ProjectPerko

Magic Systems

2009-11-08T13:44:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons I like science fiction better than fantasy is because science fiction obeys its own rules and fantasy doesn't. With that bias in mind, lets talk about magic systems in games.

Most magic systems in games are "prepackaged". You have spells, and they are basically treated the same as guns, grenades, medkits, etc. You have a spell, you point it, you fire it. It's not really very... "magical". It's more... "I-just-bought-a-new-gunical".

Because magic is indistinguishable from guns and medkits, you can treat it in the same way as you would treat guns and medkits. For example, if your game is narrative-heavy, you can simply make anyone not actively an enemy immune to all magic. This is especially obvious in Dragon Age, where you can fill a room with fire but the enemies within won't feel a thing because you haven't talked to them and determined that they are enemies, yet.

Dragon Age doesn't want to have a more complicated or diverse magic system. It doesn't have a simulationist world, why would it have a simulationist magic system?

But for those of us that like some level of immersion, there are three other ways of handling magic.

One is programmatic magic. Programmatic magic is magic which the player builds out of components (such as runes). The upside of programmatic magic is that it's relatively easy to put into your game, so long as all the physical objects and living entities follow the same rules. The downsides are that the clever player will be absurdly overpowered, and that the programming is probably either too simplistic to really get cool magic out of it, or so absurdly complex they might as well be programming the game.

Another is psychic magic. Psychic magic allows the player to direct the spell to do anything within its realm of possibility with great grace. In a tabletop game such as Mage or Nobilis, the player might simply say, "Oh, I summon a soot-covered raven to deliver a message to the high wizard." That's not so easy in a computer game, but you can still get away with allowing the player to direct the spell personally, such as telekinesis spells which allow you to move objects specifically how you like.

The third kind of magic is narrative magic, which basically takes the magic out of the control of the player and makes it... mystical. Semi-predictable. For example, if the player can make wishes of a genie, or summon the spirit of luck, the player might be able to give simple directives, but the effect is controlled by the needs of the story. Since narrative magic doesn't easily fit into a statistical world (even more poorly than psychic magic), it's not very popular. Also, it makes the GM have to do a lot more work, coming up with the exact results of everything.

There's a fourth kind of magic, sort of: passive magic. This is a magic effect that is not controlled by the player to affect the world. An example of passive magic would be an immunity to fire, or the ability to see treasure chests. However, passive magic gets along well with any given other kind of magic, so I won't treat it separately right now.

While narrative magic is the least popular at the moment, I can see it gaining some popularity as we create algorithms for making it work. Plus, it's really the best alternative to psychic magic in a world where the player has to interface using a mouse and keyboard instead of his brain.

As an example, I'll pop back to Star Wars. Play any Star Wars game, and your Jedi is encouraged to buy ~~guns and medkits~~ magic spells. Even though it makes no sense for the setting. Instead, the game would be much better served by a combination of psychic magic and narrative magic.

Now, I'm obviously glossing over some tiny, insignificant little details like how to implement narrative magic. I'll post on that matter soonish, but I'd love to hear your opinions.

Dragon Age Animation

2009-11-06T08:15:00.000-08:00

I've done the snarky bit, let's talk a bit more about what went right with Dragon Age.

One of the things I really liked about Dragon Age was the body language. They almost completely avoided the Oblivion dead-man's-stare, especially during cutscenes. This was done partly with generic body language, but also partly with camera tricks. Most people overlook that even if NPCs have realistic body language, if your screen is constantly focused on their face, then the PC has unrealistic body language. Like your avatar is staring with an Oblivion dead-man's-stare.

However, you can't make the camera swing around. That would be very disorienting. Dragon Age instead uses a variety of cuts to give you a more movie-like feel, which I think was a good idea. The two methods combined - camera tricks and body language - combine to make the characters feel a lot more realistic and immersive than previous games, graphically speaking.

There is still a lot of room for improvement, and I think we can expect to see improvement in the next generation of triple-A titles.

One spot that stuck out egregiously was the head turn animation. Probably the most common social animation aside from "generic hand waves 1 and 2", it was the worst animation in the entire game. It revolves the head like it's on a platter, with a constant speed and a sharp-edge start and stop. You can hear the greasy robot blood in the character's veins.

I presume that this animation is the way it is because the "rotate head" function takes an arbitrary angle to rotate to. The engine then either performs a simple rotation or, more likely given the way these engines tend to work, animates a fragment of a larger, linear head rotation animation.

This is a shortcut they should not have taken. The only time an actor rotates their head like this in a movie is when they want to be clear that the character is unnatural and insane. So, no, not a good choice for a major animation nested into every character.

While the engine may have technical limitations that prevent it from running on-the-fly or layered animations, it is still possible to create a selection of rotation animations and either place the targets in the spots where the animations make sense, or slightly rotate the body beneath the head to make it all line up nicely.

Head animations were a big opportunity to distinguish the personalities of the various characters. A normal person, when they turn their head, ducks their chin a bit and blinks. And definitely doesn't have a flat speed with a sharp start and stop. But you can throw in variations to distinguish both characters and moods.

For example, the grumpy witch might not "come out of" the duck-turn, leaving her chin down, glowering askance at you. The insane zealot girl might lead with the top of her head, giving her more of a cuckoolander feel instead of a robotic, "I keeel you in you sleeeep" feel.

Add in some more general head posture animations, and you can give the characters a lot of personality without needing to fully mocap and tweak every scene. In the game as it stands, the difference between mocapped and generic scenes is both striking and distracting.

Now, the head turn isn't the only thing that could use added juice. Right now the body language is still very restricted and limited, with the body itself standing rigidly. Presumably this is to keep the number of required animations down: if everyone can use the same twenty animations, you don't need to make twenty animations for each character. In order to keep them generic, you have to keep the body language from being too communicative.

It's obvious that what we'll need for the next generation of body language is an engine that can synthesize animations on the fly, augmenting the "gross" animations with layered and amped sub-animations to give them more personality.

This would also be useful in fixing of the worst animation remaining: the walk animation.

The walk animation is so bad it is the sole reason I have to play in first person mode. This isn't really a rant against Dragon Age: everyone's walk animations are hideously bad.

First, they're not even vaguely unique. Usually there's only three: woman, man, and big huge dude. Second, they're animated without taking anything else into account.

Sure, it would be nice to have walk animations where the characters actually looked at things, actually stomped when they're angry, actually turn to the person they're talking to. But easier than that, please put in a turning animation.

When I turn left, my walk animation doesn't change even slightly: I revolve seamlessly. When the rest of your game is super-realistic, does that make sense?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I would prefer to lose half the graphical quality to double the way it's integrated into the game world. When one aspect of your assets so far outstrips the others, maybe you should stop spending on the excellent asset and shore up the crappy ones.

Unfortunately, to really do it right, we need to have a next-generation engine that allows for arbitrary, layered, on-the-fly animations.

What do you think?

Dragon Age Early Review

2009-11-05T14:29:00.000-08:00

So, I'm playing Dragon Age. It's obviously a very polished game, and I'm enjoying it to some extent, but it really does exemplify all the things I hate about modern RPGs.

The checklist leveling is bad enough, but the developers have the gall to put in quests that require premium content. Put the hooks right in the game. "I need help!" "Oh, I'd love to help you, except I can't. Because I'm not willing to spend extra real-world cash to do something in-game, you assholes. So, yes, I'm a hero, but I can't help you. OH WELL."

No, that doesn't break immersion! NOT AT ALL!

I don't mind you selling additional packs or whatever. But the moment you make them intrude on my experience, you have ripped the guts out of your game and turned it into a pathetic shadow. You have made it impossible for my character to act in character. All while shouting "BEND OVER!" You might as well put a rapping spiky blue hedgehog in the game to shout coca-cola slogans at me. "I'm the real thing, baby! I'm not distracting you, am I?"

It's bad enough that it's basically an MMORPG. That's such a terrible terrible idea right there. Why would you mimic something that's specifically been crippled and neutered when you don't have to? It's such a bad design decision!

The fact that it's as good as it is is a sign of truly stellar assets teams and a solid writing team. Now all they need is some game designers.

I also like the fact that it will cover your characters in blood and you'll do truly gory finishing moves, but they still use "safety underwear". It's like the design team's whole thing was "let's make a game that takes absolutely no risks."

And they did.

Wealth in Massive Games (gedankenexperiment)

2009-11-02T06:08:00.000-08:00

There has been a storm of concerned armchair economics gurus that has come out of the woodwork over the past few months. I've become steadily more angry at seeing people trot out tired old theories that show a deep misunderstanding of even the most basic facts about money and wealth.

You can learn more about economics by playing Alpha Centauri than by reading Marx.

But almost all games suffer from an oversimplified economic rule set. This is to avoid getting in the way of whatever the "real" gameplay is. I would like to turn that on its head and theorize a game about economics.

Here are the restrictions:

1) The theoretical game must be massively multiplayer (or massively singleplayer, a'la Spore).

2) It must contain interesting non-economic gameplay (typically, various kinds of killing).

3) The economic rules must emerge from simple fundamentals rather than by complex fiat (IE, no arbitrary money sinks, no specific "B happens if you raise taxes").

4) The game must contain zones, modes, or other variations that change the fundamental rules somewhat to highlight the different economic results that occur when rules change.

