualities, ranging from the most abstract to the most concrete:

Intellectual: The need for comprehension
Technological: The need for control of the physical world
Ethical: The need for control of human motives
Religious: The need for psychological security
Social: The need for community
Economic: The need for material security
Political: The need to organize power relationships
Military: The need for group security

Just as I broke down the Technology quality into numerous key artifacts, we could do the same with each of the seven other qualities listed above. For the Economic quality, for example, we might identify concepts and organizational inventions like currency, capitalism, fractional-reserve banking and the public corporation as key markers of progress within that quality.

Through gameplay in which our characters can observe these qualities in each new civilization we discover, we could build up a reasonably effective picture of how every civilization stacks up against our own factional civilization. It wouldn't tell us everything directly -- for example, are the people in this alien civilization I just encountered typically friendly to strangers, or are they as xenophobic as the Malcorians in the TNG episode "First Contact"? So there could be other factors worth noting about new civilizations than these eight qualities.

That said, using this multi-frequency kind of cultural assessment model in a Star Trek MMORPG, whether it's the eight qualities suggested above or not, is preferable to a purely technological metric. It's not only a more adequate measure of "progress," in a way it's better for Star Trek Online because it creates more opportunities for gameplay for those who enjoy exploration. Clandestine observation of new cultures to assess their qualities played a role in numerous Star Trek TV episodes and at least one movie. So having several different kinds of qualities that can be monitored and recorded by an exploration-oriented character in a Survey role could turn out to be a lot of fun. (It could also be useful in generating appropriate qualities for bridge NPCs adopted from newly-discovered worlds.)

QUESTIONS

A system like this obviously has some edge cases and things that might change over the course of gameplay. That raises several questions:

1. Should civilizations be classified with just one tech level? Or should a general tech level be calculated as an average of a culture's level of advancement in various specific technologies, such as transportation, communication, energy production, computers, military hardware, and so on? What about as an average of a civilization's progress across several different kinds of scales (as noted above), including technological, social, economic and other bands?

2. How should the tech level be determined for a Balkanized planet on which exist multiple civilizations at different tech levels? Should the tech level of the civilization with the highest tech level be used (especially if they're close to their first warp 1 flight)? Or should an average tech level be calculated? Or is there some other approach to defining a specific tech level that would be more fun?

3. Should civilizations at a particular tech level be able to increase their tech level during the course of Star Trek Online's lifespan? Wouldn't it be interesting if a pre-warp culture were to make their initial warp 1 flight and suddenly become a new candidate for a First Contact mission, or even -- after suitable diplomacy -- for admission to the Federation or a competing faction?

4. Cryptic has said that in their version of Star Trek Online we may be able to "adopt" as characters in our NPC bridge crew some members of cultures on new worlds we discover. Should those characters come only from worlds that are warp-capable?

COMMENTS

I know that some are going to think this is overkill, that defining every faction/civilization in terms of specific levels within eight different qualities will take way too much development time for not enough benefit.

In particular I know it'll seem strangely excessive to the more combat-oriented players. But I think it's safe to guess that Star Trek Online will be designed to offer plenty of the kill-it-and-take-its-stuff content that the Acheivers among us typically enjoy. The kind of richly-detailed world features I'm talking about here are for the Explorers, who -- in this particular game, with its particular license -- require an equivalent amount of content that's as enjoyable to them as competition/acquisition is to the Achievers.

So my goal here is to describe some different ways of implementing one core gamplay idea: allow player characters to assess the level of advancement of newly-discovered alien civilizations. We've been told that exploration will be an important part of the game that Cryptic is making -- well, designing the many civilizations in this game to have unique cultural qualities is one way of helping to create plenty of solid, enjoyable exploration content to enjoy.

I'm looking forward (though not without some reservations born of experience) to seeing just how deep Cryptic's verbal commitment to "exploration" as an important part of Star Trek Online actually goes. Tech levels won't necessarily be a part of that design, but it might help if they were.

Saving Games from Game Designers

2008-09-03T13:52:00.006-05:00

David Sirlin offered a great essay at Gamasutra on September 1, 2008. His thesis this time around was that game developers need to stop trying to impose their vision on gamers of when they think players should be permitted to save their games.

As he put it: "Saving should be treated as one of the player's natural rights, not an earned privilege or a game mechanic around which to make strategic decisions."

For the first part of that statement, I agree whole-heartedly. I don't like the "we know what's best for you" attitude when it comes from the usual political social engineers; even less do I need or want it from the designers of the games I play.

