Silent Ellipsis' Dreamscape

The Thoughtful Stone

2011-03-14T01:44:00.000-07:00

This is a prose-i-fied summary of a Dungeons and Dragons one-shot I recently ran. The players are now insisting that I turn it into a full-fledged campaign. Either way, I clearly got carried away with the summary, so I figured I should go ahead and post it somewhere. This being my blog and all, it was a natural choice. Note that Arcturus was an NPC, while Artemisia, Nikita, Feomus, and Daria were all PCs.

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Arcturus didn't know what he should expect to happen, or to have happened, as the case may be. Even to someone like him, who'd dedicated years to studying the metaphysical relationship between the planes and the flow of time, parsing the tense of events in a situation like this was a headache. It didn't really matter though, because he had plenty of rules of thumb to go by, among them "Don't do anything you can get others to do for you," "Never pet a burning dog," and "When you don't know what to expect, expect nothing."

He knew that just moments earlier there had been a great ruckus, as the continuum engineers ran about checking calculations and the Archmage stood watch over the ritual being peformed, but all of the commotion seemed far away to him now. He had plane shifted before, and he almost always compared the experience to falling through the floor, but this was different; he felt a strange sort of resistance, as if he were falling through the ceiling in spite of gravity pulling him downward. Then all at once, the feeling stopped, the sky looked blue, and gravity was winning again. He managed a startled yelp before the deep thump of his head hitting the ground.

The three traveling women weren't sure what to do about the be-robed man who had fallen out of the sky. Artemisia, in her collected fashion, was simply continuing to stare at him as though she hadn't decided what he was yet. Next to her, the lithe elf Daria was excitedly discussing aspects of his appearance, and speculating on topics of conversation once he awoke. Meanwhile, Nikita, who was already small and hard to see, had instinctively gone invisible at the sound of something unexpected, and was just started to lower her guard as it became clear that the fellow was both unconscious and unaccompanied. She was the first to suggest a course of action.

“Should we tie him up?”

The trio quickly agreed that this was a wise course of action, no matter what it was they intended to do with him later. Shortly after the tying was complete, the man awoke and, being startled himself by his immediate predicament, teleported himself 100' away and outside of the influence of the rope. Once he was sure that he wasn't about to be abducted, he approached the women again and introduced himself as Arcturus, the wizard, before asking the question on his mind that burned the most feverishly:

“What year is it?”

“Year?” replied Daria, “Why it's year 58 in the reign of King Obamus, of course.”

“Then there's still...time.” It occurred to Arcturus that he'd been waiting his entire life to deliver that line. It's not every day that one's dream of becoming a time-traveler becomes reality, though it is at least two, nonconsecutive days if you're traveling any significant temporal distance.

“Time enough for what?” asked Artemisia, clearly suspicious of Arcturus.

“Time enough to save the future.” Arcturus had been practicing this speech. “I have come from a time several hundred years hence. It is a time of wondrous magics, but also of ghastly horrors. There is a being, whom we refer to as the Golem King, made entirely of stone but imbued with intelligence and magical ability. The Golem King is himself capable of creating animated constructs, and has built an army of resilient, mindless warriors with which he is wreaking havoc among the civilized races. The Golem King was born in this time, in this very week, and I have come to stop the ritual birthing the monstrosity from taking place. Will you help me to save us all from a terror we never knew was coming for us?”

The three adventurers stood dumbfounded for a moment, until Nikita, from a direction that wasn't immediately clear, spoke up, “This is bullshit, he's probably lying.”

Arcturus seemed prepared for incredulity, “You can see the forge where the creature is being constructed yourselves. It is the forge of Lludwig, the gnome artisan, in the city of Cuthbert some 50 miles north of here. I can bring us there if you're willing to help me get inside.”

“Why can't you just take care of it yourself?” asked Artemisia.

“Because there is a special ward on the forge,” Arcturus answered. “Lludwig's work is so well known that he has even been commissioned by being from other planes from time-to-time, but having drawn the attention of outsiders has made him particularly wary of their interference, so he has a magic barrier set up to prevent entrance from outsiders. It is a fortunate side effect for him that this barrier also prevents time-travelers from entering.”

Artemisia still wasn't convinced. “But then why come to THIS time, when you could have come to a time when he wasn't so well protected?”

“The workings of time are very...unintuitive. Explaining it in a way you would understand would take far longer than we have. Just...believe me, this is how it has to happen – it can't be any other way.” There was clearly something Arcturus wasn't explaining about the situation, but it wasn't going to be pried out of him easily.

“So what's in it for us?” piped up Daria. “I mean the future's great and all, I'm sure, but that sounds far away and we have stuff to do – I was hoping to do some shopping later.”

Arcturus hesitated slightly. He hadn't anticipated that saving the future would be insufficient motivation for them. “You won't go unrewarded...the forge is full of valuable artifacts and rare minerals that I'm sure can help finance whatever other projects you're engaged in.”

“I don't know.” Daria was beginning to look disinterested. “It sounds like a lot of work.”

Arcturus wasn't ready to let the situation slip out of his control this easily. “You need to do this, you simply must.” His eyes had focused on her, and then widened at that final word.

Daria felt a chill run down her spine, and then her mind felt tight, as though there was another person trying to fit in her head. This second person brought a powerful motivation with them – a quest to travel north and prevent the birth of the Golem King. Being a bard, she knew enough about arcane magic to recognize what was happening – it was a geas enchantment. “You bastard...very well, we'll help, but as soon as we've taken care of this golem-wha-cha-ma-callit, we're done. You go back to the future and we get on with our lives.”

“As long as there's enough money in it, let's go.” Nikita had apparently become visible again, but was now standing behind Arcturus.

“But we could still use slightly more firepower,” said the wizard as he pulled out a bronze whistle. When he blew into it, however, it made no sound.

Far to the west, in the city of Calais, Feomus heard one of his least favorite sounds. It was a high-pitched whistle, of a kind that humans couldn't hear, but which he could. He snarled slightly, and considered resisting the compulsion to answer, which he knew he could. There were, however, no great opportunities for valor here, and it was valor he needed in order to join the elite ranks of Hound Archon Heroes. He focused on the image of the wizard that appeared with the sound, and after blinking his eyes, the wizard was before him.

Artemisia wasn't used to people teleporting into her presence, much less twice in the same day, much less when neither of them was native to their plane (and time). Yet before her, in a flash, appeared a humanoid with the head of a dog and plate armor, which visible contained a muscular figure.

Arcturus went on to explain to the hound archon, Feomus, that great glory could be won on their noble quest by saving the future. The wizard must have understood the way archons think, because he emphasized choice words, such as “chaos”, that caused the hound's eyes to fill with sudden passion. He whole-heartedly agreed to aid them, and the party proceeded to teleport near to the city of Cuthbert.

Once there, the party ran across elven outriders, apparently patrolling the highway, and managed to convince them that they had legitimate business in the area, even after Daria began a story about being on a “shopping trip.” It seemed that the party would have to do even more talking at the gates of the city, so most of its members decided to obviate the need for conversation by turning invisible, or, in Artemisia's case, by transforming into a common bird and flying over the city walls unharrassed. Feomus simply strolled up to the gate, however, and declared himself, apparently with enough conviction for the guards to let him pass.

Inside the city, the party split up to search for information about the forge. The city was populated primarily by dwarves and gnomes, most of whom worshipped St. Cuthbert, the patron deity of the city. They learned that Lludwig has an apprentice, Korloff, who is a deurgar. This fact by itself gains him notoriety among many of the townsfolk, who are distrustful of so-called dark dwarves. A cleric of St. Cuthbert even claimed to have once spotted an item with the markings of the evil god of forbidden knowledge, Vecna, on Korloff's person, and yet the dark dwarf had broken no laws in his time in the city, and had done nothing to explicitly prove the suspicions of the city he dwelt in. This did not prevent the populous from spreading various rumors about his plotting to murder and replace Lludwig, or to sabotage his forge.

Artemisia spent this time in rat form, acquainting herself with local rats and learning of the passages they take to enter the forge. After completing their information gathering, the party slept and prepared in the morning to enter the forge. Artemisia was to enter in her rat form and find a way to the room where the ward was maintained, while the rest of the party parlayed their way through the front gate. Unfortunately, Feomus would also be repelled by the ward against outsiders (being from the outer plane of lawful good, himself), but Arcturus insisted the archon would stand a better chance at being able to will himself across the barrier than he himself would. The wizard advised them on spells that would aid in fighting golems, and provided Nikita with a wand of golem strike, which she could use to deliver critical blows to constructs such as golems. He also gave the party several potions, including a potion that would dimensionally anchor Feomus, assisting him in entering the forge but preventing him from using his teleportation ability.

So prepared, the party set out. As they expected, there were guards present at the entrance to the forge that weren't prepared to let outsiders in. Feomus appeared in dog form, as Daria's pet, and Nikita was able to go unnoticed, but the bard was still conspicuous on her own. When the forge watch proved unmoved (and indeed, put on alert) by her requests to enter, she began fiddling a tune that each person present felt they could almost, but not quite, identify and recall. The guards became dumbfounded and stared in fascination. Having their attention, Daria gave the leader of the forge watch a suggestion, as bards are wont to do, to lead her into the forge. Feomus was, however, physically incapable of passing the threshold into the forge, and remained outside, in dog form, under watch from the guards.

Meanwhile, Artemisia had already entered the forge and reassumed her human form. She spoke directly to her staff, “Lead me to the focus of the ward,” and struck the ground with it authoritatively. A circle of druidic runes formed underneath the staff and then a glowing arrow appeared on the ground beneath her, leading her to a magic door. The staff then wrote out for her the password needed to open the magically locked door. Inside, she saw an obelisk surrounded by four small altars, each inscribed in a different language, each inscribed in a different language with seasonal words. She decided to try invoking the elements associated with each season, creating or drawing out sample of each element and placing them with the corresponding season.

Daria was led by her unwitting gnomish guide directly to Korloff's room, where the dark dwarf was perusing a large tome, which he quickly shut upon the arrival of his visitors.

“Why do you intrude upon my studies, Glim? And who is this?” Korloff did not seem to be in nearly as cheery a mood as Glim.

“Sorry to disturb you, sir, but this lady asked for a tour of the forge, so I'm walking her around now.”

Korloff glanced at Daria, then back at the gnome, and smirked slightly. “Very well, Glim, I'll take it from here, go return to your post.” As Daria's guide turned and left, Korloff turned his attention back to her. “Enchant much?”

Daria really wasn't hoping to end up here quite so immediately, accompanied only by an invisible halfling. “I'd heard so much about the amazing work you were doing here, I just had to come see it myself, whatever the means!”

“Unfortunately for you, unlike the ruly mob of guards you encountered at the front door, I am not a complete idiot.” Korloff snarled slightly as he spoke. Daria could tell immediately that he wasn't the type to throw wild parties. “So what is it you're actually doing here?”

“I'm here precisely because you're not an idiot, in fact.” Daria was thinking only slightly faster than she was thinking at this point, and the extra processing time was currently be spent trying to decide whether or not to adjust her clothing to reveal slightly more cleavage. “I know that Lludwig's not the real master in this forge. You're the one creating the real masterpieces behind the scenes and I wanted to...get closer to someone with so much skill.”

Korloff's expression revealed a hint of anger, but nothing else. “And from whom exactly have you heard this? It can't be from those idiot guards, they know nothing of the work I do. Who told you this?”

Well, deurgar weren't really Daria's type, and apparently the feeling was mutual. She was a little flabbergasted at this point. “Oh, you know...people...at the pub.”

Korloff's scowl deepened, which Daria hadn't previously thought possible. “I don't have time for this. Fortunately, this is perfect timing, because a new tour guide has arrived for you.”

Daria heard deep, thudding footsteps as a stone golem turned the corner and approached Korloff's room. This is not my finest moment, she thought, as Korloff barked an order to the golem in a language she didn't understand. She was escorted by the massive creature directly to a small, dark cell, whose door locked itself when it shut.

Artemisia's solution seemed to be working, for the obelisk had opened and revealed a diamond pulsating with magical energy. The diamond was, however, surrounded by a small field of force, and slots accompanied by even more unreadable runes appeared on the obelisk beneath it. This was a bit much for her to solve entirely on her own, and she was getting worried by the fact that she hadn't yet seen any of her companions. She sent her snow owl, Jareth, to find Feomus and the others and lead them to her location.

The owl found a passage to the open easily enough in a forge that constantly billows smoke, and quickly found the hound archon on a leash near the entrance to the forge. Feomus understood the meaning of the owl's appearance, and decided that it was time for him to enter the forge, barrier or no. He morphed back into his more impressive humanoid form, and drank the potion Arcturus had given him to anchor him in the material plane.

“Whoa! The dog just became a man...dog. Halt!” The guards were confused and disturbed by this development.

“I am the archon Feomus, and I am bound to do the will of the Platinum Dragon within this forge. If you waylay me I will strike you down.” Feomus' voice boomed with authority and the very air around him seemed to be charged with his righteousness. Half of the forge watch faltered at the sight, and slowly stepped back, unwilling to take on such a creature. The other half ran toward him, weapons drawn.

Feomus drew his greatsword without hesitation, and with a word of celestial, it wreathed itself in flames. He charged into the midsts of the forge watch, unwary of being surrounded, and with one perfectly aimed swing drove his sword straight through one dwarvish fighter and into the next one beside him. The gnomes and dwarves rapidly counterattacked, but their blows tended to deflect off of his armor, and he waded through the remaining guards while suffering only bruises and minor cuts.

The guards who were already shaken by the sight of a hound archon all but fled entirely after seeing the demise of their peers, and Feomus approached the entrance to the forge with the owl Jareth leading him onward. He found himself now able to cross the threshold of the building, but doing so still filled him with a sense of nausea and weariness. He kept his pace, eager to lower the ward.

Daria was practicing her very best pouting face at the door to her cell when the lock popped open, almost as if in sympathy for her plight. She had a much better theory about the open door, however. “You were always good with locks, Nikita. Do you know where the others are?”

A disembodied voice next to her said, “Isn't that them, coming now?”

Daria turned to see a hound archon and snow owl heading down the corridor in their direction. “How wonderful for you to join us. Now, Jareth, which way is Artemisia?”

The owl lead them to a door inscribed with various runes, and hooted. As the party members approached it, Artemisia spoke the password from within and the door opened.

“Oh good, you all made it,” said Artemisia. “So far, I've managed to pass the first part of the puzzle protecting the ward, which has revealed a gem that I assume powers it, but I can't make sense of this second half of the puzzle.”

“Puzzles are overrated anyway,” responded Daria, who made a perfectly unnecessary gesture of rolling up her sleeves before casting dispel magic. The force field around the diamond dissipated, and Feomus reached in and pulled out the gem, causing the feeling of weariness in him to lift.

A few seconds later, Arcturus appeared amidst them in a flash of light. “Excellent,” began the wizard, “now we can proceed to-”

BAM. The door to their room crumpled under the fist of a stone golem. In the plane of meta-gaming, icosahedrons rolled across a table, determining the initiative of each party member.

Nikita reached for her wand of golem strike and Daria for her fiddle, beginning a familiar and inspiring tune. Arcturus and Artemisia each cast the spells they had specially prepared for the golem. Arcturus' spell was intended to cure an afflicted ally of petrification, but seemed to soften the stone the golem was constructed of, while Artemisia's spell would normally transmute unworked stone into mud, and here made the golem's joints thick, slowing its movement and making it clumsier. Feomus charged with the same ferocity as he had against the guards, placing himself between the golem and his allies and driving his blade into his foe. Unlike the dwarves' axes, however, the golem's fist struck the archon soundly, causing him to reel from the blow.

At this, Nikita became visible again, at the same moment as she unleashed the first in a small barrage of arrows that buried themselves in the golem's chest. Daria's melody shifted into tones that sounded too deep to come from the instrument she held, and the air around her began heating up. With one dramatic pull of her bow across the strings, flames burst forth from in front of her instrument, and seemed to dance around Feomus, barely singing him as they lit up the stone creature in front of him. The golem clambered further into the room to continue its assault in spite of its condition, and Artemisia stepped forward to finish it. She began running, and mid-stride assumed the form of a mighty charging bison, crashing into the weakened golem and breaking it clearly in half. The stone moved no further.

The party collected itself and Arcturus led them to the room where Lludwig was constructing his deadly masterpiece.

“How dare you interfere! This golem is the pinnacle of my career and you've corrupted the enchantments on the stone with Cuthbert only knows what rubbish!” Lludwig stood in the midst of an enormous inscribed circle cut into the stone floor as he chastised his apprentice.

“Corrupted?” Korloff stood between two flesh golems that he had brought into his master's chamber. “You couldn't have gotten this far with your own techniques, and now that they're inconvenient for you, you call mine a corruption of 'your' work. This is hypocrisy of the highest order.”

It was at this moment that a band of adventurer's entered the vast chamber. Before them stood two golem-crafters, and powerful spellcasters in their own right, bickering amongst spindling columns reaching 50 feet or more into the air. As their eyes adjusted to the lighting of the room, they started to register, one by one, the object behind the two artisans, towering over the room. It was a stone golem of incredible proportions and covered in intricately carved filigree, seated as if upon a throne. Even seated, it rose nearly twice as tall as the stone golem the party had just defeated, and the entire room was filled with its ominous presence.

“And just who are you all? Does no respect privacy in my workplace?” Lludwig had turned his attention to the party.

“We are here,” replied Arcturus, “to prevent you from making a colossal mistake. This creature that you intend to animate represents a greater threat than you know. I have seen a future where it brings down entire nations and spreads an unrelenting chaos everywhere it treads.”

“My creation isn't capable of such destructive behavior as you ascribe to it!” shrieked the master artisan. “If it's capable of any maliciousness, it could only be because of the interference of this traitorous deurgar!” Lludwig pointed an accusing finger at Korloff.

“This gnome before you is a fraud,” retorted Korloff. “This 'master artisan' can carve stone and make it move, but he has no will to create a truly great work, and now he seeks to take credit for a masterpiece he could not have created himself. This is not merely a weapon or tool, and it won't be infused with a banal mind. This creature that I am bringing into being will change the world forever.”

Feomus raised his voice. “Master Lludwig, if it really is the interference of Korloff that is corrupting your creation, then let us destroy the tainted creation, and you can begin anew on a masterpiece that you can truly call your own.”

“Begin anew?” Lludwig seemed disgusted by the idea. “This nascent creature before you represent decades of my life, my sweat, my very being. I won't let anyone touch it!”

With this, Lludwig waved his hand before him and a massive wall of stone appeared between him and the others, stretching from one end of the chamber to the other. Before Korloff had a chance to respond Daria targeted him with a spell of domination, commanding him to help them destroy the great stone golem. Korloff's face expressed horror at the thought of destroying the golem, but he turned to obey her nonetheless. Artemisia directed her magic at the stone of the wall, and opened a small passage in it just large enough for her to squeeze through, and she and several of her allies began heading toward the opening. Meanwhile, Feomus cried to the air “Come, Falcor!” and a young bronze dragon teleported into the room with him, allowing him to mount quickly before flying over the stone wall. Meanwhile, Nikita ran directly toward and then up the stone wall as if it were merely a slanted surface and not perfectly vertical.

Korloff was the first to make it through the passage Artemisia had opened, and on the other side of the wall began mindlessly swinging his flail against the great stone form towering over the room, to little effect. Lludwig was accompanied by an iron golem on this side of the wall, and when Feomus and his dragon steed drew within range of it, the bronze dragon opened its mouth and breathed out an arc of lightning that struck the iron golem solidly, causing it to jerk and twitch in place. Arcturus appeared on the other side of the wall in a flash, right next to Lludwig in the middle of the circle. The two spellcasters immediately turned to threaten each other with their rods. Artemisia crossed the wall and summoned entangling plants to burst from the ground and hold down the iron golem that Feomus's dragon had struck.

When Daria crossed over and saw how ineffective he was being trying to destroy the golem, she redirected him to “Take down Lludwig.” She wasn't sure what she'd expected him to do in response to this, but it clearly wasn't what he did, which was to turn and incant in an infernal language. Arcturus saw Lludwig's face contort as it faced him, his skin break out into boils, and his eyes fill with darkness. The gnome fell to the ground crying out in agony, and in desperation he spoke a command word to activate the magic circle he was still in. Nikita finally reached the top of the wall, and from there fired a single arrow directly into Lludwig's head as he writhed on the floor, stopping his commotion suddenly.

