Andrew Doull's shared items in Google Reader

Fractal weather

2009-11-05T20:46:31Z

New research suggests that the atmosphere can be modeled with fractal patterns and may not be as, er, complex as we thought. The benefit of the new knowledge? Perhaps more accurate forecasts and better climate models. From New Scientist:

The results point to a new view of the atmosphere as a vast collection of cascade-like processes, with large structures the size of continents breaking down to feed ever-smaller ones, right down to zephyrs of air no bigger than a fly.
The implications promise to transform the way we predict everything from tomorrow's local weather to the changing climate of the entire planet. "We may never be able to view the atmosphere and climate in the same way again," says team member Shaun Lovejoy of McGill University in Montreal, Canada. "Rather than seeing them as so complex that only equally complex numerical models can make sense of them, we're seeing a kind of scale-by-scale simplicity."

"Tomorrow's weather: Cloudy, with a chance of fractals" (Thanks, Chris Arkenberg!)

Game Developer Column 8: Turn-Based vs. Real-Time

2009-11-02T21:41:13Z

The following was published in the August 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine…

One of the most important choices a designer makes at the start of a project is deciding whether to make a turn-based game or a real-time one. Each type of base game mechanic provides potential benefits and drawbacks. While turn-based games favor more strategic and transparent play, they can feel a little stodgy to players used to action-oriented titles. Real-time games, on the other hand, are more immersive and multiplayer-friendly but can also easily overwhelm new players if they are not well-paced.

Turn-based games, of course, descend directly from the board game tradition which predates video games. Indeed, the fanbase for turn-based games still overlaps significantly with the fanbase for board and card games. Real-time games (excluding sports) were only truly possible with the advent of computers. Indeed, quite a few games - Super Mario Bros., Team Fortress, FIFA, Pac-Man - could only ever conceivably be developed as real-time games.

However, quite a few games could go either way, with an understanding that each path comes with its own set of trade-offs. Roguelike dungeon-crawlers, for example, have been made as both turn-based and real-time games. Early versions, such as NetHack, were purely turn-based; the game’s clock only moves forward each time the player takes an action. However, Blizzard’s Diablo put the same explore-and-loot formula into a real-time environment and created an experience that was less strategic but more visceral and potentially addictive. Furthermore, without the waiting inherent in a turn-based system, the designers could develop a viable multiplayer mode.

Nonetheless, Diablo has not surplanted the continuing popularity of turn-based roguelikes, such as Pokemon Mystery Dungeon or Shiren the Wanderer, which maintain their own tactical charm. Thus, deciding between turn-based and real-time is not a question of which system is “better” or “worse” but rather a question of which set of trade-offs best fits the game the designer wants to make.

How Much Stuff?

One simple way to look at a game is by asking how many game systems and elements the player needs to master to feel competent. For example, a typical shooter might have ten weapons; a real-time strategy game might have fifteen units per side; a role-playing game might have twenty spells available. New players can often be intimidated by the sheer quantity of new concepts and options a game presents to them, and the time pressure of a real-time game only makes this learning experience an even greater challenge.

When first prototyping the original Civilization, Sid Meier originally built the game as a real-time simulation. Inspired by Will Wright’s SimCity, he tried to extend the concept to a global scale. He quickly found, however, that players were overwhelmed by the high number of new game systems they needed to juggle at once. After all, SimCity had no diplomacy, no trade, no combat, no research, and definitely no marauding barbarians. Thus, he changed course and rebuilt his prototype as a turn-based game, and the phrase “just one more turn” entered the gaming lexicon.

Designers always should be aware that each game can only contain so much “stuff” before the center cannot hold, and the experience overpowers the senses. By removing time pressure, turn-based games allow players to adjust the learning curve to their own needs. Veterans can still play quickly, but new players can take their time poking around the interface and thinking through their moves.

Thus, turn-based games are generally more accessible than real-time ones. It is no surprise that many of the most popular casual games are turn-based, from staples like Solitaire and Minesweeper to PopCap’s stable of Bejewelled, Bookworm, and Peggle.

Deterministic or Chaotic Play?

At their core, turn-based and real-time games play to different strengths. One example is the question of whether an experience should be deterministic or chaotic. With the former, success often depends on knowing exactly what the results of one’s actions will be; in Puzzle Quest, for example, the player needs to know that when a row of four skulls disappears, the other pieces will fall in a specific way so that a new column of consecutive red gems might form. Just because some luck elements are involved - such as the unknown new pieces which fall from the top - doesn’t mean that the player isn’t mapping out an exact series of events in her head. This sequential gameplay is one of the core strengths of turn-based games.

On the other hand, chaotic, unpredictable gameplay is a strength of real-time games. When players first spot a heavy-medic combo in Team Fortress 2, they know that they are probably in trouble, but the sequence of events to follow is so varied that players know it’s impossible to overanalyze the situation. A sniper could kill the medic. An explosion might knock the heavy off a platform. A spy might sneak up behind them. An event on the other side of the map might encourage one side to simply abandon the area. Real-time games support chaotic gameplay best because, with the added pressure of a shared clock, players are not able to reduce each situation down to a repeatable series of moves and counter-moves.

Multiplayer or Single-Player?

Another divide which defines the different strengths of turn-based and real-time games is whether the focus of the experience is multiplayer or single-player. Generally speaking, multiplayer games work best in real-time wheras turn-based games usually focus on single-player sessions. Turn-based games, like Advance Wars and Civilization, have only a tiny, hard-core multiplayer audience. On the other hand, real-time games with similar themes, such as Command & Conquer and Age of Empires, respectively, gained much of their popularity from their multi-player modes.

The reason for this divide is clear - waiting for another player to finish his turn is anathema to fun - so designers looking for a synchronous, multiplayer experience almost always prefer real-time games. However, because no one else is waiting, designers of purely single-player games give themselves the option of using turn-based elements whenever convenient, to either add some spice or allow more strategic play. For example, the single-player game Fallout 3 allows players to pause real-time combat and enter V.A.T.S. mode to strategize which enemy body parts to target, even displaying the exact probability of success for each possible choice. Similarly, the Baldur’s Gate series is a hybrid model, with real-time combat that pauses depending on certain player-selected events, such as when a character receives damage or a new enemy becomes visible.

Breaking the Rules

Indeed, these games are but a few of the many games that blur the line between “pure” turn-based and real-time systems. For example, what about turn-based decisions with a time limit, such as Madden’s play-calling clock? What about X-Com, with its crunchy real-time strategic shell surrounding a gooey turn-based tactical core? Or the Total War series, which does the exact opposite? What about Europa Universalis, which is technically real-time but plays out so slowly that it “feels” like a classic, sprawling turn-based strategy game. How about asynchronous Web-based games like Travian, which play out over months instead of minutes, eliminating the time pressure but keeping the multi-player benefits of real-time play? What about Bang! Howdy, which plays as a typical tile-based tactical wargame, except that each unit’s turns regenerate in real-time? In reality, a vast continuum stretches from one extreme to the other, and most games find a space somewhere in the middle.

Therefore, the most important thing to focus on is not the labels themselves but what types of gameplay they represent. For example, the tower-defense game Plants vs. Zombies is ostensibly real-time, but its characteristics are more in line with traditional turn-based games. Besides being solely a single-player game, the gameplay itself is strictly deterministic, even moreso than many turn-based games. The map consists of five tracks along which the zombies progress, each with exactly nine slots on which to place defensive plants. Furthermore, the zombies’ behavior is entirely predictable - Pole Valuting Zombies will always jump over blocking Wall-nuts, even if that means falling right into the jaws of a Chomper plant. The game may look chaotic to an observer, but - like most tower-defense games - the strategic play is built upon predictable enemy behavior. The real-time mechanics simply provide time pressure, not the other qualities usually associated with the format, such as chaotic play or a multi-player mode.

Likewise, Boom Blox is a turn-based game which eskews the usual strengths of the format. In the game, players have a discrete number of throws during which to knock down various block-based structures. Unlike most turn-based games, however, Boom Blox is a very chaotic affair, with unpredictable physics-based game mechanics. Furthermore, unlike Plants vs. Zombies, in which players’ actions take place on a precise 5-by-9 grid, players of Boom Blox use strictly analog controls to point at the screen and then “throw” the ball with the WiiMote. Chaos theory dictates that an identical series of throws will almost never happen twice in a row. Furthermore, this unpredictable nature coupled with the very short turns (each only a single throw) makes Boom Blox an excellent multi-player game, a rare feat for turn-based video games.

Thus, in the end, deciding whether to make a game real-time or turn-based is less important than deciding which aspects of those formats are most relevant to the overall design. As they say, one needs to learn the rules to know how to break them.

Landscape of open source games

2009-10-29T11:21:39Z

Yo Frankie! An open source platformer created using Blender.

I recently gave a presentation on the landscape of open source software in computer games at the Univ. Rey Juan Carlos, where I am currently visiting the Libresoft research group. My slides are available here.

While much of the talk covered well-known libraries (SDL, OpenAL), game engines (Ogre, Irrlicht), physics engines (Bullet, Tokamak), and content creation tools (Blender, GIMP), there were a few surprises. One was how many open source game-creation systems I found (4, more than the zero I expected). These are Game Editor (2d with export to some mobile devices), Construct (2d, some 3d), Novashell (2d), and Sandbox (3d). Another surprise was the game Yo Frankie! (pictured above), which has very high quality animation and artwork, and was produced using Blender.

A disappointment was the state of open content sharing. While some sites, like OpenGameArt and New Grounds provide tagging with a Creative Commons license, far more common are sites like Google’s 3D Warehouse that have site-specific terms of use, and provide no ability for artists to indicate they are willing to share their work via Creative Commons or an open source license.

Interview: Spore's Chaim Gingold Communes With Earth Dragon

2009-10-28T20:00:33Z

For Chaim Gingold, working closely with renowned game designer Will Wright on the evolutionary god game Spore was just another step in the evolution of his own identity as a game creator.

Gingold was the lead for Spore's integral Creature Creator editor, which allowed users to bring virtual beings to life. But his current project, the independently-developed iPhone game Earth Dragon, is less about creating, and more about destroying, albeit in a fun, cute way.

Here, Gingold tells us how these days, the destructive capacity of big mythical monsters is completely underutilized in video games, what his work on the high-profile Spore taught him about creating an iPhone game virtually on his own, and why he thinks with Earth Dragon, it's best to "make Donkey Kong, not Super Mario Bros:

After you left Spore, what did you end up doing, and why did you decide to start making independent games?

After I left Spore, I traveled around the world for a bit, ate a bunch of Masala Dosas, and then returned to Berkeley to start making games. Why did I decide to go the independent route? If you're at a big publisher the chance that you get to make a game you want to make is basically zero. And even if you are Will Wright, you still have to fight hard.

When I left, there was some discussion of me starting my own project, but I realized two things. First, I don't have Will's Jedi powers of persuasion, so forget it. Whatever I made would probably get thrown way off course. And second, why should I make something for someone else? There are designers that require a large development team to make things, but since I can code, I don't need that. This kind of thinking does have some negative side effects, though...

I spent about a year writing prototypes for a PC game whose working title is PK. Earth Dragon actually began life as a prototype for PK, and I eventually prototyped Earth Dragon, and wrote its level editor, inside of PK. PK generated a ton of interesting ideas and prototypes. The architecture editor I developed, for example, is light years more advanced than Spore's Building Creator.

