The Browser Game

In my self-imposed hermitdom, I’ve been playing a lot of Browser Games as a change of pace and essentially as a time-eater.  In particular the titles I’ve paid most attention to are Ikariam, Travian, and more recently Wild Guns.  Ikariam and Travian are conceptually what you would get if you made a casual version of Civilization, built it as a browser game, and made it a lot shittier.  Wild Guns is made by the same company as Ikariam, and it looks like they saw Travian, stole the gameplay and business models, and put a wild west theme on it.

A number of years ago I spent a lot of time playing browser games like Archmage, and while the production quality seems to have increased somewhat, the game play is not significantly better.

Gameplay works like this:  Resources exist, and they are given to you as a function of infrastructure you have built over long swaths of time (like, hours).  The purpose of this is to make you log on every day or several times a day, over weeks and weeks to maintain your kingdom.  You use these resources to build further infrastructure, which in turn either generates more resources, or allows you to build a stronger military.  You are then encouraged to attack other players using this military.

For me, this is where the game starts to fall apart.  As there is essentially an indomitable amount of players in the game, you can’t hope to destroy them all.  The only reward for attacking others is further resources, but the amount of resources you raid are almost certainly less than the resources it took to create the military you lost during the raid.  There is no endgame, only an endless series of skirmishes, which are in themselves, unsatisfying.

Archmage happens to be an exception, in that if you manage to survive long enough, and become powerful enough, you can cast a spell which destroys the world, thus ending the game until the server is reset.  You gain a certain amount of recognition for doing this.  Nevertheless, any task that requires occasional maintenance has potential for addiction (see Tamagotchi), and I remain a willing slave, to a certain extent, until I finish the tech tree and will the inevitably get bored.

What irritates me more than the lack of solid javascript-based strategy games (Facebook is full of inane stunts in this manner) is the business model these games operate under.  The business model itself serves no purpose other than to undermine the very foundations of the game they’ve delivered, however sloppily.

Ikariam, Travian, and Wild Guns all use the same principles:  The game is free to play, nothing is restricted, and no ads are served.  However, there are premium services you can buy for a micro-payment.  The first form of these is an increase in the rate at which you generate resources.  Essentially you can pay the company to gain a direct competitive edge.  The reason this is horrendous is because it complete destroys game balance by giving players that are willing to pay a substantial advantage over those who are not willing to pay.  You then have the choice to shell out a few dollars for more resources per hour (but only for a week, after which point you need to pay again!), or you can get slaughtered by those who will.  From a design standpoint, this is exceptionally poor.

Even worse than this however, is the “Premium Account” bonus.  If you give these companies an amount of money which is roughly equivelant to bumping up the production of every resource in the game, they give you access to a better user interface.  They have developed a user interface which is better than the default one:  it provides you with a build queue so that you don’t need to log in every time something finishes building to start the next build, gives you more detailed information about combat, a better layout with details about when your stockpiles will be full, what time you’ll be able to build something at current rates of production, etc.  The company has built these things, but they withhold them from you unless you pay them.  Even if you pay them, you only get them for a week, and then you have to pay them again.  Jon Crowley was appalled, so you know it’s a bad move.

Three Rings has a much better handle on it (although I suppose their games aren’t strictly in-browser).  In Puzzle Pirates, for example, payment confers the ability to captain a ship, as well as earn vanity items (e.g. clothing, furniture, etc.).  This allows the hardcore to be hardcore without upsetting the balance for the non-paying crowd.  In any case, any casual browser game needs to support itself on a small percentage of their entire user base actually paying money to play.  GameForge AG nearly went bankrupt last year, Puzzle Pirates has 3 million pirate accounts.  You tell me which business model is working better.

Anatomy of Addiction

I’ve recently introduced my girlfriend to a little game called Civilization 4. Having sunk countless hours into both it and its predeccesors over the years, I’d put the game down in favor of more recent fare. While the game is not really new, I’ve been thinking more about design than I was when I first picked it up, so I thought I’d walk through some of the thoughts I’ve had in the last couple of weeks.