Yet the magic circle was already active, and the runes upon it glowed and then aligned themselves around the only living creature left in the circle – Arcturus. The time-traveler had an expression of terrible realization on his face as he lifted his gaze to the great stone figure before him. “What have I done?” he whispered, as the golem king's eyes lit up, and the massive form slowly lifted itself from its seat. All eyes turned to the newly born creature of stone.

Feomus flew his steed toward the great golem and swung his blade, but it scraped awkwardly off of the stone, leaving only a scratch on its huge shoulder. Daria was the next to act on the golem king's birth, saying, “Well, so much for saving the future. I think I saw a treasure chest over here, though.” She ran toward the chest and opened it, finding within a wondrous rod, which she could immediately tell was filled with chaotic energies.

The golem king raised its right hand slowly, as if beckoning, and the three other golems in the room instantly appeared at its side. At this, Daria pulled out the rod she had discovered and waved it at the golem king, shouting, “Go go magic whatever this does!” A beam of energy shot out and struck the golem king, causing it moments later to grow even larger. This is not what Daria was hoping for.

Then, the golem king incanted in a language only Arcturus understood, and the room filled with a bluish light encircled the four golems. Arcturus gasped and immediately began himself gesturing and incanting, in an apparent attempt to counteract the golem king's spell, but he was too late – the golem king and its new minions disappeared a moment later.

There was silence for a moment, and Arcturus' head dropped. “What exactly just happened?” asked Artemisia.

Arcturus replied solemnly, “You asked before why I didn't return to a time when Lludwig was more vulnerable, and the true answer is because I knew I couldn't stop the golem king from being born no matter what time I returned to.”

“What!? You're going to just give up now?” Artemisia was angry. “Then why are we even here?!”

“What has been done cannot be undone. It's not a question of will or power, it is simply the nature of time. My purpose in coming here wasn't to prevent the golem king's birth, but to understand it – to learn how it is that the golem king came to possess the magical powers that its creator, Lludwig, did not command himself. The answer, I know realize, is because it did not acquire Lludwig's intellect and magical abilities, as the gnome had originally intended – it acquired mine.”

“So it's like a huge, nearly invincible version of you?” chimed in Daria. “I hate this thing already.”

“But where did it go, and why were so distraught over it?” ask Feomus.

“It is capable of all the magic I'm capable of, including taking advantage of the temporary rift in space time that was created for me to travel here. It used my ticket home to travel to the future in my place, and now I'm trapped in this time.”

“Well, on the plus side, that means we don't have to worry about it for a few hundred years, right?” Daria seemed quite pleased by this news. “So we'll take care of it later. In the meantime, I still really want to get some shopping down while we're in this town.”

Rise of Magus Script Available

2011-02-07T17:33:00.000-08:00

I've decided to make the script to The Rise of Magus available after it was requested by some French fans who want to translate the game. It's a direct transcription of text from the game editor, which means that it contains pound signs (#) to represent line breaks in a dialogue box, and bits of text will be labeled things like "textline12", which is how I refer to lines of dialogue. I've formatted things and added a table of contents to make it a little more reader-friendly though, and I even put it in .doc format even though I put it together in Open Office. See how nice I am?

You can get it here: http://silentellipsis.com/riseofmagus/RiseofMagusTranscript.doc

One more thing - the script contains spoilers (obviously), so if you want to uncover the secrets of the game on your own, don't read it.

-Silent Ellipsis

Choosing not to Parachain

2011-01-21T20:25:00.000-08:00

This is a repost about the game Warlocks, and the spell paralysis in general, which I've posted about before.

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I was talking to a friend of mine recently about Warlocks and he asked me an interesting question: Do I think that the fact that I won the annual championship in spite of my decision to restrict my own use of paralysis is evidence that it's not a broken spell?

I think a lot of warlocks are aware of my feelings on paralysis, and some probably noticed that on my profile I declare my "personal rules", which include the fact that I won't gesture F more than 5 times consecutively (meaning 3 paras). Not only does this prevent me from abusing paralysis, I know for a fact that some of my opponents are aware of the restriction, and play on the assumption I won't parachain, so it also limits my ability to threaten with F's.

So am I providing evidence that parachains aren't needed to compete at a high level? Yes. Am I providing evidence that it's not an extremely imbalanced spell? I don't think so.

In order to explain why, I'll start with why I self-imposed this rule in the first place. When I started out, around the time I first approached elo 1600, I started to realize how powerful paralysis was, and though I never thought of myself as a paramancer, there was a time when I found myself using paralysis extensively. What would invariably happen is that in the middle of a match I would cast paralysis at some point, and then think "alright, I'll break the chain and do something else now" just before noticing that my opponent had some kind of spell he was threatening in two turns, and that if I kept up the para just a little longer, I could stop it. After I stopped that threat, I'd say "oh, but now if I para just one more turn, I can also respond to a second threat", and this would continue ad infinitum. I would end up using massive parachains even though by this point I had already begun to feel that parachains made games less dynamic and interesting. I remember Succat (a self-declared "paraholic") once saying that he pleased to see that I had a nice "para trigger", or something to that effect.

However, I felt like paralysis wasn't one of many useful strategies at my disposal, it felt like a crutch. I realized that if I left it up to how I happened to feel during a match I would always find an excuse to continue parachaining, so the only way to force myself to be more creative was to make a rule out of it, and by making it public I would feel pressure to keep at it. I was also hoping, I think, that other people would follow suite and I would see fewer long parachains coming at me, but that part never happened.

After I stopped parachaining (and charming hands to "-", and opening "D/P"), I found I really did explore a lot of different options, and was pleased with this decision for a time. Then when I got to around elo 1800 for the first time, over a year ago, I started to realize that I was going to be playing more often against the very best players in the game, and that they all used parachains and parafod extensively (some of them more than others, but every single one of them used parafod to kill me at one time or another). I felt like my own refusal to use parachains might be an insurmountable barrier that would keep me from being able to compete with them, and I honestly got to a point where I started playing very few friendly and ladder matches, and mostly just played in the League because the monthly rules were one surefire source of continued variation in play, which is what I wanted.

At some point I noticed that the players in the league, even ones who normally used parafod often, were less likely to use paralysis when a monthly rule was in play even if the rule didn't have to do with paralysis. In other words, the fact that we were playing in an unranked space where new strategies were encouraged made people drop their paraholic ways and try new things, and the results were sometimes brilliant. However, when they returned to ranked games, most players would stop thinking outside the box and play safe.

This encouraged me to try more seriously to take on the good players head on with my personal rules in play, and I could almost tangibly feel myself gradually getting the hang of beating paralysis. It's also worth noting, when I say something like "beating paralysis", that I actually used paralysis a lot myself. In fact, when I went on the warlocks archives recently, I was surprised to find that I apparently cast paralysis, per game, more often than average. The difference is that I don't cast long chains - I'll cast paralysis once or twice (or maybe thrice) and then break off into something else, and then come back and cast paralysis again a little later. It's a good spell that I like using, but forbidding myself from relying on it made my weaves more dynamic and forced me to be more creative, so I felt like I was getting the best of both worlds. In fact, in my final match against Xade in the tournament, I opened with paralysis on my left hand.

I really wasn't expecting to do as well as I did in the tournament, but if it's a sign of anything, I think it's a sign of how much I gained specifically by avoiding using paralysis as a crutch and trying to be just a little strange (Bio went so far as to call one of my moves in the final match "insane", which made me smile). That said, being the only player who doesn't use parachains has still been a serious restriction, and I've had a number of games where I believe I would have definitely won had I allowed myself to use a parachain. One of the other noteworthy aspects of the tournament was the appearance of a number of new players around the same time, some of whom experienced players found "shockingly good." The shock, I think, stems from the fact that these players haven't yet learned what the popular weaves are, and so make plays that are unexpected and hard to predict - experienced players would do well to try and learn a little from their games with these new players.

So my general point is this - once you've played warlocks for a long time it can become very comfortable to fall into regular patterns - go for charms and ogres as often as possible, and then when you have enough initiative advantage go for parafod or bolt an opponent to death. However, any time that a strategy becomes common wisdom, it starts to get stale, and forcing yourself to play in ways that are less comfortable is the best possible way to continue learning new things. To return to my original question, paralysis is an extremely powerful spell, one that I think is imbalanced, which is precisely why it, more than anything else, prevents players from developing creative strategies. If paralysis weren't so strong, my decision not to use it wouldn't have had as big an effect on my playing style.

In short, choosing not to parachain can be good for you.

Rise of Magus - The Duel Video

2011-01-16T22:25:00.000-08:00

I made a video showing one of the new sections of The Rise of Magus. Apologies for the quality, etc.

The Rise of Magus Version 1.5

2011-01-16T16:56:00.000-08:00

Well it's been a while since I posted about the game, but The Rise of Magus is back! The new version 1.5 of the game includes a huge number of fixes and improvements, as well as unlockable content that extends the game. The truth is, this is the game that I envisioned releasing when I first started working on the project, but after almost a year of work I decided to wrap things up and release The Rise of Magus at the conclusion of the main story arc.

I included, however, a hidden item, the Hero's Medal, which when found displayed the following message: "You've found the Hero's Medal! This unlocks something the designer hasn't added yet, but will." I assumed no one would get quite into the game enough to ever find this thing. I was wrong. I got emails and saw forum discussions postulating theories about about what it was the item might unlock, and wondering when the update would be released. So I went and added "one more thing" that gets unlocked by the Hero's Medal. Then I added one more thing. Then another thing got added somehow. Before I knew it I was revamping the entire game and adding a second game on top of it. This process was disrupted for a long time by distractions from the real world, but now I've finally added all of the "one more" things I ever intended to, and I think the game is ready to be played.

I feel like I should have a brief list of changes somewhere, and my blog is as good a place as any, so here's the short version:

The game is now built in Game Maker 8. The good news is that this means the game loads and runs much faster than before, even though there are more things to be loaded. It still takes up a fair amount of memory, though, and GM8 doesn't give me many options for reducing memory usage, aside from simply making the game smaller. The other downside with GM8 is that it broke all kinds of random things in the game, which took a while to fix. But I guess that was only a downside for me.
Nifty icon! It was always a little sad to have the game represented by a featureless red sphere, so now it shows a statue of Magus. You can take pride in having this on your desktop.
The menu now has music. This seems to have a bigger psychological effect than I expected.
There is now a level cap (30), with a nice extra health boost acquired when this level is reached. This provides something against which to balance to hardest, optional parts of the game.
Enemy behavior is improved. For instance, they are much better at walking up and down stairs and around obstacles. The new content also features whole new levels of enemy AI.
The attack collision system has been completely redone. This has eliminated a slew of (admittedly rare) glitches involving hitting enemies. Most notably, from time to time enemies used to take damage from an attack without getting "hit" by it, meaning they wouldn't stagger and could survive at negative health. This doesn't happen anymore.
Level layouts have been subtly altered, in particular to make jumping about more forgiving at the beginning of the game before players have any idea what they're doing.
The save system has been updated. Now all bosses offer a "retry" option on death, circumventing the need to reload from the last save point and helping avoid the "oh crap I forgot to save" problem. The downside is that save files from the original version aren't compatible with version 1.5, but you wanted to start from the beginning anyway, right? Actually, this downside was kind of intentional, because allowing players to load the previous version's save files would produce all manner of strange glitches.
An option to return to Bekkler's Castle has been added after the Bekkler fight, so that players have the opportunity to go back and purchase upgrades and prepare for the Epilogue battle.
Volume controls have been added, and are controlled with Page Up and Page Down. The volumes are High, Low, and Mute (High is the default volume). I guess this makes the game easier to play surreptitiously at work...hypothetically.
Hints have been added to a couple places where players often got confused. These hints take the form of a sparkly blue light that appears if the player passes the same room multiple times without finding the intended exit or is unable to figure out how to progress from a room for a long time. Experienced players might not ever run into them.
Pedants will be pleased to know that the Ruby Sword is now the only sword that any knight wields that appears red-colored.
It is no longer possible anywhere to jump out of the game through the ceiling unless the ceiling is an intended exit.
The Hero's Medal, rather than doing nothing, now unlocks new content called "The Duel" from the Extras menu. The picture at the top of this post offers a hint as to what "The Duel" is.
Completion of The Duel unlocks additional playable content, which in turn unlocks more, but I don't want to give away the surprise as to what this content consists of.
Many, many changes were made to make the controls smoother, sprites and text cleaner looking, glitches unglitched, and enemies and attacks more balanced.

The short, short version is that the game is more epic and more immersive, and it's hard to put into words how I feel about it now, so you should really just go download it from here:

http://silentellipsis.com/riseofmagus

-Silent Ellipsis

Elo and Trickle-Up Economies

2010-11-23T13:57:00.001-08:00

Preface: I realized after writing it that this post is pretty long and could use an abstract. It's an overview of the two scoring systems used in Warlocks viewed as economies. The objective is simply to note what kind of properties will emerge from having an economy with these particular constraints. What does emerge is that the resources in both systems are only acquired from other players, not independently generated, which results in a pyramid of sorts, where a large number of players lower down in the hierarchy provide a source of points for the higher ranked players. Larger economies will result in a higher peak, but otherwise do not effect the average player in these systems.

---

As I've mentioned before, I'm an avid player of the game Warlocks, based on Waving Hands. This game uses two different ranking systems for competitive players, and they have some interesting differences between them.

The first, and simpler ranking system is ladder points, and they work as follows: every time a player wins a ladder match, they gain one ladder point; every time a player loses a ladder match, they lose one ladder point; every time a player dies during a ladder match, their ladder points reduce to zero (note that in this game, most matches end with one player surrendering, not dying). Every player starts with a ladder score of zero, and you cannot have negative ladder points. This means that every time a player with no ladder points loses a match, a ladder point is created from the ether, and every time a player with ladder points loses a match, their point is effectively transferred to the winner. There's one more feature of ladder matches that's worth mentioning, and that is that you cannot challenge a player to a ladder match if your relative ladder scores are more than 5 points apart.

The result of these features is that ladder scores rarely get very high. Since your ladder score will get reduced to zero by a single death it takes a lot of skill (or luck) in order to continually grow your score. Moreover, since you cannot challenge an opponent who is more than 5 points apart from you, the high possible ladder score for any player is 7 points higher than the second-highest score (assuming they began 5 points apart and that the higher-ranked player won). This means that in order for me to have a ladder score higher than 20, there need to be other players with a ladder score of at least 15 I can challenge. This means that the upper limit of ladder scores depends on the presence of a population of successful ladder players who collaboratively create ladder point (by playing those with 0 ladder points) and then transferring them up the ladder to the best players.

We'll see a similar dynamic with the second ranking system: elo. Like in chess rankings, elo is a system in which the change in a player's score is weighted depending on their expected likelihood of winning (which is, in turn, based on the competing players' relative elo scores). Each player who registers begins with an elo score of 1500, which defines that score as the expected skill level of an average new player. Each match results in one player gaining a number of points and the other losing an equal number of points - in other words, once again, matches effectively cause a "transfer" of points from one player to another. If a player with a lower score beats a player with a higher score, they earn more points from the win, and if a player with a higher score wins, they earn fewer points. The difference in points earned corresponds to a player's expected likelihood of winning - meaning that if I'm expected to have a 75% chance of defeating an opponent, I will earn 1/3 as many point for winning as he will if he wins, so that over the course of many games, elo scores will stabilize if players tend to win as often as they are expected to given their elo score. Since all starting players start with 1500 points, they begin ranked as equals even though some may be stronger players than others. However, the differences in skill level will fairly rapidly be reflected in their score once they begin playing ranked games.

Let's look at an example. I register a new account and start with 1500 elo. If I play and beat another new player, I will gain 12 points, to have a score of 1512, and their score will go down to 1488. Now the difference in our scores is 24, so if I play that same player again and win, I will gain slightly fewer points than I did the first time. Once the elo difference is over 100 points, I will gain 8 points from a win and my opponent will gain 16 points if he wins - as long as I win approximately twice as often as I lose, the elo difference will remain stable, but if I win more often, it will continue to go up, and if I lose more often, it will go down.

Notably, if the winning player is ahead by enough elo, they effectively gain no points from victory, so many high-ranked players will simply refuse to play ranked matches with much lower-ranked players (since they have nothing to gain and much to lose if they make a mistake). In practice, the maximum effective difference between players who can fairly compete in ranked matches is a little over 200 points. Any more of a difference and fluke wins by inexperienced players will unduly throw off the scores of high-ranked players.

All of this together suggests some interesting features of the elo economy - since a winning player gains as much as their opponent loses from a match, the sum elo score of the player population cannot grow except by the addition of new players, and that the existence of players with more than 1500 elo requires the existence of players with less than 1500 elo. Moreover, a player can only effectively grow their elo by playing opponents with an elo score within 200 points of their own, which suggests that growing your elo depends on a population of players with elos near your own, so the highest possible elo in the system depends on the number of successful players, which is in turn limited by the number of total players. That is, a population of new players is needed in order to support the elo growth of players with elos between 1500-1700, and a population of players with elos of at least 1700 is needed to support the elo growth of players with elos between 1700-1900.

As of this writing, there are 1577 players who have registered to play Warlocks, about 200 of which never played a ranked duel. Of the players who have played ranked games, 281 have an elo higher than 1500, and 419 players have an elo lower than 1500. The lowest elo in the system is 1298 (202 points lower than the average) and the highest elo is 2106 (606 points higher than the average). This suggests that in practice, a large population of weak players is needed to support the heightened elo scores of a relative few. There are two reasons for this: first, players who repeatedly lose will likely stop competing at some point, and players who repeatedly lose will have their elos fall to the point where they no longer effectively feed the elo growth of stronger players.

Since the value of a win is weighted by the likelihood of the win, players who perform as well as expected will have stable elos - if you are about twice as good as the average new player (meaning twice as likely to win), your elo should stabilize around elo 1600. However, once a player enters the higher echelons of play, the relative dirth of other high-ranked players makes it harder to play enough balanced games to maintain a representative elo. In a population of players with elos from 1400 to 1600, it is unlikely for me to grow my elo above 1800, no matter how good I become at the game.

So the grand result is this: The total size of the elo economy of the game is determined by the number of players in the system, and the larger the total elo economy is, the higher the elo ratings of the best players can be, but that for the vast majority of players, the size of the elo economy will have no impact on their personal elo scores. That is, as a resource, the total quantity of elo in the system will only effect the players at the top.

Now there are obvious disanalogies between the elo economy in Warlocks and market economies in the real world, but it nonetheless serves as an interesting model of a competition driven economy. This is also not meant in any way to be some kind of moral statement about how "just" the elo system is - the numbers simply represent the fact that some players win more often than others, and it is the explicit goal of the elo system to represent this. I simply believed that the unintended emergent features of the system are noteworthy, since they result from the interactions of thousands of players.

Waving Hands: Paralysis and "Broken" Mechanics

2010-11-01T10:28:00.000-07:00

I recently had a request for another post on Waving Hands, and since we're in the midsts of the Warlocks 2010 championships (in which I'm well placed to make the finals right now, and on which Waving Hands is based), I decided to oblige.

A lot of discussion about the game by avid players revolves around a single spell, paralysis, which is considered by many, including myself, to be unbalanced, and possibly even broken. Its abusability has even led to the formation of a guild, the Paramancers, who specialize in this one spell. One of the interesting questions to arise from this discussion, however, is what exactly it means for a spell to be "broken."

When we talk about game balance, we generally assume that what we have in mind is a series of equally viable options. If one strategy is disproportionately represented or effective, then it is unbalanced. This, at first, seems like a fair criterion for a balanced game - if, in Starcraft, almost no one ever played Zerg, but 90% of players played Protoss, that would be a clera sign that something was amuck in the balance of the game. However, if we push the idea a little further, it starts to become murkier. Isn't the very idea of "strategy" supposed to be that some moves ARE better than others, and that finding the good moves is what makes the game fun? Rock, paper, scissors is a perfectly balanced game, because no move is better than any other, but for that reason it's impossible to strategize about anything other than player psychology, so the game is shallow.

In the case of Warlocks, some spells are clearly more popular than others, but this creates a self-balancing factor: the more commonly a strategy is used, the more predictable it is, and in a game that relies on predicting your opponent's moves as much as Warlocks does, that can be a fatal weakness. This means that if you use less popular spells, you can take your opponent by surprise, and in doing so may be able to make up for the features of the spell that make it less popular.