5) It must highlight the difference between MONEY and WEALTH.

All the examples I can think of are constructive, rather than the "static state" worlds of WoW or WoW, WoW, or maybe WoW. For example, my first instinct is a space empire game like Masters of Orion, but with far less focus on war and far more focus on the amount of time it takes to travel through space. By having specific resources obtained only from specific star systems, you would be able to stress the costs of shipping this product (or derivatives) all around the empire.

The game would require somewhat arbitrary use of fundamental materials to build products. For example, building an acropolis might require explicitly listed goods in addition to research, time, and labor. These are somewhat arbitrary sinks, but at least they make sense.

The game would also highlight the difference between a new economy and a mature economy as you expand and build up your planets. You could also have "low-traction" zones where travel happens faster, or low-fuel zones where you're forced to stick to light speed in order to make it economically viable...

You have any ideas?

Moulin Rogue

2009-10-23T06:11:00.000-07:00

I thought I was done with Batman, but last night I had a big dream where Moulin Rouge was completely redone with Batman's "Rogue's Gallery". Here's a sampling, the Roxanne melody, redone by various villains. Wheeee!

Crane:
[Treatment]
Will drive you
MAAAAAAAD!

Two-face:
BATMAN!
Maybe I'll rob two banks tonight!
I don't rob them for money,
The coin says if its wrong or if it is right.

BAAAATMAN! Maybe I'll rob two banks tonight!
BATMAN! You'll have to wear your cape throughout the night!

Joker:
My eyes upon your corpse
My hands upon your neck
My lips stretched in a grin
It's more than I can stand! (vicious giggling)

Joker & Two-face:
BAAAAATMAN!

Freeze:
Why did my wiiiiife die?
Frozen eyes caaaan't cry!
Rest, take it easy,
I'll save you as "Freezy",
And please believe me when I say
I love you!

(Psychiatric talk bridge and scattered repeating)

The Stuff Simple Games are Made Of

2009-10-14T07:52:00.000-07:00

Me Via Twitter: I've been studying relativity! I'd forgotten that it's quite mad. Quantum physics is only a bit more mad. All tutorials skip the hard stuff.

On GChat:
John: What possible use could you have for relativity?

me: I thought maybe the time dilation effects could be an interesting mechanic.
Imagine a chess match where the various parts of the board have different internal clocks.

John: OK, I can see that.
I remember modeling games with non-zero communication propagation times, but never tried tracking local age of units.

me: Well, think about it: the faster you go (the more you advance), the fewer turns you get to take.
It's a built-in negative feedback loop. Choosing the best point will always be a tradeoff.

John: Interesting.
I guess I'm having a hard time imagining the metaphor for a game in which it was so important that you do something on a ship (or conveyance of your choosing) that the tradeoff would become relevant.

me: Yeah, I'm having a bit of a time with that, too.
I'm thinking of throwing in the mass distortion effect, and having some kind of cosmic gravity-ball.
Relativistic pong, maybe.

John: Hmm.
Does relativity guarantee that inertial mass is alway equal to gravitational mass after distortion?

me: I was thinking of ignoring reality just a little.

John: That was actually a legitimate question, not a narrow insinuation, but I will take your answer as I choose.

me: :)

John: I suppose anything with RKV's might benefit from being able to calculate their physical properties.

me: Only to some extent. After about 0.7c, there's not much point. Everything is dead.
Nonviolent relativistic games are all I can come up with.

John: Perhaps interstellar wine shipping?

me: Radioactive material shipping...
Same idea.

John: You need the wine to age a certain number of years before it comes to market, but you want it to be sold as soon as possible?

me: "It was a very good year. Before their sun exploded."

John: Actually, never mind. The math works out that you would always age it locally and then send it as fast as you could.

me: Ah-ah, you're assuming relativistic travel has no effect on the wine.

John: Its true!

me: Winefolk will certainly be able to taste that "space aged" flavor.
Or think they can, at any rate.
"My, did you fly this through a nebula? Excellent nose on it..."

John: Why do I get the impression you'd have a lot more fun writing the NPC's for that game than the game itself?

me: I'm gonna do it.
I'm gonna build a relavitistic wine-merchant game.
And I'm gonna post this conversation to my blog, 'cause I'm a nerd.

John: hehe
Go for it.

Thinking without language

2009-10-08T06:51:00.000-07:00

I have a lot of interest in making adaptive, interesting NPCs. In most cases, this involves making NPCs that are "smart" - that can react to what the user does, what the situation is, no matter how exotic it becomes.

It turns out making NPCs more intelligent isn't actually what we want: we simply want them to seem more intelligent. If they actually are more intelligent, they'll act erratically (from our perspective) and will frequently derail the pacing and plot. This is in addition to making the world more chaotic simply because they take actions without the player's awareness.

So we can either take pains to make intelligent NPCs and then cripple them so they don't get too uppity about it... or we can focus on making them seem more intelligent as they go about their not-so-uppity lives. We want them to have some level of independence, but just enough to adapt to the player, not enough to derail the game.

As it turns out, that level of independence really isn't hard. You can program an NPC with a "tactical" understanding of the game world that the player navigates. Then the NPC can simply "play" this game using the same heuristics we would use to make him play any other tactical game. It doesn't even have to be a very high-level play, since they'll be playing tangentially to the player instead of competitively.

An example of this would be the ever-popular "love triangle" in an RPG. If you have two prospective love interests, it is possible for them to understand the basics of time and interest allocation such that they can figure out who is ahead, who is behind, and how to try to score more interest from the player. They can even work together behind the scenes (not in character) to insure that whoever is behind advances as quickly as possible and whoever is ahead slows down, so there's always tension. This is opposed to how it would normally go, where the player would simply pick the one he (or she) fancies and stick with them until the end of the game.

"Moves" on this playing field could consist of a variety of techniques, from the petty (showing up every time the pair gets some time alone) to the clever (figuring out what styles the player seems to like and dressing in them) to the meta (getting the opportunity to pull the player's ass out of the fire in a combat). The idea is to be somewhat subtle: a small push from the one behind combined with a bit of a snub from the one in front can do wonders, even if those pushes and snubs are not in any kind of romantic way.

This brings me to my second point: language.

Language isn't important. In fact, language is a pain in the ass. The only time you should be concerning yourself with language is when you have NPCs that actually have to communicate concepts. For NPCs that simply have to communicate emotion, language is like using a hammer on a screw. It looks like it should work, but it just isn't the right tool.

Instead, what we want is the subtler patterns of body language and situational language, enhanced by clever use of the camera.

Body language isn't something that can be canned. As most modern engines do not support live animations, this is a technically difficult situation despite the rather small and straightforward nature of the animations. There's no need for inverse kinematics or physics, just a little bit of layered subanimations to adjust the features, the way the head moves, the cant of the shoulders and the curve of the spine. It does have to interact with the world a bit - for example, staring aimlessly off into space only makes sense if there's space in that direction to stare aimlessly off into. Those are minor factors, and aren't exactly going to strain your engine.

The subtleties of animating body language would probably be well worth it, but there are twin dangers here. Scylla is the uncanny valley: an NPC that moves "almost" right will probably be extremely unnerving. It's probably best to exaggerate and overanimate. Charybdis is the emotional levels this requires. Body language may add too much emotion into your NPCs, making your players uncomfortable. Driving the player away because the scene makes him uncomfortable is exactly the opposite of what you want!

Body language is also not the only language you need: you'll also need situational language. Unlike real life, in a game world you can simply create situations at demand. These situations can be crafted to create the kind of emotional situation you want to create, regardless of the body language of the NPCs. For example, if the heuristic decides that the strong, tough-guy character needs to be brought down a peg to be liked by the player, the heuristic can simply make the next encounter a surprise encounter where tough-guy gets the worst of it (and, of course, reacts in-character: this assumes your characters are always reacting, unlike most RPG battles where the characters simply step forward, take their action, and step back).

Situational language is our "crutch": because simple body language can't communicate concepts very well, we can use situations to gently say things that fall outside the limits of body language (such as "she's willing to sacrifice honor for fairness" or "he's willing to kill to protect you" or whatever). These are the concepts we would really like to convey through our adaptive NPCs, the concepts that make the NPCs really come alive in more than just a moment-to-moment way. And it's actually stronger to communicate them through a custom situation than through any conversation... so don't bother with language!

What do you think?

ODST, yeah you know me

2009-09-27T13:07:00.000-07:00

Finished playing single-player Halo 3: ODST. I don't have any particular interest in playing it competitively on-line, so I'm going to review it based on the single-player game.

Anyhow, ODST wasn't a bad game, although there were some infuriating segments. And, for some reason, it gives me a headache to play for more than an hour or so. I don't really hold that against the game, though.

What I do hold against the game is that they got rid of Master Chief only to give you someone even more faceless and banal. It's sort of like when everyone said they hated the Ewoks, so George Lucas came up with Jar Jar Binks.

I do like that they put Mal in the game, I hadn't read up on it much so I wasn't expecting it. It was quite a surprise. He gave some veneer of human touch to the story, although all the characters were well into the uncanny valley.

There are things I miss as Halo advances. I miss the troops actually mattering. I miss being part of a larger effort. I miss being able to kill shit: every episode they give everything more shields and more hit points until, at last, in ODST you simply rely on instant kill methods 90% of the time.