Civ4 has what you might consider to be a rather steep learning curve. There are a lot of concepts to grasp: How combat works, the rules governing production, finances, research, health, and culture, trading, exploration, terrain effects, religion, corporations, great people, resources; The list continues on and on. This list of concepts adds a significant level of complexity to the game.

Sid Meier once defined fun as ‘a series of interesting choices’, and that’s reflected greatly in his most famous series of games.  While the strategic complexity of Civilization 4 is high, the game is broken down piecemeal into a series of reasonably intuitive choices.  When your turn begins, the game will cycle through all the cities that need attention because whatever they were building has completed, and it will ask you what the city should build next (while recommending some of the best choices for that particular city’s current conditions).  Once that’s done with, the game cycles through all the units you control that are awaiting orders, the scope of which are reasonably straightforward, move to a different location, or perform an action, or even simply ‘automate my activity’.  If you’ve finished researching a new technology, the game will ask you what technology you want to work on next, or show you the tree that demonstrates what the impacts of each choice will be.

This series of simple, but interesting decisions form an emergent gameplay which is highly sophisticated.  When you add in the dynamics of interacting with other players, the result is a highly entertaining game.  This is why the Civilization series is a GOOD game, but not why it is addictive.  Those roots lie in a fundamental result of these simple choices.

Anyone who’s played a Civ game is certainly aware of the “One More Turn” phenomena.   These games are impossible to put down.  There’s no clock in the game, because time is piecemeal, so by the time you manage to exert some form of self-control, you look up from your computer, bleary-eyed, and find that it’s now 3:45am and you’ve just been game-locked for the past 6 hours.  I loved Bioshock and Portal, but they don’t give me the itch the way Civilization does, because those games don’t have a pound of pure psychological crack built into their framework.

The key to the addiction in Civ is I believe delayed gratification.  As I’ve discussed before, addiction comes from giving the player food-pellets (which are rewards of some kind) at frequent, but not regular, intervals.  There is something about the irregularity of the pellet reception that triggers certain psychological mechanisms that rhythmic reward does not.  In Civ there are several types of rewards going on, and there are a myriad of factors that go into the determination of the time between requesting the reward (beginning the production process) and the reception of said reward.

Because you have several cities, each producing something to bequeathed at a later time all at once, your subconscious brain is not able to grasp a pattern behind the frequency of reward, even though you can clearly see how many turns it will be until you get a pellet.  This is compounded by the fact that you have a lot of things to do each turn, so there is a significant amount of time that occurs (usually minutes) between movements of the clock forward.  The amount of real-time that occurs between turns is not consistent however, which again adds to the irregularity of the pattern.

Every time something completes, you can literally feel a small jolt of excitement, at which point, like a drug addict who’s becoming resistant to his favorite hit, you immediately request your next jolt, but you’ve got to wait for it.  Not too long mind you, just a few turns, but with so many of these activities going on at once, you’re going to get another hit in just one more turn, until it’s 3:45am and your cat is yelling at you to get out of his chair so he can go to bed.

Colorblindness and Videogames

Destructoid has a good article up about the problems those of us who are colorblind or color-impaired (like me!) have with videogames. To discuss this a little further, approximately 10% of the male population suffers from some degree of color impairment. The article’s author seems to be significantly more colorblind than I am, as he can’t tell the difference between the red and green on Big Daddies in Bioshock. Neither of us, however, can see the boat in this picture (I’m told there’s a boat here).

I’ve never found my colorblindness to be so significant that it ever impaired my ability to play videogames, but I’m certainly on the less severe end of the scale.