So in the case of paralysis, the fact that it is used much more often than most other spells is, in some sense, unbalanced, but that doesn't necessarily make the game worse. This is where we can draw a distinction between an unbalanced and broken spell, because a broken spell will interfere with the overall playability of the game. The problem, in this case, is that paralysis DOES interfere with the overall playability of the game. The criteria that can be used for a broken strategy might include:

1. Whether or not predicting the strategy makes it possible to "punish" the player who is predictable.

2. Whether or not there exists effective counters to the strategy.

3. Whether or not there is a good motivation for a player to use a different strategy.

As I mentioned before, there exists a guild called the Paramancers, who specialize in paralysis. In other words, just by being in this guild, they are effectively announcing to their opponents before the duel begins what strategy they will use, and yet they are still successful players. This simply wouldn't be the case with any other strategy - if I announced that every game I play, whenever possible, my right hand will constantly be casting antispell, I would lose every game I played (even though, in a given game, my right hand might end up making those gestures anyway).

Discussing counters will require a more detailed discussion of the spell itself, which requires some background knowledge of Warlocks. So if you've been reading up to now simply because you liked the idea of distinguishing "unbalanced" and "broken" mechanics, here's your chance to escape.

Paralysis - FFF

In Warlocks, you submit gestures on your left and right hands that add up, over several turns, to spells, that take effect when the gestures of that spell are completed. The gestures needed to cast the spell paralysis are FFF, and it causes one of your opponent's hands to be "paralyzed" into the same gesture on the next turn (well, except that W is paralyzed into P and S into D). The important thing is that since the gestures of paralysis are so symmetrical, gesturing another "F" on the next turn allows you to cast it again immediately (because now your last three gestures were, once again, "FFF"), resulting in "parachains" where one hand gestures "FFFFFFF..." ad infinitum. There is one restriction on parachains built into the basic rules, however - on consecutive turns, you can only paralyze the hand you already were paralyzing.

At first, this doesn't seem terribly abusive. If I use an endless parachain, I can keep one of my opponent's hands tied up, and effectively make us both play one-handed. This makes the spell useful on its own, in case you have some other advantage you want to hold onto, or force your opponent to respond to you and a summoned monster with only one hand available. It also grants a small initiative advantage, because as soon as the paralyzer decides to end his parachain, he can immediately begin casting a new spell, whereas the paralyzed player must suffer the effect of the final turn of paralysis before he can move his hand freely again, leaving him one turn behind on one hand. This is a significant advantage by itself.

However, the real problem with paralysis occurs when you start changing targets. Since it counts as a mind-affecting enchantment, it cancels with other mind-affecting enchantments, which means that you can cast paralysis on yourself to counter an opponent's interrupt, and then go back to paralyzing them on the next turn. What's more, when you stop paralyzing your opponent for one turn, and then start again, you can switch which hand you're affecting, allowing you to alternate and restrict your opponent's use of both his hands. Finally, paralysis cast on a monster stops the monster from attacking that turn, which means that a parachain can be used, on any given turn, to disrupt either of your opponent's hands, hold his monster at bay, or counter one of his interrupts on your (including his own paralysis). This versatility in a spell that can be cast every single turn is incredibly powerful.

There already exists, however, a standard variant that helps to make paralysis easier to disrupt, called "parafc". It means that when paralysis is used on an F gestures, the F is paralyzed into a C gesture. The significance of this is that it makes paralysis targeted at yourself (to counter another enchantment) into a risky move, because if your opponent was bluffing, and doesn't complete their own enchantment, you've paralyzed yourself, and either cannot continue your parachain (because now you've gestured FFFc), or must disrupt your other hand. The effect of this rule is that many situations in which a parachain could not be countered are now situations in which your opponent can generate "50/50" opportunities to disrupt you.

The problem with this solution seems, to me, fairly straightforward. While it's better to have a 50% chance to disrupt a parachain than a 0% chance, if I really know, before my opponent has made a single move, what he's going to do, I should have a 100% chance of countering him. Paralysis can still be cast every turn, can restrict both of your opponent's hands, and can be used defensively - now it's simply that you have run a 50% risk of disrupting yourself when using it defensively (which is the case with every other mind-affecting enchantment, anyway). The fact remains that even playing parafc, Paramancers can play effectively even when their opponents know what strategy they are using, and this simply shouldn't be the case.

I think there are two ways to balance out paralysis as it stands, and they each essentially involve removing one of the spell's advantages - either it shouldn't be cast every turn, or it shouldn't be able to target either of an opponent's hands. I, in fact, already play with the former restriction self-imposed: I do not allow myself to cast paralysis more than three times consecutively, and this is a restriction that is public, and which my opponents know about and take advantage of. The reason I play with this restriction is simple - because playing without extended parachains makes the game more dynamic and interesting, and if I didn't have an explicit rule, I would end up using them simply because they are so advantageous. However, a fiat "do not cast paralysis more than three times" rule is not a very elegant solution, so this restriction, were it generally enforced, would best take the form of a chance in the gestures of paralysis such that it was impossible to cast every turn.

And restricting which hand can be paralyzed would also balance out the spell effectively. My preferred way of handling this would be to say that whichever hand I cast paralysis with is the hand that gets paralyzed (if I gesture "FFF" with my right hand, I can paralyze your right hand). This is significant for a reason that goes beyond the ability of a parachain to alternate hands every other turn - even though only one hand can be paralyzed, as long as the caster gets to choose which hand it is that is affected, and the choice is made after the spell is successfully cast, the target of paralysis has to restrict which gestures he makes on BOTH of his hands, in order to avoid having a gesture on either hand that will become particularly unusable once paralysis takes effect. In fact, it might be a downside of the parafc variant that any spell featuring an F can be so disastrously disrupted by paralysis (given how few spells use the C gesture). The result of this is that on a turn in which I expect to be targeted by paralysis, I will try to gesture either a W (paralyzed into WPP - counterspell) or PS (paralyzed into PSDD - charm monster) on each hand to prevent my opponent from being able to totally disrupt my spellflow. However, since my opponent can alternate the paralyzed hand every other turn, that means that in theory I have to be prepared to make one of those restricted gestures on each hand every other turn. If I knew ahead of time which hand would be paralyzed, this would not be an issue.

There's plenty more to say on the topic, but this is plenty for one post. I like to hope that some of my idealistic self-imposed restrictions gain traction in the community at large, or that at some point a further evolved version of the game will address some of these issues, but in the meantime paralysis is a legitimately broken aspect of an otherwise unbelievably well-crafted game that we must live with.

A Bold Experiment

2010-05-16T20:08:00.000-07:00

43:60, Year 8572, LV-Timeline:

I hate politics. It's like putting on a circus show for an audience of baboons. At this rate I'll have spent as much time as I spent growing the Mk IV getting permission to use it. I know it's a bold proposal, but since I wasn't laughed out of the council chamber, they're bound to approve it sooner or later.

If it was anyone else standing at that podium, they probably would have been laughed out of the chamber. I'm sure they're repeating that very sentence to each other right now. I'm sure that fool Tiresias is also going on about the redundancy of the whole proposal, given the accuracy of his simulations. He has no respect for real science - if he did he would be advocating for this stronger than anyone, for someone to prove his evolutionary simulations.

Why don't they see what I see - not just a model, but a complete history of an entire planet! I can trace the longterm effects of controlled environmental pressures, watch whole species emerge, adapt, and die off. What greater work of art could there be than an entire world presented in 4 dimensions? Besides, it would give us some solid data on the effects of exposing primitive creatures to LV-radiation.

And at the end of the experiment, the cultures are to be wiped - it's in the proposal! I don't see how there's any risk of timeline contamination. I suppose I simply need to be patient, but patience was never a strong suit of mine.

45:30, Year 8572, LV-Timeline:

Dear diary, this is an auspicious day. The final bit of bureaucratic nonsense has been dealth with, and I now am officially approved to carry out the most ambitious ecological experiment in history. I've picked out a planet in the Syrma system which was life-sustaining in very recent past (astronomically speaking), but is not currently known to bear life.

The plan is to create a vast time-warping field to touchdown on the planet as it was approximately 65 million years ago, bury the Mk IV some miles below the surface, and have it collect data constantly while I remain in suspension. I'll be pre-programming a series of environmental stimuli, including an influx of LV-radiation in the final 3 million years of the experiment. I don't know if that will be enough time to observe its full effects, but I'd rather play safe in this case and wake myself up before it produces an army of intelligent spiders with gatline guns. Not that it would do much good against the Mk IV. Just to play things safe, I'm equipping it with a kill-switch that will plasmatize the entire biomass of the planet's surface. Even better, I'll be able to reabsorb the plasma and may have a net energy gain through this process. I'm so brilliant.

In any case, I should be ready to begin the experiment in a few weeks. Then it'll be a quick nap for me and a return trip with 65 million years of data!

45:47, Year 8572, LV-Timeline:

Dear diary, I AM PSYCHED.

0:0, Year 0, LV'-Timeline:

This marks the start time of the experiment. I have arrived in the Syrma system and will be touching down in approximately 3 hours. Unfortunately, the time warp used even more energy than I'd expected (and I'm working on the budget of a small nation here). It's possible that the inefficiency points to a flaw in the temporal drive, but I should still have enough reserve energy for a return trip (at least, after plasmatization), and since there's no chance of field interference from other time machines on the planet, the field should be stable enough.

---

Wow, I don't think I'm ever going to get sick of freefall touchdowns. That impact was incredible (and yet my Mk IV is unscathed!). I'm sure there are animals on the surface that didn't fair quite so well, but sacrifices do need to be made in the name of science. I'm just glad those sacrifices don't include me, HA. Since everything seems to be in order, I'm going to set my first anchor point now, run one more system check, and activate suspension for the initial time frame. See you on the flip side!

Yours truly,
Greatest Scientist Ever

0:0, Year 50,000, LV'-Timeline:

I have strange dreams in suspension. There was this guy on my street trying to sell pretzels to people, and then when I tried to buy one he told me he only accepted payment in moons. What a fucker.

Anyway, aside from that, everything is going great! The first checkpoint has gone perfectly, although it's interesting to note that just in the first 50,000 year period, I've seen one of the planets dominant species go extinct. It seems likely that the impact of my landing was involved, since no other clear extinction events have been picked up in the history. I'll probably have to exclude this period for most of my analysis, but the surface seems to have already returned to a fairly normal state, and I think it's time for a real data-gathering session.

0:0, Year 30M, LV'-Timeline:

This is incredible! We're just under halfway through the experiment timeline and already I have enough data to spend a lifetime analyzing. And in case anyone thought it was all redundant, I have already found three genus-level inconsistencies with Tiresias' simulation. They're going to be rewriting ALL the textbooks.

0:0, Year 62M, LV'-Timeline:

It's time for the final phase of the experiment to begin, which involves the effects of LV-radiation. I'll be a litte disappointed if nothing interesting happens, but that seems unlikely. When I next wake up it should be time to clear the cultures and prepare for the return trip.

37:36, Year Y-14,142, LV'-Timeline:

I never would have believed it, but LV-radiation has even more dramatic effects than anyone predicted. I wasn't planning on waking up for another 14,000 years, but the system is on alert because of a power drain, of all things. It seems that a relatively unremarkable species that came in contact with the stimulus probe has become sentient and developed civilization in just the last 3 million years. They've even managed to build a device that can draw power from the Mk IV - I wonder if they even realize where they're getting this energy from.

Even more surprisingly, there are faint readings of temporal fluctuations in what appears to be the capital building of this civilization. Is it really possible that they've managed to develop timewarping technology in this time? It seems more likely that an accidental technology of theirs is causing some kind of resonance with the Mk IV's temporal drive. In any case, this represents a nontrivial threat (much worse that spiders with gatling guns, which was my previous worst-case scenario).

I really don't want to have to engage a planet-wide culture wipe without the last 14,000 years of data (and I can only imagine how interesting this data will be). I suppose some of my colleagues would also take issue on "moral grounds" with wiping a culture of sentient creatures, but the potential threat of timeline contamination is a much worse outcome.

Nonetheless, I will need to make another anchor point here, regardless of what I decide to do.

22:04, Year Y-14,134, LV'-Timeline:

The audacity of these creatures! They actually built an underwater facility to get more direct access to their energy source - ME. I can't afford to allow my energy reserves to fall below the point needed for a surface culture wipe, so I had no choice but to destroy the facility, and all of the technology that was used to develop it. I discovered the source of the temporal fluctuations - it was coming from a piece of jewelry worn by a female of the species, which seems to be linked to the device that was draining power from the Mk IV. When it came into immediate contact with the Mk IV, it caused a series of significant temporal rifts. I destroyed the facility as quickly as possible in order to minimize potential timeline contamination. I never thought this expedition was going to prove so dangerous.

Fortunately, there are no lingering fluctuation signatures, and I'm disseminating an airborne agent that should deactivate some of the more dangerous genes in the present population. I'll have to keep an eye on the development of the situation, but hopefully the experiment can continue - and I suppose it will have to, as my energy reserves are running dangerously low. I'm going to switch into geothermal mode for the remainder of the experiment timeline and I should be able to build up enough energy for a culture wipe at the anticipated end date of the experiment.

12:53, Year Y-1,399, LV'-Timeline:

This is perhaps more bizarre than my last entry - I think I was intentionally brought out of suspension by a creature on the surface. What I don't understand is how an LV-irradiated creature with fairly sophisticated technology survived the last 12,000 years. The other members of the species seem to be working at a much lower technology level. Is it possible that he was moved to this time period by one of the temporal rifts I observed? I can only hope this process does not repeat itself. In any case, he's been dealt with, and I've set another anchor point. Maybe later I can examine this period more carefully and try to figure out where that guy came from.

39:20, Year Y-999, LV'-Timeline:

The system picked up another temporal fluctuation. It seems to have been located at some kind of celebration or carnival, but there's no remaining signatures. I'm going to be scanning for tech, but if nothing comes up I'll ignore it.

0:0, Year Y-0, LV'-Timeline:

At long last, the final day of the experiment has arrived. I've regained enough power to plasmatize the surface biomass, but after the unexpected strain the Mk IV's been put through, I'm beginning to think that it'd be safer to grow a fresh vessel for my return trip, which I should be able to do with the energy boost from plasmatization. After 65M years in suspension, what's another 300-400 years?

Anyway, I have to admit that I've come to kind of admire the tenacity of the creatures that have evolved on this planet, and it's a shame to wipe them all, but I have to return with my findings.

0:0, Year Y-0, LV''-Timeline:

The readings on my instruments suggest that an additional timeline has formed somehow! This should be impossible! Clearly this experiment has proven much more dangerous than I expected, and I need to proceed with an immediate culture wipe.

---

What. The. Fuck. A temporal rift has opened up and a miniature horde of LV-irradiated creatures has poured out of it. These are pretty much the mutant spiders with gatling guns I was afraid of, except one of them is wielding a sword. A SWORD. And he's actually damaging the hull of the Mk IV with it! WHAT THE HELL IS THAT SWORD MADE OUT OF?! If they penetrate the hull, I'll have to activate emergency security measures. It better not come to worst case scenarios, but if it does, the Mk IV's core module has my entire genetic code and memory bank backed up, so it can recreate me at will. These punks clearly don't know who they're messing with. In case you weren't sure, I'll remind you:

THE GREATEST SCIENTIST OF ALL TIME.

---
This was the last journal entry of Professor Icarius Lavos. Following are some discussion questions about the reading:

1) Professor Lavos brought up the concept of "timeline contamination" several times in his journal? Why is it that time travel, especially to the distant past, might be considered dangerous?

2) Professor Lavos' experiment is often blamed for rise of humans as a competitive time-traveling species. What are some steps he could have taken to insure this hadn't happened?

3) The sword Professor Lavos refers to in his last entry was made of Dreamstone, a previously unknown material which is now in wide use. What properties of Dreamstone might have made it particularly effective when used against the Mk IV?

4) If you could do any kind of time-travel enabled experiment, what would you do?

Luck and Twitch-Skills

2010-04-21T10:58:00.000-07:00

Perko just put up a post justifying his claim that skill (or at least twitch-skill) and luck-based challenges generally amount to the same thing from a game design perspective.

What I've come to realize is that a mechanic based on luck and a mechanic based on skill both serve the same purpose in this final framework. They both act as a "scattering" agent: they push the player in somewhat unexpected vectors, allowing them to explore the gameplay "terrain" with a quick and interesting feedback loop.

Generally, I agree with him, but his language is abstract enough that I think it could really do with some more concrete examples. Let's consider three turn-based games with units on a grid: Chess, Civilization, and Archon. In each case, if one unit attempts to move into a space occupied by an enemy unit, this creates a conflict, which needs to be resolved somehow. In Chess, a consistent rule is applied - the piece that's moving wins the encounter every time. In Civilization games, resolution depends on a combination of the units' stats and random luck (if the units are of similar strength, considering any modifiers, you've got about a 50/50 chance of winning), and in Archon when two pieces overlap it causes a dueling mini-game to start, where the pieces, controlled by the two opposing players, duke it out. The point is that in each case the overall strategy of moving pieces on the game board will be similar, but the difference between Chess and the other two, in terms of strategy, is that you can't afford to be quite as precise and pre-planned in Civilization or Archon because an enemy unit could unexpectedly break through your front line if your opponent is lucky or good at the minigame, respectively.

Avid players of pen-and-paper games might be more willing to accept the interchangeability of twitch-challenges and random chance since their games so often rely on random elements to resolve situations that theoretically rely on the character's skill. A d20 roll in D&D could be replaced by rock, paper, scissors (which is still mostly luck-based), or even by a quick game of table-tennis while retaining the overall structure of the role-playing game. Video gamers may be less likely to accept this interchangeability because they're more likely to experience the twitch-skill end of the spectrum and value the skills they've developed. But from the game designer's perspective, the range of skill-levels of the players represents a predictable curve of possible outcomes, just like the die-roll does.

This isn't to denigrate twitch-skills as being no better than luck, but simply to suggest that in any game where a the result of tactical decision isn't guaranteed, the designer can choose to add a twitch-skill element or an element of luck, and expect it to produce a similar "scattering" effect on the results. Generally speaking, the advantage of using skill is that it gives the player a greater sense of ownership over their victory, but it also makes it possible for a player skilled at the twitch-challenge to skew the results of tactical decisions more consistently then they could with a luck-challenge, whereas the luck-challenge preserves, over time, the relationship between strategy and expected success rate. Allowing a twitch-skilled player to surpass expectations may be fine in a single player game (I was really good at the lock-picking mini-game in Oblivion), because it's only that single player who's fun we need to worry about in the first place, but in a cooperative game such as D&D, a single player outshining everyone else in his party as a result of being a good table-tennis player could produce ill will, and I imagine this is part of the reason twitch-challenges are more likely to appear in video games than tabletop games (that, and the fact that twitch-challenges are easy to introduce in the medium of video games).

-Silent Ellipsis

Dating Profile Clichés

2010-03-21T21:33:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been quite a while since I posted to my blog, which I'm sure I could blame on something, but I'll skip that part. Incidentally, commenting on how long it's been since one's last blog post is a high-visibility cliche, which just happens to be the topic of today's post! More specifically, I'm going to ramble about cliched phrases I continually run across in online dating profiles (yes, I'm on dating sites, see if you can use your powers of inference to guess what my username is). This has absolutely nothing to do with my usual topics, but I felt like writing about this somewhere, and it is my blog afterall.

So on to the list! These are a selection of phrases that I've run across dozens of times, when browsing profiles either on OKCupid or Plentyoffish (both free sites, so they have large populations of uncommitted users). Some of these phrases have come to seem so unoriginal to me that when I see them, I immediately stop reading the person's profile.

It is worth noting that I have read many more profiles written by women than by men, which I'm sure biases the phrases I'm running across.

1. "I don't bite (unless you're into that sort of thing)"

I don't know why this is as popular as it is. If I'd only seen this once or twice, I might have thought "Oh, heh, I get it," and moved on. As it is, this phrase is so inexplicably popular that I can feel my blood start to boil when I see it, but maybe that's a defense mechanism my body has to ward off vampires.

2. "I want someone who can sing to me/play [x] instrument"

As someone with mild musical ability, this probably shouldn't bother me, but it does. The problem I have with this phrase is that it's a clear manifestation of the profile-as-venue-for-fantasies complex. Of course you'd like to date a rock star. Everyone would. Telling us so is not the point of your profile - you should be trying to convince readers you're interesting or cue them about what your interests are. Instead, profiles that include this phrase often read like dating fanfiction.

3. "If you want to know [x], just ask me!"

In the time it took you to write that sentence, you could have simply told your reader the fascinating fact you're obscuring from us. To make matters worse, the user that includes this phrase usually doesn't respond well to you asking about it, because everyone who messages them asks about it and now they're tired of repeating the answer hundreds of times. Of course, the solution to that is to just include it in your profile to begin with.

4. "I want someone who won't lie to me/cheat on me/make me cry for a change!"