I understand these changes: they have to make the game better for competitive multiplayer mode. All of these adjustments are in the name of multiplayer enhancements, even if they damage the single-player game. Hell, you can't even dual-wield anymore.

Where are my one-player games going? Even Crackdown 2 is "focusing on multiplayer gameplay". Which, as far as I can tell, means crippling most of what made Crackdown fun in exchange for balancing a game I don't want to play. I want to play Crackdown. ODST is a bit similar: the single player game is neutered due to the focus on the multiplayer gameplay. A continuing evolution throughout the series.

I don't mind games that focus on multiplayer modes, but I don't like games I liked for their single-player aspect gutting the single-player aspect to enhance the multiplayer aspect. Grrr.

Castles of the Mind

2009-09-20T07:11:00.000-07:00

_{Nothin' but theory.}

It's obvious we can't keep scripting every aspect of our NPCs' lives. There are too many NPCs, too many subtle differences in how the player can treat them. We need to build algorithms that can reasonably drive an NPC's actions - not for all games, but for the growing number that require extremely detailed, player-driven interactions with NPCs.

We've tried to use alignments - you know, lawful good, chaotic good, lawful neutral. But these alignments were created specifically to give tabletop players a framework for making tough moral choices. If you're lawful good, you'll eventually have to choose between honor and justice. If you're lawful neutral, you'll have to decide which is better: order or peace?

These tough questions are possible because of the framework of "lawful/chaotic, good/evil", but they can only be answered by a human mind. Well, a computer could pick a pre-scripted answer (or a random one), but that's not the same at all.

Another attempt is with factions. If a character is on the magician's faction, he wants to help magicians and hinder their enemies. But this breaks down for the opposite reason that alignments do: factions are too simplistic. The pat answer of "anything the magicians do is right" is robotic and unrealistic, and the greatest source of personal strife in this environment would be a "fall from grace", where a character decides the magician's guild isn't very good, and what they decide to do about it. As with answering the questions an alignment poses, there's no way to create a meaningful answer out of this data set.

Don't even think that factions plus alignment is the answer: that just introduces two dimensions of moral choice instead of one, and no answers on either axis.

Unfortunately, to make NPCs capable of having these kinds of moral dilemmas and subtle moral choices, we have to have a much more rugged and nuanced model.

The first step is to build a graph (node graph, not bar graph) of the things the character cares about. This could be people, places, ideals, etc. This would probably need to be scripted, or created from augmented stereotypes: randomly assigning them wouldn't make much sense. This is a simple positive or negative number for each.

From this foundation we can create their opinions on other people, places, ideals, and things. Some of these would probably have defaults set up - for example, if you are for the ideal of law and order, then you probably like the town guard. If you have a father who is a town guard, you probably like the town guard.

These defaults can be over-ridden if the designer feels it would be interesting to have a different value, and of course things that are unrelated in most people's minds might be related in a given NPC's mind due to their personal experiences.

All of these values are positive or negative, and there are edges linking them back to the node(s) they spawn from.

This propagation can continue indefinitely - if you like the town guard, then you like the guy who likes the town guard - but should probably be capped to three layers.

This foundation is significantly more complex than the simpler faction model, but it allows us half of the equation we need in order to make more nuanced decisions. You like the city guard, but if you see the city guard going bad, you'll have second thoughts and perhaps even turn against them, since you only like the city guard because you like law and order. This is true even if you like the city guard a lot more than you like law and order, because even though you may not be aware of it, your liking of the city guard does, in the long run, descend from those fundamental values.

When talking about simple reactive responses, this model is not better than either of the more basic models. If the player attacks a guard, the NPC's response to the player is no different than if the NPC simply had a faction preference for the guards (or, more likely, the government, since it's always abstracted way out).

But the whole point is to pull the NPC away from simple reactive responses into having justified moral reactions. This framework allows the NPC to change their feelings over time in a meaningful manner, especially in response to the aftereffects of player intervention. If the player kills a cop, that festers in the minds of the NPCs who care... but if the cop shoots at the player in cold blood, that also festers.

It also allows them to stay cozy in their bias, because the positive reactions from positive propaganda would offset a larger amount of negative press, just due to the math involved.

Adding into this a news/rumor system, you could create a city that actually responds to events in an intelligent and emotional manner, even though they're probably stuck expressing it with canned catchphrases from a voice actor. It would also create a "disinformation" system of crooked politicians and self-centered media clowns, just like the real world. Although that's optional when you're creating the world from scratch.

However, I don't really think that's enough, because the NPCs still have no way to be proactive. This allows them to know what they think about things, and allows them to change how they think according to what they see, but it doesn't allow them to make or interpret plans.

I haven't really come up with anything solid on that side, but I have the strong idea that it involves ranking change over time and remembering causes of change. This would have the benefit of also allowing for recollection - an NPC who feels maudlin when they go to the park where they spent much of their childhood.

However, the progression doesn't work out yet.

What do you think?

Blue Mars

2009-09-16T15:19:00.001-07:00

Well, I'm going to rag on Blue Mars a bit. If you're a Blue Mars fan (or employee), don't take it hard, I rag on everything. I'm just one of the internet's many assholes.

I understand that Blue Mars is in early beta, but there are core design decisions that don't change, and those are what I'm going to rag on. Even if Blue Mars was fully populated and had a larger feature set, I would still find it disappointing for many reasons, all of which revolve around the idea of empowering your user base.

Blue Mars is occasionally compared to SecondLife. Usually in the form of, "Unlike SecondLife, Blue Mars does not allow content creation". It's important to realize that not only is Blue Mars technically incapable of allowing the kind of content creation SecondLife allows, it's also a corporate-mindset money guzzler with no intention of allowing ordinary users to create mediocre content, instead starting right from the get go by explicitly focusing only on well-funded teams of professional content developers. As Blue Mars will find, that is not a viable path into the future. You gotta eat your veggies before you get any dessert.

Like the other 3D chat rooms running around, Blue Mars is a game of pure luxuries, where the only thing to do is dress yourself up and cyber. Of course, Blue Mars "isn't sure" about this "adult content" thing, so it's illegal to do that. Leaving you with basically nothing to do. Oh, "the Cryengine supports advanced gameplay, so you can make good games within the context of the Blue Mars space"... my ass.

People who think that way have obviously never tried to make a game. It takes a lot of tweaking down in the guts to get a game engine - even a really good one - to respond properly. If Blue Mars is counting on the Cryengine to allow for the development of immersive games in their space, they're counting eggs that ain't ever gonna hatch. They will, however, have no problem creating samey spaces for people to extremely clumsily stagger around in. Why they decided not to use Cryengine's navigation, and instead went with a painfully nasty implementation of their own, is never really explained.

I don't think that Blue Mars is bad. I just think that there's no reason to choose it over, say, IMVU, which is easier to make content for, has more fluid animations, and you can see people's faces.

My bitterness is at least in part because I'm a Mars terraforming fanboy, and now that these berks have put their corporate thumbs into the "Blue Mars" name, it'll be decades before anyone else can make a game with that name that does the concept some justice.

No, I don't see any reason to play Blue Mars. I imagine it will do well enough, because advertising blitzes aimed at the non-geeks they're really intending to target will generally yield dividends. But as a replacement for SecondLife, it is totally not an option. And I hate SecondLife. So that's saying something.

...

There's just something wrong with this whole idea of commoditizing game elements. They don't even bother pretending there's any gameplay. They flat out state that it's a micropayment beast that exists solely to make you pay out the nose for any content they deem worthy. This whole thing - not just Blue Mars, but all these games - these are a huge step backwards.

When are we going to start stepping forwards again?

Space

2009-09-14T17:35:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start way out in theory land and then bring it back in, so bear with me. Skip to the ellipsis if you want to skip the theory crap.

This is a topic I've done before, but this is new content.

Space in games is usually used both to separate/pace challenges and to form the challenges.

This is controlled mostly by the algorithms which control the space. For example, the simplest spaces are probably in adventure/text games, which have clearly defined rooms and very basic movement control. The gameplay in such games is less about navigating the space and more about putting non-space-related things together. However, even in that sort of game, everything is couched in space. You move to rooms to try things out, and progress is measured in new rooms that you can explore.

Most games have more complex spatial algorithms which allow for correspondingly greater amounts of gameplay in the space, rather than adjunct to it. Most games are about exploring space, and most of the rest are about modifying it, but that's a false dichotomy. An RPG is mostly about exploring, while Sim City is mostly about modifying, but an FPS is both. There is no "real" difference between exploring space and modifying space, because exploring space can be thought of as modifying space such that your avatar is in a different location. Obviously, a player might not feel that way, but I'm talking about underlying algorithms and rules.

A fog of war over some terrain: are you exploring the terrain as you vanquish the fog of war, or are you modifying the terrain to not include the fog of war? It's a useless semantic question. The algorithm of the space allows the player to vanquish the fog of war. There is no need to consider whether it's exploration or modification unless you're considering player psychology.

Well, there's no fundamental difference between space that is explored and space that is modified unless you're going out of your way to create one. But what about space where the rules change? What about once you get that double jump?

There's no fundamental difference then, either. The algorithm that governs when and whether you can double jump occupies the same "logical space" as the rules governing how fast you fall, whether you can survive an enemy's gunshot, whether you are stopped by a wall, whether you can build a house, and so on. It's a complex logical space with a lot of complicated rules, most of which are inherited from earlier games in the same genre.