There have been noises in the industry about taking accessibility into consideration when designing a game, which I think is terrific, although of course there are always trade-offs in doing so. In the realm of color-blindness however, the solution to this problem is nearly always to never use color as the sole indicator of anything in the game. This is not only often reasonably easy to do, it’s also sound design practice to aid those who are not color-impaired as well. It’s nice to see that Peggle has gone to the trouble to design an entire mode around the colorblind, but it would have been reasonably simple to simply add symbols into the design of the blocks in the first place.

Exclusive: Will Wright on Emergent Game Design (Part 2)

This is a multi-part post.  Jump to:

Part 1

In a previous post, I discussed a lecture recently given at Microsoft by famed Game Designer, Will Wright. The topic of this lecture was Emergence and Game Design. The first part of this post discussed what emergence is, how it relates to Game Design, and the problems it solves. It also discussed some of the problems it creates, specifically that it’s impossible to predict a priori whether a game will be interesting based on the basic mechanics which form it. It would be useful, nonetheless, to be able to discern particular areas of mechanics which tend to work well together to compose a whole game. That toolkit is the subject of this post.

Will’s toolkit draw many parallels to the concept of game grammar, advocated by such industry tycoons as Raph Koster. There are three independent groups which any given game rule-set will derive from. These sets, called Topologies, Dynamics, and Paradigms roughly correspond to the linguistic concepts of nouns, verbs, and grammar rules. Each of these groups is further broken down into specific techniques. Any game system will draw on a mix of techniques from all three systems, but there is no express order in which the groups must be explored.

Topologies

The first of these, Topologies, is the noun analog. Topologies represent the framework upon which the rules act, and create structure for the game environment. Interestingly, Will considers game communities to be part of topologies. A good example is the advancement progression in most games. Some games have a very linear progression, as you advance through levels and are led from one place to the next (e.g. Gears of War). Others are gated - the possibility space branches outward after each gate, only to collapse to a single node at the next (e.g. Mass Effect).

There are three outlined techniques within Topologies, from most rigid to most flexible: Agents, Networks, and Layers. Agents represent particular objects and beings which perform actions, or have actions performed upon them. In Sim City, individual buildings would be considered agents. Nearly all games make use of agents in some form.

The second, networks, represents the framework that defines interactions between agents. These linkages may be spacial (Buildings can be connected by roads), temporal (an action by one agent causes an event in another), functional (companion cubes can be placed on buttons), or relational (forests and gold mines are resource providers).

The last topology, Layers, is a technique whereby several layers of agent-network graphs can be laid upon each other to create a different facet of the same game. Battle for Middle Earth’s War of the Ring mode is a good example of this, as one game is placed on top of another game, and the outcomes of each affect the other. Different views on information (such as seeing the amount of crime in your city), or statically linked layers of graphs (In Sim City, electrical system, water system and road system) would fall under this as well.

Topologies are the most straightforward of the three concepts, and a similar concept is covered in nearly all books on game design. The next concept, dynamics, brings these simple structures to life. Dynamics will be covered in part 3.

Exclusive: Will Wright on Emergent Game Design (Part 1)

This is a multi-part post.  Jump to:

Part 2

One of the lovely things about working for Microsoft is that really cool people show up from time to time. Last week Microsoft Research brought Will Wright in to talk about Emergence, Dynamics, and Design. Unfortunately the talk is Microsoft internal, so I can’t post the slides or any video clips. I did however obtain Will’s permission to write whatever I like about his talk and to use “head shots” from the video, so without further ado…

There was an article put on Gamasutra a few weeks ago on Design Cognition, and on the concept of bottom-up vs. top-down design cognition. While Gilliard and Rafael are trying to touch on things on the meta-design level - how we think about game design - it’s interesting to note that few are the number of games actually produced in a bottom up manner. While the example of Doom is cognitively bottom up in the sense that the entire game exists as an exhibition for the features, I highly doubt it was actually designed in a bottom-up manner.