Rule number one of online profiles: never focus on negativity. When you see the above sentence in a profile, it's often part of a greater paragraph, or in some cases a manifesto, about how much they really hate it when people are mean to them. This usually makes me run away.

5. "I'm not your typical girl/boy!"

Yes, you probably are.

6. Listing "travel" as a primary hobby

This is one of those lines in a profile that seems like it would add an air of sophistication, except that traveling any significant distance costs money. So unless you're completely loaded (in which case what you say in your profile doesn't matter that much), traveling is something you only get the chance to do from time to time. In other words, this user is claiming that one of their main hobbies is something that they spend 99% of their time not doing.

More importantly, this is most likely completely irrelevant to someone you're considering dating. Unless you're going to invite them to come with you on a trip to another continent right away, it's not going to have much impact on whether or not they're going to want to grab a coffee with you next week.

Note that this is different from "I traveled to [x] place and really loved it," which suggests you have stories to tell. Instead, the cliche suggests a negative story space that sucks interesting stories out of a date (again, profile-as-venue-for-fantasizing complex).

7. "I'm preparing for the zombie apocalypse."

I can't dig on this one too much, because it clearly does tell me something about the user's personality. However, this user would, in all cases, die instantly in a zombie apocalypse. So would I, probably, but at least I didn't waste any time preparing for it.

8. (In response to "I'm Really Good At") "Everything, especially being modest."

This is the one cliche that I'm guilty of perpetrating myself (or was guilty of). There's nothing inherently wrong with the phrase, until you start to realize how unoriginal it is.

9. (In response to "The Most Private Thing I'm Willing to Admit") "I'm on a dating site."

No. Crap.

Furthermore, this carries the connotation that the user is trepid about online dating and therefore less likely to respond to messages, which doesn't usually help their case.

10. (In response to "You Should Message Me If") "You're bored."

Way to maintain your standards, there.

-Silent Ellipsis

Crazy Ideas for Crazy Times: Centralized Digital Distribution

2009-10-19T20:13:00.000-07:00

Alright, I'll get right to it: amongst the many things that are being revolutionized in the world around us, distribution is a rather important one. There has been a lot of attention in particular to itunes, a music-player/mp3-store that has been the first successful attempt to capitalize on mp3 distribution, and on Steam, a game-server/game-store that sells Valve's products, as well as those of third-party companies. Amazon also recently entered the picture with the Kindle, to digitally distribute books.

So it seems like we're making a lot of progress on the digital distribution front, right? Unfortunately, there's a problem: each of these services is so much more successful than any competition in the same genre (itunes for music, Steam for games, Kindle for books) that they pretty much hold a monopoly of their respective markets.

Now certainly there are smaller distributors of digital goods, and in many cases individual developers of media can distribute their own files, but it's very hard to be a small distributor. In particular, smaller distributors have difficulty integrating effective DRM that users won't find overly intrusive (and in most cases, the overly intrusive DRM isn't effective anyway). Wizards of the Coast, for instance, has had so many problems with piracy that they've pulled all D&D .pdfs from their store (not necessarily a smart move, but then they just got $120k in a settlement with one particular pirate, so maybe they know better than I do, and in any case it shows that they at least perceive piracy to be a very dangerous problem). Steam and Kindle, however, are able to convince their users to put up with DRM by offering in exchange the convenience of a centralized library users can access from anywhere (something Wizards of the Coast can't offer, since they only have their own products available for download, and no advanced management software).

This suggests that digital distribution relies on centralization, to some extent, in order to gain traction, but since the companies that are capable of generating that kind of centralization are large and few, digital markets seemed to be destined for monopolization, and we're already starting to see some of the side effects, such as Amazon retroactively removing purchased documents from users' Kindles (would not go over well with consumers if there were an alternative product for them to defect to).

What could possibly be done about this? In my mind, what we need is to take the "hard" part out of the hands of for-profit organizations. If it were up to me, I'd create an international organization tasked simply with maintaining a database of users and which digital files they have access to. This organization isn't responsible for actually distributing the files - just keeping track of who owns what.

Once this is in place, private companies can gets permits to access the database and even modify entries for users for which they have the proper credentials. The companies offer services for connecting the user to files they own and to offerings for new things they can buy - basically what things like Steam do now. The difference is, now any other company that wants to can offer a competing Steam-like storefront that's capable of offering the same games Steam does. In fact, if you switched, in our scenario, from Steam to a competitor, you would still be able to access all of the games you bought on Steam from the competitor's application (because they're both accessing the same database).

In other words, the idea is that companies like Valve, Apple, and Amazon would be offering browsers - interfaces whose principal value is their user-friendliness, but users wouldn't be completely beholden to these companies for access to the items they purchased. What's more, the creation of a digital ownership database could speed up the shift toward digital distribution for things that aren't already available and possibly result in other advantages down the road...

There are a few more things that could be pointed out here, but that's the basic idea, so I'll stop there for now.

A Word If You Can Spare

2009-09-30T15:42:00.000-07:00

Her eyes dart. There's me, left, below, and sometimes nothing. She's juggling, but doesn't think to catch her parts. They simply wait to hit the ground. Her face is focus, and wonder underneath. If you peel you find quiet fears with loud reasons. Her answers aren't clear but they are transparent. When enough words swell and battle to describe her, she fades, and in her absence, her emptiness speaks to me:

Newborn memory
You stand before me
And taunt me with
The arms at your side

Your blood makes me move
Your bones keep me still
I need your skin to keep me
Clothed

But when I see through you
I do not see you
When I speak to you
My words do not travel

Where do they go, the things we hold in our hands?
How do we find them, the things we never lost?
When will we remember the things we never learned?
Why I do not love you

So I answer with my fleeing words and sounds, and all the things that emerge from my fingers, eyes, and sores. I answer with my unseen stares, my unwashed heart, and unwanted needs. In whispers to the world, and notes sacrificed before so many altars I say:

You cannot tickle your own foot
Though you might feel its scratch

You cannot frighten your own hand
Though it bows in its submission

You cannot yearn for things for you have
But might miss what you've misplaced

You cannot see yourself
Except before a mirror

I know no metaphor or trickery
I can only tell you what you are
A filled cup desperate to pour
A defiant falling
Juice

I have no solution, but am thoroughly immersed
I mistake double meanings for twice the words
Curiosities for desires
Wisdoms for truths

Love is not a thing you wait for
Come to
Or bring

Passion is not a paper trick
Of many-fold wonders
Hung by a string

And alone is not a number

They are the bubbling parts of your mind
The transformable parts of a world
And the means of my meaning

They are words

I'm writing them now, but may come back to hack off parts. What she has is still a mystery to me, but I know I have both longing and love. Freshly plucked with no jar to keep them. Her eyes no longer dart, but remain, and in her stillness her absence wanes. The earth is quiet again beneath me, but remembrances below me still flood with meaning.

I may be here for a while.

Categories: Gameplay Instance and Sequence

2009-09-29T13:14:00.000-07:00

When trying to categorize and describe gameplay experiences, there's one huge difference in experience that I've been thinking about lately, which is the difference between an isolated and repeatable gameplay experience and between the long-term experience of progressing a game.

The former experience I think I'll refer to as a gameplay instance. Note that I'm making up these terms as I go along, so if someone has better ones for me to use, let me know. A gameplay instance includes the decisions involved in completing a specific task, usually in a single gameplay session - like "take the opponent's king" or "roll up the largest ball possible." As I'm describing it, gameplay instances are layered on top of each other - completing the task usually involves completing minor objectives along the way ("lure the opponent out of his defensive position" or "get onto that hill so I can pick up the stuff on top of it").

So with a definition of an "instance" that broad, what is left? The unspecific goal - "progress the game." Usually progressing the game involves completing specific tasks, but there's a separate experience that emerges out of these specific tasks that is more than their sum. In a Final Fantasy game, each battle is a gameplay instance, and navigating a dungeon is a gameplay instance, but then there's the motivation to see what happens next driving you even when you're tired of killing your 300th zombie dragon. That's the gameplay sequence at work.

So while most games these days include both kinds of gameplay experiences, they emphasize each to different degrees. Games far on the instance side include almost all board games, and games like Left 4 Dead that emphasize repeatable mutiplayer experiences. On the sequence-heavy side of things we have adventure games and interactive fiction. Between the extremes we have most modern games, which include overcoming challenges as part of an ongoing progress toward an uncertain final goal.

So I intended to say more, but I think I'll just stick to this for now and come back to it. Generally speaking, the point is that figuring out early on what kind of experience you want to provide and focusing on elements to provide that is important, and among other things you should figure out to what extent you want to emphasize a instanced or sequential experience.

Chess and Resource Management

2009-09-22T11:55:00.000-07:00

My local Starbucks has a chess board sitting around, so I decided to play against myself. Since this gives me perfect predictive power about what my opponent is going to do, it obviously removes some of the standard elements of Chess, but there was one thing I realized when playing it: Chess is first and foremost about mobilization. That is, you begin with all pieces in play, but since most of them are behind a wall of pawns to start with, they don't immediately threaten your opponent. The way you gain options is by moving them into positions where they can form threats.

On reflection, this is more similar than I'd thought to modern strategy games and their treatment of resource management. Think of Magic, where I've chosen cards to place into my deck - the cards are there, but they're not in a usable state, they're not active threats, until I draw them (and have enough mana available to use them). Even if I play an RTS game, say Starcraft, I have a potential army that becomes realized when I gather enough resources to build it, and the question I constantly have to balance is how long I should spend mustering threats before I try to use them - if I'm playing well, I should attack as soon as I think I have a force my opponent won't be able to defend against. This is the same kind of strategy I'm using in Chess - I'm trying to move my units into a position from which they can simultaneously threaten my opponent, and as soon as I think I can launch an attack my opponent can't defend against, I will.

So revelation of the day: mobilizing units and building them are, from the perspective of their impact on strategy, extremely similar (as long as it takes a similar amount of effort). The big difference, of course, is that my units can still be used to defend in many situations before I've moved them at all. If you like, however, you can imagine these situations as my opponent bringing the units into play (like if my opponent plays a card that results in me drawing new cards, or allows me to respond by playing one). It also suggests a certain consistency between the way classic and modern games conceive of strategy.

Just thought that was interesting.

Some Haiku

2009-09-10T22:41:00.000-07:00

I don't know why in particular I've become interested in haiku, but I have. I post them from time to time on Twitter, but it occurs to me that they're likely being lost in the flood of 140-character posts, so I'm assembling them in one place, and may do so every few months if I produce them at a sufficient rate. These were all written this summer, and are in chronological order:

Summer sky beckons/An empty desk behind me/It's time for dinner

Shit-stained sidewalk/Ambulating down the hill/Cars pass on my left

Banana carcass/Its purpose perfectly served/Lies and stares at me

A "frappelatte"/An airport's quiet hours/And a slow-paced walk

Constant dull humming/With a book and a window/Sound of returning

In addition to the 5-7-5 structure, there are a few rules I tend to apply to haiku. First, they should describe a particular moment. Second, you should not only have 17 syllables, but really respect what it means for them to be different lines. That is, I don't think it passes to take a 17-syllable sentence and present it as haiku. In that case the haiku structure is nothing more than an inside joke, whereas if you respect the structure and what the limitations mean, they can force things out of you that you didn't expect.

On Short Games: Canabalt

2009-09-03T23:33:00.000-07:00

Firstly, I see that I've been away for a month now - a variety of tumultuous things have happened in my life recently, so I don't feel too guilty about it.

So anyway, from Raph's Website I just got the link to Canabalt and it got my thinking about short games. You see, the game is very cool - it procedurally generates levels, has nice art, and is capable of producing a "that's badass" experience with simple presentation and single-button interaction. However, it is also immensely unsatisfying, because once you get over the "ah, that's cool" reaction, there's not much else to the game. It's not simply that the game is too short or needs more features - by concept, the game cannot provide anything more than it does.

The issue here is that it takes time for me to fall in love with a game, and even when I like short or experimental games, I never really fall in love with them. This troubles me because I care about art, and I care about games, and I'd like these two concerns to overlap at some point, and it seems that experimental games are an important part of getting there.

Maybe it's just that no one has hit quite the right chord with me to make me fall in love with such a short game, but I don't think that's quite it. The problem is that games, I think, need to allow for exploration, and if I feel like I get it right away, then there's nothing to explore. Exploration here doesn't simply refer to having a big map to cover, though that can work (I'm looking at you, Bethesda games!). A player can explore a game mechanic, or different strategies, or possible narrative paths, or a single narrative path, for that matter.

I'm not trying to discourage anyone from making experimental or short games, by any means, but I do worry that games that don't at least provide a couple hours worth of exploration (whether its by having a two-hour long linear path, repeatably simple gameplay with deep strategy, or just lots of stuff to discover in a virtual space) are ultimately limited in how deeply they can affect us.

That is, for games and art to converge, I think we may need to have larger-scale experiements.

Preliminary Eternal Poison

2009-08-10T17:09:00.000-07:00

Because the only way to improve on an awkward title is to add more multi-syllabic words!

I bought Eternal Poison yesterday in a moment of weakness. I realized I hadn't bought a game in two months, which I decided was probably unhealthy, and the game had several solid points in its favor:

1) Nifty cover art. (see above)

2) It's put out by Atlus.

3) On the back, it advertises that you can bind enemy's souls. Pretty cool, but then it elaborates that afterwards you can "enslave" them or "sacrifice them for profit." Yeah, this is pretty much the exact same thing that made me buy Folklore (which I don't regret). It's almost like these crazy Japanese people have figured out the keywords that will make me buy anything they make. Almost.

So anyway, I've played about a half-hour of the game so far, but already have some commentary. Firstly, it definitely delivers on the promise on the back of the box - you play a witch who runs around binding demons into servitude, which is awesome. You also have an ally (familiar?) who is a magical wolf with antlers on cold fire. Somehow it doesn't seem quite as absurd when you see it, though.

The other side of the proverbial coin is that...the UI is kind of clunky. This is honestly kind of shocking from a moderate-budget strategy RPG. Maybe I've just been spoiled by the likes of Disgaea, but I feel like absolutely everything I want to do just has two-or-three-too-many button presses involved. What's worse, every time you attack an enemy, it cuts to this 3D environment and plays out the attack animation in close up. That sounds really cool, except that it takes a good 5 seconds to load the animation, another 5 seconds to load back the tactical map, and up to 10 seconds of attacking animation when all I'm just using a normal attack to finish off a mook. If it were, for instance, a special animation when I score a critical hit, or a special animation the first time I attack the enemy leader, then I'd be fine with that, but not every single time anything on the map does anything. That's just excessive. Fortunately, there seems to be an option to turn these animations off (I didn't know what they meant by "animations off" in the menu screen when I first ran across it, and certainly didn't expect that I'd want to actually come back and turn them off).

Finally, after each battle, it asks you if you want to save your game, and if you do, then it returns you to the main menu screen. This isn't a huge deal, since you can just load the game to continue, but the whole "save and continue" idea has been around long enough that failing to include it is kind of befuddling. It's almost like these design choices were made by someone in the early 90's who used an arcane technique to communicate with a modern team of developers.

All in all the clunkiness is outweighed by the personality of the game so far, and I'm definitely going to continue playing, but it boggles my mind that a game would ship in a condition where in a half-hour I can come up with a multiple-page-long list of obvious and easy improvements. Then again, I guess that's why I believe there's a market for people like me in the first place.

-Silent Ellipsis

What is a Bubble? (Philosopher's Economics)

2009-08-06T21:40:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about economics a bit recently (I doubt I'm the only one), and a few things regularly creep back up into my mind. One of those is the question, "What is a bubble?" Now I'm not asking what people mean when they use the word - I know that much - I'm asking what it represents. In theory it's a disconnect between the perceived state of the market and its actual state, but I want to see what it is one level deeper than that. Where did the money lost go? Why is it that bad accounting results in our society being poorer?

Before we begin, full disclosure: I'm not an economist, and I'm not an expert on the intricacies of the market. In fact, I'm historically the kind of person that doesn't even like thinking about economics. In my defense, however, recent history has shown that many supposed experts on the market are nothing of the kind, and it's also forced many of us who would prefer to spend our time on other topics to think a bit harder about the economic system we live with. I'm also not going to try and explore the intricacies of the market here; we're going to be looking at fairly high-level concepts instead.

What I propose is a mental exercise: imagine, for the time being, that you do not know what "money" is, or quite what an "economy" is, and you are presented with our society ("our" meaning American society, here, but much of this will apply to other developed countries). You do know that the people in this society adhere to a complex codified system of behavior in order to allocate resources, which they refer to as "the economy".

So how does this system work? It seems to have a number of conditions and goals:

1) It seeks to produce value for the system as a whole. Unfortunately (very unfortunately, as we shall see), what qualifies as "value" is vague and isn't universally agreed upon.

2) The system needs to allocate resources so that they are spent on the projects best capable of adding value to the system (in order to fulfill the goal above). Note that just because a project contributes value today doesn't mean it will contribute value tomorrow, so this must be constantly re-evaluated.

3) The system motivates citizens to be productive by allowing those who create the most value to consume more of the value produced.

4) The system requires citizens to consume its products. This is for two reasons: first, the act of consumption is an expression of faith in and acceptance of the system. Second, and more importantly, it is a means of measuring the perceived value the system is producing.

So (4) ties back into (1) - it's how the system deals with the ambiguity of "value." If a citizen consumes or makes use of the products of the society, they are assumed to be getting value out of it (or else they would choose not to consume those products). Now you also have a way of measuring the productivity of projects - if their products are consumed, they are productive projects.

We have a basic idea of how this system likely works, now. When citizens produce value, they are rewarded by being able to claim or use up some of the value produced, and their consumption is an indicator that the producers of whatevever they consumed are contributing value, so these producers are also allowed to consume, etc. This is how it works once you "get the ball rolling", but how does the consumption chain start? Who is the prime mover, if you will?

In this case, it's financial institutions like banks that have the authority to declare that a citizen deserves to consume before they've proven that they're creating value. In theory this is because the bank has determined that the likelihood of this citizen producing future value is very high, and because the consumption chain needs to get started to keep the society as a whole productive. Since the objective is to have the rate at which value is created constantly increase, the rate at which value is consumed must also increase, so the purpose of these institutions is to bring the rate of consumption closer to the rate of production, so that the system gets more feedback.

At this point, things are starting to look pretty familiar, and we can see where the current crisis fits into this chain: bad predictions about how much value citizens are likely to contribute. However, let's step back and consider what that means.

In the case of a real estate bubble, we're talking about building houses. The financial institution is deciding that a citizen should have a house, but it turns out, eventually, that the citizen didn't create enough value to justify the consumption. In other words, the society has decided that the current house owner does not deserve the house. That's what the bubble means. The bubble popping is the large-scale recognition that house owners have not earned their houses, and the subsequent punishment enacted by the system.

Now you may not remember getting together with your fellow countrymen and having a vote where you decided to punish house owners. That's because there was no such vote - instead we have a tool in this system that automates the decision for us, called "money" (along with contracts and credit scores and such). If you remember, however, we agreed not to talk about money when describing the system, and there was a point: by giving ourselves a little distance we get a new view of the system. It is the same core system whether we vote to punish or not - money is just a means of implementation.

So back to the situation at hand: the system is punishing people, both house owners and financial institutions, but on a large enough scale that it has destructive consequences. When the financial institution loses sufficient authority in the system, it is no longer able to delegate resources, and the rate of consumption falls. This has a chain effect, or viewed another way, it interrupts the chain effect the system so carefully created. If you do not have consumption, you don't know where to allocate your resources (because you don't know who's contributing value), so resources will simply sit unallocated, and projects grind to a halt. In our society, this manifests in a rise in the rate of unemployment.

Now here's the weird part: at no point in this story was a problem caused by a decrease in the rate of value production. That's the result of the problem. The problem was actually too much value production, or rather, "unjustified" value production. Now we have nice houses, which carry a lot of value, just sitting around unused because we can't decide who should get to live in them.

From this perspective, our current situation is rather obviously absurd. As a society, we have the resources and infrastructure we need to be prosperous, but we're stuck in an extended period of indecision about how to allocate these resources. In order to fix the situation, you simply need to start allocating resources again (in fact, to a large extent it doesn't matter where you allocate them, as long as you enable consumption and get the chain effect restarted).

This makes recent proposals seem much more reasonable than they appear at face value to many Americans. Bailing out banks is, in this little model of ours, synonymous with "not punishing" those banks, so that they can continue to allocate resources. If (and this is a big if) you add well balanced regulations to the mix, you can force the bank to do a better job of allocating resources without interrupting its operation, and getting it to do a better job allocating resources was the whole point of the punishment feedback loop in the first place.