The iPhone felt like the solution to this problem I had, where after working for over four years on Spore, which was a great education for me, getting to write so many prototypes, design the editors, and work closely with Will Wright, I had no sense of proportion for what kind of PC game I could actually pull off. I got to the point where if I was at a big publisher, you'd start to throw people onto my dev team, and I looked around, and they didn't magically show up.

I turned around, and realized that the cavalry wasn't coming, like it did on Spore, and I took a step back and reminded myself that I'm doing an indie game. I am the cavalry, and I'm not smarter than Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler put together - what am I doing?

My job now with PK is to figure out which parts of it are most interesting to me, and how I can build a marketable product out of its core ideas and discoveries. That was a difficult realization to make, and I realized that I probably needed to take a creative break and work on some smaller stuff. With the iPhone it's a lot harder to go off the rails in terms of scope because of the platform's constraints, which at the time I thought would be the perfect antidote for me.

Why iPhone? What attracted you to it?

As a player, I've bought and played more iPhone games in the past year than games for all other platforms combined for the past three years. I don't want to spend $50 on a game that takes 40 hours of my life. Sure, at one point I happily did that, but games just don't fit into my life that way anymore. And they feel rather repetitive to me. Part of what's going on here is that what we call casual gaming is basically taking over the world. I will spend $15 on World of Goo for a handful of non-stop hours of fun I've never had before.

I don't want to play Final Fantasy or Legend of Zelda yet again. I'll happily spend $3 on a game that provides an hour or two of novel, fun, experience. And these games, and the whole indie gaming world, are providing far more interesting gaming experiences than I can get anywhere else. iPhone games, and the indie scene, are becoming the creative center of gravity of the gaming world, and I'm excited to be part of it. It feels like a whole new golden era of video games.

The shorter forms and lower price points on the iPhone -- and new distribution channels in general -- are also really interesting -- they fit into my life better, and they also seem to encourage more experimentation on the part of developers. With games we have our epic novels, Lord of the Rings, that sort of thing, but we don't have our short stories, or our New Yorker length fiction pieces. We're starting to see what that might mean. Jason Rohrer's Passage, for example, is like a lovely poem. Adam Saltsman's Canabalt is like a short piece from Heavy Metal. These short forms excite me as a developer and a player.

As an interactive designer, the iPhone is like crack. It's like being a kid, and walking into some otherworld fantasy toy store. The iPhone hardware is a marvelous playground for designers. Ever since seeing Jeff Han's YouTube video of his multitouch setup and the demo software written by a bunch of NYU grad students, and playing with it in person, I've had a burning desire to write multitouch software. I'm a total interface nerd.

And with the iPhone you don't just have multitouch, you have an accelerometer, network capability, location awareness, it's portable, a camera, and a decent GPU. What do you do this thing? I'm really excited about where this medium is going, and the possibilities it presents. With consoles and PC's it's like ok, great, more triangles and CPU, big deal. With the iPhone you get something totally different, plus less triangles and CPU power, which is a creatively refreshing constraint.

Also, I love how easy it is to playtest with the thing. What motivates me as a designer, and creative person, is the experience of making things -- solving problems, figuring things out -- and creating experiences for other people. I love watching people play not just my software, but play with anything. It's endlessly fascinating to me. I'll even playtest other people's games and software on my unsuspecting friends, to see how they react and why.

Now, as an interactive designer, playtesting is pretty key to my job. Ask anybody who is still playing Spore what they do with the game, and chances are they spend at least half of their time making stuff in the game's creative tools. My team got something like four years to playtest and develop the editors, and I firmly believe that all that playtesting is what got us to such a fluid, easy to pickup, and fun to interact with set of editors. And all that observation and iteration made us smarter designers.

Working alone, it's surprising how hard it is to drag people back to your office to playtest your game, so you can figure out if you're headed in the right direction or not. But the iPhone is a whole different story. You can playtest as often as you have your phone on you -- which is almost always. That is just amazing to me. I can indulge my playtesting addiction as often as I want.

The ease of distribution with the iPhone is also a big plus. Apple really nailed it. And the development tools are easy to get, and super friendly. Coming back to the question of scope, the iPhone also encourages developers to think small, and grow successful ideas, which I thought would be good for me. I had an "a-ha" moment listening to Neil Young talk about Rolando at GDC last year, that this is one of the most profound transformations digital distribution is bringing to games. My mantra while developing Earth Dragon has been "Make Donkey Kong, not Super Mario Bros." Think small! If people like it, you still care, you can pile in the other million ideas you have later.

Tell us about Earth Dragon and why it differentiates itself from other titles. What gameplay mechanisms are you particularly proud of in the game?

I'm really happy with how juicy the game is, and how vivid, funny, and spatter-ful it is. People love it, and they just laugh and laugh. You've got burning cows, exploding people, castles crashing down onto archers -- it's just a riot of playful violence. I'm really happy with the tone of playful intensity Earth Dragon's violence has.

Earth Dragon has the most intense level of cartoon violence Apple allows. And Apple has come back to us and said, fine, but people are going to have to be at least 12 years old to play this game. Basically, Earth Dragon is so intense that you if you're less than 12, forget about it, you should go play a different game. It's a good thing, too, that the iPhone and iPod touch screens are made of glass, because they protect you from the spray of blood and other matter that is generated while playing. The glass shields you from the game's juicyness, and is easy to wipe down after you're done playing. I wouldn't make this kind of game on any other platform -- it would just be too messy and awkward, not to mention unsafe.

I'm really happy with Earth Dragon's touch and feel. I had to get the flying feeling really good on the iPhone, and be easy to learn in play tests, before I committed to continued development. One of the exciting things about designing for this platform is that everyone is basically inventing the platform's game conventions together. It's an evolutionary explosion of design. How you control characters, whether you should even be controlling individual avatars like we do on consoles, how you perform actions, appropriate length and difficulty, the types of games that make sense, and so on.

It's an exciting place to be designing things. In Earth Dragon, I wanted to get a feeling of flapping and flying around -- you flap the phone to flap the dragon's wings and go up, and tilt side to side to glide around, and it feels really nice, and you have this slightly inexact feeling of control, but very satisfying feeling of flying and swooping around the screen. And that leaves touching the screen for smashing things, breathing fire, and diving onto people who probably aren't expecting a dragon to come screaming down from the sky, straight at them. It's a control scheme that just wouldn't be possible on any other platform.

Earth Dragon's theme is pretty unique, not just for the iPhone, but for games as a whole. Earth Dragon is basically Rampage with dragons and castles, but specifically designed for the iPhone. You're a super cute and super powerful dragon who takes on entire castles, and levels them. No survivors. I wish we had more giant monster games - it seems like a totally underrepresented video game genre to me. Being really big and powerful, and smashing your way through cities is really fun, not to mention therapeutic.

Katamari is the most recent game I played that really hits this feeling. Apocalyptic destruction in these types of games requires a certain playful or ironic tone that Katamari, Rampage, and Earth Dragon all have. Otherwise it can just feel kind of sadistic, which is how a lot of violent games can feel to me, like Grand Theft Auto or Gears of War. Games with a lot of graphic violence turn me off.

Make it playful enough and people will enjoy inflicting massive destruction while laughing their heads off. They're laughing at their own violence, thrilled at their own destructive powers, while feeling kind of sorry and silly at the same time. It makes a great demo -- setting people and cows on fire, and then smashing them to bits. You can kidnap the princess, or just set her on fire. Either way, it's funny. It's totally the kind of game you want to show off to your friends.

The castle smashing levels have a compulsive quality to them I'm really proud of. Jane Ng, the artist I collaborated with on this project, told me that she would often get sucked into playing the game while she was trying to test something. I've had to tear away people from the game, including myself, which is a nice feeling. Even though the game is kind of short, I'm super happy with the game's pacing, the rhythm with which things happen and the game unfolds.

If the game is received well enough I'd like to make a procedurally generated infinite play mode, where the levels just kind of regenerate underneath you, kind of like how Pac-Man CE on the Xbox 360 has this endlessly unfolding and compulsive play quality. That kind of pacing can be dangerous -- we might never be able to finish making it! I also want to release the castle editor I made for my Mac, which is a surprising amount of fun, on the iPhone. If the game sells well enough I'll totally be motivated to do that.

Are you worried about standing apart from other titles in the iPhone store, since it's so crowded?

Yes, I am worried about standing out in the super crowded App store. I do have a kind of naive belief that as a designer I bring something unique to the table that other people won't, and hopefully there are enough people out there who want to play with my weird software that I can make a living making the things I want to make. This dovetails nicely with my other naive belief that despite the volume of stuff on the App store, people will tell their friends about software they like, and it will find its way to appreciate, paying customers. I guess I'll find out shortly.

I'm not trying to win the iPhone lottery and get into the top 10 or something -- for me, it's about being able to make a living doing what I love.

What's your longer-term plan? To keep making iPhone games, or try other things?

I have about a gajillion ideas that the iPhone is the perfect platform for, and I'm really digging the shorter games that it makes possible. I have a ton of ideas sitting in my personal prototype vault that I've never been able to figure out what to do with, but I think many of them would work nicely on the iPhone, which is exciting to me. And I'll probably be able to work a lot faster now that I've got my development bearings here.

I do want to return to PK, the bigger PC game I was prototyping - since I'm really in love with a lot of the prototypes and ideas that it generated. I've also realized that one of the things I love about designing in a team environment is the quality of teaching and mentorship it has, and I'd really like to devote time to teaching one day. I'd also like to get some hens, because with hens you can get fresh eggs from your backyard, and they eat your kitchen scraps.

Mechanic Assessment: Use-based Skill Gain

2009-10-28T16:37:00Z

From my experience with use-based skill gain systems in Oblivion, Morrowind, and Darkfall, I’ve noticed that such systems are inferior. They should be avoided in favor of other approaches to skill-based advancement (as in Fallen Earth) and class/skill hybrid systems (like the one in Final Fantasy Tactics).

First, three gamist reasons why use-based skill gain is an inferior character advancement system:

The character can only be rewarded for a much narrower set of tasks. And that set of tasks is doing whatever action the player wants to level. It’s not clear how quest (or whatever kind of achievement system you want) rewards can fit into this framework. Use-based skill gain cuts out an important part of the incentive structure. In an RPG like Dungeons and Dragons, Dogs in the Vineyard, or Mousegard, combat isn’t an end, it’s a means towards surviving a precarious scenario. There are other means, such as parley, avoidance, and escape that serve that purpose just as well. With use-based skill gain, it becomes difficult to reward the player character for accomplishing anything except easily quantifiable combat and crafting tasks. This leads to gameplay focusing on direct combat and crafting, which narrows significantly the effective and beneficial conflict resolution methods.

Use-based skill gain leads to runaway positive feedback loops that restrict character growth and ability diversity. I kill using ability A so ability A becomes more powerful so I use ability A to kill stuff. This loop generates a second-order effect on skill growth. If you only have a few abilities that are strong enough to use against mobs that drop worthwhile loot, you’re going to use those abilities frequently leading to them becoming more effective and the farming being more efficient and worthwhile. In this way, characters are stuck using the same abilities because only certain abilities are day-to-day useful. But all the abilities are on a similar scale. The Illusion and Mysticism schools of magic were like this in Oblivion: they had some nifty effects, but they were largely composed of utility spells that you would never justifiably use enough to keep the skill level competitive with your melee skills or destruction magic.