Many of the most memorably original games are original because of this logical space, rather than the tangential rules governing things like XP, inventory, etc. Braid and Sands of Time both included time mechanics that gave you a strong and then-unique method of navigating space: they did this partly by simply altering the mechanics of what it means to mis-jump or die. Additional rules, especially in Braid, added additional layers of spatial complexity.

Games like Shiny's Messiah or Omikron Soul give you the power to switch bodies. While this often doesn't change the mechanics of exploring space like rewinding time does, it does change where you can go and what you can do when you get there. Which is in the same logical rule space.

Even games which aren't avatar-centric, like Tetris or Guitar Hero or Bust-a-Move, still use this logical space to define the core gameplay. There's a "space" that follows specific rules, and you move forward by interacting with the space correctly.

It's clear just how far this logical space can bend. The same basic idea - the algorithms that govern interaction with space - can be used for everything from Braid to Tetris to Sim City to Quake. Tangential rules are then added to govern the progression of these algorithms and spaces. You move from stage A to stage B. You select an avatar and a map. You get a new gun. You earn a new skill.

Even in a game like Skate, where the whole game is about interacting with space, there are still tangential rules: buying new skateboards and clothes, accomplishing arbitrary tricks and times. These tangential rules are often what designers agonize over.

...

I prize the spatial interactions. They are usually the fundamental interactions. When a player presses "right", the immediate response is the avatar moving right inside space. This tight, deep feedback can be found in most really great games: they're really great because they enhance the experience of interacting with space. Even the RPGs we prize are largely prized not for their RPG mechanics, but for their spatial experience. How pretty? How impressive? How interesting is the space we're in? Is the narrative tightly tied to/represented by the space?

What do you remember about FF6? The characters? Do you remember why you remember the characters? Because they defined themselves with space. Kefka burned down a city, then burned the world. Each character, on their own, had representative game levels - castles, small homes, smoky gin joints, vast plains. The characters were tightly associated with the spaces that represented them.

In games where exploring space is more tightly done, this is even clearer. Can you even name a memorable action game that didn't include some extremely well-polished or unique aspect of interacting with space? If you can, you're probably not remembering the interaction. Half Life 2, for example. The interesting aspect was not the gravity gun, which was barely a curiosity, but the level design, which forced very specific pacing on to the player. Did you notice that while you were playing?

Now, with that said, has a game ever become lauded for its tangential rules?

Can you name a game where the game was famous because of its inventory wrangling? Its level-up mechanic? Its deep social interactions?

It's hard. There are so few. A few that leap to mind are experimental games, famous only because they're trying out some weird new algorithm. When it comes to real games - even indie games - those tangential rules don't seem to add much to the final product. With one exception: when the tangential rules allow you to modify the spacial rules. For example, a level editor.

Which kind of feeds back into the original point: it's all about the space, and the algorithms that control it.

I think.

You?

Please visit the Blogs of the Round Table's main hall for links to all entries.

Having a Point

2009-08-28T15:58:00.000-07:00

I just finished Arkham Asylum. No spoilers, don't worry.

The thing about the game is that it got me thinking about themed games, and how the gameplay doesn't usually match the theme. For example, Arkham Asylum was a Metroid game.

But it got me thinking. If you were free to make a Batman game, no rules, no regulations, no DC dictating to you, what would you make?

I think the Arkham idea is a good one. You put it in Arkham and not only do you have a limitless supply of supervillains and freaks, you also have a chance to make your game about madness. Every story needs a point or it wallows in itself. Like Arkham Asylum does.

My first move, in making my imaginary Arkham game, would be to ditch the bat. You don't play Batman.

You play the supervillains.

I'm a big fan of replayability and deep, wide gameplay, so I would probably make it an open world (well, open-asylum) game. But there is no centralized leader. You can choose any supervillain, and play through the game in only a loosely scripted manner.

This gives us three points of strong gameplay. One is the specific gameplay of the character - and how their madness affects it. For example, Mr. Freeze and Harley Quinn would play very differently in terms of how they move, attack, and so forth. But more importantly, their psychology affects the way they can interact with the world.

Quinn's silly, childish insanities lend themselves to a kind of Tank Girl feel, tainted by her obsession with the Joker. She would be better able to interact with both supervillains and random inmates, she would play around with pianos or complicated control pads, or so forth. Mr. Freeze would be more likely to disassemble, hack, or repair the devices in Arkham, and to build up a lair. There are a lot of potential ways to do it, and it would require some prototyping to figure it out in detail.

The second point of strong gameplay is the dynamic of all of the supervillains expanding into the asylum. This can not only provide the typical deep gameplay of strategic expansion, but also the added unique flavor of negotiating with total madmen, both from a position of strength and weakness.

The third point of strong gameplay comes from the plot and arcs we can introduce. Using some moderately flexible triggers, we can create an emergent story (we could even re-use the same components in the existing Arkham game, although I don't know why we'd bother). But, more than that, we can also have their madness evolve as the game progresses.

The point of the game is exploring the dynamics of the kind of fantasy madnesses these characters suffer from.

There are many other games you could come up with for a Batman theme exploring a point. It is somewhat hard to find a point that can support a thirty-hour game, but certainly not impossible. You could even make a game exploring the oldies but goodies that Batman has explored in the past, such as the existence of a superhero causing an upward spiral of supervillains.

Perhaps you have some good ideas yourself? At the very least, I hope you understand what I'm trying to say.

If you've played Arkham Asylum, tell me whether you thought the same things about it.

Holistic Design

2009-08-25T06:11:00.000-07:00

"Holistic" has a bunch of new-agey connotations I don't like, but I can't think of any other words that mean the same thing. So, before I start, this has nothing to do with holistic health or medicine or any of that, all of which I think is crap. But, of course, this may be crap too.

There's a strong duality in the mind of many game designers. A feeling that the rules and the aesthetics/narrative are two distinct entities that come together to make a game. I don't believe this. I believe they can be separated and even recombined, but it's not an ideal or "natural" practice. I've been thinking about how to show this.

Katamari Damacy. You could theoretically separate out the aesthetics and replace them with anything. Earlier I used the example of organic proteins. Which would be a pretty boring aesthetic at first glance, but let's consider it.

The idea of rolling around and sticking things to your ever-growing sticky ball can theoretically be decoupled from the fact that you're rolling over toys and squids and people and planets. But those decoupled mechanics have very little value.

Mating them up with a different aesthetic sounds like it should be simple and translate well. But any new aesthetic/narrative you define would be better served by other rules. The same fundamental mechanic might serve in both situations, but the specifics would have to be redone to make it fit with the new aesthetic.

For example, a Katamari Damacy where you roll up music notes and motes of light would certainly be possible, but it wouldn't make much sense for it to be rolling around on an open-map world with wild terrain. That would feel wrong. Instead, I'd move the Katamari to a tube-track like something from a Jeff Minter (Yak) game. The patterns created by moving forward in a spottily-floored tube give the otherwise unintriguing dots and notes an intriguing air.

Even though this is the same fundamental roll-over-stuff-and-get-bigger/bounce-off-larger-stuff, it isn't the same game. A twisty donut arrangement and much higher maximum speeds are better for this kind of aesthetic.

I could make the aesthetic the aforementioned proteins, which come in radically different sizes. Again, it would make no sense to have the same kind of world design as the original. Organic proteins are interesting because (A) they are on a radically different scale and (B) they are chemically interactive.

Perhaps a "swimming" Katamari would be the right idea, with proteins all floating around in patterns. Instead of a ball of souls, something like a squid of souls. Calamari Damacy. The camera would need to be different, obviously.

Another option might be that the level is made of the protein strands, and you race along them absorbing free electrons and sucking off atoms. That would be fun because you would change the nature of the level as you do this. For example, sucking off a hydrogen atom might result in the strand you're on fusing with a nearby strand.

The aesthetic is not separate from the gameplay. It appears that way at first glance, but it's like saying that the paint is separate from the painting, and that you could use that same paint to paint a different painting. Maybe, but the quantities would be weird and you'd be laying it down in radically different patterns.

What do you think?

Mysteries of Scale

2009-08-22T16:00:00.000-07:00

My mind's been stuck with the idea of little pieces of unique, touching content. I've been stuck on this ever since the failure of Spore, an unaccountable failure, a depressing failure, an idiotic failure.

One of the things that is most touching in games is when you discover something new and interesting (I call them "tidbits"). There's a lot to be said for games with deep and interesting gameplay, but there's also a lot to be said for the moment you first see a flying city or meet a particularly weird and entertaining fellow.

Well, I'm fairly confident of the basics of gameplay, but I have always had a harder time with the basics of tidbits. I like to think I'm relatively good at them, except that all my tidbits tend to be big impressive things rather than small, personal things. But unlike rules and dynamics... well, I can tell someone how well their rules are going to perform, what kinds of dynamics will result, and what they might want to think about changing. But I can't tell them how their tidbits are going to act, and suggesting new tidbits for them is hard to do without diluting their vision (assuming they have one).