As a diehard save-gamer, I was extremely unhappy when I discovered in playing the original Far Cry (for PC) that there was no quicksave/quickload feature. Save and load were implemented; they just weren't made available to the player because the developer had the "we know better than you how you're supposed to play this game" attitude. Fortunately there was a console hack that allowed a quicksave/quickload key-bind or that game would have been dumpstered on the spot... but why should such a gross hack have been necessary in the first place?

Furthermore, as a dedicated PC gamer, the (from my perspective) misbegotten choice being made more often these days to design first for consoles and only later -- if ever -- for the PC means that more games are following the Far Cry no-save-option model. As a result, my gaming experiences are becoming worse, not better. I'm buying fewer games. Isn't that the opposite of what game publishers should be wanting?

Having said this, however, I have to acknowledge I'm not closed to all no-save-option designs. I recently decided to give Call of Duty 4 a try. (Again, this is the PC version.) When I realized that there was no way to save when I wanted to save, I growled something about "Far Cry all over again!" and nearly quit. But out of curiosity I kept playing a little longer... and discovered that the checkpoint system in CoD4 actually worked pretty well. The number and location of the checkpoints was usually close enough to where I would have saved so that I was willing to accept the game's handling of that for me. I still didn't like it, but I could live with it.

So this approach can work, even for someone like me who absolutely hates having a developer's theory about when I "should" be able to save my gameplay experience imposed on me.

It's worth noting, however, that this may not work for all kinds of games. CoD4 and BioShock, for example, are very different kinds of games. A linear shooter intended to be a high-adrenaline experience might be able to justify a checkpoint system rather than a save/load option that could supposedly "interrupt" the visceral experience. (I'm not sure save/reload is any more interruptive than dying and magically restarting at a checkpoint, but let that go for now.) I could accept not being able to save in CoD4 because the pace of gameplay in that particular game made a checkpoint system feel reasonably natural.

But in a slower-paced, more thoughtful and more exploratory game like BioShock, I and, I suspect, most other players want to be able to do what Doug Hofstadter once called "subjunctive replays" -- we want to be able to explore one path, then reload and see what would have happened had we taken a different path. RPGs with branching dialog trees generate a similar desire in players to try all the options to see all of the possible content. Games like these need to reward players who try to explore that content, not punish them for their curiosity.

One approach for accomplishing this would be to provide the traditional save/load feature so that players can -- without having to replay the entire game or level -- see everything the designers spent time making (and for which publishers want $60). Alternately, designers could design games with some kind of explicit subjunctive replay feature that allows the player to scratch that "what would happen if I...?" itch. Why not design exploratory games so that the act of saving and reloading (which a game can easily be programmed to detect) is an active and perhaps even necessary feature of the gameplay? What if reloading wasn't thought of as a punitive "ha! got you!" but as a "hey, if you think that was cool, go back and try it again!"

It might be OK to treat saving as a game mechanic around which to make tactical decisions... if game designers can break out of thinking of saving only as an enemy to be destroyed and start thinking of it as a feature that, for the right kind of game, could be fun to explore and play with.

The Evolution of Starship Class Designs in Star Trek

2008-08-27T05:20:00.006-05:00

If you stare long enough at images of all Star Trek ships (excluding those from the Star Trek: Enterprise era), and then do a completely ridiculous amount of research and interpolation and outright guessing, I think it's possible to discern three major periods of Starfleet ship design, each period with a visibly different design ethic. Not surprisingly, these three periods correspond pretty well with TOS, TNG, and DS9/VOY.

Generation 1

According to my spreadsheet, Generation 1, from about 2240 (TOS) to about 2293 (ST:VI), started with the iconic Constitution class and ran through approximately 2288 with the Sydney class. These ships distinctively featured a saucer, an optional secondary hull, and slender, proportional-length warp nacelles.

(It might even be possible to see a generation 1.5, starting from about 2268 with the Miranda and original Constitution refit look first seen in ST:TMP that featured the angular warp nacelles. But the basic saucer/secondary hull/nacelles-on-pylons look remained pretty consistent, so I wouldn't call these second-generation designs.)

Generation 2

Generation 2 began in about 2320 with the Ambassador class and the New Orleans (ca. 2346) and Galaxy (ca. 2353) classes that soon followed it. The Nebula and Niagara classes, along with the strikingly different Akira class with its downswept pylons (perhaps a technology transfer from a Klingon Bird-of-Prey?), concluded this evolutionary line in the early 2360s. G2 "ended" shortly thereafter with the first great burst of experimentation from 2364 to 2366 that produced the almost-elegant Freedom class and the baroque Challenger, Cheyenne and Springfield classes.