Use-based skill gain encourages and rewards exploitation, macroing, and cheating. Some skills necessarily will be used less than others. By factors of hundreds. This forces designers to balance skill advancement against use. This problem cannot be solved. Designers need to measure skill-use frequencies and balance that frequency against how difficult advancement should be. But if a player wants to level a skill, he’s going to find ways to use it more than is reasonable, throwing these calculations off and leading to imbalance. If the player wants to level his buffing abilities, he is going to cast buff spells on everyone he sees if he’s nice, but more likely he’ll cast a buff on himself, then dispell it, and repeat those two actions until he has the desired skill level. Players will always seek to find safe ways to level skills, trivializing the advancement system—developers will always be behind in preventing this kind of behavior. Exploiting and macroing becomes the only way for an honest player to keep up. Darkfall’s EU server has fallen victim to this problem. Exploitation is always the most effective way of increasing skills and it breaks the balance of skill gain.

And one simulationist reason:

Use-based skill gain doesn’t make sense from an immersion/metaphor perspective either. People do not go out and put their life in direct danger to advance from novice to super-novice at using a sword. They spend years practicing with the weapon for several hours every day. The time spent practicing far outstrips that time spent in actual life-threatening struggle. When you’re engaged in combat where life is in the balance, the amount of skill you have when combat begins determines if you live or die. You’re focused on survival, not on dinging 34 on your sword skill. Certainly you will learn from direct combat, but not even a tenth the amount you learned from training since you were the age of 10.

Use-based skill gain should be avoided for primarily these four reasons. As a mechanic, I thought it was a great idea before I played games that implemented it. Now I don’t see a reason to go with use-based skill gain over a different skill-based advancement system, such as purchasing skill levels with XP or some other broader resource.

Originally posted on That's a Terrible Idea

Time-traveling through the English language with the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary

2009-10-27T21:22:34Z

Matt and I recently had the opportunity to spend some time browsing through the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, which has just been published by Oxford University Press.

I began by reading the introduction. He began by looking up curse words. Once he had satisfied his curiosity about when certain very popular profanities first entered the English language, he turned his attention to the more unusual words within the inferior persons, as abused subcategory that have fallen out of use, such as windfucker (1602 to 1616), hog-rubber (1614 to 1621), chuff-cat (1653), shit-sack (1769 to 1785), and son of a sea-cook (1806 to 1977). This led to an animated discussion of the common themes that connected many of the words—comparisons to animals, sex with relatives or objects, and the inability to control one’s bowels.

That’s what happens when you put the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary within reach of a writer.

Browsing this work feels strangely like time-travel. All the words from Old English to 2003—obsolete and current, including slang and dialect—have been extracted from the Oxford English Dictionary and organized by their meanings and dates of use. This places each word within its historical context, revealing how ideas and meanings emerged and the different ways they’ve been expressed through time.

It took forty-four years to bring the HTOED to publication, overcoming what the editors politely describe as “a series of intellectual, financial, and domestic challenges.” About 800,000 meanings from the OED were transcribed onto slips of paper and organized into a unique classification system with over 236,000 categories and subcategories. A fire in 1978 would have destroyed a decade of work but for the fact that the paper slips were stored in a metal filing cabinet. They could have finished making slips by 1980, but the decision was made to add new material from the second edition of the OED and the supplements. Computers were eventually used to enter, store, and retrieve data, but much of the work continued to be done by hand.

The result is the world’s largest thesaurus, nearly 4000 pages of small type in two big volumes weighing fifteen pounds, with a slipcase and folding chart of the top levels of the classification system. I like print references because browsing can lead to serendipitous discoveries, but these books can be awkward to use. It’s especially frustrating when looking up a word with multiple meanings, as the index may list dozens of identification numbers, which means lots of page flipping. No, it’s not available online or on CD, though that may eventually change. I’d like to see the powers-that-be at Oxford University Press quickly add the HTOED to the online OED so both works can be used together and fully cross-referenced and searched.

The classification system of the HTOED is mind-bogglingly complex, forming a hierarchy of meaning from the general to the specific. At the highest level are the three main sections—the external world, the mental world, and the social world—which divide into 26 major categories, such as the earth, life, emotion, society, morality, faith, armed hostility, and communication. These branch into more detailed categories like food, clothing, people, animals, transport, love, moral evil, and sexual relations. More specific categories and subcategories lead to the synonyms and related words, which are organized by part of speech and listed chronologically with the date of the first recorded use in English and, for obsolete words, the last recorded use. (I recommend reading the “guide to the use of the thesaurus” to get your bearings.)

Each level in this hierarchy of meaning is assigned a two-digit number, which when combined creates identification numbers for every word in the thesaurus. Some words have many identification numbers because they have numerous meanings or have changed their meanings over time and thus appear in different locations within the thesaurus.

For example, in the alphabetical index, the first identification number for the noun serendipity, one of my favorite words, is 01.05.05.10.02.01|10.01, locating it in the thesaurus within these nested categories and subcategories:

01                                                         the external world
01.05                                                  existence in time and space
01.05.05                                     action/operation
01.05.05.10                              endeavour
01.05.05.10.02                       searching/seeking
01.05.05.10.02.01 (n.)              finding/discovery (noun)
01.05.05.10.02.01|10               accidentally (subcategory)
01.05.05.10.02.01|10.01        faculty of making happy discoveries by chance

Here you’ll find that the noun serendipity was first cited in 1754. After the finding/discovery (noun) category is the finding/discovery (adjective) category, in which serendipitous (01.05.05.10.02.01|03) dates from 1958.

The HTOED will clearly be important to the study of the English language, but it also could contribute to other subjects, especially history, literature, and culture. The descriptions of life and the earth over centuries are like crash courses in the history of science and medicine. Cultural historians will look for clues in our language to our attitudes about gender, race, and class, as with the words used to describe women based on animals (mare, hen, cow, heifer, bird) or clothing (skirt, smock, petticoat). Advancements in technology are reflected in subjects like travel, tools, telecommunications, and computing. Shakespeare scholars will be able to compare the words in use during his lifetime and argue about the reasons for his word choices. Even a category like clothing can reveal shifts in morality, as when underwear became unmentionables in 1823.

I believe the HTOED could be a rich source of inspiration and world-building for writers. Historical novelists could gain insight into the past and how people lived, what they knew and believed, and how they described their own world. And they’ll know whether the words their characters are speaking were actually in use at the time. (Elizabethans would not have called a packed meal a picnic, as it was first cited in 1748.) Fantasy writers may unearth ideas in forgotten names or descriptions of supernatural beings and mythical creatures. Poets can reintroduce lyrical and imaginative words that have fallen out of use, such as candel (Old English to 1634), luminair (1456 to 1560), or streamer (1513 to 1647), all of which once described heavenly bodies. Eclectic writers like my husband who have a strong love of word-play and enjoy collecting unusual bits of knowledge will find it addictive.

Let’s say you’d like to take advantage of the current craze for vampires or literary monster mash-ups like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The HTOED can tell you when different monsters first entered our nightmares and what we called them at distinct points in time. Follow the hierarchy of categories from the external world to the supernatural to supernatural being/spirit to malignant monster (noun). Here you’ll find that the word vampyre was first cited in 1734, followed by vampire in 1796. Though vampire is still in use today, the last recorded OED citation for vampyre was in 1847. Referring to vampires as undead didn’t begin until 1897. Werewolves trace all the way back to the Old English werewulf, lycanthrope was first cited in 1813 and is still in use, but the more poetic turnskin entered the language in 1831 and exited forty years later. Oh, and zombie was first cited in 1819, two years after the death of Jane Austen.

The editors have included all those words that have been too controversial for some other dictionaries and thesauruses. Curse words, sexual slang, and offensive slurs for racial and sexual minorities appear dispassionately in their chronological place among their less inflammatory cousins. Reading certain entries may cause shock, disgust, or pain, but there is value in putting these powerful words in their historical context. If you are easily offended or prefer your works expurgated, consider yourself warned.

Priced at $395 (on sale at Amazon for $316), the HTOED will unfortunately be out of reach for many of the writers and word lovers who might appreciate it, so keep it mind if you are looking for a fabulous gift for your favorite logophile.

For more information, check out this OUP website for the HTOED and this OUP blog post with “fun facts and figures” about the work. Here’s the link to a sample page from the work at the OUP website.

UPDATE, 10/28: I received an email from Christian Kay, editor of the HTOED. There are indeed plans to eventually link the HTOED to the OED online and make it available to subscribers, but that could be a couple of years away. There are no plans for a CD version. So it looks like the books will be the only option for quite some time.

Posted in Amazon, Authors, Books, Browsing, Dictionary, Fantasy, Historical fiction, History, In the news, Reference books, Research, Science Fiction, Searching, Shakespeare, Thesaurus, Words, Worldbuilding, Writer's Bookshelf, Writers, Writing

Rewards in Games: The Psychology of Slot Machine Design

2009-10-22T14:22:28Z

The Sydney Morning Herald has an interesting article about designing games to encourage continued play for slot machines. The article is well worth reading and should have implications for design of non-gambling games.

It is interesting to think about how game design and game business model get tied into game incentives:

If I am building a "game for sale", I need good video clips, fancy feature lists, and marketing support. I may also have to build a teaser/demo version to give enough of the game away to entice customers to purchase the game but not enough to satisfy them (a problem that a lot of demos have).

In an MMO, I need a reason to keep you playing (or at least paying) month after month.

In a Free-to-Play game, I need to make the game interesting for non-paying customers, but with a way to pull them to play.

In a gambling game, I want to keep you paying game after game after game.

The business models & game designs for all of these games are very different and do not readily translate between each other. MMOs have had problems switching to the F2P business model because the subscription game design is deeply entrenched.

In some sense, the business model (or models) & marketing strategy need to be part of the game design from the earliest stages. Features like viral-ity may be able to be added into the game later, but will work better if woven deeply into the game's systems.

The casino game industry thinks very deeply about these issues. In some sense, I think they are still limited by the metaphor of earlier mechanical slot machines and table games. Similarly, with computer games, our designs tend to draw on existing patterns which may not be well-suited to the medium where we are creating our new games.

If you were starting from scratch, what would a social network game look like? A F2P game?

N. Galvin (2009), "Poker face", http://www.smh.com.au/national/poker-face-20090930-gctl.html

Kotaku Editor Details EverQuest Addiction

2009-10-20T15:36:24Z

Kotaku editor Mike Fahey has written a wonderfully detailed and candid first-person account of his addiction to EverQuest.

Fahey begins his story in late 2000, noting that he had a job, a car and a girlfriend. Shortly after, following the breakup of his relationship, he was enticed to join the online world of EverQuest at the behest of his roommate. Falling completely for the game he soon found himself unemployed, his car towed and his wallet empty. While he rebounded for a time, he apparently committed the long rumored, rarely admitted geek-sin of turning down relations for a chance to hit level 40 with his character.

Mike again rebounded, turning his addiction into a job, which helped, as he states, “I've managed to turn a habit that once interrupted my work into something I actively have to do for work. It's no longer escapism if I am doing my job.”

Fahey also admitted that the fault was mostly, if not all, his own:

I hid. I ran from my problems, hiding away in a virtual fantasy world instead of confronting the issues that might have been easily resolved if I had addressed them directly. As far as I am concerned, the only thing Sony Online Entertainment is guilty of is creating a damn good hiding place.

Thanks Andrew

Free Graphics For Indie Developers!