I always find it fascinating when a game comes along that seems like it will let me see tidbits from other people, to learn more about how this sort of thing works. But these games always fall through. After so many games failed, I took a step back and decided to figure out why I didn't see anything I considered a tidbit in them. Why didn't I consider, say, an interesting SecondLife vehicle a tidbit? Why don't I consider a funny-looking creature in Spore a tidbit? But a six-by-six pixel blob with one line of text in a retro adventure game can feel like a tidbit!

I think it's in the framing.

I've been thinking about this. I think that if you slow way, way down, everything becomes tidbits. Because tidbits are interesting in comparison. An interesting NPC is interesting because he's weird-looking and he's got funny dialog. If there's fifty weird-looking, funny-dialog NPCs in this region, there's nothing tidbitty about any one of them. (Although the square full of weird people could be tidbitty in itself!)

I think if Spore gave up its content a hundred times slower, I think people might feel a little of a sense of wonder at the creatures and civilizations they find. At least for the first hundred or so. But because they are common as dirt, none of them are interesting except for the ones that are programmed by the game designers to stand out (the center-of-the-galaxy guys, for example). Everyone else just blends in.

Similarly, in SecondLife, if you take it very slowly and consider each thing you find, then every other thing suddenly takes on life as a tidbit. If you look closely and slowly, everything that has been hand-crafted has some little tingle of tidbittiness.

I don't think that these are ideal tidbits in either case. I'm simply saying that you can have player content result in the same kind of emotional response you can get from developer-scripted content. It just requires a radical reworking of the game's pacing.

And the game doesn't even have to be slow. It just has to reveal different kinds of things at different times. You can be jumping across platforms, shooting at aliens, and all that... when you encounter some new NPC. The NPC will be interesting because NPCs have been made very rare.

There's all sorts of theories I have as to how to punch up the tidbitty nature of things - how to make them more interesting to the player. But I haven't tested any of them yet, so they're just smoke.

However, the speed of reveal has been tested and can easily be tested. Just play a game with large amounts of player content, such as Spore or Secondlife. Then play to restrict yourself. Don't play to win: play to see the world, but only one new object every minute.

It makes the games even more boring than they already are, but you can feel the little twinge that you get from seeing something new and interesting.

Do you know what I'm talking about? Do you have any opinions?

Fairy Tale Games

2009-08-19T07:17:00.000-07:00

The problem with fairy tales is that classic fairy tales are structured very badly for statistical gameplay. They are, flatly, adventure games. Albeit generally ones that are long on narration and short on puzzles. They aren't RPGs.

Now some modern fairy tales have been created which either have plenty of statistical play or, at least, can be easily adapted into games that have statistical play. Prime examples of this include Quest for Glory (a computer game) and Thieves and Kings (a comic/illustrated story). There are plenty of others.

These systems do pretty well at one- or perhaps two-character statistical play. But they are extremely difficult to adapt into four, five, ten, a thousand character play. They still have the memory of the original fairy tale structure, and therefore they always orbit a Hero, and anyone else he or she meets is likely to just be an Accomplice or Background Flavor. A good example of this are the classic Tolkien novels, with their scads of characters, only three or four of which are even worth remembering the names of. Think of this back before the movies came out, not since.

There are systems where many characters - five, six, even seven - can all get along well enough and do cool things in a statistical setting. As far as I can tell, these were all pioneered by the dark and sinister crossover of WWII wargames and ~~WWII fantasy novels~~ Tolkien's books. Dungeons and Dragons and its ilk.

Fundamentally, they took all the elements of war stories and mixed them with fairy tales to come up with a statistical variety. Magicians have a different way of playing than warriors than thieves than elves than... well, you get the idea.

By introducing this highly varied statistical system, these games allowed players to all play together as a functioning team, each player having different capabilities which are more or less useful in various situations and don't require a main hero that dwarfs the other members of the party. (Although early balancing being what it was, this often happened anyway.)

If you notice, this is what the Lord of the Rings movies adopted to distinguish the ten billion minor characters those books contained. While seeing exactly how an elf or dwarf fights as opposed to a human has no particular story merit, it looks cool and is very well known. So now we can remember Legolas as The Elf That Surfs Wooden Planks Down Stairs While Firing Fistfuls Of Arrows And Looking Intense. Before the movies, we would remember him as, "Oh, was there an elf in that party? Yeah, I guess there was." Not that there's any real story difference between those two memories, because Legolas, along with just about everyone else, is there only to serve as background noise until their single plot event.

But there is a gameplay difference.

This gameplay difference is extremely good at allowing for small parties like this, and is the backbone of nearly every modern RPG, both tabletop and computer. How large and diverse your parties can be depends almost entirely on how distinguishable your characters are from each other statistically. So some games, like Disgaea, allow you to have many characters in any given battle and dozens of characters in your roster. They do this because their statistical play is so complex and nuanced that there is an almost infinite variation available. Of course, they are also almost unapproachably complex to many gamers for the same reason, so there's a tradeoff.

MMORPGs have a fun time of this, too, trying to balance variation with complexity and... uh... balance.

Anyhow, that's all getting off the track. These statistical variations are a trick to make you able to have more than just one or two main characters like old games and fairy tales. However, they make it difficult to tell a fairy tale.

FFVI (FF3 as it was called when I played it) gives us a good example of an approach that might help. Like many other games of its time, it had many characters, but it took a somewhat unusual stance that you might remember: the party got split up and you had to play through their story segments separately. This isn't unique to FFVI, but FFVI is the game I bet everyone's played.

This method requires the same diversity of stats to keep play fresh, but by creating multiple independent sub-fairy-tales it gets around the hopelessly dreary march from A to B that most of these games have. Of course, this solution is probably not ideal, as it does involve quite literally making multiple games. It also doesn't adapt well to tabletop games.

Radical diversity of gameplay is another option. This is when the various character classes have SUCH different capabilities that they are essentially playing a different game. This is a subject all its own, but it doesn't work very well in tabletop games due to the way it pulls the GM apart.

A few theoretical methods I've come up with - some of which I've used to a bit of success, some still untested - might be worth mentioning.

One is the Worldbuilder method. In this method, the game is not about dungeon crawling (although there is plenty of it): it's about worldbuilding. For example, players might build or obtain a castle, they might recover or enchant a magic sword, or discover a long-lost spell, or open up a cave full of obedient golems... and, of course, the Enemy might do all of those same things.

In this case the players probably start statistically fairly similar to each other - somewhat distinct, but not tremendously. As they proceed, they define themselves by what they have (and where they are). Someone with a magic crystal sword will have statistical characteristics that revolve around it, while the same character with their own castle will have different characteristics (such as guards). The very act of defining and obtaining these things can also set side quests in motion, allowing for loosely connected MMO plots.

The basic play results in kind of a magic-the-gathering sort of feel, but it also results in an a very fairy-tale feel as well. These games tend to be fairly short - five or six sessions each - but they lend themselves well to multiple games played consecutively in the same world.

The best method I've found for allowing this kind of variation is to allow players to generate two fairy tale elements out of components, and then the GM chooses his favorite for the Enemy. If the players choose to contest it and try to obtain it before the Enemy does, then they have a tough fight ahead of them and the Enemy gets the second object instantly.

Of course, it's not just defining and obtaining components, because these things need to wrap back in on themselves, but you get the basic idea.

Another method of doing fairy-tale games without being simple fantasy games is to use less character-centric play. If the players don't play individual characters but instead play, say, concepts, then the players can use the characters like chess pieces to build the game into a meaningful and deep story.

This is also not a new idea, although it's still fairly rare. It's extremely rare to give the players an actual goal, too: most of these systems simply use a bidding system to make players form conflicts. That doesn't give players enough of a goal for me, so I strongly recommend giving players a concept or moral-of-the-story or something that they can strive for that isn't directly related to in-game assets. IE, don't make them want to revive a kingdom or save a princess. Those are character goals. Player goals would be more like "show crime doesn't pay" or "you get a point for every round of a duel (2-character fight)".

Can you think of any other methods to make fairy-tale-like games? Have you ever used any of these methods, or played in a fairy-tale-like game?

PC Madness

2009-08-12T14:26:00.000-07:00

I'd like to talk about madness in live games (both tabletop and LARP). And fortunately, not only do I want to talk about it, but someone asked me to. So I don't feel too silly.

In most games, insanity comes in one of two ways. Either statistical or freeform.

Freeform insanities are the most common. That's when you just take a trait like "paranoid" and play it however seems reasonable. There's nothing particularly wrong with that, and good players can do it well. However, it does have two draw backs. The first is that many players won't do it well, and the second is that it doesn't have a strong connection to the game world, which means it may interfere with rather than help the gameplay.

Statistical insanity is used by games that "specialize" in insanity in a desperate attempt to wedge insanity into the core gameplay. The biggest example is the Cthulhu game, and the other Cthulhu game, and that other Cthulhu game, you know the one. I suppose we could mention this Cthulhu game too, and that one if we feel a bit mad.

This legislated statistical insanity allows for the rules to dictate an insane reaction. For example, you might be forced to run in fear, or gibber for 2d10 turns, or whatever. They also give the GM a clear indicator if he wants to play unreliable narrator. Low-sanity characters can see things in an unusual manner or, if the GM is a poor GM, see random crap, whatever he pulls from the hat.

Statistical sanity is also often linked to other game performance. For example, you might have to have a certain minimum or maximum sanity to perform a certain spell.