Despite some variation among them, these ships together form a stylistic bridge between the fairly simple and clunky looks of the G1 ships and the highly refined and angular looks of the third-generation ships. The separate sections of the G2 ships were beginning to be more integrated, in some cases appearing to be fused together, foreshadowing the highly integrated designs of G3. Also, most of these ship classes sported the fat, stubby warp nacelles seen on the Galaxy class which, while more slender in G3 designs, remained (with the exception of the Sovereign) equally shortened in G3. However, G2 designs still retain the original G1 themes of a generally rounded saucer section and warp nacelles on pylons, and thus don't quite fit into either the piecemeal G1 or highly-integrated G3 design aesthetics.

Generation 3

Generation 3, from 2370 to 2374, was the second great burst of experimentation with forms by Starfleet naval architects. Although these ship classes shared some features, it's possible to see that they branch off into two divergent design paths. The first definining element of G3 ships was complete integration among the hull elements, finally ending Starfleet's long love affair with the saucer separation feature. The first line of G3 experimentation was driven by this new design aesthetic, and may be seen to flow from the highly integrated Akira design into the Defiant class, which took this concept to its logical conclusion by becoming an all-in-one design. The later Steamrunner and (somewhat less clearly) Norway classes appear to be additional variations on this theme, retaining the tight (or, in the case of the Norway, very-short-pylon) coupling of nacelles to the main hull but cutting out hull areas between the nacelles, perhaps to reduce mass in an effort to improve maneuverability.

The other design element generally common to G3 ships is the replacement of the rounded saucer section with an angular saucer or even an acutely triangular wedge. The Intrepid, Nova, Sovereign, and Prometheus followed this second design path (with the Saber as an intermediate experiment), generally retaining the warp-nacelles-on-pylons theme but shifting to a "saucer" that was not only integral but angled and stretched along the long axis (as opposed to saucers stretched along the transverse axis as was characteristic of G2 designs). These ship classes thus enjoyed a remarkably sleek and rakish appearance. In fact, these are, IMO, the most attractive of all the designs that Starfleet has ever produced. (Note: The Elkins and Yeager types [and note that these are "types," not classes] with their obvious Intrepid-based primary hulls also appear in this generation, but it's probably just as well to accept the invented story in the DS9TM which implies that these ships were pieced together by non-Starfleet shipyards to respond to the Borg/Klingon/Cardassian/Dominion threats. And we will not speak of the evil that is the "Curry-type" abomination.)

...

There are probably other ways of imagining the design evolution of ships in the Star Trek universe that are equally or more valid than this one. (Especially considering that we're all trying to impose some kind of rationality on a 40-year sequence of stuff made up for TV shows and movies!) But I think there's some value in this three-generation model -- it's reasonably defensible based on ship appearance and rough chronology, and even if not perfect, it's at least a marginally plausible framework for thinking about the evolution of Starfleet design philosophy.

Which is fun. :)

--Flatfingers

MMORPGs Without Roleplaying

2008-08-26T15:58:00.004-05:00

I read some comments recently that today's gamers -- in particular, players of MMORPGs -- don't value roleplaying. They were reported as saying things like "it's creepy to think you are the toon" and "I'm playing the game, not the character".

I think these are accurate observations. The "RPG" part of MMORPG has atrophied and is about to fall off.

The current population of gamers simply isn't interested in the original D&D model of storytelling through action. Instead, they favor what I suppose we might as well call the WoW model of action-oriented materialism. The land of MMORPGs has been thoroughly colonized by the Achievers, and the rest of us are living in their world.

This has been a self-reinforcing process. Gamers who prefer rules-based acquisition over narrative-based storytelling come to roleplaying games; as they do, new games are released that cater more to these rules-focused gamers; the greater supply of rules-based games attracts more rules-focused gamers; and so on. I'm not implying that this is good or bad -- it's just how things appear to have gone.

As I've put it before, most of today's gamers (especially MMORPG players) see the avatar not as a character with a story, but as nothing more than a vehicle to be inhabited temporarily for accessing game content. "It's just a game." From this perspective, the avatar is merely a tool.

As a mere tool, the avatar could be anything -- a human person, a nightelf, a cyborg, a mech, a car, a cloud of particles from the Xlpnrx Galaxy -- whatever. The form of the tool is vastly less important than its functionality to the type of gamer whose enjoyment comes from collecting the most stuff by being the best at following the rules of the game.