2009-10-19T20:25:00Z

Here's the link: Download The AI War 2.0 Graphics Library

And here's the contents of our readme file:

-------------------------------------------------------------
AI War 2.0 Graphics Library: Free To Use For Indie Developers
-------------------------------------------------------------

I'm going to keep this as brief as possible, for the sake of clarity. This library contains the graphics for the indie space RTS AI War: Fleet Command, as of version 2.0 of that game. This readme is written by Chris Park, AI War's creator.

Whoever you are, an indie developer or otherwise, you're free to use the graphics in this library for whatever purposes you want. Don't sell these graphics by themselves, but you can include them in your game, your pictures, whatever, and then you can sell your work with this art intact. You can modify them as much as you need for your purposes, as well. Make a new RTS, make some other genre of game, whatever. Just please be sure that you attribute the art to the artist(s) that created it.

---------------------
Who Created This Art?
---------------------

The original art for AI War 1.0 was all by myself (and not that good), or by Daniel Cook (mostly the ship graphics, but also some other aspects, and quite good). For almost everything that is by Daniel Cook and included in this library, it has also been modified by myself (Chris Park) to a greater or lesser degree. But the work is still primarily Danc's (I mostly only bring up my involvement so that some of the... less appealing... compound works that are in the Daniel Cook folder are not mistaken as something that he put together. If it looks a bit lesser quality, that's probably my hand at work).

After release, an AI War player named Hans-Martin Portmann, who is also an artist, was gracious enough to donate some art to help improve the game. His suggestions also led to a lot of the improved special effects, even for those where he did not directly contribute images.

After version 1.013 of the game came out, Philippe Chabot joined the Arcen Games team and upgraded much of the art, replacing a huge amount of it outright. He also did some significant upgrades to some of Danc's/my work, making it larger, or animated, or more detailed in certain ways, or whatever.

So here's how you know who the artist is, looking at the folders in this archive:

ChrisPark
----------
The work in this folder is original to me, and there is not a whole lot of it left at this stage.

DanielCook (http://lostgarden.com/)
-----------------------------------
Everything in this folder was created by Daniel Cook, and probably also altered to some degree by Chris Park. A few things that were orignal to Chris Park might have been stuck in here as well, but that's just things like numbers or a check mark, etc.

Tyrian: http://lostgarden.com/2007/04/free-game-graphics-tyrian-ships-and.html
Iron Plague: http://lostgarden.com/2005/03/download-complete-set-of-sweet-8-bit.html
Hard Vacuum: http://lostgarden.com/2005/03/game-post-mortem-hard-vacuum.html

DanielCookPhilippeChabot
------------------------
The work in this folder started out as Daniel Cook's work, and then way probably also altered to some degree by Chris Park, and then was altered to a much more significant degree (in most cases) by Philippe Chabot.

HansMartinPortmann
------------------
The work in this folder is all original to Hans-Martin Portmann.

PhilippeChabot
--------------
The work in this folder is all original to Philippe Chabot.

----------------------------------------
Why Are You Releasing This Art For Free?
----------------------------------------

As I mentioned above, AI War started out with just unimpressive programmer graphics mixed with the excellent work of Danc. The game went on sale in this state, and sold into the four digits of units sold without any art upgrades from Philippe. The primary determinant of our sales was the game itself, of course, but having graphics that weren't all as terrible as they would have been if I had had to make them all myself was a huge boost, I think. I couldn't afford to pay for art at the start, as I was developing AI War in my own spare time and had no budget to speak of.

Danc releases some of his old pixelart on his website -- some of it is from Tyrian, and some of it is from some other older games of his that were not actually ever released -- and it's safe to say that AI War wouldn't have existed in at all its released form without his having decided to do that. His generosity helped get AI War off the ground, and once AI War was to the point where it was making enough money that I could afford to hire an artist, I knew I wanted to give back in the same way.

All of Philippe's art in this library was done as work for hire and so belongs to Arcen Games, but Philippe was very much on board when I pitched him the idea of making a library for other indies to be able to reuse from. There simply isn't much out there aside from what Danc puts out and maybe four other sources for free pixelart that indie developers can use in commerical products, and so hopefully you'll find this library useful. It's our way of giving back to the indie community, in hopes of bootstrapping some other talented developer the way that Daniel Cook bootstrapped Arcen Games.

Photos of remote birds killed by our trash

2009-10-19T20:18:56Z

Photographer Chris Jordan has published a series of images identified as dead albatross on Midway Atoll whose bodies are filled with bits of plastic they ingested.

Midway Island is an anemic little line of sand and coral reefs, way out in the middle of the Pacific. Now, I don't know Mr. Jordan personally, and haven't fact-checked the story behind the photos -- but presuming it's all as presented, this really is a horrifying set of images. Birds that live as far away from civilization as you can imagine, their innards packed with petroleum flotsam? Wow.

The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking. To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

Midway (chrisjordan.com, Thanks, Susannah Breslin and Sean Bonner!)

The Most Important Part When Creating a 3D Game

2009-10-19T15:36:00Z

From time to time, people send me mails, asking me if they can create a World of Warcraft, Oblivion or Quake like game when using Irrlicht as Game Engine. Well, in short: Yes, of course you can. No one will stop you.

But a longer answer would be: First, let me tell you that Irrlicht is a 3D engine. It draws nice graphics. And doesn't do a lot more. Irrlicht is NOT a game engine. Let me draw you a simple UML diagram, illustrating what you usually find in a typical game:

Diagram created using UModel

As you might notice, a very basic game consists usually of a graphics engine (examples for these are Irrlicht, Ogre or maybe even a DirectDraw based one), a sound engine (for example using fmod or irrKlang) and today, in most cases even a physics engine (like ODE or Bullet). And last but not least, there has to be the game logic somewhere. This is the most important part which no one will create for you, which is the core of your game. The component that is the fun part, the one that basically is your game.

All this together is forming a so called game engine.
The gray rectangles on the bottom on this diagram are exchangeable components. Instead of using Irrlicht, you could use DirectDraw and instead of using irrKlang you can use fmod, but the game you are creating will still be the same. The important part is the gray rectangle with the text 'Game Logic' on it. Concentrate on this, that's what the most essential part is.

So yes, you can create the next Oblivion using Irrlicht, if you like. But have you ever thought of making it fun first, and using for example simple 2d graphics? Before trying to generate a huge 3d world on your own which usually takes teams of up to 100 people, many years and several million euros of money? Games are not there for the graphics. They are there for the fun. For entertaining people. Just a thought.

(Disclaimer: This blog post has been created so I can link it for all the following mails I get, asking me if they can use Irrlicht as game engine for their next MMORPG.)

My generation: How Indie Game Makers are Embracing Controlled Chaos

2009-10-12T16:41:17Z

One of the highlights of this year's Austin GDC was a session by game design veteran Greg Costikyan on the 'blight or bane' of randomness in games -- a wide-ranging talk that covered the history and delicate balance of luck or chance in games, and their interplay with the idea of skill. Of particular note were his final slides on algorithmic content: randomly or procedurally generated games, starting, of course, with the genre-defining early computer RPG Rogue, a game highly dependent on luck but also one of near infinite variety with each successive playthrough. The idea is one that's been prevalent throughout videogame history, but it's also one that's most recently and notably being embraced by indies for its exploit-ability in adding 'cheap' (once your algorithms have been perfected) content and replayability on a tight budget and tiny team. Derek Yu's Spelunky (at top) is easily the best example, and where all discussion of the indie embrace of procedural generation needs to start. Taking the Rogue formula and applying it to the 8-bit platformer genre, Spelunky's enduring power and charm (having been finessed for nearly a year, and only just now hitting its 1.0 release) is its ability to create "situations" rather than rote level layouts. Though your only goal is 'simpy' to reach an exit at the bottom of each generated cave, without the benefit of memorization (think of how easily, 25 years later, you can now anticipate each impending Goomba and pitfall in World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros.) every new twist in Spelunky is a fresh test of more overarching skills: arrow-traps lining the walls of your next drop, a giant spider hovering near a precious gem, a distressed damsel crying for help at the bottom of a snake pit. None of these situations are ever presented the same way or in the same sequence twice, nor are their solutions any less unique, and each failure presents a learning opportunity that feels as rewarding as each victory (particularly in how it avoids the Groundhog Day frustrations of butting up against identical deaths). Play Yu's free PC release of the game and you'll understand instantly, and prep yourself for the 2010 release of the Xbox Live Arcade version. Adam Saltsman's embrace of these ideas goes even deeper: his decision not to include GUI level-editing utilities in his recent free Flixel Flash engine was meant to encourage new developers to experiment with script-based procedural techniques, starting with his own game Fathom (and Flixel demo game Mode). Where that's shined most brightly, though, is in his Experimental Gameplay contribution Canabalt (just recently released for the iPhone [App Store link]). Stripped down even further than Spelunky, Canabalt is one-button economy over-top procedural play. Your only interaction in Canabalt is to jump from roof to algorithmically-heightened and extended roof in a break-neck escape from a situation unspecified, giving the game a laser-focus on speed and reaction time. It's that simplicity and variety that's made it not only one of the most compulsive indie games of the year, but also the near-instant viral hit it's now become (alongside Saltsman's smart social network promotions). Finally, procedure meets sandbox in Farbs' Captain Forever, the least overtly or recognizably generated game of the three, but no less infinitely replayable, as signified by its title. Your goal in the game? Merely to act and excel as a star pilot -- and by 'you' I mean 'you': Forever's best fourth-wall-breaking trick is to use your PC's webcam to project your own face as a ghostly reflection on its low-bit display, visible primarily on direct-hit enemy explosions, which places you directly inside your ship's cockpit even as you sit slumped at your MacBook. To progress further into its infinite universe, Forever lets you procure scrap from demolished ships to build your own ever-more-fearsome craft, which elicits a further push-pull by generating both more powerful foes with higher-grade shields and weapons, and easier prey as you lose your own components in firefights. Still in pre-release, you can donate to Farbs to get an early look into the infinite space of his generated space, and, as with the other games above, become a firm believer in the church of procedural gaming.

The joy of iteration

2009-09-24T15:36:42Z

Game developers often talk about iteration. When I began writing about games, I was perplexed by this word and even more bewildered by its verb form: iterate. Why, I wondered, would a developer purposely choose to repeat what he or she had done before? My understanding of iteration stemmed from its standard definition: "to do again, repeat," from the Latin "iterationem" which means "repetition."(1)

But a closer look at the etymology of the word reveals that a common synonym for iterate is rehearse, and when I discovered that little tidbit, the full meaning of the word opened up to me. In the theater we don't practice a play; we rehearse it. Practice implies doing something over and over again until you get it right. Rehearsal is a discovery process wherein doing something again reveals new ideas or information that can be useful in the creation of something we collaboratively build. The kinship I feel with game designers and developers comes from this sense that we speak each other's language...even if I don't know a thing about middleware or C++.

I mention this because the genius of the iterative process is clearly at work in the game I've been playing for the last ten days, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story. While it's possible to see iteration as a way of cashing in on a successful game - adding a few features and pumping out an annual edition - the latest Mario & Luigi game suggests its predecessors have essentially been rehearsals for this culminating masterpiece. Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story is the finest and most fully realized Mario RPG ever made, and that's saying something for a highly regarded franchise that includes the original Super Mario RPG, the Paper Mario series, and two previous Mario & Luigi games.