I do not like either of these approaches. The first has no structure to serve as a foundation for a game, and the second is a good foundation but is not terribly good at actually making the players feel their characters are insane.

I've experimented with character insanity in many ways. It's not an easy thing to work into a game properly, which is probably why nobody does. I have not discovered a way to base a game entirely on madness. It either makes it impossible for the players to act coherently OR it requires a huge amount of GM effort.

But I have figured out how to integrate madness into many other kinds of games.

Let me show you how I do it.

The basic idea is simple: reward the players for being insane.

The specifics are more complicated than that, so let me explain a bit more.

In Bastard Jedi, madness was a big part of the game. However, it was couched in such a way that I don't think any of the players figured out until several weeks into the game that they were going insane. Or even that it was possible.

The mechanic was very simple. Everyone had a few emotional axes, such as humility vs arrogance and harmony vs anger. They have a score in that axis, such as a +2 or a -1. At any time, they can act suitably whatever and receive a number of extra dice equal to their rating. So someone with a -1 anger could gain a die by acting harmonious or lose a die by acting angry.

Very simple, and an obvious, clear path to falling and rising, right?

Nnnnnnno, not really. The mechanics are simple, but the resulting dynamic has several layers because it screws with the player's head a bit. As a clear example, after a player has gotten used to relying on being humble when they need a few dice, you find something fascinating: the player character has developed a rather serious self-esteem problem. Even when the player doesn't need dice, he's in the habit of being humble, legitimized by the idea that he has to be "ready" to pull the humble out at any moment.

Humility... that's a light side trait, though, right?

No, I never said that. You can fall to humility. I don't know if you noticed, but you just did.

This "lead-in" trick works exceptionally well and on all kinds of players. Even shy or socially inept players have an easy enough time bending the short distance required to express a simple emotion, and it becomes second nature remarkably fast. Lead-ins aren't suitable for one-shots, but for anything that runs over a few months, the technique can be used at will. The players will happily wander into full-blown insanity without any explicit help from you, without even a list of insanities.

Depending on the situation, the players may instead draw BACK from full-blown insanity. But they know it's there, and that immerses them very deeply in both their character and the game world.

I can't guarantee its efficacy for other GMs, but it's always worked spectacularly for me, and I'm a fairly "hands off" GM.

...

The other method I've used with somewhat less success (but still more than Cthulhu or Cthulhu. Or even Cthulhu!) is the sanity tradeoff.

For example, if you get superpowers, you get insanities to go with them.

The key to this is that your insanity is directly entangled with your superpower, either as an obvious social result or as a psychological source of power. This means you need a wider variety of subtler insanities. There's no Axis of Insanity where you randomly roll to see if you're gibbering or running in terror this round.

For example, if you gain the ability of flight, then you can take one of two insanities. One is that you can't fly unless you are feeling a specific emotion, such as detachment or panic. (One of them, not either of them.) In this situation, the insanity powers your ability.

"That's not insanity!"

Ssssshhh... you don't start insane. You go insane.

The other option is to have an insanity that is a clear result of the ability to fly - the social result. For example, feeling "above it all". This is also not an insanity, it's just being snooty. While the insanity-powered ability is mandated by the need to fly, the ability-result insanity has to have a different mechanic. I generally use "active tokens". When I think the player is acting his mental difficulties out, I give him the token. When I think he isn't, I take it away. As long as he has the token, he can use the ability. This works okay with 3-4 players, but some other method is almost certainly possible, and it could certainly use some refinement.

The player characters are rapidly (depending on your timescale) given additional abilities either powered by the same insanity or resulting in the same insanity. Unfortunately, it also means that the player has to go further into the mindset.

What was once powered by a simple feeling of detachment is now much more powerful but must be powered by a feeling of profound isolation and uncaring. It becomes necessary to actually do acts that show how detached you are. In the beginning you might have refused to give a beggar change. Now you must sweep past him without even seeing him. Your friends want your help? Well, if you turn them down, you'll be able to use your power for the rest of the day...

Any otherwise normal (if slightly peculiar) mental states can be blown up into full-blown insanity if you let the players grow into it.

This method seems less efficient, but I haven't given it nearly as much polish or playtesting, so take it for what it's worth.

...

Notice that in both methods I never give explicit instructions. There is no "you must run around screaming now", no "oh, you see a giant purple iguana flying around your head". I just let the players take things to an insane extreme. You might think this limits the kinds of insanities you'll end up with, but that's not the case. Players are quite creative and will usually come up with much more convincing insanities than your rule book.

Basically, my philosophy is that true insanity comes from within.

Have any of you used these techniques? I've used them in games large and small, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Mechanics that Change the Game

2009-08-12T11:31:00.001-07:00

The mechanics of the game fundamentally change how it is played, and what kind of flavor the game has. A lot of people seem to forget this, and they instead think about how to tweak the parameters of familiar mechanics to give the proper feel. For example, I've seen people try to run horror-themed D&D games, and I've seen people try to run lighthearted, slapstick Shadowrun games.

I've also seen this in computer games, where old techniques are recycled into a very different kind of game, and it doesn't usually end well. At least computer games have the excuse that making a new set of mechanics is actually difficult. There's no excuse for using the same mechanics over and over in tabletop games, unless your only point is to be as familiar as possible to the players.

There are a wide variety of relatively simple rule changes you might want to think about making to give your games different flavors. These are suggesting with tabletop games in mind, but they can be adapted to anything.

Replacing the Randomizer

Most new designers of tabletop games are happy to simply change the number of sides on the dice you roll. After all, rolling a bunch of d10s is quite different from rolling a bunch of d6s, right? And what if you have to roll a bunch of DIFFERENT kinds of dice? Whoa, it's like a breakthrough.

Well, you can make dice feel different, especially if you throw in exploding dice or pattern matching results (pairs are worth more, or rolling three sixes kills you, or whatever). Dice are also easy to calculate if you run that way: you can easily determine the precise chances of things happening if you know how many dice they have and what their target is.

But there are lots of ways to replace the randomizer. There are two basic categories: replacing the random function and offsetting the random function. Replacing the random function is just a matter of choosing a different method of randomization. Most are interchangeable with dice to a large extent, but some are not. For example, if you use cards, then the cards drawn from the deck cannot be redrawn, so it is possible to count the cards, modify which cards are put into the deck, and other things that "stack" the deck to your (or your players') preference.

My preferred method is to offset the randomizing function, by which I mean that the randomness is controlled by the players. For example, if the players are each given five cards that they look at and can play on any conflict, then it is up to the players to choose which cards they will use up when. Add in trading cards and character-specific pattern recognition, and trading cards becomes a major element of the game.

There are lots of other methods, such as allowing players to bid on dice, or spend points to reroll/redraw, or using tokens rather than dice with both sides revealing their "bids" at the same time. All of these reduce the amount of actual randomness by granting the player some level of control. All of them also make a significant part of the gameplay about figuring out the best tactics. If you are careful, you can craft your offset rules to guide the players into a particular mindset.

For example, in one of my Bastard Jedi games, I used the aforementioned card-based system, including all the trading and pattern matching. One thing I did on top of that was give out cards that had red backs as well as the normal, blue-backed cards. These were "rewards" for doing dark-side things, or were channeled from the local dark side miasma. Choosing when and how to use dark side cards was one of the three or four methods I used to make the dark side both more attractive and less clear-cut.

Stat Arcs

Another big deal if you're trying to make a game feel a certain way is to create stat arcs. This is a system whereby a stat will trend in a particular direction for a particular reason. One example of this is the insanity mechanic in most cthulu games. Another example is any game where you actively spend stats to do things, and can only rarely regain them. Other examples might include dwindling batteries, fame (as a useful stat), and equipment that degrades with use.

It's possible to do positive stat arcs, too, although somewhat more difficult.

Stat arcs are only valuable if the player is given the option of either proceeding along the arc or doing something else. Dwindling batteries dwindle a lot faster when you fire your laser cannons, so it's up to the player: fire the laser cannons, or find another way out of the situation. Obviously, if one choice or the other is clearly the better choice, it's not really a choice at all. If you can either fire your laser cannons or just wish them to death with your brain, you'll never even hesitate.

Tradeoffs

Somewhat related to stat arcs and sometimes embedded in them is the idea of tradeoffs. This is rare in most modern games, because they have a continuous "upwards and onwards" feeling. However, tradeoffs can really make a game interesting.

For example, I ran a game where you could be radically enhanced, but each enhancement saddled you with more insanity. This led to an interesting situation where players had to weigh how insane they could afford to be (really insane, not the easy insanity most games feature). Obviously, the radical enhancements weren't the only source of gameplay power, or there would have been little in the way of choice. Instead, both equipment and skills played a roll. Just... less efficiently.

There are lots of examples of this in every non-game arena. Sacrifice to get your job done. Even comics have "with great power de blah blah". The closest a game comes is making it so that if you choose the good path instead of the evil path you don't receive the extraneous, useless power-ups for at least another ten minutes.

Cut and Choose

I like this method because it's not very nice. I find that most of the best methods are not very nice.

Using a cut-and-choose mechanic relies on some kind of bidding system where a player will say "either this or this". For example, "I stab him with the sword and he dies OR he stabs me with the sword and I'm badly wounded."

Obviously, whoever is doing the choosing (it's always someone else) will choose whichever appeals to them most. It's not really much of a choice unless they like the other guy, too. But it can be designed with a better set of choices.