In fact, I doubt there are very many games designed in a bottom-up manner, Will Wright really being the only designer that comes to mind who does this on a regular basis. Will’s design philosophy stems greatly from emergence - a concept he claimed to learn primarily from playing Go, playing with cellular automata, and ants. This really struck a chord with me, being something of an Evolutionary Biology fan myself.

The concept behind emergence is that by creating some very simple rules and letting them interact with each other, you can get very complex pheonmena to emerge from this.

Ants are an excellent example of this, and much of the first half of Will’s talk focused on some of the particulars of the way ants behave, and how each individual ant obeys very stupid, simple rules, but these rules cause the colony as a whole to act in an intelligent manner. An example of this Will used was that ant larva need to be fed different things at different stages of their growth. To do this efficiently, they need to be sorted. Sorting is a rather advanced concept, but an emergent sorting algorithm occurs in ant colonies by the following mechanism. At the different stages, larva produce a different smell. When an ant comes upon a larvae, if the smell it emits is different than the surrounding area, the ant will pick the larva up. The ant will then wander around essentially randomly until it comes upon an area that smells the same as that larvae, where it will drop it. This simple rule applied across each individual ant in the colony will result in the larva being sorted into like piles.

This is just one example of an emergent phenomenon of several he gave (and if you’re interested in more, you should certainly read up on the fascinating little creatures). The question then is how does this come into play in game design. If you view a game as a possibility space, the act of playing the game is centered on the exploration of this space. Once the space has been explored to the extent the player is willing to spend their time on, they will burn-out on the game and cease to play. It has been incumbent upon designers over time to enlarge the possibility space as much as possible while retaining a high quality experience. This drive for high quality content has ballooned development budgets and staff requirements by orders of magnitude over the last several years causing relatively little increase in the size of that possibility space, and in many cases a shrinkage. Will views what I’ll refer to as Emergent Design as a method for creating extremely large possibility spaces without a comparable development cost.

The major problem with emergence is that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to design for with any accuracy. The designer brings to bear several game mechanics and allows them to interact in various ways. For example, in conway’s game of life, there are only four rules:

1. Any cell with less than 2 neighbours alive dies
2. Any cell with more than 3 neighbours alive dies
3. Any living cell with 2 or 3 neighbours stays alive
4. Any dead cell with exactly 3 neighbours comes to life

From just looking at these rulesets, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether this game will be fun, what the emergent strategies or phenomena will be, or anything else about it. It behooves us to find a mechanism to determine this. In nature, successful genes are those that are able to maintain their existence in a competitive environment. There are no rules that apply to genetics to determine fitness, no fitness function. The only way to determine fitness in life is by allowing it to occur.

The hard part then becomes what the best way is to go about doing this. Upon asking him about this, Will said there were two key components: Smart Interns, and creating many prototypes. The interns create and playtest many, many prototypes in the possibility space of the games they could make. When making Spore, approximately 200 prototypes were made, 60% of which were complete garbage.

Even if it’s not possible to determine the end result in an emergent system, throwing darts at the wall randomly is not an incredibly efficient system. In his many years of experience, Will has noticed certain patterns that he’s adapted into a toolkit to refine the ’search space’ of possible games he wants to make, thus making the likelihood of any given prototype revealing fun gameplay more likely. I’ll share some of these insights in part two.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted

I finished playing Assassin’s Creed last night at about 4 am, and I feel decidedly lukewarm about the whole thing.

Marketing

I’ve been waiting for this game for what seems like forever. From the first moment I saw the game, I thought to myself that this was going to be a game that was truely groundbreaking. Taking the lessons Ubisoft learned with Splinter Cell and spinning them off into some wild combination of Hitman and Prince of Persia. You know the feeling you get when you see a commercial for a comedy, and it’s really funny, but when you go to watch the movie, you find out that every single funny moment in the movie was in the commercial, thus making the movie not only rarely good to begin with, but now even those moments are ruined for you?