If careful iteration produces notable refinements, what's so refined about BIS? Aside from its top-to-bottom graphical polish and colorful interface, (aesthetically, this game sets a new standard for sprite design and animation on the DS), the game distinguishes itself in two areas that have become M&L signatures: writing and tone. It's easy to isolate the gameplay elements, the RPG elements, the platforming elements, etc., and these all contribute to the experience BIS delivers. But I contend the flavor and spirit of this game are communicated most powerfully via its sharp canny dialogue and self-aware conceit that establish a playful link between game and player.

Mario & Luigi games are a hoot because they're cleverly written and expertly localized. Developer AlphaDream distills the signature characteristics of each Mushroom Kingdom resident and gives comedic voice to those traits. Dialogue is often delivered in a manner reminiscent of Chaplin's City Lights, with voices speaking gobbledygook in varying pitches suited to each character, ridiculing the notion that characters must speak, but embracing the necessity.

The game winks at the player by ripping styles of dialogue from other games. Globins talk in medieval fantasy-speak ("Thou hast dropped something in yon mucus pool, methinks"); Fawful, by far the most entertaining character, speaks in badly translated Japanese-to-English ("Fawful is gorging on his plan of win! And still he has hunger!") and ("Now I have chortle time. Fawful scattered your minions like litter from a sad ugly cat. Are you wanting to hear them? For they are on the TV show. The TV show of your tears.")

Bowser, a big dumb vain lug encounters a standard-issue sensei trainer who speaks in spiritual non sequiturs:

Bowser: That doesn't even make sense!
Midbus: Sense is for the weak.
Bowser: (smashing his own head with his fists) Stop talking to me!!
Midbus: You are unenlightened.
Bowser: TOO MANY WORDS!

More than in previous games, BIS presents a humorous, but disturbing picture of a society ruled by a charismatic leader. Fawful has brainwashed the citizens, and an eerie cult of personality has emerged that won't tolerate dissent:

Citizen: Fawful trading cards, Fawful keychains, fudgy Fawful cookies! Fawful action figures, hot Fawful sausages, Fawful magic beverages! I gotta buy it ALL, man!

Citizen: If you asked me what Lord Fawful's best feature was, I'd have to say those sweet swirly glasses. Those swirls show the cyclical nature of the world, am I right? Now THAT is deep fashion.

Citizen: His best feature is his marvelous teeth. In those spotless, shiny teeth, we see our very souls reflected. They're our greatest treasure.

All of BIS's humor and mashed up gameplay (it's an action adventure puzzle-solving RPG platformer) is encased in a stylish self-aware wrapper that, in my view, is the real hallmark of the series. Every game can be seen as a kind of dialogue between game and player. But the interaction between BIS and an engaged player occurs simultaneously on many levels, like two jugglers working together to keep many balls in the air. To me, this all adds up to a signature tone that I find irresistible.

The game knows it's a game. It knows it's a Nintendo game. More importantly, it knows it's a game you hold in your hands. Even more importantly, it knows it's a Mario game you hold in your hands. BIS plays with this awareness in innumerable ways, from subtle character cameos and self-mocking Wii Fit craze references to mini-games and rhythm challenges that put you under the hood, so to speak, of Bowser's ridiculously prodigious feats of strength and gluttony. Playing as Bowser (it's really more like playing on behalf of Bowser, a pivotal distinction) is a blast, and the control/gameplay differences between him and M&L are stark and tangible.

BIS knows Bowser is an empty 2-dimensional character, so it locates you inside that space, transfigured to a game space with all the Mushroom Kingdom accoutrements. And so you're Mario and Luigi on the bottom screen, and you're Bowser on the top screen...except that you're not. You're manipulating a piece of gaming hardware (buttons, stylus, screens, microphone, book mode - you name it) to navigate in, out and around Bowser's body, and the game consistently reminds you of this thematically and mechanically. The benefits of iteration can be seen mostly clearly here, as the game's masterful use of the DS contrasts sharply with the tacked-on feel of its predecessor Partners in Time.

A downside of iteration is that it can sometimes lead to feature-bloat, and BIS teeters on the brink of it. The rhythm game additions are a welcome touch, but the maze-like complexity of some areas is needlessly confusing, and the backtracking required occasionally feels tedious. My main complaint, likely not shared by many others, is the game's length. It took me nearly 30 hours to complete BIS, and while most of that time felt fun and rewarding, most players will never see the end, and that's a shame. I had the luxury (?) of playing the game for extended sessions during a bout of the flu. Remembering where you are and what you're doing could be challenge if you take an extended break between play sessions.

Quibbles aside, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story is one of the best games I've played this year, and it's another reason (Scribblenauts and Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor are two others) to keep your DS charged up and close at hand. As Toadsworth says, "I feel like a gut spelunker." Who knew spelunking guts could be so much fun?

Unintended Consequences in Tuna Fishing

2009-09-24T13:44:49Z

In the 1980's, fishermen trawling for tuna killed tens of thousands of dolphins each year, scooping them up as "bycatch" in their nets

1/2KiB roguelike

2009-09-21T23:28:45Z

Hello, back in 2006 I made the 2KiB roguelike, the first of the really
small roguelikes. I then left the roguelike world for a few years. A
few weeks ago, I was making a search for my old code, and noticed that
others have taken up the challenge, and there now are a few 1KiB
roguelikes, half the size of the original. Not to be out done, I then

COLUMN: 'Battle Klaxon': The Game Design 'Heaviness' Of Demon's Souls

2009-09-16T20:00:34Z

['Battle Klaxon' is a bi-weekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column where traveling games journalist Quintin Smith fights to win a bit of glory for the beautiful, brave but overlooked games that people are missing in their lives. This week: Demon's Souls, From Software's stealth sequel to the King's Field games.]

Yeah, this one's important.

Demon's Souls is a hack and slash dungeon crawler for the PS3 and the best game I can remember playing in years. It might seem in the following paragraphs that I'm laying it on a bit thick, but I'm honestly trying not to. Talking about this game is like using a salt shaker that someone's loosened the top of as a gag.

The boxart's a good starting point that gets across From Software's thinking, so take a look at it. Specifically, look at how its purpose isn't to make the game inside seem fun. No sir. Instead it's throwing down a gauntlet, 80's style. The knight on the cover doesn't look dead- it's worse, and better, and more mysterious and intriguing than that. The lack of wounds mean he's just slumped against the wall in exhaustion or misery. The boxart is making the game out to be a rabbit hole, an adventure in the literal sense as opposed to the industry buzzword.

Then you actually play the game, and it backs up this hint with the force of a wrecking ball. Following a very cursory tutorial that closes by pulling the rug out from under you, you find yourself in a world of secrets and surprises that's been built from the ground up to keep you guessing and gripped. You find the game rewards every ounce of effort, time and energy you invest in it, and you realise you've found something scarier than most commercial horror games, more exciting than the big action releases and boasting a more absorbing world than most RPGs could dream of.

(The Asian boxart is not to be confused with the forthcoming US box art, which is trash.)

Enough hyperbaton for now. It's only making me sound like a press release. Let's talk design.

SHE'S A REJECTER

Demon's Souls is a heavy game, which is to say it's all about weight. The emotional weight your character carries having been separated from his soul. The weight of your decisions, which can and do kill you. The weight of fear, panic and the unknown. The weight of your equipment and loot, which sometimes has you wincing with each extra pound. And the weight of the constant combat, which pays enough attention to heft and tactility to make you think best the close-quarter fighting games of the past were doing it wrong.

Demon's Souls' combat has been built around the concept of exhaustion. Just underneath your health is a stamina bar which drops like a stone when you sprint, attack, dodge or block. Try to block a blow without the stamina to soak it all up and you'll take some of the damage, have your shield or weapon knocked wide and go staggering backwards. Likewise, if you're stronger than an enemy and have the stamina then they'll bounce off your shield and leave themselves open. Try an evasive roll when you don't have the stamina and your character will fling themselves to the floor with a crash instead.

Getting good hits in isn't just about watching your enemy, it's about making sure you've got the puff in your lungs to hit hard, and true. Sometimes giving an enemy a fierce shove instead of hitting them is your best bet, since it can buy you the time to stop, breathe, swing your weapon back and then bring it down in a proper blow.

Aside from being a fresh idea, this makes fighting enemies which are very strong, big or fast completely terrifying. There's a genuine sense of cowering behind your shield and an urgency to stay out of the way of hits that has you sucking air in through your teeth with each successful dodge.

But the benefit of From Software taking pains to make Demon's Souls a tactile game extends beyond the combat. In making the way your character moves and fights feel so real, they're increasing your immersion in this world they've made. That ends up being much appreciated, because the world they've built is phenomenal.

This is what separates the good dungeon crawler from the great one- an understanding that the crawling, the exploration of an unknown space, is half the game. In Demon's Souls pushing through the kingdom of Boletaria is nothing short of a total joy. The art design, level design and sheer imagination of the team make every new section an expectation-shattering treat, the only constant the idea of a once-majestic kingdom corrupted by demons.

You actually muscle through five separate dungeons simultaneously over the course of the game, accessing them from a lonely and grand central hub that gradually fills with the few lost folk you can save. Your first stop, Boletaria Palace, is a foggy and maximalist interpretation of a medieval castle where the old palace guard and the enormous dragons that feed on them are your opponents. Stonefang Tunnel is entirely subterranean, but even it manages to distance itself from all the usual dungeon crawling tropes with an orange colour palette and a Journey To The Centre of the Earth vibe.

Then there's the Tower of Latria, an impossible structure of spiraling and spiked masonry that's half fairytale and half nightmare, and the Shrine of Storms, a weatherbeaten temple where huge flying manta-ray creatures prowl the skies constantly. Finally there's the Valley of Defilement. Oh, man. Once a proud jewel of a city, it's now a terrible vision of sickness. I don't want to spoil it, but outside a Wii I didn't expect to play anything this generation that'd make me wish High Definition didn't exist.

Having five distinct areas you can swap between every time you feel like a change is nice, but there's another idea at work here. As a dungeon crawler it shouldn't come as any surprise that progressing through Demon's Souls has you gaining stat points and finding new gear, but the twist is that pushing deeper into each area you'll find they all have a tendency to get tougher at maybe four times the speed you do. That means exploration is always darkened by the knowledge that you're walking blindly into the jaws of death. Sooner or later you're going to come up against a trap, enemy or some horrid entity that /will/ murder you. Unless, of course, you turn back. This isn't entirely new, what with everything from Etrian Odyssey to Angband doing the same thing, but in those games the solution was to grind areas you'd already explored. That's something Demon's Souls never asks of you, though you'll probably do it anyway once you start lusting after a certain item. Instead in Demon's Souls you just swap to one of the other five dungeons and battle your way through even more fresh territory, right up until you come up against another wall.

Course, this doesn't change the fact that Demon's Souls is still a game which points you in the direction of certain death and tells you to walk. It also boasts side-paths guarded by stationary enemies triple your level, obvious traps that goad you into triggering them, treasure that glints on the far side of pits that are a touch too big to jump and so on. There's no denying the game is rattlesnake-mean, but then so are the best dungeon-crawlers. Where on Earth is the excitement in exploring the unknown if you know you're safe?

The only thing that matters here is that the trepidation that builds inside you when you're in unexplored territory is fierce enough to keep you safe. The artistry From Software have deployed here is in creating a world that's consistently lethal and foreboding enough to build fear, immersion, excitement and great caution in the player, but not so dangerous as the same caution won't be enough to keep them safe nine times out of ten.