The best way I've found to do this is to do a reflect. That is, once the player gives the basic options, the GM (or other adversary) attaches price tags of some kind to each choice. Whichever one the player picks, he pays for, and whichever one is left over, the adversary pays for.

So the adversary might say, "killing the enemy will cost you five karma, but getting maimed is free". Now, if the player chooses to kill the enemy, the adversary is up five karma (or, perhaps, the karma vanishes). If the player chooses to get injured, then the adversary is the one who pays.

The cut-and-choose method does require an adversarial relationship, as it's extremely easy to work together to derail the system otherwise. This is usually best done by making it a zero sum game of some manner. That way, even if they collude, the colluder will quickly run out of resources.

Anyhow, all of these methods can be used as primary or secondary resolution mechanics that dramatically change the flavor of the game. Have you ever used them? Can you think of any others?

There are a lot of specifically interplayer mechanics I want to talk about, but that'll have to wait.

Minifacturing

2009-08-10T06:48:00.000-07:00

Previously on ProjectPerko: the problem of 3D printing. This week's episode: Makerbot makes a move!

I think this is a good first step. At first, I was a little derogatory: they're essentially manufacturing need for manufacturing when there isn't really any. But after a moment, I became more positive.

There is no need for "crowdsourced manufacturing" or even its superset brother "minifacturing". As I said, there's simply no particular interest among the public for being able to build small numbers of a huge variety of things. Most people are happy to buy one of a billion manufactured, non-customized objects for a fraction of the price.

However, I do not think this disproves the concept of minifacturing. The idea of manufacturing things in your basement seems outlandish and unreasonable, but so does having your own personal computer. I can't imagine any reason anybody would need their own home computer.

So I do think that minifacturing has a tremendous future. I don't see it exactly, but I see its shadow, in the same way that you could see the shadow of the internet on the first personal computers.

And I think that manufacturing a need is, for the moment, not a bad idea. Sure, it's just a shadow of real demand... but these sorts of things might help shape a real demand. And once that happens, maybe things will change.

Personally, I still think that minifacturing's breakthrough probably lies mostly in guerrilla home-improvement: minifacturing solar panels, water purifiers, etc. But I wouldn't bet one way or another. Shadows are notoriously hard to interpret.

Join us again next time, same print-time, same print-channel.

Expectations of Control

2009-08-09T06:49:00.001-07:00

I keep thinking about control in games. Because I'm a simulationist at heart. I want to know that if I push this to happen, then other things happen descending from it.

I remember reading Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, which fascinated me even if I never followed the combat rules or anything else that required stats or dice. It didn't bother me that I couldn't "choose the things I wanted", because it was presented in such a way that it was obvious there was no real simulation involved. I was just navigating something that was already written.

Similarly, I don't feel disappointed by adventure games or other very heavily-scripted games, because it's obvious there's not any kind of adaptive simulation. Funnily enough, as soon as these games include even a hint of adaptive simulation - such as giving you choices between two distinct plot branches - I start to get itchy.

"You gave me a choice, which means you CAN give me choices, which means you SHOULD give me choices, but you aren't, which means you suck!"

Obviously, I understand intellectually that most of these choices are of the choose-you-own-adventure variety and are not simulated. But I grew up with so many simulators that the itch is very strong.

This is the reason I dislike Knights of the Old Republic, and anything else that gives you "good or bad" choices. At first it seems like a simulation to my instincts, but even when I realize it's not, I still want more detailed and reactive control over my goodness and badness.

Do any of you have this problem?

Advances in Game Design

2009-08-01T16:03:00.000-07:00

I got in a short argument with someone on Twitter. He takes the position most people seem to take: that games have advanced technologically but not in terms of gameplay.

This sets my teeth on edge.

First, the two are inextricable to a surprising degree. We couldn't have a 3D shooter without the technology that allows it. We can't have Boomblox without decent physics simulation. We can't have Mario Galaxy without an overpowered level design system to keep developers from going insane. We can't have MMORPGs without the internet.

But more than that, game design has advanced tremendous amounts. It's just easy to ignore. Let's look at a few MAJOR, VERY COMMON titles.

Mario Galaxy. Would you dare to say it's just a platformer? That the design hasn't "advanced much" since Super Mario Brothers?

Prototype. I don't like the game, but the 'minor' technical upgrades allow it to have a smooth and flowing play experience. Is anyone willing to pretend it's not significantly different from Moon Patrol?

Dead Rising, with it's brick-wall learning curve, has an impressive design that not only unfolds a spiral of avatar upgrades but also allows you to use/destroy almost everything in the mall.

Even Gears of War is significant design change from early shooters. You can pretend that it and Halo are not significantly different from their predecessors, but only if you're willing to pretend that a car is not significantly different than a horse-drawn cart.

Shall I start talking about less popular games? I don't think I'll even bother.

I think the reason so many people think that game design hasn't advanced much is because it's possible to trace modern games contiguously into the past. When you can see the change tiny increment by tiny increment, it's easy to not even see the progress.

But the progress is there. We've made tremendous progress.

Not to say we're perfect, or that we're even very good. But don't pretend we're still standing on the sand thinking about going in: we're already wading up to our knees.

Songish

2009-07-31T04:21:00.000-07:00

(This is a parody of "Hallelujah" with the lyrics bastardized into a song about the discovery of pulsars. I woke up and it was in my head, so I wrote it down. Hope you enjoy it.)

I heard there was a secret star
that pulsed clear beats from afar,
But you don't really care for physics, do you?
It went like this, every second and a third,
A pulse that could clearly be heard,
Baffling and delighting with little green men!

Little green men! Little green men.

It was clear to most that the distant tone
Was long distance from an alien phone
But some math came in and stabbed right through you
You read it in your kitchen chair,
You checked that math in your underwear,
And every breath you drew was little green men!

Little green men.

Well, maybe deep in outer space
Is a suitably little green alien race
But ignoring the facts just isn't in you.
It's not a cry we heard at night,
It's not somebody's distant light,
And it's so cold and lonely without little green men.

Little green men. Little green men. Little green men.
Little greeeee-eee-eee-eee--eeeeeen men.

:D

"Reality"

2009-07-28T15:40:00.000-07:00

Raph Koster found something interesting. A few people are touching up their screenshots. I'm sure this is most useful for the in-game advertisements, such as selling underwear or mecha or whatever.

It never really occurred to me that the same techniques used on real actors and models would be used on avatars. It makes sense, but it never occurred to me. I'd like to stretch this to its illogical conclusion.

Actresses and models are employed specifically as faces for metareality. Movies, underwear sales, etc. It's a given, when you think about it, that avatars in games will develop the same way. I imagine that once the uniqueness of the avatars starts to approach the uniqueness of a nation's population, the diversity will result in a similar diversity of jobs. So it's only natural that avatars will be employed specifically as (created specifically for) metagame stuff.

I'm trying to imagine the other rather unusual jobs that will crop up that have nothing to do with actually playing the game. I also like thinking about the differences that these roles will have from the real-people version...

What do you think?

Data Infrastructure

2009-07-26T08:55:00.000-07:00

_{Not game related}

Recently I've been thinking about data infrastructure. Like your house has pipes and wires and vents, individuals are extending themselves using a data infrastructure that allows them to wrangle important data while offloading the boring, fiddly part.

Anyone reading this has a significant data infrastructure. We have vast stockpiles of sessions, cookies, login names, emails, and so forth. While these seem like passive storehouses of data, the truth is that programs are constantly accessing those storehouses and applying that data. While we may not personally use the infrastructure, it's there.

Working with systems that produce vast amounts of data is my day job, and in those situations the data infrastructure is much more significant. 99% of the data that is pumped into the database will never be seen by a human, but it is piped through an infrastructure and transformed into human-useful form through complex transforms.

This sort of data infrastructure is going to get more and more common as individuals start realizing that they want to monitor vast amounts of data without needing to manhandle all of it. For example, how many more years will it be before many people have a health monitor that scans their body's overall health on a day-to-day or even hour-to-hour or minute-to-minute basis? Simply looking down and seeing the present situation is useful, but to really be useful it has to have a history of data on you and the ability to determine what kind of changes mean what kind of things.

Not just health data: I can think of literally dozens of things that could pump data into our "data bloodstream". Power production and use. City contamination or health. Whereabouts of your friends and what instant-community events are around. Data trade on solving evolutionary programming problems. Or maybe that last one's just me.

The point is that we'll be developing more and more autonomous computing systems just to support the kind of monitoring we want to do. Figuratively, we're expanding our senses and memories to new areas.

I think its safe to say that many of the things we do manually today will be done automatically tomorrow. Like choosing backgrounds for your computer screens, or skipping boring tweets, or looking for interesting news.I even think we'll probably see a new kind of programming language which is far smarter about determining what you want to accomplish and the best way to accomplish it.

Not just data will be wrangled, though. I imagine that in a decade or two, when I walk into a coffee shop, my computer will figure out exactly how much caffeine I need and what other additives I'll want in my espresso... and order it for me.

What do you think?

Exploring Culture through Games

2009-07-23T18:08:00.000-07:00

I've always had a fascination with teaching games (or learning games, or educational games, whatever you want to call them). Mostly I'm fascinated by them because they are terrible, and it's very interesting to think about how to design a better one.