The way I see it, the gamers whose enjoyment comes from experiencing a compelling story have always been in the minority. The first major multi-player roleplaying game -- D&D -- just happened to cater to the Narrativist interest of these folks. Within the world of roleplaying games at that time, these gamers looked like a majority merely because few others were playing this kind of game. But as more games followed D&D, and especially as roleplaying games moved onto the computer where there was no human DM to place the game's action in the context of an emotionally compelling story, games about "stuff" overtook and eventually overwhelmed games about story.

To anyone who naturally enjoys gameplay that's about following rules to collect stuff, this probably seems like a obviously sensible progression, and not like any kind of "problem" at all. Developers are just giving gamers what they say they want.

To us old-school types, however, we're left scrounging for leftovers in the wastebin like a bunch of crazy old bums. For each of the rare games published these days that offers more than lip service to storytelling and interesting characters and roleplaying -- BioWare being about the only developer consistently making such games as KOTOR and Mass Effect -- there are probably 10 or 20 "kill it and take its stuff" games.

And the ratio is even higher in the MMORPG world. Is there even one triple-A MMORPG that caters primarily to roleplayers? Really?

...

That's a pretty grim picture for those who enjoy action but prefer that it flow from and support a meaningful narrative about people. But I'm not convinced that we're doomed and might as well just stop playing games entirely.

For one thing, BioWare's acknowledged success could spawn some imitators. (If so, I hope they won't repeat BioWare's mistake of initially releasing roleplaying games like Mass Effect solely for consoles, but that's another essay.)

For another thing, we don't know that there's not some new technology on the horizon that could create a new playing field for story-driven gamers in a way similar to D&D. What if someone came up with a dramatically (and I use that word deliberately) improved model of NPC AI where the NPCs felt much more emotionally plausible? What if someone dreamed up a new roleplaying system that made it incredibly easy to build emotionally engaging content?

Such innovations could produce a new golden age of true roleplaying games. Narrativist and Simulationist gamers (who are still around, IMO, because those are innate motivations, not learned preferences) would be the first to explore these new game spaces. Later, of course, they'll be overrun (again) by the larger population of Gamist folks and Gamist games once they realize that this "new world" exists.

But until then, it'll be nice to be able to play interesting characters in immersive worlds again.

I'm such an optimist. :-)

Star Trek Online: A Simulationist Manifesto

2008-08-01T14:17:00.003-05:00

One of the complaints that always seems to be leveled against Star Trek fans asking for Star Trek Online to be faithful to their concept of the license is that they supposedly are demanding a "Star Trek simulator." This is usually followed by the diversionary claim that what the Star Trek fans really want from STO is a glorified chat room in which what little gameplay there is will be about scrubbing plasma conduits and watching the dials on the matter/antimatter reaction assembly.

We're never going to get past this silly level of chatter until we have a shared understanding of what we mean by "simulation."

To start with, "simulation" means a heck of a lot more than just "complicated starship controls."

What we're really talking about when we ask for simulationist features in Star Trek Online is for unique aspects of the world of Star Trek to be implemented as features of the gameworld. Not the trivial stuff -- virtually no one has ever seriously insisted that Jeffries tubes simply must be implemented or they won't play -- but the operational features, the things that characters in the world of Star Trek can do that help tell interesting stories.

Certainly that includes wanting starships to be implemented as large, mobile, multi-person, multi-system tools. Starships are a major story-telling tool in Star Trek; it would be a mistake not to implement them as high-functionality systems. (It's a big hint to Cryptic that detailed starship controls are the first thing everybody seems to think of when the subject of "simulating Star Trek" comes up.)

But simulating Star Trek goes far beyond just starships. And it doesn't only benefit the simulationist gamers and hardcore Star Trek fans.

SOCIAL SIMULATION

For one thing, Star Trek is also about cultures and organizations. The point of having starships is to be able to go to new places and meet interesting people (and survive the trip!). What's the current state of relations between the Federation and the Klingon Empire? Heck, what's the current state of the Klingon Empire? Is Martok still running the show? What challenges is he facing, both internally and externally? Military? Political? Technological? Economic? Social? All of the above?

And what about the Romulans? Who are they allied with currently, and why? (And for what benefit, and how long will the alliance last?)

What about the smaller political entities? Are they moving toward joining up with the Federation, or are they looking elsewhere for support? Why? What does the strategic map of near-Federation space look like? Where are the key resources, and who holds them, and what do they want?