That said, let's talk about the meanest trick Demon's Souls has. Let's talk about the souls themselves.

WITH SOUL POWER

I haven't talked much about the plot of Demon's Souls, but it goes like this: A deep, black fog is slowly spreading over the world, swallowing whole regions. It's believed that slaying the monster at the centre of the fog will stop it, but nobody who has entered the fog has ever returned. Nobody even knows what the monster looks like. Your character (choice of one of ten different classes) enters the fog and, surprise, is promptly slaughtered by the demons inside it who hunger for tasty souls.

As a freshly lost soul, you can strengthen yourself by killing demons and returning to the hub with enough of their corrupt demon souls. This is the game. However, if you're killed (uh, again) then all the unspent souls you were carrying are left exactly where you died and you're thrown back to the last hub portal you found. Only one soul-cache like this can ever exist, so if you die on the treacherous hike back to your corpse-cache those souls are lost forever when the new cache is created. In summary, as you push through an area it's not just progress but experience points which are at stake.

I'm going to save my defense of this mechanic until after I've talked about your body. By which I don't mean your real-life body, as it wouldn't really be my place to speak. I'm sure your body is lovely, though. Boys, nobody's even noticed those blackheads. Girls, the baby hair just beneath your bellybutton is cute. Relax.

Bodies in Demon's Souls: Killing the few really big boss demons or using rare items which exist in finite number will get your character's physical body back. The difference between your physical form and soul form is simple- you stop glowing and your health is doubled. This is a Big Deal. Die, and your body is lost to the fog once more.

The potential loss of body and soul in Demon's Souls are design decisions worth studying because they deliberately punish the player for death, something big Western developers now try to erase completely from their games, and yet it works, implying we're missing a trick. The tension and excitement that comes from forging into dangerous areas is magnified and elevated by the knowledge that you have something to lose beyond having to replay a tiny scrap of the level. Walking into the lair of a new boss demon becomes as petrifying as "walking into the lair of a new boss demon" sounds like it should be.

I remember reading in an issue of PC Gamer UK the idea that Thief would have only been half as scary without the prospect of mammoth loading times after each death. Makes you wonder, no?

Finally, let's talk about something else Demon's Souls does that goes against Western game design. Let's talk online features.

It doesn't happen often, but occasionally a Japanese developer will create something fascinating by approaching an area long-established in the West with none of the traditional wisdom. Breakdown for the original Xbox, for example, which was Namco's skewed vision of an FPS, or there's Chromehounds for the 360 which earned a cult following by bucking plenty of team-based multiplayer traditions.

Demon's Souls does the same thing with its online functionality. It's the product of a bunch of guys who sat around a table for a very long time and did some thinking without the burden of preconceptions.

UNDERGROUND WIRES

First of all, there's player messages. You can choose to leave a message at their feet at any point, choosing from a big list of stock phrases like "You'll get weapon after this", "Strong enemy ahead", "I'm scared", "Real Demon's Souls starts here" and the like. If you're playing online a small random selection of these messages from other 'souls' will appear in your game as unobtrusive scrawls in the ground that you can read with a button press. If you like them, you can say so with a further button press. If somebody somewhere gives one of your messages the thumbs up, you get a little health back. It's nice. Obviously desperate warnings are totally in keeping with the game's tone, both because of the foreboding inherent within them and because you never know if they're tricks.

The blood splatters are more honest. Die in Demon's Souls and the game will (unnoticeably) record your last few seconds of life and dump it in some other players' games as a blood splatter. If you walk over a splatter in your game and press a button to touch it you can watch that player's ghostly form act out the last moments of their life, which will usually hint at what killed them. Or it won't, which is always deeply unsettling.

The blood splatters are equal parts cool, hilarious and a useful survival tool. Say you round a corner and see a knight with luminous green eyes standing stock still at the end of a long corridor. There's a blood splatter at your feet. You touch it and see a ghost run towards the static knight, take a swing, then turn and start sprinting back up the corridor in terror only to take some kind of blow to the back and die in one hit. You look at your game's knight, still yet to move, and bite your tongue behind your lips. What's your move?

The other half of the online stuff is the black and blue phantoms. Blue first- blue phantoms are Demon Soul's co-op. As long as there's an undefeated boss in the area you're in, through use of an item you can call for aid from a bodiless soul to help defeat it. Other players looking to get their body back can then drop into your game as phantoms, and though they can't speak or interact with your world (unable to flip switches, open doors or pick up any of your loot) they can fight and emote. A large part of playing as a blue phantom is in guiding your partner through the world and its dangers with body language, and if the two of you manage to defeat the boss together then the phantom player gets his body back and a few souls for his trouble.

Black phantoms are great and terrible. Again, to play as one you use a specific item to drop into another player's world, except this time you're no benevolent spirit and your presence definitely isn't requested. You only ever enter the worlds of players with bodies with the mission of hunting down and killing them. They don't get to return to the hub until you're defeated, but if you manage to get them nice and dead by besting them in combat, shoving them off a cliff or shivving them in the back as they fight some bigger foe, then you'll get your body back as they lose theirs. Again, it fits seamlessly within the game world and there's no voice communications of any kind just to make sure. It's simply a clever way to fill a single-player game with more colour by letting other players act as your foe for a bit. There are even items you can equip which cut the chance of black phantoms finding you.

All these ideas spark a frustration in me, actually. What sets this generation of games apart isn't some great technical leap, but the prevalence and ease of online functionality. Yet no-one's playing with it. We're getting DLC, co-op, new multiplayer modes, more DLC, more co-op and leaderboards, in case you were curious that your recent success ranks you 201,774th in the world. But then here's Demon's Souls, a game that's having real success fumbling in the dark while everybody else is playing it safe.

But that's getting off topic. Anyone with the niggling belief that too many games these days are focus tested into oblivion as every rough edge is smoothed and softened needs to buy this as soon as possible. It plays like an adrenaline spike, and has a very important lesson to teach about what we're losing as so many developers and publishers continue down this path where mass customer satisfaction is the primary concern. Demon's Souls is cold, and hard, and brilliant.

I suppose at the core of all of this is that it's a game that actually feels like it has respect for both you as a player and itself. Not once when you find a new area or enemy does it scream LOOK AT THIS in a cutscene or set-piece. Not once when you die does it apologise, or help you back on your feet. Not once does it let up in its astonishing quality and turn to padding or repetition, and not once do the ideas stop coming.

Although the American version of Demon's Souls isn't out yet the full English-language translation (voice acting and all) already exists in both the Korean and Asian editions which can and should be purchased from many fine import sites. That said, most seem out of stock right now. Picking up the American version on day one of its release on October 6th would also be acceptable. This one is an unquestionable must-buy. Anticipate it, buy it, play it, love it, shout about it and beat it, in that order. You'll be making the world a better place.

[Quinns is a freelance journalist who has fun working for Eurogamer, contributing to Rock Paper Shotgun and reading Action Button. You can currently find him either relaxing in Galway, working in London or at quintinsmithster at gmail dot com.]

Why Rebalance A Released Game?

2009-09-16T14:46:00Z

The main reason for making these changes (and balance changes in general, you don't have to click those links to understand this article) in AI War is to increase the opportunity cost for a number of actions, and to provide a more rich set of strategic options in general. Some expert players had concerns with the above linked changes that they would basically reduce the viability of certain advanced strategies, but the second link demonstrates why I feel like the strategies in question are all still very valid (but no longer abusable). However, these come with some cost.

But for purposes of this blog article, this isn't a discussion of any specific changes, but is rather a discussion of what makes for good changes versus bad changes. Some external commentators have noted that I am "faffing" about with game balance, which I take great offense to -- I know exactly what I am doing, in terms of my long-term goals, and my actions have all been purposeful and productive. I'm building a longterm game environment, of the sort you normally only see in MMOs. This requires some ongoing thought and commentary from expert players who find tricky ways to abuse the mechanics. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Why Nerf Strategies?
When an advanced strategy comes up that I feel like is too exploitative of subtle unit interactions or too abusive of the game rules, I often will add a counter (either in AI logic, or in the game rules/mechanics themselves) to counter this. To some, on the surface this seems counter to the goal of having a strategically rich environment. Is it my goal to have all players playing the game exactly the same way, with minor variations? Of course not.

In general, the only reason I ever nerf a given strategy is if it gives too great a benefit at too low of a cost. There have been some really challenging issues of late with players taking too few planets and doing all sorts of clever things, which really causes the AI to be less effective and lowers the difficulty in an artificial way. My response to this has been partly to teach the AI some new behaviorlets, and partly to reduce the benefits and increase the costs for these more esoteric strategies.

Preserve A Rich Decision Space
When I look at AI War, or any game for that matter, the main thing I am looking at is the "decision space." When a single strategy or group of strategies are too effective, the decision space effectively shrinks because expert players would be fools to use any other strategy. This becomes a failing of the game which I have to address through balance updates and new/updated game mechanics in some cases. Individual ship balance is only the beginning, because how players use all the myriad types of ships in concert, plus how they plan their overall strategy, can have an even more complicated effect on game balance.

My goal is not to make all strategies exactly equal (because then the decision space is shrunk by nature of the fact that any strategy is as good as the next, so it doesn't really matter what you do). Having no interesting deviations in strategy is just as much of a game-killer as having one best strategy is.

Instead, my goal is to make strategies that are generally all within a standard deviation of one another, so that players with different playstyles can play as they wish, but also which are context-specific to a degree, so that the truly expert players will adjust their strategy very heavily depending on the specific circumstances of a given scenario. This not only adds to the richness of the strategy of the game, it adds to the replay value.

Of course, when players play below their true difficulty level, they have more latitude to just use their favorite strategy and have done with it. But when things are really neck-and-neck, players should have to make appropriate evaluations of the map and act accordingly, rather than being able to artificially lower the difficulty through exploitative tactics.

Balancing For Very Long-Term Play
Will this annoy some players who rely on these tactics to play at a higher difficulty level? Of course it will, and that is an unfortunate side effect. Any balance shift in any RTS game seems to annoy someone, while (hopefully) the majority rejoice. You might assume that because AI War is not a competitive pvp affair that these sorts of balance issues are not important. To a certain extent this is true, it is certainly much less important that the unit balance be perfect because of a number of facets of the AI War design. However, the overall strategic balance is critical for the longevity of the game.

When I play any RTS game, I am going so solo or co-op against the AI in skirmish mode. That's the only way I play. I basically can get 6-12 months of biweekly play out of most of the better RTS games, and that's the point at which I get bored with the game because I have figured out some sort of killer best strategy that the AI can't counter and that I can't top. At that point there's no other way that I really want to play the game, and I've lost interest playing the game using that best strategy, so there's pretty much nothing left for me to do with the game and I move on.

That's all well and good if you are trying to sell a huge series of RTS games, but with AI War I intend to grow and build it as a series of expansions, not sequels. That means that the core game had better be extraordinarily rock solid, with absolutely no best-paths that people discover after however many months of play. There are always tricky things that players figure out, of course, and so that makes an ongoing balance load for me. This is not unexpected -- Starcraft is still getting balance patches some 11 years after its release, from what I hear, and it is regarded as supremely well balanced.