Ubisoft could have done that, but they didn’t. Superb marketing, Grape job. Big A+ Sticker

Parkour

The whole Parkour thing is awesome. The sandbox thing was very appropriate for this game and the sheer ability to climb up nearly everything was done in an exemplary fashion. Unlike say, Spiderman, who can climb up pretty much any surface, Altair needs handholds - but can make handholds out of pretty much anything. What this means is that when he’s climbing, he’s climbing the way a real human climbs. The walls aren’t just a big sheet of chain-link fence that game be translated across. I can’t imagine how much time they must of spent on this, but it’s really, really awesome, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to deal with stealth games that don’t allow you to do this ever again. The freerunning is also awesome, and it’s a lot of fun to try to lose guards chasing you by doing your thing. The weird part about this is that it doesn’t seem to just be your thing… guards in full armor are almost as manuverable as you are. This kind of takes the wind out of my sails as a bad-ass assassin, but cool nonetheless. The major complaint I would have with the freerunning is the controls. When you’re trying to jump towards a pole, if the direction you’re aiming with an analog stick is more than about 5 degrees off, Altair decides that what you really wanted to do was jump four stories down to the ground. The section of the game in the docks is especially annoying due to this problem, as instead of nearly killing yourself from a four storey drop, you land in the water 2 feet below you and drown. What kind of asshole can scale massive buildings, is a Parkour master, and can’t fucking swim?

Social Stealth

I was really excited about this idea. The idea that you’re hidden when you’re doing things that are socially acceptable is really neat, I just would have liked to see it explored more. There are exactly four ways to hide from the guards - You can hide in these weird little huts that are on the roof and stand out like an eyesore (how do the guards not poke their head in?). You can hide in a pile of hay. You can sit down on a bench and blend in with other people, or you can fall in with some wander scholars. Now, I would note that only two of the above are actually social stealth conditions. The other two are real, I’m hiding somewhere you can’t see me conditions. Scholars appear so rarely and benches hard to pick out that I almost always ended up in a pile of hay or the hut anyway. To make any significant distance (because the cities are massive, you have to freerun like a mofo. While people comment about this, it doesn’t seem to actually bother anyone - other than the guards I inevitably end up throwing off the roof. You’re either sword out in the streets, or just walking along doing nothing in particular. I suppose when Ubisoft said they were doing this big social stealth thing I expected it to be a little more elaborate.

Fighting and AI

Some of the reviews for this game make complaints about the AI. If that’s your opinion… wow, you’re retarded. In my view, the AI is very REALISTIC, which is kind of the whole point of AI in the first place. Yeah, the guards on the roofs don’t immediately kill you for being on the roof. You know those ladders that are everywhere, that would indicate to me that theoretically citizens can get up here too. Ever been in a building at night when you’re not supposed to be there? Does the security guard draw and open fire the second he sees you?

Let’s look at some examples of good AI. Contrary to what you might think, climbing up the side of a building onto a rooftop rarely buys you an escape right away from the guards. Because they follow you up the side of the building. If it’s too hard for them, they’ve usually found another route anyway, so you’re still not out of the woods. If you get somewhere they really can’t get to, they start throwing rocks at you to knock you down.

The fighting system is awesome. Unlike many games which are a huge festival of hack and slash, Altair fights the way a skilled swordsman should fight when outnumbered. Likewise the enemies don’t swing at you all at once, but look for opportunities to break your guard. The sheer number of animations (all of which are beautiful) are astounding.

Now the problem with this is that it’s way, way too easy. Altair can take a ridiculous number of hits, while each soldier, even the ones who are generally on a similar level to Altair are getting their throats slashed and stomachs impaled. In an earlier preview of the game it was indicated that Altair was not supposed to be a tank who could take lots of damage. These fights are in fact easy enough that it’s generally simpler to kill all the guards after you instead of run and hide from them.

This is a bad design decision. The two main pillars for this game are social stealth and freerunning. The latter is usually a means to break the line of sight with your persuers so you can do the former. Allowing Altair to get into massive brawls in which he sweeps the floor is completely at odds with this model.