A stimulus package is an alternative of the same idea - but in this case you skip the institutions that performed poorly and have the government allocate resources directly. Again, as long as the policy enables consumption, we start getting feedback about value production, which allows the system to adjust resource allocation and slide back into an efficient state of operation.

Note that this doesn't say anything about how these policies are actually being implemented. Bailing out banks without adding regulation might reinforce their poor performance, and result in the chain effect starting back up, but at low efficiency. A stimulus might not allocate resources fast enough to effectively jumpstart the chain effect. Either way, the principles behind the policies clearly have some grounding.

We could go further, but I have to stop at some point, and going further into policy risks getting us too far away from the core concepts. So what's the takeaway? Well if you've gotten to this point and think that what I've said makes some kind of sense, I consider the post a success, but if there is one idea I want people to come away with, it's this: money is a means, not an end.

We were able to tell a perfectly coherent story about our economy without the concept of money being involved, and we can see where it fits in - it's the common unit of measure for the value of any product. Its purpose is to distribute the evaluation mechanism among all citizens in the system, which is important because, as mentioned before, our products need to be constantly evaluated to have efficiency in the system. In other words, dollar bills are evaluation tokens, or a mini-vote for a the value of things we consume. This is clearly not how citizens tend to think of them, however; since these tokens can be exchanged for items of value, we think of them as having inherent value, and treat them as property.

The first step to a more sane system might be recognizing what money actually is.

-Silent Ellipsis

Basho Translation

2009-08-03T21:06:00.000-07:00

Nothing to do with videogames today. I spontaneously decided to post my own translation of Basho's most famous haiku to Twitter earlier, and I wanted to take a second to explain it a little (is that supposedly against the spirit of haiku? well it's not my poem to begin with, so I think I'm free to analyze it). The original, in case you know Japanese but don't know it, is:

古池や蛙飛びこむ水の音

furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto

My translation is:

Back at the old pond
A frog leaps and dives within
The sound of water

So a couple things to note here. Firstly, I maintain the haiku syllable structure. Not all translations do, but haiku has the rule for a reason - it forces you to pick your syllables carefully. Contrast with this translation by Curtis Hidden Page (reference):

A lonely pond in age-old stillness sleeps . . .
Apart, unstirred by sound or motion . . . till
Suddenly into it a lithe frog leaps.

You can add a lot of detail by elongating the translation, sure. Conversely you can super-shorten it to just get the idea across very quickly, but the original poem is neither of these. It's just long enough to introduce a little personality into a thought, without being long enough to pin down and define the personality.

Ok, so secondly, the word "back" is nowhere to be found in the original, but the poem as a whole definitely gives the impression that the poet considers the pond a very familiar place, which the word expresses. Also, the wording maintains a certain ambiguity - it's not clear whether the poet is present at the pond or not. He might be back at the old pond, taking it in, when a frog leaps and creates a moment of awareness, or the frog-leaping might be occuring "back at the old pond" while he's elsewhere. I like the ambiguity, myself.

Thirdly, I use the singular "frog." In Japanese, there is no distinction between singular and plural, so kawazu is ambiguous. In English, we have to pick one, and my understanding is that Basho thought of it as a single frog (his painting to accompany the poem depicts one frog), so I went with it.

Fourthly, tobikomu is made up of two components. By itself, tobu means to fly, and the komu suggests being enveloped, thus I use two verbs to express the meaning of the multi-faceted word. This is apparently an unusual move - many people focus on the brevity of the haiku, but this word actually feels pretty long and considered to me, so I give it that time in translation.

Finally, "the sound of water" is a pretty literal and orthodox translation of the last line, but it's unusual that I lead into it with the word "within", suggesting the metaphor that the frog is becoming a sound. It does fit with the structure of the original poem, and it's a bit ambiguous, but it's fair to say that this is the second place (the first being the occurence of "back") where I'm taking some poetic license. I think it fits the impression of the poem as a whole, however. We don't know if Basho actually sees the frog, but in theory he does hear the frog. It's possible that he is surmising the existence of a frog based solely on the sound he hears. Either way, it is clear that Basho is leaving us with "the sound of water" as an indication that after the leap and the dive, the sound, and the impression of the action, is all that remains. It is in this sense that we might think of the frog as literally becoming a sound.

That's it for now. I seem to be on a roll this week with the posts. We'll see if I burn out soon from over-posting.

-Silent Ellipsis

FFIV: Archetypes; Also: Moon Expeditionary Party

2009-07-31T20:26:00.000-07:00

Two posts in one day! Maybe I'm going crazy, or maybe I'm just listening to too much FFIV music.

So to follow up on the OC Remix post, I wanted to talk about FFIV generally. It has a couple qualities that are interesting, and to contextualize them, we'll consider the game's role in Final Fantasy history (and thus JRPG history). The game represents a dramatic shift - that is, a shift toward drama!

See the original Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games were almost like Western RPGs in that they really didn't have preset characters - the characters were just empty shells for you to move around and use in combat. In Final Fantasy you didn't even have to use any characters in particular - you could have a party of four thieves if you really wanted to (not that it's advisable...). These games had a story, but they were really about "look, you can explore dungeons!", much like the original D&D was.

Sequels started to add more established characters with established party roles, but FFIV took this to a new level, with a huge cast of diverse and in some cases multi-faceted (I know, shocking) characters, FFIV was the forebearer of JRPGs that focus on character development and convoluted plots.

So the interesting thing is the sheer number of genre-defining archetypes, both good and bad, that appear in this game. It's almost as if the developers realized that this was a direction all future games of the genre would be going, and decided to explore the possibility space in order to figure out what worked. The game includes betrayal, redemption, regicide, patricide, fratricide, genocide, suicide, love triangles, tragic star-crossed lovers, strippers, people who wear masks only to reveal that they're incredibly beautiful underneath, revelations about the origin of the protagonist and the antagonist, a captured useless girlfriend who ends up in your final party, characters who become substantially more powerful and useful just before they die, boss fights that you have to win so you can watch a cutscene where you lose, a last surviving member of a species that joins your party, instant adultification, interplanetary travel, vehicles that carry other vehicles, a sampling of every D&D class, and lots and lots of character death. This game has everything.

So if you want to know if a given story element will work in your RPG, a good rule of thumb is to think about when it happened in FFIV (and trust me, it happened in FFIV), and whether or not it made the game better. So moral dilemmas, yeah that was pretty sweet. Having your girlfriend spend a big chunk of the game tied to a chair not doing anything, not so much.

So the second interesting thing about FFIV is that it's one of the few FF games where I honestly believe that the characters in your party are special and are qualified to go save the world. FFVI is also ok in this regard, but otherwise...really, why is Butz (excuse me, "Barts") saving the world again? He's a random guy with a chocobo. Yippee.

So for the second half of my post, we'll be going through a mental exercise. Let's say you had to select a team to go with you to the Moon to battle an elemental force of destruction based solely on the character summaries I give here. Who do you take?

[warning: mild spoilers ahead]

1. Cecil (FFIV) - This guy is a half-lunarian who became a dark knight and captain of the elite fighting force the Red Wings. He eventually rebels against his own king's tyranny and ascends a legendary mountain to perform a purification ritual and become a paladin. That's right, he's both a dark knight AND a paladin, and his ancestors are FROM THE MOON. That's not only the most interesting background of any FF protagonist, it makes him a rather obvious choice for the mission to the Moon.

2. Rydia (FFIV) - She's the last member of a race of magical humanoid "callers", and a personal friend of Leviathan, the king of mythical creatures (on Earth at least). She can use both black magic and summon things. Also, she has hair that partially covers one of her eyes. Yeah, she's clearly going to the Moon.

3. Kain (FFIV) - It's not immediately clear why he's extraordinary, since his apparent backstory is simply that he's a soldier, but Cecil will vouch for him. What's more, he can jump really high...like really, really high...like this-is-a-good-technique-for-beating-bosses-with-a-countdown-timer-before-they-attack kind of high. He's in.

4. Rosa (FFIV) - Here's my big FFIV exception. Rosa's story is this: she's Cecil's girlfriend. Wow, that's special. She's also a healer, which makes her useful, but we can probably find a better one. You can see Cecil when he gets back.

5. Edge (FFIV) - He's a ninja. Pretty cool by itself, but in order to determine how useful that makes him, we have to apply the Law of Ninja Quantity, which states that the power of ninja is inversely proportional to their quantity. So how many other ninja are in FFIV? What's that, none? That makes this guy a maximally powerful ninja. Also, he can convince a paladin that it's ok to steal an airship because "the ship wants us to have it." Those are some skills we can use on the Moon.

6. Butz (FFV) - I think we covered this guy already, but here we go again. He ran across a meteor and decided to investigate, and somehow got caught up in a party that decided to save the world for no particular reason. He can only come if he's willing to wait inside the Fat Chocobo's belly.

7. Faris (FFV) - Now this character is more interesting - a cross-dressing pirate! Despite the inherent coolness of being a crossdressing pirate...it's not obvious what they have to offer in particular, either. They're on the waiting list.

8. Cloud (FFVII) - This guy is a delusional terrorist who has somehow managed to convince himself that he was part of an elite fighting force when he wasn't. Yes, I know people think he's cool, but that's his actual backstory. Take your giant vegetable cleaver and go cook our heroes something, spiky-haired kid.

9. Barret (FFVII) - He's a guy with a gun instead of an arm. He's also a terrorist. That's about it. There's no explanation as to why this guy should be any better at saving the world than the mooks with guns you spend the game decimating.

10. Terra (FFVI) - She's a half-esper who was captured by the Empire and turned into a lethal weapon and a source of magitech research using a slave crown. She is the link between the human realm and the realm of magic, and the only non-FFIV protagonist to have a legitimate reason to be in a party that saves the world. She can also cast both black magic AND white magic, and wield swords, so we got our healer role covered in style. She's in.

11. Gogo (FFVI) - The other solid FFVI candidate, Gogo has spent an unspecified amount of time living inside an enormous monster. That's right, he literally knows what it's like to be in the belly of the beast. Also he can do everything...that's right, everything (he's a mimic by trade). I would definitely want to have this guy around as a wild card.

12. Locke (FFVI) - A good example of an FFVI character who probably doesn't have Moon chops. Don't get me wrong, Locke is very cool and stylish, but his background is that he's a thief (sorry, "treasure hunter"). Could be handy, but we already have a ninja, and when it comes time to fight an elemental force of destruction, what does he have to offer? Enthusiasm. He can join the ghosts that appear to cheerlead for the party before combat.

13. Squall (FFVIII) - He's a student at a school that's training kids to be commandos, or something like that. He also wields a gunblade, which is like a sword...with a gun inside it. I think the appropriate use for that weapon is to have Edge throw it at things. He's out.

14. Irvine (FFVIII) - Here's the depressing thing about this character: he's one of the more interesting characters in FFVIII. His backstory is that he's a sniper, but he doesn't actually like to shoot at people. I don't think we're going to be bringing someone to the Moon so that he can sit around and not shoot at things.

15. Zidane (FFIX) - This guy doesn't even have a backstory. He's a thief, like Locke, and his special characteristic is that he has a monkey tail. Why? I don't know! In theory that makes him non-human, but no one even seems to care that he has a tail, so I doubt it's an indication that he's part Moon-person. He's not coming.

16. Garnet (FFIX) - This girl is basically like Rosa, except she can also summon things and she's a princess. Those are nifty traits, but we already have Rydia on our team, who seems to be a lot more proficient, so this girl's out.

17. Tidus (FFX) - MAJOR SPOILERS [for remainder of Tidus description] Tidus is one of those characters that seems to have no particular reason to be important or part of the team, but is revealed at the end to have an inextricable connection to the force threatening the world with destruction. Also, he's a ghost. Potentially useful, but he's kind of specialized for the FFX world, and it's not like he has any special ghostly powers or anything. His special abilities include being good at Blitz Ball. I think we can move on.

18. Yuna (FFX) - Yeah, you'll never guess, she's another Rosa/Garnet. The main argument for her is that she's an important priestess of some religion. Again, kind of specific to the FFX setting - I don't see Zeromus really being intimidated by the ability to make people who are already dead rest peacefully.

19. Anonymous Hero (FFXI) - I believe the words I'm looking for are, "If everyone's super, then no one's super." This person is no better explained than the FFI heroes.

20. Vaan (FFXII) - He's an orphan who kills dire rats and dreams of being a sky pirate. He's not even a real pirate like Faris is. He's like Zidane, but without a tail, so we can be 100% certain that he's human and has nothing special going on.

21. Fran (FFXII) - She's a viera who wears completely absurd looking armor. That said, the outfit makes her very distracting, so she might be handy to have around as a decoy. She's on the waiting list.

And that's it. I didn't have time to cover everyone, but it's a pretty representative list of SNES-and-onward characters, and based solely on background story and powers they are claimed to have in the narrative, I really would choose the cast of FFIV (plus Terra and Gogo) to be my Moon Expeditionary Party. Apparently the existence of an explanation for how or why a given character is saving the world has been deemed unnecessary in recent FF games, which I think is unfortunate. Also note that just because a character didn't get to come with us to the Moon doesn't mean that I don't think they're cool (as in the case of Locke) - just that there's no particular reason to believe this character is qualified to save the world.

-Silent Ellipsis

FFIV OC Remix

2009-07-31T14:07:00.000-07:00

First thing's first, it's my blog's birthday today! Happy birthday, Dreamscape.

Next on the agenda - I've been listening to the OC Remix of the FFIV soundtrack. You can grab it here. I don't know why they have Yang on the cover art and not Cid/Pallom&Porom/Tellah/Edward, but whatever. It covers the whole of FFIV and is pretty faithful (though obviously with more techno beats and electric guitars than the original had).

Personally, it's kind of hit-and-miss: some of the tracks are awesome, like Tundra of Dwarves, Evoking the Dawn, or Somewhere to Hide, and some are less awesome (I'm not going to name names). The Zeromus music seems to encapsulate this by being both awesome and bad at the same time. It's like they had a good song going, and then ended up cooking it too long and burnt it. There's also seems to be an implicit admission that the song has something wrong with it, since there's another version included by most of the same people (and a couple by other people). The second attempt is somehow worse, though. And by somehow, I mean because what passes for evil villain speech when executed with a death metal voice sounds simply absurd when executed with a voice that sounds vaguely human.

Despite my being frustrated with it, I keep listening to the Zeromus music, and it reminds me of something - writing good music is really hard. This might seem obvious, but every once in a while I do stop and wonder if I like the music I do simply because I gave it time to grow on me. This is more likely to pop in my head if I go for a while listening only to music I like (and thus have little standard of comparison). So I find it really fascinating to listen to things that are close to being awesome - the "less awesome" tracks here aren't really bad, they're just unbalanced in one way or another, and when I listen to them a couple times I feel like I can start to pick out exactly where they started going wrong.

Anyway, despite my having some reservations, I recommend you download the music (it's free, afterall!).

-Silent Ellipsis

Crazy Ideas for Crazy Times: Pre-Pre-Ordering

2009-07-29T14:38:00.000-07:00

There's a very relevant and well-put article on Jeff's blog about funding for indie game development. The summary is this: the situation looks bleak. On most platforms, financially survivable options are surprisingly narrow. And yet AAA games are trending towards larger budgets and banking on blockbusters, which means there's very little room for "risky" development.

The article also addresses a recent proposal by Gabe Newell of Valve: public funding for games. Basically, instead of starting with publishers, the game begins with funding from the games community, that can choose what kind of games get developped and potentially get a return on their investment. Jeff doesn't think this sounds like a particularly viable option, pointing out, among other things, that if every player is an investor, they may have legal rights relative to the developer that would get, well, messy.

In my opinion, the public funding idea is really interesting, but it seems like the wrong part of it is getting emphasized - if I put down $50 for a cool game idea to be developed, it's not because I'm hoping for a return on my investment, it's because I want the game to be made! That's giving me my $50 of value - I don't also need to get my money back two years later (from what, selling copies to the fans...the one who provided the money to create it in the first place?)

The way to make an idea like this more viable is to focus on the part where players want cool games and are theoretically willing to pay to have them. Here's my variant: pre-pre-ordering. The idea is very simple, and similar to what was proposed above - players want to see cool games made, so they're willing to put down money to have them made, but trying to make it a standard investment relationship is messy, so instead they put down money just to own the game when it's made, on the condition that it actually does get made.

That is, the game developer comes up with a cool idea, maybe some concept art/writing/prototype mechanics, and presents them to the potential players. If the players want the game to be made, they basically agree "I will buy this game if it is made" (which is legally binding, like saying you'll pay for an item on ebay is). Now if a sufficient amount of "potential" funding is raised to make the game, then the players' credit cards are charged, and production begins. If not, then the players keep their money. Of course, once the game is completed, those who pre-pre-ordered get sent a copy without having to pay again.

There is still a question about what happens if a developer fails to deliver a game. In theory they would have to return as much of the money as they can, but it's theoretically impossible for them to return all of it, and this only needs to happen a few times for players to become disillusioned with the system. An alternative setup is that the players aren't charged anything until the game is actually released - in this case, the pre-pre-orders are used to secure immediate funding from another source (and in theory, it should be easy to do so if you're guaranteed a certain amount of revenue).

The second question is, do players who pre-pre-order get some kind of say in the development of the game? Generally speaking, I don't want players to be making major design decisions (for that matter, I don't want publishers making major design decisions), but I do think the model would benefit from giving players a vote in certain aspects of development. This could also be something that costs extra: you can pre-pre-order at the basic cost of purchasing the game, or offer more to be able to vote on community decisions, get guaranteed access to beta testing (or even alpha testing), get your name in the credits, etc.

So that's the idea, minus a marketable name.

-Silent Ellipsis

Natural Funativity: The Rant

2009-07-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

As part of Ian Schreiber's online course on game design this summer, I've just come from reading Natural Funativity, by Noah Falstein. I would like to preface this whole post by saying that the author seems like an intelligent person and that I agree with most of the general (rough, approximate, vague) points he wants to make about fun being related to skills that could be potentially useful (whether or not they in fact are).

Now that I've said that, I'll proceed with the short version of this post: ugh.

Longer version: Apparently the word "natural" means the same thing when applied to game design it does in all other contexts - from the African veldt! Falstein's argument is that what makes an activity fun today is that it was useful to our paleolithic ancestors. Not an absurd idea on its face, but Falstein proceeds as though this were a clear fact, despite providing next to zero evidence for it.

The evidence he does provide is generally in the form of hypothetical anecdotes or examples of analogies between common modern and supposedly common paleolithic activities. Now, as a student of philosophy, I'm all about hypothetical examples, but in philosophy we generally apply them to questions for which there is no way to gather empirical evidence, like "is determinism incompatible with free will?" or "how many people are on this chair, the one on which I'm sitting?" (if you think the answer is obviously one, you're probably not a philosopher or much of a party animal)*.

There are several reasons this bothers me. For one, I have a lot of respect for biologists and evolutionary theory, so when people start throwing around stories about our ancestors and pretending like they're facts and not fabrications of their imagination, it bugs me. Secondly, it creates some instant associations with evo-psych, which I'm not a fan of. Thirdly, I think it's wrong on some level. Fourthly, there's no real reason to go back to cavemen to explain these things.

Let's go back to thirdly - the part where Falstein is wrong. The hypothesis is that things are fun because they were useful to our ancestors, but not to us. Yet from early on in the article:

"So not surprisingly, when you really look at not only games, but all human entertainment, you see that at its heart it is all about learning about survival and reproduction and the necessary associated social rules and behaviors."

Yes, social rules. Falstein doesn't think we're operating with the same social rules we were x-thousand years ago**, does he? And yet this is immediately brought up as one of the first examples of things we learn from games and entertainment. Generally speaking, it seems that Falstein is completely forgetting that genetic evolution is only part of the explanation for our behavior. I'm ok with people leaning toward the nature side of the "nurture vs. nature" debate, but he seems to not even recognize that any such debate exists.

This brings me to fourthly again: we don't need the cavemen frame to understand what we're talking about. We just need the "human people" frame. For instance, Falstein attributes all collecting and gathering behaviors as being derived from the need to gather berries, as in:

"There are a huge number of popular entertainments that involve gathering. Casinos packed with slot machines recreate berry-picking, abstracted and refined into an RSS-related compulsion."

Why does it have to be about berries? I mean, isn't it just as easy to say, "people like collecting things because it results in them having more things"? It also lets me avoid the burden of having extra assertions to back up. I think this is an important point for anyone writing an essay, about anything. Examples are good, but each time you include one, you're also usually introducing a new assertion (at the very least, that your example is an instance of X). Thus, examples only help your cause when you can convincingly show that they support your main point. Otherwise, they're just one more thing for someone to object to (for instance, I think comparing casinos to berry-picking is a pretty bad analogy). Falstein seems to think that more assertions are always better.