As with the Starcraft balance updates, my goal is not to quash player innovation -- I applaud it. However, my goal is to keep all strategies within essentially a single standard deviation of the norm, and also to add as much context-sensitivity to the grand strategies as possible. The kiss of death for an RTS game, in my opinion, is when all the games start feeling basically the same to expert players. That's when it's time to move on and find a new game to play. My goal is to keep that from ever happening with AI War, because that's the only way I'll maintain my own interest in the game, let alone the interest of anyone else.

That sort of outlook will annoy a few players as I go, unfortunately -- and I need to be very careful to listen to player feedback and not do something that pisses people off for no reason, or which is hated by a majority of the playerbase. In general I'm pretty averse to doing things that players don't like, which I think is a crucial attitude for game designers to have (just "doing your own thing" or having a "take it or leave it" attitude is stupid and is suicide). However, it's impossible to please everyone when making any given change, and so player feedback has to be weighed against the longterm health of the game. Rebalancing a game that has already been released is always a tricky proposition, but you only have to look at examples such as Starcraft or World of Warcraft to see how incredible the results can be in the long term if care is taken.

Positive Game Design

2009-08-19T08:30:00Z

Animal trainers for many years now have been using what is known as positive training, a system which uses only rewards and never punishment for teaching behaviours to animals. The technique is effective, and has been used to train everything from champion showdogs to the orcas at SeaWorld. The same technique could be used as a system of game design – but what would such positive game design be like, and what would it be good for?

Positive Animal Training

Positive training, as practised by a great many dog trainers such as Pamela Dennison, Pat Miller and Gwen Bailey, is based upon the principles of operant conditioning (Skinner etc.) to develop reward schedules that reinforce desired behaviours and eliminate undesired behaviours. As I have discussed previously in my exploration of why people play games, the same reward mechanism in the brain that makes these kinds of training techniques effective lies behind the different kinds of enjoyable play – thus there is a ready-made connection between this kind of teaching method and videogame design.

It is very easy to understand the basics of positive animal training, and one of the simplest summaries of the method is Pamela Dennison's “Three Laws of Learning”:

Rewarded behaviour gets repeated.
Ignored behaviour stops.
Once a behaviour is in place, variable rewards will strengthen the behaviour.

Positive game design would incorporate these three rules into the game design process,

It may seem strange to be suggesting using a technique intended for training animals on humans –surely humans are significantly different than their animal cousins, and surely games are very different than animal training methods? Well, yes, but the idea of games as tools for learning is actually very well established (Raph Koster etc.) and, as I have previously observed, “games as learning” has as its flipside “games as rewards”, since learning and operant conditioning are intimately related.

The Purpose of Positive Game Design

Before proceeding, it's worth explaining that I am not proposing positive game design as a replacement for other kinds of game design – there is not, nor can there be, a single method to game design as I have discussed in the article Zen Game Design and the book 21st Century Game Design. Instead, positive game design is proposed as one particular method of approaching game design. In principle it should be good for at least three different things:

Educational games whose express goal is to teach
Mass market friendly “casual games” looking to reach an audience who do not enjoy punishment in games
Tutorials in games expected or intended to reach a wide audience.

Reward, Don't Punish

The highest principle of positive game design (as in positive animal training) is reward not punishment. The player should thus be rewarded for their successes, but not punished for their failures. This concept may be difficult for some people to get their heads around, especially given the ubiquity of punishment in videogames, particularly time-penalty punishments, and punishments used to generate fear (usually of death and hence failure) in order to enhance the rewards of play.

Yet there is no reason that a game need punish players, and it is perfectly possible to design games that reward the player without punishment (although of course such games look very different from many of the videogames we usually see). In some respects, we can already see something akin to positive game design in games such as the hugely successful Animal Crossing (which has no punishments, and has already sold 10 million units on DS), or in advanced tamagotchi's such as the phenomenally successful Nintendogs (which has no punishments, and has already sold 22 million units on DS). These titles may not have been designed with positive game design as a foundational principle, but they demonstrate how successful this approach can be in appealing to a wide audience not so willing to endure punishments to enhance their rewards (as with many gamer hobbyist titles).

The first of Dennison's “Laws” is that rewarded behaviours are repeated. So, for instance, experienced videogame players always smash crates (even when they are expressly told there is nothing to find) because previous games have rewarded them for doing so by placing power ups and items (i.e. rewards) inside crates. The behaviour is very hard to break in most videogame players because they have been heavily rewarded for smashing crates and barrels in the past.

In designing games for mass market players (those who may not have the game literacy of experienced hobbyists), it is thus necessary to ensure that the things you want the player to do will be rewarded. Now a particular design challenge here is that different players enjoy different things, and thus there are no guarantees that something that is offered as a reward will be received as such. However, there are a few things that can be counted upon to be interpreted as a reward by any player (although whether they are seen as a big or a small reward will depend upon the player in question):

Currency rewards: any game with an in-game currency easily provides rewards; simply pay out some of that cash! This kind of reward is intuitively understood by all players and is likely to be a foundational reward scheme in practical positive game design, but it is important that the currency earned can be spent on something, else it becomes meaningless.
Avatar Improvement: players love to improve their abilities in games – in fact, role-playing games have their success rooted in this kind of improvement. However, when considering what appeals to a wider audience the kind of improvements that will work as rewards must be immediately appreciated. Three strong examples are increasing jump height, faster speed of movement, and improved weapon damage. Improvements that are essentially mathematical in basis (+1 Strength, 1% interest) should be avoided, since these kinds of improvements appeal to a minority of people (although they work well among gamer hobbyists).
Gifts: giving the player new things is always rewarding, even if the gift that is given out isn't of particular interest. These are great rewards, but can also be very expensive to develop, so they must be used carefully. Gifts can be purchased using a currency system, or alternatively can constitute a structured reward scheme in their own right.
Fanfare: from an ascending scale or an uplifting chord, you can count on music to create the emotional resonance of a reward, but of course the more often you rely on the same reward music the less enjoyable it will become. However, because they are cheap to implement they are an essential tool for positive game design.
SFX: a good sound effect can also be extremely rewarding, especially if it fits the representation of the game well, or is particularly amusing. And as with fanfares, the cheap development cost makes fun SFX essential to positive game design.
Eye Candy: just as sound effects and music are universally enjoyable, explosions, lightshows, colour ripples, particle systems and anything else that is visually showy and impressive will work as a reward for almost all people.
Stamps: having a “stamp collection” that fills up as the player finds or completes things is another reliable reward (although some players will find this more rewarding than others). A reassuring 'stamp' sound effect and pleasing graphics all add to the appeal of stamp collections. This is a possible alternative to a currency scheme, or a useful additional reward mechanism.
Narrative progress: the vast majority of players enjoy a story, and advancing that story becomes a reward in itself. However, there is a risk in this kind of reward in that if the player is enjoying the story, failing to progress becomes a form of punishment. Care must be taken when using narrative progress as a reward.

There are many other kinds of rewards, but the value of these will vary more from player-to-player, and from game-to-game. For instance, some players are perfectly happy to chase high scores, even though these numbers have no real meaning beyond an arbitrary measure of performance.

When using positive game design, you want to reward the player for doing whatever it is you want them to be doing. So in a positive shooter, for instance, the player is supposed to be hitting enemies and avoiding being hit. You want to reward the player for both these activities. Blowing things up is usually intrinsically rewarding (especially with good SFX), and can also provide points/currency, but normally in a shooter being hit is punished (your ship takes damage and then eventually blows up). A positive shooter cannot punish, so being hit can produce a sound effect or show the ship being beaten up, but it can't actually blow up (this could be perceived as punishing).

To reward not being hit, a positive game designer can draw upon ideas used in games such as Crazy Taxi and Burnout, which give bonus points to the player when they narrowly slip past other cars. (A parallel could also be drawn with “bullet scraping” in vert shooters such as Radiant Silvergun). However, this might train the player to produce near-misses rather than simply to avoid being hit. An alternative approach would be a combo of missed shots that is broken when the player is hit. (Although there is a risk here that a broken combo will feel like a punishment; this idea is discussed below).

Ignore Instead of Punishing

In positive game design, undesired outcomes are to be ignored and not punished, which is to say, failure should produce neutral outcomes, not negative outcomes. This runs counter to most gamers expectations as to what a game should be, but this deviation from the norm should not be considered a barrier. (After all, most gamers do not consider Nintendogs, for instance, to be a game, yet it is still enjoyed by a great many mass market players).

What constitutes a punishment is an important aspect of understanding positive training, as there are two very different kinds of punishment in operant conditioning. The first is known as positive punishment, meaning “punishment where something bad happens” and corresponds to what we normally think of as punishment. Examples in games (in rough order of the degree of punishment) include:

Damage (thus taking a step towards dying)
Temporary disadvantage (such as reversed controls)
Dying (and thus having to repeat a portion of gameplay)
Game Over (and thus having to repeat a large amount of gameplay)
Loss of a progress resource (such as experience points)
Permanent loss of equipment or abilities
“Permadeath” (i.e. having to start again from the beginning).

In general, positive punishments can be interpreted as forms of time penalty – since whatever is lost could be regained by the player in a certain amount of time. The most punishing outcome is thus all progress lost (permadeath, as in Fire Emblem or Steel Battalion), and the least is a temporarily applied disadvantage, but it’s important to remember that “punishment” in this context isn’t a game theory term, it’s about how the player feels, and thus what is a punishment will vary somewhat from player to player.

The other kind of punishment in operant conditioning is known as negative punishment, which means removing something that the individual in question wants. This could include temporarily disabling an ability, or the disruption of a scoring mechanic the player is benefiting from (such as the aforementioned breaking of a combo that gives increasing score as it advances). Both kinds of punishment – positive and negative – risk frustrating the player, and anything that may frustrate a player is a potential punishment of some kind.

In positive training, positive punishment is never permitted, and negative punishment is allowed only to prevent entirely unacceptable behaviours (never to encourage the desired outcome). Thus in positive game design, the player should never be actively punished (everything in the bullet list above can never be allowed to occur) and cases where desirable aspects of play are withdrawn (i.e. negative punishment) should be minimised wherever possible.

Dennison's second “Law” is that ignored behaviours disappear. This can easily be seen in any game – if it doesn't work, players will eventually stop doing it (although some deeply embedded behaviours, like crate-smashing, may be impossible to remove from an experienced gamer).

Instead of punishing an undesired outcome, positive game design should ignore anything but success wherever possible, aiming to design the game such that failure on the part of the player has as neutral an effect as possible. It’s acceptable for failure to result in no gain, but it is best to avoid failure resulting in a loss of time or resources.

Perhaps the key to making the “ignore don't punish” concept work is to find ways to replace punishments with neutral outcomes. In the previous positive shooter example, the death of the player's ship was replaced with it becoming beaten up (although there is a risk here of watching it get toasted being rewarding); since the positive shooter rewards the player for avoiding being hit, the penalty for being hit is not being rewarded – there is no need for an additional penalty. In a positive platformer, a difficult punishment to avoid is the time penalty for missing a jump, but this is easily fixed by a “safety line” system – as the player passes various generously positioned points, they clip on a rope that reels them back to that point if they fail (not dissimilar to the ‘rewind time’ ability in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, but with unlimited uses). In a positive fighting game, perhaps the closer the avatar gets to death the stronger it becomes – victory is assured, it's only a question of how beaten up you get first.