Story

I’m not even going to discuss it, other than to say it’s terrific, one of the most intricate and crafted plots seen in a video game yet. My only real gripe is that Altair starts the game as an arrogant jerk, and as he progresses becomes more and more wise and lucid… by killing people?  Nevertheless, they’ve got some cool order-vs-chaos-nothing-is-black-or-white stuff going on, so points for that.

Overall Gameplay

Okay, I’ve sung my praises. I had to make myself finish this game, and I largely did so because Penny-Arcade told me I had to. This game had so much potential, and the things they did right were really innovative and well polished. Unfortunately, the rest of the game is just paste around these mechanics. Here is an outline of how the entire game will go:

1. Get mission from boss, go to appropriate city
2. Find Assassin’s Bureau, go talk to dude in there.
3. Spend the next 45 minutes climbing up to the top of the 12 or so towers in area, some of which seem to be replicas of each other
4. Spend the next 45 minutes doing exciting investigation activities such as “Sitting on a bench and targeting that guy”, “Walking behind someone and pushing a button”, or the classic favorite “Finding 20 flags in 3 minutes”. What is up with that, why do these assassin’s keep losing their flags all over hell’s half acre and requiring that they be cleaned up in less than 3 minutes?
5. Find every single citizen being mugged and save them. They will utter one of 3 or 4 lines of dialog. There are somewhere between 6 and 15 of these guys in every mission.
6. Go back to the Assassin’s Bureau, get authorization to kill
7. Wander over to your target, listen to him talk for a while, use ’social stealth’ (read: scholars) to get near him and shove a knife in his back
8. Run away, or just kill every guard you see

The information you obtain in the investigations is rarely useful, and extremely tedious. You’ll be bored of doing it before the end of the first mission. Tidbits like “Hey, there’s some scholars nearby that you can probably use to get close” are really inane. What’s really disappointing though is that there’s very little differentiation between the scenarios for killing the target. One has to make the comparison to Hitman at this point. In Hitman, every single kill is a unique experience, the whole level exists to provide many different ways to execute the hit, some of which are better than others. In Assassin’s Creed, you basically just have to run up and kill the guy (since you’re going to alert the guards anyway), and the ’stealthy’ solution is almost always hiding with some scholars to get close and then kill him, and otherwise involves jumping down off a wall behind the guy.

Overall I’m disappointed with the title. Ubisoft clearly made some very costly investments into getting the engine for the fighting and parkour down well. This game was not really a safe bet, they’re doing some new and unique things here. I feel bad that they did take a unique take at the stealth action genre but completely fouled up the execution on the gameplay part of things. And really the crux of it is that it’s a game, and the gameplay should be more important than anything else. Everything but the gameplay experience is absolutely top knotch in Assassin’s Creed, and perhaps for the second one they can take the engine they’ve built and build an assassination experience that is not a tedious chore. Major points for unique ways of killing or approaching each individual target.

More Gaming Crack

In the previous post I discussed the fact that addiction and enjoyment are not the same thing, and I cited several games who have the addiction (if not also the enjoyment) down square.  What I did not talk about is how exactly you go about making that happen.

Casinos have boiled one technique down to a fine art: high payout at rare intervals.  Now it’s not simply enough to randomly dole out a large reward on an arbitrary basis.  Players need to understand why they’re getting this reward, even if there’s a lot of randomness to it, it must be as a direct result of an action they took.  The reward happens to also provide a fun element, but much as Crack is is much more addictive than its more expensive counterpart Cocaine.  Because the high is so intense, and so short-lived, it triggers an extreme desire to repeat activities that led to the high in the first place.