On top of this "fun is about cavemen behavior" center there is an organizing strucural part of the essay, about how there's three kinds of fun activities: physical, mental, and social. My main objection here is, "doesn't that include the entirety of human activities?" I mean, it's presented as a practical tool for thinking about what kinds of activities might be fun, but if it includes the entire set of activities, I don't see what's practical about it. It's like saying "human beings tend to like the taste of just two things: organic things and inorganic things. For instance, they like both pig flesh and salt." Of course, not everyone eats pig flesh, but I'm pretty sure prehistoric people did, which is why we eat it today (see, I just used science)!

To conclude, I don't think I would have had any problem with this essay if it were framed as "I find that a useful thought experiment when designing a feature is thinking, what might a cavemen need to do?" Instead, Falstein feels the need to have his thought experiment carry the authority of fact, but without taking the time to convince us that it actually is fact.

And that's the rant (for now).

-Silent Ellipsis

*Or you're both an animal and an animalist. Shout out to all the animalists out there! By the way, I think your theory is ridiculous. Text me if you want a QED.

**The vagueness about timing also kind of bugs me. I mean, human societies have seen a lot of variety in a lot of places over the last 10,000+ years, but we're asked to imagine that there's modern man, and then before that we were all living on the African veldt since forever.

Why MMO?

2009-07-18T12:16:00.000-07:00

Massively has an article up about the trend in MMOs to allow for easier and easier solo play. This hearkens back to a post I made a while back on the same topic, but it still seems like most of the other arguments I'm seeing on the topic travel in the opposite direction of mine. The Massively question is: Given an MMO, why make it more single-player? For me the question is: Given a game concept, why make it an MMO?

I'm not uniformly against MMOs or anything - I actually believe that they have a huge amount of untapped potential. The keyword, though, is "untapped." The kind of gameplay we see in existing MMOs is, by and large, very similar to what you can get in a single-player game (or a merely-multiplayer game, like Neverwinter Nights, Halo, Mario-Kart, or anything that has less than 100 people in the server at once). However, in an MMO the content is more strictly gated, the space between levels is artificially extended, and you can't have any effect on the game world. So I guess what I mean is they're watered-down versions of single-player games.

So what I see isn't an evolution of MMOs, but rather a presumption that MMOs are the standard, causing them to open up to audiences that weren't originally interested. So again, if the game is trying to appeal to people who want to play solo, then why is it an MMO? The actual answer seems obvious when I'm in a cynical mood: because MMOs are trendy and offer high profitability. The profitability portion comes from the fact that you can make more money from each committed user in an online game than you could by selling them a traditional game for a set price - if addicted they'll keep shelling out. Also, online games are relatively immune to piracy, because in addition to a working, hacked version of the client software, you need an actual server to play on.

That said, MMOs are a very risky investment, for several reasons (ooh, time for a list, I love this part):

1) Since standard MMOs rely on being addictive, it's not enough to convince someone to play it - you have to convince them to live your MMO.

2) Since MMOs rely on being addictive, most players won't play more than one at a time. That means that most of your potential audience is already occupied playing WoW, so you need to give them a reason to play your game instead of another (whereas a player who bought Halo 3 can, and probably will, also buy Gears of War 2).

3) They're friggin multiplayer. Even though many of the developers at this point have a lot of experience making multiplayer online games, it's still no easy feat to make the game work properly, and this fact makes both programming and designing the game harder, which is final nail in the coffin of anyone who dreams of making a low-budget MMO.

And since they're so high-risk, clearly the publisher is going to try and minimize risk by insisting that the title is as similar to existing MMOs as possible.

So is the tradeoff worthwhile? It certainly is if you're Activision-Blizzard, but given the sheer number of MMOs in development, I can't help thinking that many of these developers would have been better off with a different strategy.

-Silent Ellipsis

Japanese and American Hero Stories

2009-07-12T13:21:00.000-07:00

This post is going to be about an over-generalization, but one that I think is interesting: a couple differences in popular representations of heroes in Japan and America.

Firstly, order of operations. I've noticed that one stereotypical anime/video game hero story in Japan goes something like this: There is a group of powerful/supernatural beings X, which threaten civilians/humans; one special member of X, who happens to also be unusually powerful, stands up against his group in order to protect the civilians/humans.

This "special" member of X is often half-human, or has a relationship with a human/civilian that is the foundation of their dissent from group X. The key part here is that group X exists prior to the dissent of its special member. Consider some examples (warning, some of the examples may contain mild spoilers, key word being mild):

Shikabane Hime - The recent anime that brought this to mind. In it undead creatures called shikabane terrorize humans, but one such shikabane (the title character) stands up against them in order to protect humanity.

Devil May Cry - Devils once freely traveled between their world and the human world, terrorizing humans, until the Legendary Dark Knight Sparda stood against his devil kin and sealed the gate between the worlds. Now his half-human son Dante has to maintain his father's legacy by killing devils that make it across to the human world and preventing cultists from re-opening the gate.

Vampire Hunter D - Vampires once freely traveled the world terrorizing humans. One half-vampires, however, stands up against them and protects common humans.

Vampire Princess Miyu - Shinma are supernatural creatueres that feed on humans. At any time one shinma (currently Miyu) is allowed to live in the human world as a "guardian", on the condition that they protect humans from any other shinma that try to pass into the human world. Awesome aside in this case: as long as Miyu protects humans from OTHER shinma, she's allowed to feed on their blood.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - Dracula's castle appears once every hundred years, but when it mysteriously appears only 5 years after its last disappearance, Dracula's own half-vampire son rises from a 300 year sleep to enter the castle and protect humanity from the threat it represents.

Rurouni Kenshin - In a time when swordsmen of skill are regularly deployed as a weapon of oppression, the hiten mitsurugi school was created with the following principles: owe allegiance to no one and protect the defenseless from those with power. Kenshin wanders around protecting civilians from other swordsmen that try to use their martial prowess unjustly.

Gundam - The Earth federation is threatened by the Principality of Zeon, which has at its disposal a "newtype" named Char. The Earth forces start to gain momentum once Amuro, who happens to also be a newtype, happens to pilot the experimental mobile suit Gundam and show a startling affinity for it.

Evangelion - Mysterious alien entities called angels descend upon the Earth and threaten humanity. Humans study them and create an angel-like being in their own image to protect themselves (note, though, that the "hero" status and Eva Unit 1 and its pilot become extremly ambiguous here).

Final Fantasy IV - The Baron's Army has begun aggressively attacking other cities in order to seize magical crystals. The Dark Knight Cecil, captain of the Red Wings, is overcome by guilt and turns against his king and the evil he has come to represent.

Kung-Fu Hustle - Not an anime, but the rule applies. The protagonist is a wannabe gang member trying to break into the famous Axe Gang. As the over-the-top martial arts being used to vie fro control of a tiny town continue getting more ridiculous, he must eventually face his destiny and become "the one" to save the town.

Ninja Gaiden, Trigun - These are two examples where the explanation might qualify as too much of a spoiler.

The point is that this a very prevalent structure. The hero arises as a response to some imminent or ever-present threat, especially if their own empowerment has a direct relationship to the threat.

Now the contrast: in many American hero stories, the hero arises first, and then a threat emerges as an implicit or explicit response to the presence of the hero. This structure is used largely for the nice narrative rhythm it creates (small conflicts are resolved by the pseudo-climax of the hero's rise, and then a true threat creates a greater conflict with a greater climax). Villains are supernatural or otherwise powerful, but are often represented as being poor derivatives or corrupt versions of the hero(es). Some examples that come to mind:

Spiderman - A guy is bitten by a radioactive (movie version: genetically modified) spider and gains spider-related powers. He starts cleaning up crime in his city until unnaturally powerful super-villains start emerging to threaten his crime-fighting work. In one comic, I believe written by JMS, attention is specifically drawn to the fact that so many of his opponents have also had a totemic relationship with an animal (such as Doctor Octopus, Lizard Man, etc.), but suggests they are all poor imitations.

Iron Man - In the movie version, Tony Stark creates a basic armor suit early on, and later creates a much more advanced model capable of flight. A villain gets their hands on the original suit's design and manages to create their own, evil version of it. They fight.

X-Men - As part of the natural evolution of humanity, some people are born with super powers (hey, evolution, stop slacking off and give us super powers already!). A backlash based on the fear of mundane humans causes some of the mutants to become bitter and cynical, and follow Magneto in aggressively and violently overthrowing the non-mutant controlled system.

The Power Puff Girls - Sugar, spice, everything nice, and Chemical X create super-powered kindergarteners. Otherwise mediocre villains become highly annoyed and start accumulating power in order to thwart the super-powered kids. Their ultimate rival, Mojo-Jojo, was also created by Chemical X. As a super-hero parody, this show reflects the creator's perceptions of super-hero stereotypes.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Four turtles and a rat living in the sewers encounter a chemical called "the ooze" and become pizza-eating ninjas that fight crime. Eventually Shredder, a discontent student of the rat's former master, has been finding street kids and training them to become his ninja army of the foot! (also a super-hero parody, as well as a martial-arts parody)

Harry Potter - A young boy discovers that he is a wizard, and spends half a book delighting in the joys of magic and broom-riding. He slowly comes to discover, however, that there is a lurking threat from the Dark Lord Voldemort, who repeatedly tries to use his mysterious connection to Harry to return to life (this one's British, not American, but who cares).

Ghostbusters - A group of paranormal investigating pseudo-scientists develop techniques that somehow actually work and allow them to capture ghosts. They start acquiring fame and fortune, but an alarming increase in the amount of paranormal activity in the area suggests the emergence of a powerful new ghostly threat.

There are obviously counter-examples, as well, but I'm not trying to demonstrate a law, just a trend. It seems much more likely to be the case in an American/western hero story for the heroes to be a boon to civilization, and for the evil forces they fight to have "eliminate the heroes" as a principal goal. In Japanese stories it's more common for the threat to exist and for the heroes to arise in an effort to return things to a state of normalcy.

Other trends in the Japanese stories include an increased likelihood that the hero is a subset of the threatening group, and an increased likelihood that the hero will retire or give up their power at the end of the story. The Japanese hero is more likely to be operating in secret (I don't mean with a hidden identity, I mean without normal people even being aware that a hero exists). Finally, the Japanese hero is more likely than the American hero to NOT be the protagonist of the story. If the protagonist is a hero in the Japanese story, they are often surrounded by much more supernatural/powerful allies. I'm not going to give a lot of examples for all the claims here, because this post is already way too long, but this last point is pretty prevalent, and I'll give a few examples of it in list form:

Tenchi Muyo - One normal guy surrounded by a half-dozen extraordinary alien women...who all want him.

Fushigi Yugi - One normal girl surrounded by a half-dozen extraordinary men from mythical China...who all want her.

Escaflowne - Hitomi is an average high school girl who can read tarot cards. Her two love interests both pilot giant semi-magical armored suits, one of which turns into a dragon.

Chrono Trigger - Chrono is so uninteresting that he literally never speaks. His allies include a spunky princess, a frog-knight, and a robot from the future.

Final Fantasy V, VII, IX, X, XII - Butz, Cloud, Tidus, etc. are fairly mundane guys with swords who have much more interesting people team up with them, including a cross-dressed pirate, a talking flame-tailed tiger, and a bunny-girl in a thong. (FFVI is notable for having the protagonist being the strange and powerful character, not to mention being female, and FFVIII is notable for having no interesting characters at all).

Metal Gears Solid IV - Seriously, why is Raiden like 800 times cooler than Snake?

Half the examples I gave before - In the following examples from the beginning, the story, at least at the very beginning, is focused on a mundane person who observes the hero, rather than on the hero directly: Shikabane Hime, Vampire Princess Miyu (in the OVA, at least), Trigun, Rurouni Kenshin (in the series). In Evangelion Shinji seems weaker than everyone else, but ultimately that's just because we see his vulnerabilities up front, while every other character takes a while to reveal their weakness.

Again, there are plenty of counter-examples, too, but there's a strong tendency in Japanese stories to have an everyman stand in and observe interesting and unusual heroes who, in the case of video games, have predetermined personalities you don't have much control over. In the American/Western game, this is highly unusual - the fan is obviously intended to fantasize about BEING the hero who's interestnig and unusual. In video games the American game tends to give the player more control not only over themselves, but over NPCs, as well, and how they evolve (at least in the case of RPGs).

I'm not going to jump to any conclusions about what this means about the respective cultures, since I'm already over-generalizing just in identifying these trends, but they're interesting trends to notice either way.

-Silent Ellipsis

Content and Context

2009-06-30T19:30:00.000-07:00

My friend has a brief post up about html, and the very concept of hypertext is no longer central to the way we use the web.

I think this has been part of the democratization of the web. Back when everything was hand-made html pages, there weren't that many sites (relative to today, I mean, which I suppose is an absurd comparison, but there it is).

But it's not so much that there are fewer html pages as that the rate at which other kinds of web content has grown has been explosive - content creation tools have been the real cornerstone of Web 2.0, and as the barrier to entry for content creation has dropped, the amount being created has skyrocketed.

Now the obvious part is over and it's time for me to start firing off into the dark. In my opinion, twitter represents the climax of the push toward content creation. The content itself is so simple that users are able to constantly post more of it, and no one can possibly keep up with the flood of information. The reason I call it a climax is because it's hard to imagine the content getting much weaker. The internet has been trending toward more, weaker content for a long time now, but it's not a sustainable trend.

I don't think that web technology will continue trending towards "more content" for long. Once the network is inundated with information, which it is, the push for context is going to become stronger and stronger. People will increasingly want rules - something against which to define themselves and their information. This is where virtual worlds can potentially be very powerful, but right now they're too removed from the rest of our internet activities to be really big.

So the list of contextual elements that I think are becoming increasingly important include:

Identity - This is probably something that would greatly surprise people 5-10 years ago, and which members of certain chan-related websites would like to deny, but the idea of being anonymous on the internet is rapidly going out of fashion. This is primarily the result of the internet becoming an increasingly relevant part of our society and our daily lives.

Space/Location - It looks like the main candidate to tackle this right now is augmented reality (AR). The basic idea behind AR is to associate virtual content or information with real-world locations and objects, instead of keeping them in a completely artificial space.

Legitimacy by association - This is something that happens to a large extent already, but I don't hear discussed much. The flexibility of html has also been a huge weakness - since one can create literally anything, you have no idea what to expect from a webpage. Contrast that with, say, a page on Wikipedia - sure, the content changes from one page to the next, but there is an inherent structure to the wiki page and it has built in controls (other people editing the page). When I search for something I'm suddenly curious about on google, and a Wikipedia page pops up, I'm more likely to click on it than another page, not because I believe it has the most informed or unbiased writers behind it, but because I know what the expect from the page. This is a direction that the web has been headed in for a while and will continue in.

That's about it for now. You have my official prediction that Web 3.0, whatever it is, won't be about yet even more content than we can produce now.

-Silent Ellipsis

The Rise of Magus: Big in France

2009-06-29T13:45:00.001-07:00

Apparently French people respond well to my game. I noticed today a visit to the site that came from a search on google.fr, and I checked it out to find that someone had created and uploaded a 10 minute gameplay video on Dailymotion.

It also included a link to a forum discussion going on about it (in French), which included a request for a translation. Now, I'm confident enough in my French to post on there and say hi, but not to try translating dialogue myself. What's more, I don't think Game Maker supports accents or most foreign characters.

That said, if someone wants to translate the game into French or any other language, I'll try to plug the translation into the game and release an alternate language version.

Rise of Magus Site Down

2009-06-23T11:12:00.000-07:00

*Update June 25: The site is back up now at http://silentellipsis.com

Due to an issue with the server I'm using, silentellipsis.com and the main page for The Rise of Magus are temporarily down. The issue should be resolved soon, but in the meantime, the domain will redirect to my blog here. You can still play the game on YoYo Games here:

http://www.yoyogames.com/games/show/81474

You can also download the game from any of these locations:

CNET
Softpedia
ZDNet

-Silent Ellipsis

Music Videos

2009-06-19T17:17:00.000-07:00

I assume anyone who actually reads this blog realizes by now the kind of nerd I am, so I doubt my image will be tarnished much further by sharing these.

Last night I ran across a music video (an anime music video, no less) I made some years ago, and it occured to me that not everyone has seen them. If you have, you're free to stop reading, or to roll your eyes at me for making a post about this.

The first, which I made 2 or 3 years ago, is a fairly straightforward video of Final Fantasy VII Advent Children to Nightwish. This is not the most original combination of source material, but the editing and timing is exceptional, if I do say so myself. This was actually a collaborative project with UntoldForce, who came up with the combination, the outline for the video, and a couple key moments. Unfortunately, the original draft also included full minute-long clips of footage without any original cuts, which I found heretical. I gutted the video, left most of the outline in place, and recreated it.

Of course, it lacks anything resembling a plot, meaning, or purpose beyond "that was cool." In other words, I was very faithful to the source material.

My single favorite moment of the video is at 3:43, when the motorcycle bounces. There were plenty of well-timed shots, but that one was truly perfect. I crack up every time I see it.

Alright, second video. This one is a little...um...less faithful to the source material. It's also one of my greatest high school accomplishments. This video was created in an editing frenzy not unlike the Vulcan Pon Farr - a ritual in which I could only expel the demons that possessed me through a primal act of creation, by completing the project in 48 hours.

Unfortunately, the concept will not be immediately clear to most viewers. Basically, I took the audio from a legendary scene in Transformers: the Movie (not the Michael Bay movie, the animated one) and edited it together with footage from the Escaflowne movie so that, I hoped, they would look like they were meant to go together. There's a bit of story behind its creation, but I'll save it for after the video.

Reactions to this video vary from "huh?" to "that was the greatest video I have ever seen." Your reaction was likely between the two, and may have tended on the "huh?" side.

Now the story. In my second year of video production in high school, we were all expected to complete an "independent project" in one quarter. I was making a highly pretentious video set to Philip Glass music, and had collected all the footage I needed, so I asked my teacher if I could borrow one of the editing machines (a G4 Mac) over the weekend so I could edit the project. He said ok, but unfortunately (or fortunately for those who liked the video above) I forgot to bring my footage home with me, and the video lab was locked.

Not wanting to show up empty handed on Monday, I decided to take advantage of having an editing machine for another, more dubious purpose. I knew immediately that I wanted to make a video that used the audio from Transformers, but I wasn't sure what to edit it to. I went through a list of candidate series and movies, considering what each had to offer, until I just stumbled upon the Escaflowne movie and discovered that if had everything I needed. I did sleep and eat food that weekend, but I'm not sure that I did much else.

Now, there's another piece of background I skipped. In my first year of video production, discussions about anime had derailed the class often enough that my teacher had declared all anime forbidden in his classroom. Additionally, my friend, UntoldForce, had dropped the class a week after school started, in a move that thoroughly disturbed my teacher. Knowing this, you can probably imagine his reaction when he came into class on Monday and saw my friend sitting in the classroom viewing my final product, which at first glanced didn't even appear as an edited project but simply a scene from an anime series.

I escaped punishment by convincing my teacher that it was impressive that he hadn't been able to tell it was something I'd edited together from two sources. He rejected my attempt to turn this in as my indepent project however, so I ended up finishing Pretention in 3 Parts (I don't remember what the original title was, but that works just as well).

I've made other music videos, but they do not appear here either because they're not in digital form (they're on VHS tapes in my closet - I really should digitize them), or because they are unspeakable horrors that were created in order to please other beings and not myself.

-Silent Ellipsis

Chrono Compendium Post (also: Jason Rohrer)

2009-06-16T14:41:00.000-07:00

Today, when I went to check on traffic to silentellipsis.com, I noticed a sudden spike in the numbers, and subsequently that many of these new users were coming from chronocompendium.com. Sure enough, my game, The Rise of Magus, had been mentioned on the front page of the site.

As I mentioned before (and as has been reported across the internet at this point), the main project for the site got shut down by a cease and desist order from SquareEnix about a month ago (in fact, it was posted on the very same day I intended to submit The Rise of Magus to be posted on their site), so I'd expected that in the immediate aftermath my game probably wasn't going to get much mention. I appreciate the fact that my game was eventually brought up (and in a positive light). Maybe now I'll get more feedback from people on it and feel compelled to add a couple bonus features that I didn't get around to.

---

In other news, I've been playing Jason Rohrer's games lately. He's essentially a crazy independent programmer making an earnest attempt at using games as an artistic medium of expression, and for what they are, they're very good.