Nor should we forget the Federation itself. What's the prevailing attitude among Fed citizens -- war-weariness and a growing distrust of contact with new worlds, or great eagerness and energy for expansion? And what is Starfleet's position on this? Who's running the Admiralty these days, and what's their agenda? Will characters in Starfleet in STO be able to earn the Starfleet ranks we saw characters gain in the TV shows and movies?

Simulating this level of social-factional reality pays off big in a character-driven gameworld. It's not just making stuff up because somebody thinks that making stuff up is fun, or to have some cheesy "story" text available to dump on people when they take missions. Simulating large-scale NPC factions -- in both their motivations and their actions -- is valuable because that provides a vast source of material to support both storytelling and action within the Star Trek context.

PHYSICAL SIMULATION

"Simulation" is also about mimicking some aspects of physical reality as portrayed in Star Trek. It's about having planets that act like planets, with varying gravity, rotation periods, temperatures, atmospheres, seasons, and weather; it's about plants and lifeforms whose forms and behaviors are appropriate for their environment; it's about planetoid fields going 'round and stars going nova; it's about having millions of worlds to visit so that there's always something unexpected to be found in the game even if some players try to learn and publicize every secret on Day One.

Simulating physical phenomena also extends to both the macro and micro levels. Space in the world of Star Trek seems to be littered with objects and fields and particles and even lifeforms; you can't back up your mighty starship without bumping into something that wants to eat you, mate with you, or turn subspace inside-out.

Spending the time to simulate this part of Star Trek is valuable, too. It's necessary to be able to tell many of the stories that Star Trek is noted for. But having lots of different kinds of materials and energies (most of which should have gameplay effects) will also provide a lot more interesting things to do, both in space and on away missions. What if you can mask your ship's energy signature by hiding in the photosphere of a star? What if you can blind your opponent's sensors by ducking into a Mutara-type nebula? What if you can lure a pursuer into a cloud of metreon particles and set it alight? What if the kelbonite in those rock formations on Planet X prevents your tricorders from detecting an escaped spy?

Again, Simulationists don't favor implementing world-y features like these merely because they think that slavishly recreating such stuff from a TV show is "cool." It's for the practical purpose of bringing the literary world (in this case, Star Trek) to life; it's for generating surprises to explore; it's for providing rich environments for brilliant tactical action.

PROCESS-TECHNOLOGY SIMULATION

This is the "running a starship" thing that people think about, but it's also about "what tools are there," and "how does stuff work?"

Starships in Star Trek, even down to the runabouts, are fairly complex systems. Operating such devices requires some knowledge of navigation, piloting (helm control), sensors, power systems, warp drive, impulse drive, deflectors, and emergency systems like transporters and space suits. Starfleet vessels also require knowledge of offensive tactical systems such as direct-fire beams (phasers) and torpedoes. There are also science and medical facilities that can be used to gather knowledge and interact with objects.

And then there are all the other bits of high-tech gadgetry that Star Trek is known for. How many ways can a hand phaser be used? Is there anything you can't do with a tricorder? What happens to a transporter system if you don't keep the Heisenberg compensator in alignment?

Star Trek is about characters exploring their world, and an important aspect of that is science. It's why Shuttle astronaut Mae Jemison and physicist Stephen Hawking have appeared in episodes of Star Trek -- they understand that the joy of scientific exploration is a big part of what has given Star Trek its long appeal. So where does doing science fit into Star Trek Online if none of the requirements for it are simulated, if there is no technology for doing science, if there's no vast array of physical phenomena to study with tricorders and ship's sensors?

The world of Star Trek is filled with technogizmos like these, even to the point having its own word: "treknology." Implementing these technological devices and processes in Star Trek Online isn't something to do for its own sake, but because it both makes the gameworld feel right to those who enjoy the show, and it provides unique (license-based) opportunities for action-oriented fun to those who care more about pure MMORPG gameplay.

CONCLUSION

My point is that "simulation" does not mean arbitrarily making starships complicated. It's about taking many of the familiar parts of a highly detailed literary franchise and implementing them as elements of a multiplayer game. Doing this serves roleplayers and explorers and combat-oriented gamers alike by insuring that there's a huge source of license-specific features for generating and influencing gameplay.

When simulating the best bits of Star Trek means not only that the gameworld feels more real to fans but also that there are more fun things to do, why should we not hope for lots of simulation from Cryptic's version of Star Trek Online?