Over the years I've come up with a lot of techniques that may or may not help, but one thing that's been more and more clear is that simply teaching science (or math, or whatever) isn't really a viable goal. Not only does it have to be anchored in some way to something that the player cares about, but it should also be taught in a context that makes it clear what the ramifications are.

For example, simply teaching about electrical current is possible. You could even make it a fairly fun puzzle game. But half of the amazingness of electric current is that we wired the planet with it. The whole planet, pretty much. The changes electricity have wrought on society are at least as important and probably more interesting than the way electricity actually works.

So lately I've been thinking about teaching games that teach something while being deeply rooted in some kind of cultural or social context. I like the idea of teaching science and technology, so that's naturally where my thoughts go. There's a lot to be learned by the cultures and contexts as well as just by the explanatory bits.

In fact, culture is largely driven by the available technology, and it's not hard to imagine games which not only educate about a technology, but also about its effect on a culture.

Here's a fun example: cell phones. Imagine a game set in a somewhat idealized Africa. (All games are set in idealized settings, although often ideal for violence.) Your "special power" is not that you are a wizard or a superhero or a car thief, but in that you have a cell phone.

Sound boring? Now, now, imagine for a second.

The primary power of a cell phone is to let you communicate with someone who is far away. This is a superpower to a destitute villager who doesn't have access to a cell phone. Instead of carting their goods to the nearest city and trying to sell them just to whomever is standing around, you can arrange for a buyer to be there, waiting, ready to pay an exact amount of cash.

If there is family far away, you can keep up with them and mitigate risks by supporting those who fall on harder times. If there is a disease or injury, you can call a doctor. If someone is lost, you can organize a search team. And, if you have web access, you can even do ridiculously insane things like get micro-loans from America or learn how to build a windmill generator.

The power difference between you and a random villager without access to a phone is roughly equivalent to the difference between a random fantasy villager and the legendary heroes you play. However, there is one very important difference: in the cell phone game, your power is proportional to the number of people who share it. You can only call people who have access to phones, after all.

The focus of the game becomes on integrating into your society. Both integrating yourself and integrating this new technology.

I think that sounds like an interesting game. And you'd certainly learn how cell phones work.

...

It's also possible to make games which span generations of technology rather than being about introducing a single paradigm-changing technology. For example, we could make a game about audio recordings, taking it from marks-on-paper to records to tapes to CDs to files to file sharing...

If each stage is as much about the culture arising around these developments as it is about the development itself, the game can be made much deeper and more interesting. For example, you could play a musician and his children/reincarnations/whatever. Struggling to succeed in each era, using what technology is available.

Moreover, it's possible to use this same idea to push into the future and show reasonable reflections of what technologies may cause to happen to culture. The nature of integrating players into the culture means you'll have to at least think about a plausible result, which is more than most people bother doing. Even if your cultural predictions are incorrect, it's still better than not predicting anything.

For example, you could make a game about the culture arising from widely available chemical fabricators, or AR gear, or rising sea water, or whatever you want.

Most people who do something similar use it as an excuse to revert culture. World War III destroys civilization and mankind reverts to tribal barbarism... that's hardly the sort of thing I'm talking about. The idea here is to be educational both about how whatever it is works and about the effects whatever it is have.

A smarmy global warming game where you try to deal with the aftereffects of rising sea water accomplishes nothing. You might as well make a game of pong in which your enemy's paddle is the height of the whole screen. The gameplay must also involve (in this example) play involving the same dynamics that cause the rise in sea water. IE, play will have to allow players to adjust the Earth's weather patterns.

Otherwise you're just being preachy and boring.

What do you think?

Uniques Economies

2009-07-22T14:09:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about game economics, specifically in massively multiplayer games. They suffer from a host of problems, but the situation gets infinitely more confusing and muddy if you begin to talk about large numbers of unique items, like we will certainly see in the relatively near future.

The whole point of MMORPG economics is that everything is fungible. That is, there is no difference between this gold piece and that gold piece, and there is no difference between this Codpiece of Flugorth and the other Codpiece of Flugorth. Demand varies, of course. Over time, space, and between items, demand varies wildly. Today the Codpiece of Flugorth is worth 10,000 gold, tomorrow only 150. When combined with the various other bits of Flugorth, the price becomes ten times that of the pieces individually, because they form a set, but even that set can be considered perfectly identical and interchangeable with other sets of the same components.

This interchangeability is the cornerstone of MMORPG economics, both the good and bad elements. However, it can't last. As time marches on, more and more massively multiplayer games are going to feature more and more customized content. Even if they take the cheap route and allow for only small amounts of customization on top of solid fundamental blueprints, that small customization will change the value in chaotic ways. Even just letting you die your gear various colors will make the price vary wildly, often with the expensive variants costing more than double the cheap variants.

With true variation between objects you can end up with something more like SecondLife. One detail worth noting is that SecondLife allows for very easy mass production, however, so it is possible for many people to have the exact same product. To a large extent this focuses and centralizes the production of goods so that many of the people in SecondLife own the same sets of goods, even though there are technically an unlimited number of unique variations they could use instead.

However, SecondLife's economy is not suitable for other massively multiplayer games (and is arguably not suitable for SecondLife), so their method of mass production and weekly dole isn't one that should be adopted willy-nilly. I personally would prefer to think of a system where all the players tended to create uniques, rather than a few players creating uniques and everyone else buying them.

In such a system, the economics would be very different and would need to be carefully planned. For example, what purpose is there behind trading? Are some uniques flat-out better than others (IE a unique wooden sword versus a unique flaming sword of badassium)?

An economy of uniqueness seems to require a few rather unusual attributes in the rest of the game.

First, there seems to be a need for an unlimited number of "slots". If someone can only equip one weapon, one hat, one suit, then there are only so many unique things they'll want. They may end up with ten or fifteen hats, if they're obsessive, but they'll usually only wear one of perhaps two favorites. To encourage people to gather uniques, it is important that a large number of uniques be simultaneously viable for play without sorting through them every time.

One example of this would be a wardrobe that the character would automatically dress from, picking random (perhaps themed or otherwise fashionable complements) pieces. This would allow you to see a variety of uniques over time, meaning that none of your uniques get forgotten in the back of some closet somewhere.

However, this is only one step in the right general direction. You're still limited by the number of clothes your character can wear. equally important is increasing the number of slots. For example, your players may want to collect houses, NPCs, dance moves, poetry - things we can't even think of. It's important to allow this to (A) exist in multitudes during gameplay and (B) vary such that no uniques get lost in the closet.

Once this basis is set up, we can talk about the actual economy of uniques. Without this kind of revolving, wide-spectrum use, an economy of uniques would simply be a stilted and clumsy normal economy.

One aspect of any economy is how difficult it is to manufacture wealth. Most MMORPGs have various means of manufacturing wealth, but the biggest is through killing monsters. This automatically scales with your level, meaning that you generate much more wealth if you are higher level and killing nastier monsters.

A uniques economy could have the same basic philosophy - perhaps the components of the uniques are collected from the corpses of monsters - but it doesn't really fit the needs very well. The reason for the monster farming is to create a treadmill, but when uniques get involved there are a lot of other ways to suck down player time, and level-based treadmills should be easy to play down without losing players.

A uniques economy could also have the opposite philosophy, where you can build anything you want whenever you want, like in SecondLife. A newbie can theoretically build anything that an experienced player can. However, this also has problems, largely in the proliferation of non-unique uniques (I call them "hello world" uniques).

A middle ground can be reached by allowing users to literally grow their content. Real-world time is spent while their character manufactures or tends a given product. The next iteration(s) of the product naturally descend from that, allowing the users to tweak their products to their own desires, rather than programming them from the ground up.

This middle ground has a lot of advantages, but the biggest is that the amount of uniqueness between player content will be much, much higher. Even just a few days in, newbies will have manufactured suitably unique newbie gear. After a few months, two players will have developed such radically different equipment that trade becomes useful. Crossing two "lines" of unique content could also be fun...

This method of growing content does result in a huge number of "spares", so you need to take some pains to eliminate them. This can be done through making things wear out, or through making them break when you descend from them, or from selling them to NPCs, or any number of other means. However, at some point some players will be producing literally hundreds of times more stuff than they can use, and this is a serious threat to the economy because they will flood the market.

Therefore two things must happen. One is that those players should have some recourse for all their spares (perhaps donating them for prestige). The second is that there must be a difficulty in marketing. It must be hard for a player to mass market goods (or even give goods away to many people).

There are a lot of ways of doing these things, but thiey all have ramifications on the overall nature of the economy. For example, if it is difficult to mass market goods, then the economy is hugely fragmented, which will result in a large number of players who specialize in moving goods from one fragment to another. These brokers will probably use out-of-game channels to organize and, in time, they will flat-out replace your implemented market with third-party market(s) that unite the fragments into one, more smoothly-operating economy. You can inhibit them to some extent, but doing much inhibiting will make the players angry.

It is still important to prevent an in-game smorgasborg of uniques, though. Players routinely encountering lists of hundreds or thousands of unique items will cause problems with swamping. There are various means of dealing with this, too, such as a central market that randomly segments, or having players rigidly separated into shards.

These are some of the difficulties a uniques economy will cause, I think. But I also think it's inevitable. How about you?