Primrose is a very good puzzle game, though it lacks any implicit narrative that would give it the same impact as some of his other games. The game that struck me most was Passage, and Gravitation was also a fascinating game. Between didn't impress me as much, and I'll describe why below - these games largely depend for their effect on the player not knowing what it is they're supposed to expect, so I'm going to avoid describing them as much as possible prior to my spoiler warning tag:

SPOILER WARNING (for the remainder of the post)

Ok, so now that we're past the spoiler warning, I'll spoil your ability to properly experience the games I mentioned above.

Passage is a game that presents itself as being about perception and time. The game has a set time limit, and as it progresses, your apparent position on the screen shifts (while the room moves under you as you walk around), and you are only able to clearly see that portions of the screen closest to your current appear position. This is interesting, and it's kind of touching just to see your character grow old (possibly with a partner, possibly not), but I say that this is how it "presents itself" because I think what's really interesting is the implicit subject matter: games.

Passage includes a number in the upper right that grows as you move right and as you find stars hidden in treasure chests. It also allows you to explore freely, has maze-like sections, and presents new environments as you move right. Gamers will naturally take the number in the upper-right to be your score, but it's immediately unclear that getting a high score is actually your objective. It might instead be to make as much progress right as possible, attempting to reach an unknown "destination", or it might simply be to explore the maze-like areas in the hopes of finding something interesting.

Since you only have a few minutes to play the game before your character grows old and die, you cannot do everything in one playthrough, and each time you play the game you might play it very differently. This, it seems to me, is the real point - when presented with a set of rules and a virtual environment, our nature is to find a goal and strive for it, and Passage leaves your own psychology bare as you play it.

Gravitation is very similar, this time in platformer format. You begin in a room which you can only see a small portion of, and when you "warm up" you can leap straight out of the room and up to untold heights. Eventually, however, you will start to feel "cold" again and feel your power drain out of you (and sight limit itself) - you can gain boosts of warmth by collecting stars, but you'll soon find that you get cold faster and faster afterwards until you cannot progress. At this point, you can wait forself to slowly heat up, or head back down to the beginning to stand by the fire. If you go down, you will find blocks of ice that have appeared, and you can score "points" and warm up faster by pushing them into the fire. Once you're warm, you can continue exploring above yourself.

Here's the interesting part. I started realizing as I played that collecting stars wasn't actually increasing my score, and at some point I realized that the stars, which fell after being collected, were actually becoming the blocks of ice at the bottom of the level. That is, these items that we are used to associating with bonus points (or temporary invincibility) are being subverted, and now both help and hinder my progress. For that matter, it's not clear that I am making progress, because nothing ever indicated to me that I'm supposed to be climbing up - it just seems like the correct course of action.

The experience of having your own assumptions about what it means to be playing a game brought into question was really quite exceptional. So I decided to ask my friend to play the next game in the list, Between, with me (it's mandatory multiplayer). This game presents you with the ability to spawn blocks of three colors, and the ability to travel to different "worlds" by either going to sleep (the S key) or waking up (the W key), which circle around. There's a tower that can apparently be constructed out of your blocks in each world, but after minor progress you will see that the tower requires colors you cannot make. Then, when waking one day, you find these blocks you could not have made yourself, that allow you to continue building, and they are signs of another, who you cannot see.

This is the intended concept of the game, clearly, but it simply didn't work for me. The reasons for this are fairly simple. Firstly, it didn't work because I knew that thre was another person involved...the game is multiplayer by fiat! As such the "revelation" that there was someone else affecting my game was instead a sense of "is there any other way we can interact?" followed by a resounding "no." Secondly, the objective is too clear. Now, this is possibly the only game that I will ever accuse of having an objective that's "too clear", but it's true in this case. As I mentioned, what was interesting about the last two games was the fact that the objective was obscured, and you were never sure what counted as progress. Now, I have a very clear objective before me, but the consequence is the sheer amount of work needed to complete it is also clear, and I spent most of that time recognizing that I probably would get nothing for the effort in the end - and I was right. I completed the tower and nothing happened.

I'm not sure what exactly could have been done to make Between work better. I think it is an interesting idea, but ultimately one that probably cannot be properly made into a game. If nothing else, in a game this simple it's impossible to convince me that blocks appearing is proof of "another" because the game could simply be producing the blocks for me - in a world whose rules I don't already fully know, I cannot possibly know that those rules are being broken.

In any case, that's enough for now, I recommend trying the games out if you don't already feel spoiled (and you should, there was a reason I put that warning up there!).

-Silent Ellipsis

Offline Browsers

2009-06-01T19:19:00.000-07:00

My game, The Rise of Magus, is now available on cnet (aka download.com), and has subsequently appeared on every other site that duplicates its content.

That aside, something has occurred to me as seeming obsolete, even though I use it every day – MS Office, and in particular, MS Word. Now I’m actually using the 2003 edition of this stuff right now, so it’s possible I’m naming a few things that are anachronistic, but from my experience with Word 2007, it’s not significantly different – they’ve just made the words “File, Edit, etc.” at the top of the app into icons instead (wow).

What I’m talking about is the fact that Office applications are little standalone apps on your computer that aren’t connected to the web. It seems archaic that when I see a hyperlink in a word document, I not only have to ctrl+click, but that it opens another application to display the content for me. It seems that given just how online our computer experience is overall, I should default, when I want to write text, to a tab in my browser.

Now Google docs theoretically could serve the function I’m talking about, but for some reason I’m just not a consistent user of the service. I guess it’s because I really do need to have documents available offline, and because Google docs emphasizes collaboration so much (so that’s what I use it for).

No, I’m imagining something a little different. When I hit ctrl+t to open a new tab in my browser, I want the url bar to be there for me to use, sure, but what about the page itself? Google’s Chrome uses this to display a list of your favorite sites, but that seems kind of redundant to me, because as soon as I start typing in a url, Firefox will tell me what I’m likely looking for about 3 characters in. What I would really like is to hit ctrl+t and in addition to the ability to type in a url, have a couple of options right there, like a word processor, a file explorer, maybe even games. By and large, I feel like my browser is the center of my computer experience anyway, so why can’t some of my offline content live there, too?

I suppose what I’m really suggesting is that we get more OS-like browsers (or maybe a browser-like OS), because it feels like the distinctions between my online and offline content are relics of a bygone era when going online was something special, not the default state. I don’t know if anyone’s already working on something like this, but I’d like to see it.

RTS Devolution

2009-05-26T17:50:00.000-07:00

A very interesting thing happened in the last week - I picked up a copy of Starcraft, and with it a realization about the progression of RTS as a genre. Firstly, though, I feel obligated to defend myself for the terrible oversight of not having played Starcraft earlier. The reason I didn't pick up Starcraft when it came out was simple - it looked like Warcraft in space, and I'd played Warcraft, so Starcraft seemed redundant. In retrospect that was a very silly thing to think, but that's my excuse.

Anyway, I have since played just about every other RTS game I could get my hands on, so the experience of playing Starcraft has effectively been a way to return to what you might call the "core" of RTS games and understand the overall trajectory they've taken. What struck me immediately about Starcraft as someone who hadn't played it before is that it actually felt "fresh", moreso than some more recent RTS games, even though it's over a decade old. The races are more differentiated and well defined than in most other RTS games, and yet it's clear that every unit has been meticulously balanced. The gameplay is aggressive, chaotic, and micro-management intensive, and yet immediately more comprehensible than in many games that are less chaotic.

That's enough gushing about a game that's already got plenty of acclaim. The point is that I was expecting to enjoy Starcraft when I bought it, but I wasn't expecting to think that it was still better than most games in its genre made in the last decade.

So what's the difference? It's actual quite simple: what Starcraft has is fluidity. The game isn't about building up a huge base and teching up - it makes you branch out, build forward bases, and constantly skirmish with your opponents. There are a lot of small design decisions that work together to make this work, but there are a few that stand out as missing from more recent games (yes, it's time for a numbered list!):

1) Base defenses are weak. That's not to say that they're not useful, but they're ultimately there for support - you can't just build a couple photon cannons and then consider an area safe. This is even more true for the Terrans and Zerg, who lack a single anti-ground/anti-air defensive structure. All defensive structures are available very early on, and useful for repelling rushes, but by the end of the game they aren't really turning the tide of battle anymore.

Compare that to more recent games: AoE2 and AoE3 both have upgradeable towers AND castles (forts in AoE3) that can only be overcome by full armies. In Command & Conquer Generals, one general can build EMP missile defenses that disable any vehicle they hit, making a direct assault suicidal. Perhaps the most egregious case is Supreme Commander, in which you can cover your defensive turrets with energy shields to make an impregnable fortress.

Building powerful defensive structures is so popular that it's become its own genre of game (Tower Defense). While there's certainly a place for games that are about building towers that shoot things, effective base defenses have become an assumed in RTS games and I'm not sure most designers recognize the kind of effect it has on gameplay (hint: it's called turtling).

2) Resources are not infinitely reproducible. As far as I'm aware, it was Age of Empires that introduced farms and the idea of renewable resource gathering. Like effective base defenses, it has come to be an assumed part of many modern RTS games. This, more than anything else, enables turtling, because expanding your territory is always risky, if only because you have more ground to defend, whereas building more resource-producing buildings comes with no risk at all.

Getting past turtling economics in RTS games doesn't strictly require that resources in your base run out, however. It can also be effective to simply limit the rate at which resources can be gathered from a single base. In other words, the important thing is that you can't endlessly grow your economy without opening yourself up to risks.

3) Maps are full of chokepoints. This feature has more to do with level design than systems design, but it's clearly part of the overall gameplay concept. In most RTS games, you're building on open plains with occasional geographical features of interest, or else on islands connected by water. In virtually every map in Starcraft, your base is in a fairly small, defined area with 1-3 points of entry.

The significance of this is that it's what makes turret-less defense of your base possible. If you know that your opponent is going to come from one direction, you can concentrate your forces there and stand a good chance at repelling attacks. On open plains, no matter where you place your units, the enemy, if they scout ahead, will be able to go in a small circle around them and enter your base. To avoid this, you need walls or other defensive structures you can place around your perimeter to buy you time to respond to attacks...which leads us back to point 1.

So overall, it seems that in the last decade RTS games have become more about building (and thus about defense) than about fighting. That's not necessarily a bad thing (building is fun!), but the fact that I found Starcraft to feel "fresh" reinforces my belief that there are very few more recent representatives of the Starcraft model of tactical-skirmish-centric gameplay. I believe that Dawn of War II sees itself as being such a representative, but I find it kind of hard to get into the game for several reasons (forced Windows Live registration plus a CD-key even when you buy off Steam, it's laggy on a computer that meets "recommended specs", there's no real tutorial, etc.).

I'd like to see more RTS games taking some of these points into account.

The Mission Architect and Creative Gameplay

2009-05-20T20:30:00.000-07:00

So shortly after my last post on user-generated quests, Cryptic actually released a user-generated quest system for City of Heroes. The initial reaction was very positive, and Raph Koster gave a particularly rosy assessment of the situation by claiming that users were just as good at creating game content as the designers were (perhaps not surprising that he would take this stance, given the extent to which his own virtual world emphasizes UGC).

Then came the bad news: players were gaming the system, in this case by creating missions designed to provide the most experience in the least time. Of course, anyone who bought the game did so with the explicit intention of “gaming”, but there’s clearly been some confusion about what exactly that means. In the minds of the developers, the players are supposed to be contributing to and enriching a virtual game world. In the minds of the players, they’re supposed to be gaining power as quickly as possible.

So there are a few points to take from this:

1) Players will always try to game the system. You should always anticipate the most abusive way a player could use a system and then either decide that you don’t mind, or find a way to prevent the abuse. You certainly can’t just hope players will be reasonable.

2) If you want to introduce a feature that’s as fundamental to gameplay as user-generated quests, you should incorporate it into the game from the beginning. The thing that made the system abuse particularly harmful in this case was the fact that City of Heroes already had a carefully crafted set of quests that lead the player through controlled level advancement. If, on the other hand, the game had been originally created with user-generated quests in mind, other elements of the game could have been altered to accommodate it.

3) I’m afraid I’m going to have to radically disagree with Raph Koster and suggest that most players are, in fact, terrible at designing games (or levels/missions). The main reason for this is that it’s so different from what they do as players. Most games involve power fantasies on some level, and when a player thinks about what they want from the game, it’s colored by the fact that they, as players, wanted power. What does this lead to? Unbalanced design proposals.

For that matter, you might see this as a problem amongst the professional designers, as well. They started off as players themselves, and when it comes time for them to design, they're going to come to the table with "what would I want to see in a game I'm playing?" If they're used to power fantasies in their games, then the things they "want" in their game is, on some level, power. This can result in what I'll call the Dragon Ball Z effect. Stories and mechanics can become more and more unbalanced over time if the goal is to more perfectly serve up a power fantasy.

Balanced design requires a different outlook. Sure, you can make a badass main character and make the player feel special, but in order to do more than that you have to be able to think beyond "what would I want" and think about "what makes for a more interesting game?" Outside of game design itself, there are a few places to exercise this idea. One of them is being a dungeon master.

When you're the dungeon master in D&D, you have vast power. As the arbitrator of world events you can decide if the players live or die. With that much power, gaining power is no longer an interesting objective - the goal of being a dungeon master is to figure out how to make an adventure fun for the players (and if successful, yourself as well). This is what I call creative gameplay - unlike the players, the dungeon master doesn't have a clear goal to work toward within the confines of the rules. Rather, the dungeon master has a goal that exists beyond the scope of the rules, and has to figure out how to make the rules a tool to reach it.

So the point is, if we think that user-generated content is something we want, we should be encouraging creative gameplay on the part of players, something that is fairly rare in digital games.

-Ellipsis

The Rise of Magus on yoyogames

2009-05-12T11:09:00.000-07:00

The Rise of Magus can be played on the Game Maker site now at:

http://www.yoyogames.com/games/show/81474

There are several nice things about this. For one, it means the game is available even when my site is down (which it apparently was an hour ago). It also means that it's possible for users to play the game without having to download the .exe file (if they install the yoyogames plugin, they can play it off the site), which will hopefully make people less scared of trying it (and I wonder if that works on macs - I should test at some point).

Also, the site keeps track of how many people are playing it and what score they gave it, so that makes it a useful source of feedback for me.

-Silent Ellipsis

The Rise of Magus

2009-05-11T20:17:00.000-07:00

Alright, it's time for a post that's both exciting and a little anxious. The exciting part first: I have officially put up version 1.0 of a game that I've been working on for 10 months in my free time. It's called the Rise of Magus, and is a platformer based on the character Magus from Chrono Trigger, a classic Japanese RPG.

The official site for the game is here: www.silentellipsis.com/riseofmagus

If you go to silentellipsis.com, you'll also find a nifty link to this blog (henceforth the official blog of silentellipsis.com). Now, a necessary awesome looking title screen:

Now if the page on the other side of that link looks suspiciously like this one, it's possibly because I just ripped off the style sheet for this blogger page and made a couple changes.

The game was a lot of fun to make - I created it in Game Maker 7 using, among other resources, sprites from Chrono Trigger. That's where we get to the anxious part...

One of the sites on which I found some useful resources was the Chrono Compendium, and I decided that after I finished, I would submit the game to the webmaster and see if they wanted to put up a link to my game.

Today, having just finished my game the night before, I visited the Chrono Compendium to see an announcement that they'd received a cease and desist order from Square Enix over the weekend in reference to some of the other fan projects on the site. Obviously, this did not sound like it boded well for me.

However, when I looked at the cease and desist order more closely, I realized I might be ok afterall. The document (which they link to on their front page) is specifically concered with ROM-hacking, and a quick look through other projects that had previously been linked to showed that the ones to receive cdo's were either:

1) ROM-hacks

or

2) Recreations of the original game

While I'm sympathetic to the webmasters on the Compendium when they say that they disagree with Square's argument, Square has much more justification for ordering stops on these kinds of projects than they would have with one like mine. ROM-hacking, as a practice, enables game piracy, and recreations of the game compete with their own product (and at an advantage, since they're free). Whether or not these projects will actually result in a loss of revenue for Square Enix (I seriously doubt they actually would), the practices have the potential to hinder Square's business.

My game, on the other hand, is not a ROM-hack, mod, or remake of Chrono Trigger. It's an independent game that uses sprites from Chrono Trigger. The fact that the game is a different genre from the game that inspired it does a lot to support the argument that it doesn't directly compete with the original game, and since I didn't do anything with Square's software, I haven't violated any user agreement or tried to circumvent their copy protection.

That's enough for me to go through with putting the game up and posting about it on a couple sites. The folks at Square Enix aren't stupid, and they have no reason to pursue litigation against people who aren't actually threatening their business. What's more, the cdo against the Chrono Compendium shows that they looked into the situation in decent detail, so I doubt they'll be sending me an email just because they're in a litigate-y mood. Of course, they can prove me wrong at any time.

So I don't think I have anything to worry about, and for now will just enjoy the fact that I actually completed this project (of course, if I get enough positive feedback, I'll probably come back and add a little more to it). Seriously, check it out, I think it turned out pretty well.

Names as Identities

2009-05-08T14:30:00.000-07:00

A few months back, a friend pointed out to me that in every Bioware game he'd played, there was a common element: the main character had a past to be discovered. He speculated that this was used as a way of simultaneously giving the player freedom in creating their character (that is, their character in the present), while holding onto the sense the character being played is more than just an avatar for the player. This is likely true, but I think it's also an indication of just how powerful the theme of uncovering an identity is.

Now let us consider Chrono Trigger, and the realization that led to this blog post (warning: minor spoilers ahead). Chrono Trigger has 7 playable characters, and while you can choose to name them whatever you want, they each have a default name. Here's the interesting part - only 3 of those characters use their "real" name as their default character names: Crono, Lucca, and Ayla. The other 4 characters are all using aliases. What's more, they're using aliases that obscure their identity. In fact, 3 of those names aren't really names at all - they're descriptions.

Frog is called so because he's a frog, Robo is a robot, and Magus just refers to the fact that he's a wizard (and yes, the fact that Magus joins your party is spoiler I warned of). In each case, the process of learning their true name is inextricable from the process of learning the character's true identity. At the same time, each character has undergone a change, such that their new name is a new identity.

The fact that the uncoverable past is used so many times in Chrono Trigger shows how ubiquitous the idea is in the minds of the creators (in addition to playable characters, you uncover the identities of the 3 gurus, Yakra, the ghost of Cyrus, and even Lavos). The fact that each character with a hidden past also has two names is perhaps more interesting. I know I for one felt that the "true names", once revealed, had some kind of inherent power to them; the mere fact of knowing a character's true name made me at once feel like I had some new level of control over them and made me empathize with them. The fact that it's a secret makes it a personal feature, and any entity with a personal feature feels richer for it (end of spoilers).

Ursula K. LeGuin, of course, takes the power of names a step further by literally giving not just every person, but every single object in the world of Earthsea a true name. Merely speaking the true name of creature of Earthsea gives you power over it. This seems to me a manifestation of something we feel the force of every day - that names carry identity, and that knowing the identity of another grants you power over them (hence, it would be completely inappropriate for me to address the president as "Barack" to his face).

That's as far as this will go for now. It was simply on my mind. As to why Chrono Trigger is on my mind, it's probably because I've been working on a fan project. It's what I was referring to in my last blog post, and it's an original platformer game about Magus, made using Game Maker 7. I'm hoping to have the first finished draft of it ready this weekend, so stay tuned, I will most certainly post about it if I do.

-Silent Ellipsis

User Generated Quests

2009-04-10T13:03:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't posted anything in a while (over a month), but I've been fairly busy with things, including a game I've been working on (codenamed "SquareEnix Please Don't Sue Me"), which I'll likely be posting about in the near future.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about user generated content, and in particular quests. User generated quests are one of those ideas that people love to throw around*, but that's hard to actually implement for the very simple reason that users suck at making quests. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, and I'm sure that many people who have been game masters for tabletop RPGs could manage it, but most players don't have a very clear sense of balance (especially where there own characters might be involved), and there's a big difference between the mindset that focuses on "this sounds cool" and the one that focuses on "this would produce a good user experience."

But user generated quests are a cool idea, so how would you add them to a game (I'll assume we're talking about an MMORPG, here). The way to get good user-generated quests is to actually give them as little control as possible over the method of completing the quest. A user generated quest could work like this:

1) Wiz132, a Level 10 Wizard, needs to gather components for an alchemy experiment that he needs to do in order to gain access to the Alchemist prestige class (no, I’m not advocating prestige classes a la 3.5, it’s just an example).