Examples:

• Any form of Gambling, Poker, Blackjack, Slots causes you to win big only occasionally, which keeps you playing another hand or pulling the lever one more time, just in case you get lucky again.
• Match 3 games implement this by having a normal scenario be the matching of three items causing a chain of new blocks to drop.  Occasionally the blocks that drop will cause a further match, and a cascade effect may occur giving the player massive point multipliers.  This is random to a certain extent because the player is unaware of what blocks will drop next.
• Diablo/World of Warcraft acts through rare item drops.  Players will do a raid dungeon over and over again on the pure hope that an extremely powerful and rare item will drop that they may be able to obtain.  Even if a usable item does drop, there is not a guarantee that the individual player will be the one to roll for it.
• Crack Cocaine works by releasing massive amounts of Dopamine into the brain.  This high only lasts a short time, and repeated hits will not achieve the same level of euphoria as the first round did.
• In experiments with mice, a mouse will spend proporionally more time pushing a button which dispenses food at random intervals than with a button that dispenses food at regular intervals (say every ten pushes of the button).  This effect is so pronounced that a mouse will spend the majority of their life tapping away at the button given the opportunity.  If the reward is of higher value than food (a non-narcotic drug), the effect magnifies).

Tarot

When most people think of SPORE, they think of the character builder.  This is something which instantly jumps to mind, putting the power of Maya in the hands of the multitudes.  When I think of SPORE (and I suspect anyone who works in the industry), I think of procedural interaction.  There is some concern that many of the best and brightest new talent are being pulled into the vortex of Will Wright’s project, and that they will remain forever guarded within the boundaries of EA, shackled to a project which will be ultimately anti-climatic from a sales perspective.  I must admit, considering the continual delays SPORE has being enduring, much of the excitement it once evoked has somewhat worn away.

What I would like to see is the tools that make the procedural interaction of player-generated content possible be made available to the public, although I know coming from EA this is probably a pipe-dream.  Perhaps if sales are not what they would like them to be, EA would at least consider licensing the technology out.  To me, SPORE is a tech-demo (an impressive one) of that technology, and I think they’ve done a disservice to themselves by announcing it so far before it was released (and giving away much of the structure of the gameplay as well).  I feel like I’ve seen the game played in demos so many times now that it’s not fresh and exciting.  What I do think is exciting is the possibilities for the technology if it ever gets out into the world.

I’ve been playing the wonderful GROW series of games by Japanese Game Designer ON.  In these Flash-based games, the player chooses from a list of items (shapes, objects, elements) and places them into a world.  The longer each item exists on the world (in terms of turns), the more that item will grow.  The trick is that elements also interact with each other, sometimes in a positive, and sometimes in a negative way.  The purpose of the game is to place the items in such an order that they all grow to their maximum potential.  What is interesting about it is that significantly different things may occur to a given item depending on the presence and state of other objects at any given time.  While GROW is, I’m relatively sure, scripted with case statements, I wonder about the possibilities for the procedural technology behind SPORE if mixed up with Mr. ON.

Which brings me to an idea I tentatively refer to as Tarot.  Tarot Cards have long enchanted me (from a symbolic, not divinitory standpoint).  I suspect the presence of such items as Tarot cards, tea leaf reading, the I Ching, etc. in nearly every culture since the dawn of time speaks to a certain presence of the desire for symbolic interpretation in humanity.  This suggests to me that the symbols present in these mediums represent what Daniel Dennett would refer to as a “Good Trick”, although I’m not sure I understand exactly what the trick is.  What I do understand, however, is that Good Tricks can be exploited if you know how to hook into them.  Games are a fundamental part of the human condition for this precise reason, as they exploit evolutionary responses which have become prevelant everywhere in our species.