Positive game design might also have to resort to deux ex machina to make the avoidance of punishment workable, bringing in an extra element that comes into play if the player struggles for too long. In a positive shooter, their mothership appears, kills the enemy and repairs the player's ship before leaving. In a positive platformer, an ally makes the jump and then runs a line across. In a positive fighting game, an ally rescues the player, drives off the foe and heals the player. In ways like these, failures (which risk feeling like punishment) are recast as neutral outcomes to some degree.

Some care needs to be taken with design elements intended to reward which might instead frustrate. In the positive shooter example above, the issue of broken combos was raised – building up a combo is exciting because a mistake breaks the chain, but having the chain drop to zero feels very punishing to many mass market players. To avoid this, positive game designers can deviate from conventional videogame logic and simply ameliorate the penalty. Perhaps breaking a combo subtracts 10 from the counter, rather than zeroing it, or the combo could remain the same but be temporarily blocked from increasing. (These are still forms of punishment, but heavily reduced).

Pragmatically, the needs of gameplay may make it impossible to entirely eliminate punishment from all kinds of games, so reducing the extent of the penalty may have to suffice. In general, however, since success is rewarded there is no need to punish failure when conducting positive game design. Anything that could frustrate or annoy the player should be eliminated where possible, and minimised otherwise.

Variable Rewards

Predicable rewards cease to be rewarding – the secret of keeping rewards effective is to vary them to ensure maximum effect. In positive animal training, fixed schedules (rewarding after every success) are recommended when first training, but in order to ensure that a specific behaviour persists trainers recommend switching to variable schedules. Random elements can be used to determine when to reward, and how much to reward, and the actual rewards themselves can be varied.

Dennison's third “Law” is that once a particular behaviour is established, you can strengthen the behaviour by using variable rewards. Videogames design already uses random reward schedules to great effect – the random treasure tables in games such as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Diablo (and it's cousin World of Warcraft) epitomise the compulsiveness that can come from a variable schedule of reinforcement. Once the player has learned that killing monsters gives treasure (something common to most RPG designs) it's easy to use random treasure to make the game extremely compelling. Positive game design can learn from these successes, and also take it further.

Animal Crossing, which effectively uses positive game design techniques, is packed full of variable rewards. Firstly, every day there are different things on sale in the shop – players thus come back over and over again, looking for specific things they want, or seeking something unusual and interesting. Furthermore, apparently random events occur all the time – a rare fish is seen in the stream, a rare insect appears, or a new fossil is dug up – and specifically staged events occur in ways that appear to the player (at least at first) to be entirely random. It is this density of variable rewards (and variable events that provide rewards) that help make this game so compelling for its audience.

With animals, trainers are encouraged to vary what is given as a reward and to provide additional rewards at random – this can easily be incorporated into game design. Imagine a positive game with collectibles: the player picks them up for the rewards inherent in doing so (including the minor reward of the collection SFX, and the major reward of whatever benefit is conferred), but they can be made more rewarding by triggering additional random rewards. Imagine that sometimes when a cash pickup is collected by the player it is worth double – this variable reinforcement will make cash pickups even more desirable to players, and will increase the player's desire to find and collect them.

The frequency of reward can be made entirely variable as well, and a system which 'retreats' can help to ensure that the player doesn't burn out on too generous a reward. A positive platform game might reward the player every time they jump when they are being trained (perhaps with a tiny in-game currency reward), then later give them a modest in-game currency reward 10% of the time they complete a long jump. Later, it might give them a giant in-game currency reward 5% of the time they complete a difficult jump. In this way, the player is encouraged to keep jumping because they know that new rewards will come, but not when they will come or how big they will be. (This is the same trick that makes slot machines so compulsive to gamblers). This is very different to a typical platform game (in which pickups are almost incidentally collected as the player jumps in specific places), but positive game design if pursued should be expected to produce unusual approaches to gameplay.

Existing games have already made use these kinds of randomly triggered rewards. For example, Front Mission 3 features special abilities that trigger with random frequency under certain preset conditions. It might seem that having random effects trigger would make the combat less engaging, yet Front Mission 3 is considered to be one of the best games of its kind, and the compelling nature of these randomly triggered advantages helps contribute to that popularity.

A word of caution concerning frequency of rewards is warranted. There is no point in rewards coming so rarely that the player can no longer expect to encounter any additional reward except by persevering for ridiculous lengths of times. This happens all the time in conventional videogame design – there is always some treasure that is so legendarily rare that players strive to attain – but as effective as this might be with the gamer hobbyists, who are often willing to commit a great quantity of time to the games they enjoy, it should be largely resisted in positive game design.

Conclusion

Positive game design will certainly work because the principles upon which it is based apply to all mammals, and many other animal species besides, plus videogames are already capitalising on rewards and reinforcement schedules in many different ways. Furthermore, games such as Animal Crossing and Nintendogs arguably already use positive game design, although perhaps not by intent, and have achieved success that equals and exceeds the most popular FPS and RPG titles.

For games seeking the mass market “casual” gamer, and Serious Games looking to train an arbitrary individual in a certain skill, positive game design represents an intriguing new possibility worth exploring. And even in games seeking the conventional gamer hobbyist (“hardcore”) market, there may be merit in exploring positive game design in the design of tutorials.

I would like to extend my thanks to the people whose work influenced this piece, including John Hopson (who first convinced me that applying Skinner’s models to videogames was not insane, but in fact inevitable), Raph Koster (who more than anyone challenged me to credibly consider “games as learning”) and of course Pamela Dennison (from whom I have learned the most about positive dog training).

The opening cartoon is Dog Video Game by Mitra Farmand, which I found here as part of her fuffernutter comic blog. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended and I will take the image down if asked.

COLUMN: Alt Space: War Ain't No Fun

2009-09-05T20:00:40Z

['Alt Space' is a regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column by critic and writer Phill Cameron, discussing the relationship between the personal computer and gaming. Sweeping his gaze across the esoterica of PC gaming, today he regards WW1 Medic, and the success it has portraying the essence of war, and the implications of that portrayal.]

Two dots and a curve. That's all you need, these days, to denote happiness. The entire culture of smilies and emoticons has grown up around the basic principle that facial expressions can be boiled down into a few markings and thrown from the keyboard across the aether, until the person on the other end knows you're joking, happy, angry or sad.

A simple concept, arguably trivialising the infinite capacity for human emotion, the massive number of combinations those 52 muscles resident in the human face can amass. So there you have it, two dots and a curve, boiling something down into it's essence, with little lost in the process.

It's a principle that can be applied to the majority of things. Abstract art and absurdist theatre rely on only hinting at their subjects, creating thoughts and concepts beyond just blatantly shouting what they're trying to say. It's the subtleties that offset the core messages, stripping away the fluff to leave you with something profound and meaningful. War games, of late, have been more concerned with the fluff than the message, and that's all well and good; it's fun to play war. In the list of things that the 2004 PC freeware title WW1 Medic elicits, fun is not even there.

From the creator of Dwarf Fortress, the infamously complex, arcane and inpenertrable city building game, WW1 Medic places you as, unsurprisingly, a medic in the trenches of World War One. You're tasked with saving as many as you can by crawling around through no man's land, patching your men up as best you can, then dragging the unfortunates back to your trench, where they're presumably sent home to live out the rest of their lives. It's a simple concept, complete with scoring system and the chance to patch up the enemy for those more altruistic among us. The interesting thing is not what the game is, but how it's portrayed.

Presented with the most basic of graphics, you see both ends of no man's land, the enemies trenches, and your own. One side is blue, the other green. You're green. Bullets sail over the space between the trenches at erratic intervals, each one randomly sent at the other side, just as likely to miss as hit. There's no thought behind the destruction in WW1 Medic. You just hover behind your side, patching up anyone unlucky enough to get hit, dreading the cry of that horn.

The horn still haunts me. It's jovial, almost whimsical as it sends dozens, if not hundreds of men to their death. They begin to charge, walking stoically to their deaths, some quickly falling onto their stomachs as their comrades get cut down. Even if they do reach the other side, the huddled masses of the other army will soon cut them down. If it's your side that charges, the temptation is to hang back, waiting for it all to calm down before venturing into the field of death, patching up whoever is close enough to drag back without worrying too much about catching a stray round.

Bullets are hardly the only thing you have to worry about. Mustard gas forms arbitrarily around the field, catching friend and foe alike, all dying with a splutter. There's little to no warning of where it's going to strike, so staying alive depends almost entirely on luck. The shelling has a little more warning, as you see the shadows of the shells growing ever bigger before exploding upon impact. Planes strafe occasionally. Really, bullets are the last of your worries.

It's hard to describe, and you should really play it yourself, what with it being free, but the ideas it spawns and nurtures are far more simple to explain. WW1 Medic is, in my experience, the truest depiction of war ever conceived in the space of gaming. Perhaps that is too broad, and should be limited more to depicting World War 1, or pre modern war, but the arbitrary nature, and utter disregard for human life present makes it seem that much more real and horrifying.

It raises interesting questions on why exactly we glorify war in the first place; with the Call of Duty games, and previously Medal of Honour, World War 2 has been done to death, but while you can get some sense of the sights and sounds of war from those games, you were always just one step below super human, able to shrug off bullets and explosions with nary a worry.

It's not a complaint against those games, but they never made me feel like I was there. It was just a bit more cinematic fluff, used to elicit a reaction. Of course, WW1 Medic is there to garner a reaction too, but it somehow feels a bit more true, and thus, more poignant.

Vulnerability has been a concept played around with in games for a while, but never truly embraced. Even in something like ArmA or Thief, you rely on tactics and intelligence to outsmart and outmanoeuvre your opponents, so they never really get a shot off at you.

You can still take a few shots, get patched up, carry on like nothing's happened. Perhaps the increased vulnerability here wouldn't make for a fun sustained experience, and only works within WW1 Medic's small walls because it's an isolated, short play session, where it sometimes lasts only a few seconds as you take one of the first shots fired in the cranium.

WW1 Medic is not fun to play. It's not even satisfying. You might save a few lives, but you can never make a difference to the soldiers there, as more are always ready to take the place of those lost. At the end you're given a score on how well you did, but that's almost a mockery, placed there to attach a figure to something that doesn't need or want one. You go out there, you do what you can, but ultimately, it's all futile. And that's war.

Gundam Creator: "Video Games Are Evil" [Traces Of Nuts]

2009-09-03T12:00:00Z

But giant mechanized machines are your friend! Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino gave a speech at the CEDEC game conference hoping to, as game site Gamasutra says, "provoke game developers."

He wasn't looking for a fist fight! The man is a senior citizen. Rather, he was hoping to get game developers to think deeply about the future of gaming. Tomino dished out nuggets like:

I think that video games are evil. [Gaming] is not a type of activity that provides any support to our daily lives, and all these consoles are just consuming electricity! Let's say we have about three billion people on this planet wasting their time, bringing no productivity at all. Add 10 billion more people, and what would happen to our planet? Video games are assisting the death of our planet!

And then only mecha could save us. The irony, as Gamasutra points out, is that Gundam appears on tons of video games. The irony of that is that we think Tomino was being ironic. We think. We hope.

"You have to find the median — that games are not evil, perhaps not necessarily good either, but something that can be considered a pastime. What would make people enjoy a game? How do you make them feel like it is not just a waste of time?

"If finding answers to these questions were easy," continued Tomino, "then something better would have been out by now. Has there been anything better than Tetris since it first came out? How many years has it been? This is what I want to tell you: I want you to create a game that does not negatively affect our daily lives and is something that is considered more productive." So fewer Gundam games, more...?!