Tarot Cards are a method by which some game designers create free-association in order to generate story.  What Tarot would do is combine near ubiquitous symbols such as those found in Tarot or Jungian Psychology, and allow the player to apply them in a more direct way.  At the beginning of the game, the player would choose cards from a Tarot-like deck, either at random or by choice, and a game experience would then be proceedurally generated from those choices.  Content would have to be built in such a way that it was aware of possible interactions with other content, depending on the role it was to play.  Gameplay would still be built in a structured way,  so that the game would always be, say, an RPG, but the particulars would change with every game.  The challenge would be in building it in such a way that the particulars were always compelling, or even better, that one game would build on another.  It would be imporant that the game was not always the same, with the roles substituted, but the presence of one card versus another would radically shift an element of the game world.  The most correct selection of type of world would seem to be an open format, such as Oblivion, only more tightly constrained.  Elements of the game world would persist from story to story, but be gilded or tainted by the choice of cards in the initial sequence.

An additional difficulty would by in marketing this work.  Even if one could create proceedurally generated and compelling gameplay, it would be difficult to know what marketing approach would be best, other than perhaps the standard Peter Molyneux technique of “This is the best RPG ever made”.  Diverging too strongly from an established medium is generally not a good sales technique, but then if a medium is truely to be an artform, sometimes you need to put that on the back burner.

Identifying with a Blank Face

I finished the fight last night (after losing 2 hours of progress by not saving).  My friend Reed made a comment about the way I was speaking whilst playing Halo 3.  You see, all of the commentary I was making about the game was in the first person.  I was saving humanity, not Master Chief.  In a sense, I was master chief.  This is a technique video games can employ to create a strong narrative in ways that film and literature never can. 

When you watch a movie or read a book (other than a choose-your-own adventure, which I’m not counting), you’re being told a story about someone else.  This doesn’t mean it can’t be a great story, but it’s still a story about someone else.  Even so, if you look at many of your favorite books and films, you will find that you probably identify rather strongly with at least some of the major characters.  You may not realize you do, but on some level, those characters you like you probably unconciously see as a kind of alter-ego of yourself, based on character traits of that persona.  The more strongly you identify with a character, the stronger your emotional connection will be to the work. 

Unlike in film and literature, protagonists in games can be very vaguely defined.  Creating a vague definition of a protagonist is a tricky thing.  If done well, the player will project their own thoughts and feelings into the void of your protagonists character.  If done poorly, the player will fail to identify with your hero at all, and as a result feel no emotional attachment to the situation the character is in, and therefore the narrative of your game. 

There are two major ways in which video games can create vague character definitions.  The first is to not show the player what the character looks like.  Master Chief has a helmet on, at no point do you ever see his face.  Jack from Bioshock is not obscured in any way, but because the game is always shot from the perspective of jack, and all the mirrors in Rapture are conveniently broken, you never see what he looks like.  This goes a long way to helping the player identify with the protagonist (because if you could see his face, he would look like you!).

The second method is to limit or completely curtail the protagonist’s dialog.  There is a long history of silent protagonists in video games with rich plots for this reason.  Examples include Link from The Legend of Zelda, Gordon Freeman in Half-Life, Jack in Bioshock, Chrono in Chronotrigger, Ness from Earthbound, and Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII.  The technique is not as simple as abstaining from dialogue, as identification requires traits to create an emotional connection.  The trick to this technique is to use the other supporting characters to suggest a variety of traits the hero may possess (without spamming the entire continuum of character traits).  If done well, the player will latch on to those which suit his fancy and ignore the rest.

Creating a vague character is not the only way to get players to identify with your protagonist, but it is a way that works for a broad spectrum of people.  Idenification with the protagonist does not ensure the game will be loved either, but it does help to bring about a strong emotional reaction.  If the character you identify with suddenly starts acting in a way inconsistent with your views, or if the work as a whole doesn’t meet your standards, you will probably hate it - but at least you have strong opinions one way or another.  On the other hand, it’s difficult to love the narritive in a game if you don’t identify with the main character.

Top 10 Game Optimization Myths

Gamasutra has a good article on the top ten game development myths.  Very programmer-centric, but a good read nonetheless.

 Update:  I found this while cruising around, an older article by Daniel Cook on Game Design Myths.

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