2) At least some of the components are hard for him to personally acquire (perhaps one is found on a magic-resistant monster)

3) Wiz132 creates a quest: Bring me the eye of the Magic-Resistant Jabberwocky. He decides what the player needs to do (bring him the eye), and what the reward is.

4) The meat of the quest, that is, the part where another player will have to explore a dungeon/hunt a creature through the woods/sneak into the creature’s lair and fight it is determined by the game world and the existing game mechanics, not by Wiz132.

Now if someone goes and does this quest and brings the quest item to Wiz132, they’ll receive the reward. This should happen whether or not Wiz132 happens to be online (an NPC version will appear in his laboratory if he is not). Another issue here is: how does the player get to decide what rewards to give? Money seems straight-forward, but do they also have to give up xp to finance the quest reward? That might be interesting, but I’d be more likely to include some kind of item the player can acquire that can be used to create quests worth a certain amount of experience.

Now you might wonder how this is different from a player running around killing everything in sight and then selling the rare drops they get in an auction house? Well, aside from the fact that they can get experience, as well as money, you could solidify this quest concept by requiring the user to have the quest in order to make progress on it. For instance, what if the monster in question doesn’t even appear unless someone with the quest shows up to fight it? Or perhaps the monster exists, the but the eye only drops for people with the quest.

The point is that user generated content should both feel like part of the game, rather than a separate activity the player can do instead of playing, and it should be fairly high-level. User generated content, as part of a game, shouldn't be asking the player to take on the role of game developer, but give them a way to add to the content of the world simply by playing it.

-Ellipsis

*I hear that City of Heroes is going to get a quest creation tool sometime soon. I'll be interested to see what that looks like.

Crazy Ideas for Crazy Times: Social Credit

2009-03-02T22:42:00.000-08:00

Yet another non-video-game post. Be forewarned, this post is full of crazy ideas.

First, background: I see both the government and corporations as basically serving the same purpose, which is that they're ways of organizing human capital so that we can accomplish projects that take many people to complete. The downside of corporations is that strict pursuit of the bottom line will often cause them to compromise the projects in the name of reducing cost or increasing profit, while the downside of government is that it has a very slow feedback mechanism, which results in lower efficiency. Both can get a lot worse if the wrong people get into positions of power, and both are capable of good when the right people are in positions.

Anyway, so the question is, how could we get the best of both worlds? How do you allow people to give immediate and variable feedback to projects without dumping those projects into the free market? How about we have a pseudo-free market with explicit controls? I'm not talking about the economy at large - I'm talking about a separate self-sustaining economic structure. What you do is you take some of the money that people are being taxed, and instead of having the government spend it, you turn it into social credit.

What's social credit? Well, it's like money, except that you can't spend it anywhere - you can only spend on specific kinds of projects (government sanctioned projects, essentially), and generally speaking, you're not "buying" anything with it - you're just choosing where this money should go.

So let's say you want to upgrade the theater at your local public school, for example. In order to raise the capital to pay for the project, you could ask people to donate their money, but they'll be hesitant because they could buy something else with that money (so you're asking them to sacrifice something personal in order to get the public good). If you have social credit, however, the situation is different - everyone has money that's already set aside for investment in public goods, that they CAN'T use to buy personal goods with, so if they want the school to have a new theater, they'll contribute some of their social credit toward the project.

Now that's pretty cool, I think, but here's where it gets crazy. You can have any corporation become "social credit approved" on the condition that it accepts no other form of payment and makes it services available both to those who pay and those who don't. Now this would not be a practical move for many companies, but for some, particularly information-based companies, this can be an effective source of funding. There's another advantage for such companies built into this system: piracy vanishes. Completely. There is no such thing as piracy when you give away your products for free to begin with. Instead of trying to convince people to pay you for mp3s and computer games that they can just as easily download for free, you just give them the products for free, on the understanding that the consumer has a set budget that they can only choose to spend supporting companies like yours - so if people like your stuff, they'll just hand you money.

So that's the crux of it. Now feel free to let me know what's wrong with this idea. Also feel free to comment that you don't get what I'm talking about - it's still kind of fuzzy around the edges.

Guiness Knows Video Games

2009-02-27T23:01:00.000-08:00

So apparently Guiness World Records decided to put together a list of the most influential console games in history. In short, it's ridiculous. I'm not going to reproduce the whole list (it's a top 50 list), but let's just look at the top 10:

1. Super Mario Kart
2. Tetris
3. Grand Theft Auto
4. Super Mario World
5. Zelda Ocarina of Time
6. Halo
7. Resident Evil IV
8. Final Fantasy XII
9. Street Fighter II
10. GoldenEye

Now remember, these aren't supposed to be favorites, or best games, or anything of that sort - they're "most influential" games. Now, I would measure influential games by the kind of impact they had on the games that followed them, so one rule I apply from the get-go: No games from the last couple years. And yet there's FFXII staring me in the face, and a little further down (at #14) they have Call of Duty 4. Even the Orange Box (further down the list), which seems like it's guaranteed to have a long-lasting impact on gaming because of it's inclusion of Portal, is something I would hesitate to put on their, because there simply hasn't been enough time for it to have a "legacy," which is one of the criteria used to judge these (supposedly).

But that's not the big issue. The big issue is all of the things that aren't in the top 10 list here. I mean, where's Mario - you know, the game that invented the side-scrolling platformer, which for a while was the pre-eminent genre? Where's Dragon Quest, the first console RPG? If you're going to include a Final Fantasy game in the top 10, why isn't it VII, which not only made JRPGs mainstream in America, but got a movie made about it? Why are Super Metroid and Castlevania: SotN so far down (in the late 30's) when they're the origin of "Castleroid" games? DDR isn't even on the list, even though it's a predecessor to games like Guitar Hero (which did make the list)?

And that's granting already that they're discounting all PC games (in some cases, this also seems kind of disingenuous, since titles like Oblivion and Call of Duty are probably more significant for their PC versions than their console ports). That means things like SimCity and Civilization aren't even in the running.

I would probably feel better about this list if they at least had a consistent metric that they were basing it on, but from the Kotaku article, it sounds like every item on the list has vague justifications. Guiness should probably stick to things they can measure, like "largest game cartridge ever," "longest loading screen ever," and "most copies sold back to GameStop."

-Ellipsis

RocketOn Embed

2009-02-16T13:26:00.001-08:00

Hello. This post is just a test to see if this embed works. Clicking on the image below should open avatars over the page (I know, crazy, huh?). Here goes:

-Ellipsis

Waving Hands 2: Finite Resources

2009-02-14T00:55:00.000-08:00

So, given how fan-ish I was in my previous post on Waving Hands (aka Spellcaster, aka Warlocks), it shouldn't surprise anyone that I've continued playing the game in the interim (though a little less frequently now that my boss has figured out what the strings of random letters on my monitor are), and I think it's time to return to what makes the strategy feel particularly deep.

In particular, it's occured to me that several of the elements I discussed before are enabled by a single feature - finite resources. In this case, your primary resource is your HP, which you "spend" for better position and the chance to complete major spells. The key here is that your HP starts off at a set number (15), and generally only decreases. I mean, there are healing spells, but they're less efficient than their analagous damage spells, and in any case your HP can't go above 16. The healing spells have their uses, but in general, the game is about gradually moving toward 0 HP.

Why does that matter? First of all, it keeps the game from dragging out - every turn that passes brings you closer to the conclusion because resources are always being spent faster than they're generated. More importantly, perhaps, it prevents either player from establishing an unbeatable advantage, like you can achieve in many real-time strategy games. In Age of Empires III, if I played the Dutch and survived to the Imperial Age, I got an economy going that was so absurdly efficient that it was virtually impossible to defeat me (because I could replace units as fast as they died without putting any significant dent in my resources). In warlocks, you can't build up your resources and then steamroll your opponent - you only have the resources you started with, and even if you have a clear HP advantage, you can always be defeated by a single Finger of Death or permanent enchantment, so you're never safe.

Now, in order for this to work, it doesn't require that there is actually no resource generation at all, just that resource generation is limited. In addition to healing, I would count monster summoning as "resource generation," in which case it might seem possible to build resources (by summoning endless hordes of monsters). The fact of the matter, though, is that getting out multiple summoned monsters is hard. Not only can your opponent disrupt or dispel you, but once you have a monster summoned, you have to pay attention to them, or they might be charmed by your opponent, and become their ogre or troll. Monsters are a good investment, but they have to be maintained, and can be expensive to cast in the first place, so the decision to bring out a monster is itself an important strategic decision. While summon ogre is a popular opening spell, you can win a match without ever summoning anything.

And that's what really matters here - that every decision is meaningful. In most RTS games, resource gathering is so central, that it single-handedly determines the outcomes of the game, and decisions like army makeup and where and when to deploy units are secondary. While I immensely enjoyed AoE3, over time the games start becoming identical - the game was about perfecting my rapid development strategy. Games of Waving Hands, on the other hand, are wildly different and unpredictable, and that's what keeps me fascinated with it.

Speaking of strategy games, I just got my hands on a copy of Valkyria Chronicles, so now I have something other than Valentine's Day dinner on my to-do list this weekend.

Rebuild of Evangelion

2009-02-12T21:46:00.000-08:00

So been over a month since my last post, and I'm not even talking about video games? How devious of me.

I remember hearing about the new Evangelion movies over a year ago and flipping out, only to hear that their North American release was indefinitely postponed. Sometime in the last year, that situation apparently changed*, because I just returned from a screening of the first movie, and the short version is that it was awesome.

First, to recap, Rebuild of Evangelion is a trilogy of movies** that retell the original story. That's right, it's not new, post-post-apocalyptic story, it's the same story, again. Now, you might ask, "didn't they already remake the series into a movie, in the form of Evangelion: Death"? Yes, yes they did. There's also the manga, which is different from the series in a couple significant ways, and the NEW manga, which retells the story without any mecha at all. Then Rebirth tried to be a remake of episode 25, but was itself remade again as the first half of End of Eva. So what's with all the remaking?

It's worth remembering that a lot of great art goes through creation and recreation. Some of the greatest haiku poets went through literally dozens of versions of some of their best poems. I'm not talking about drafts, I mean complete, official versions of the poem that they wrote onto paintings (and hung on some nobleman's wall). That's just working with 17 syllables, mind you, so it shouldn't be that surprising that a 13-hour long series has a lot of room for variation.

Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that Evangelion has always been a deeply flawed work. The fact that creators and audiences keep coming back to it, and not to add on new stories, but just to rework and refine the existing story, just shows that there's something buried in it that's so compelling that it shines through the flaws and captivates people. In other words, it's got some pure, unadulterated human condition in there somewhere.

So the first movie, You Are Not Alone, is largely surprising just for how little they've actually changed. I mean, they've redrawn everything from scratch, as far as I'm aware, but sometimes you have to look really close to be sure they did. I'm talking frame-for-frame identical shots in there. A lot of them.

In fact, in the begining, it's an almost overwhelming number of them. I missed the opening credits, but what I saw of the first half-hour felt distinctly like someone had just taken the first episode and given it more aggressive stop-cut editing. Oh yeah, and added a pretty rainbow-lens-flare effect like every 5 minutes. I was never actually much of a fan of the first episode, anyway, so I guess it's not surprising that this part felt like going through the motions.

Fortunately, it gets better fast. I'm not going to go over all the differences, but it definitely starts feeling very different - purer, if you will. The major success of the movie, and clearly an important focus in this retelling, was to make Shinji's character more sympathetic. He's just a little more willful, a little more vocal, and we're given more reflection from the adult characters that takes him from seeming whiny in the show to seeming like a real "epitome of human adolescence" character.

They've also redone the music, which is generally very good, and of course added CG effects (mainly for computer displays and such). The strangest non-change is probably the fact that Shinji is still using a portable cassette player (that's right, not even a CD player, much less an ipod), which is downright anachronistic at this point. Maybe cassette players are just an important object in Hideaki Anno's mind, and I suppose it's true that updating it to an ipod would just doom it to be obsolete again in ten years, but I'll be amused if Asuka makes fun of him for not owning an mp3 player when she shows up. I mean, I guess that shouldn't strike me as a big deal compared to the fact that in the original show, an apocalyptic event occurs in 2000...

And while the CG effects are generally pretty irrelevent to my assessment of the movie (and downright distracting in at least one instance), there's one thing that is made immensely more awesome by the newfanfly CG, and that's Ramiel, the 5th (or in the movie, counted as the 6th) angel. Its basic appearance, as a giant floating 8-sided-die, is the same, but in the movie, every time it attacks, it does so by rearranging itself into some alternate crystaline form that's theoretically better suited to the particular energy beam it's firing at the time. Ramiel was always one of my favorite angels, and now it is officially the coolest godzilla-sized creature to ever attack a Japanese city.

Seriously, I do not recommend pissing that thing off.

-Silent Ellipsis

*Edit: I have since received evidence that it has technically still not been released in the US...
**Edit: Only half correct - there are going to be four movies, apparently, and the first 3 retell the story from the series (the last one is totally new material :O)

Personal Quests

2008-12-27T19:41:00.000-08:00

First off, Happy Holidays, everyone. New Year's is coming up soon, and I probably won't post again before then, so Happy New Year. My resolution for the new year is to be awesome.

Anyway, I'm going to talk about quests now. Quests have come to be an assumed part of just about every western RPG. JRPGs are, on the whole, more linear than western RPGs, and thus can control the flow of story and gameplay more easily, providing the player with regular feedback on their actions, but in a nonlinear (or at least less linear) RPG there is an ever-present risk of the player’s actions feeling meaningless (I’m looking at you, Legend of Mana). Quests are a way to avoid this – by placing quest-givers around the world who need the character to help them with some problem, the player can find regular short-term goals to guide gameplay as they slowly progress toward a real or imaginary goal.

There are, however, a couple problems with quest-based gameplay (actually, more than a couple, but I'm going to try really hard to limit myself to two). One is that it severely limits the range of possibilities for the story, because engaging in endless quests only makes sense if your character is an "adventurer" - which really just means that they're the kind of character that likes to go on quests. Another problem, which is closely related to the first, is that it prevents your character from having a very strong personality, because their actions are largely dictated by what various NPCs tell them to do, and because you're rewarded for playing the kind of character that will do any and every quest (that isn't eeeevil) regardless of how silly or out-of-character it is. Put another way, it forces you to play a character for whom no task is out-of-character.

So how do we deal with these problems? Well, I guess you could try to address the second problem by making the character picky and refuse to do certain quests, but that doesn't change the fact that they're an adventurer with no self-determination, it just means that there's a more limited range of tasks they can do. You could try to fix the first problem by writing the setting such that "quests" aren't random mercenary assignments but structured actions leading toward a definite goal, but then you've just made a linear game. Linear games can be fun, but right now we're trying to figure out a way to make a less-linear game more interesting.

What I would do is change the nature of quests by making them character-driven. As it is, in many cases quests are just excuses for you to go and loot a dungeon, because you read online that some rare item you want is in there, so why can't going to find that rare item just be the quest? And I'm not talking about going to fetch it for someone else, I mean that your character finds a book that talks about some powerful rare item that's supposed to be hidden at location X, and your character now has the "Find the rare item" quest, because they want that item. This is a very simple example and doesn't sound very exciting, but you can push the idea into interesting places by adding one more layer: character goals.

The quest described above fulfills a pretty clear goal: gain power. We'll say, then, that this quest is under the umbrella of the "gain power" goal. Now what if, in the book, you also found a reference to the person who created the rare item (let's call him "Melchior")? That might spark another goal: learn more about Melchior. Perhaps if you start looking you'll find out that he's still alive (somehow), and you can eventually find him and befriend him. For that matter, your character might be interested in becoming a master blacksmith, in which case finding Melchior and becoming his apprentice is a way of acheiving a very long term goal (maybe you've had the goal since the beginning of the game).

So we have a series of goals, and each goal can be forwarded by a series of quests. You still have quest givers, but rather than being people who ask you to perform a task on their behalf, they're people who provide you with help on the way to completing your goals. Every once in a while you encounter an element new enough that it creates a totally new goal, such as the first time you hear about a potential future rival, the Black Knight, or the first time you meet a potential romantic interest. The people or places where you first acquire new goals are effectively meta-quest givers, which spark a whole new questline. So far, we've managed to make the quests seem more personal, but we've done so just by rewording the same quests you might have been doing anyway (instead of going to a dungeon retrieve item X for NPC Y in exchange for item Z, you learn about item Z from NPC Y and go to the dungeon explicitly to retrieve it).

But we can get more work out of this idea. What if goals aren't just folders that hold different quests in them, but equippable like items? While you have the "gain power" goal equipped, you're more likely to find quests that fall under than objective, and it affects your dialogue options with NPCs. Maybe they even have game mechanical effects (the "get revenge" goal makes you do 5% more damage to enemies, while the "become a master blacksmith" goal grants you +10% xp from repairing items, etc.). What this means is that the player has a mechanism for explicitly telling the game what they're interested in doing (maybe they think the Black Knight sounds interesting and want to find him, or maybe they don't really care), which lets the game give them more content related to the things they're actually interested in pursuing (rather than giving them quests in a totally haphazard manner). In fact, you could use the player's choices of goals to pursue as a way of determining what kind of form the overarching story and their ultimate goal takes.

If the player is pursuing all of the sneaky assassin related goals, then the game will start to focus more on stealth and won't even bother presenting the player with quests that are out-of-character, like the "become a knight of the order of X". If, however, the player pursues the "become a knight of the order of X" goal, the sneaky assassin related goals don't show up, and the player may in fact acquire the "destroy the sneaky assassin guild" goal. If you want to have multiple endings to your game, then you can make several climactic-sounding quests, but which one appears for your character depends on what kind of character you've been playing. The less-curious player might go through the entire game thinking that the quests they played through were how the game was "supposed" to be played, because they aren't presented with options that don't make sense for the character they're playing, while the curious player will discover that different options allows them to effectively play a different game altogether.

Well, whether you like the player-customized gameplay idea or not, I don't see any reason why developers shouldn't start making a habit of making quests about your character, instead of making them about the NPC that gave the quest to you. It seems like it would just be more satisfying to achieve your own goals than it is to help a person you've never met before achieve their goal and get paid 200 gold pieces for it.

-Ellipsis

Ubisoft and the No DRM PR Stunt

2008-12-13T00:57:00.000-08:00

About to go to bed, but I wanted to throw in a comment on this. Apparently Prince of Persia will ship for the PC with no copyright protection measures. This is theoretically good news, since it suggests that someone is listening to gamers and their rather straightforward points. However, the article also quotes an Ubisoft community representative giving us this gem:

You`re right when you say that when people want to pirate the game they will but DRM is there to make it as difficult as possible for pirates to make copies of our games. A lot of people complain that DRM is what forces people to pirate games but as PoP PC has no DRM we`ll see how truthful people actually are. Not very, I imagine. Console piracy is something else entirely and I`m sure we`ll see more steps in future to try to combat that.

Wow, nice job predicting that your own initiative is going to fail. I guess the idea here is that he's trying to intensify the sense that they're giving gamers a "challenge" to prove them wrong, in an effort to boost sales, but they seemed to have missed the part where the people who care about DRM aren't morons, and a lot of them aren't going to give you any brownie points (or $60 wads of cash) for releasing a DRM free game and then turning around and demeaning players.

In short, seeing the headline on Slashdot made me think "Oh yay, someone's listening, maybe I'll have to buy Prince of Persia," and then reading the statement immediately changed my mind by reminding me that Ubisoft doesn't really care about gamers - they just like marketing stunts.

I will be curious to see what kind of piracy rates Prince of Persia has, but I'm prepared to take any analysis of the numbers, especially from Ubisoft, with a hefty grain of salt.

-Ellipsis

Fallout 3: Part 2

2008-12-09T12:24:00.001-08:00

So when I said that Part 2 was "coming soon," apparently I meant a week later. (edit: if you're hear for tips, scroll to the bottom, this section is editorial)

So, I probably left you with a terrible impression of Fallout 3 after my last post. If so, that means it's time for me to set about the ambitious task of reversing that opinion. Time for Fallout 3: Part 2: The Good Parts.

The Sneaking Game

In Oblivion, I played a roguish character with a bow (and magic). In Fallout 3, I play a sneaky sniper. This largely speaks to my own interests and personality, but the point is that even though the game isn't explicitly about being sneaky, both of these games provided much more satisfying sneaking games than any game I've played that WAS explicitly about sneaking.

Why is that? Let's compare the sneaking experience in a couple different games. In Metal Gear Solid, you are presented with a linear level, with enemies as obstacles. You're supposed to sneak, and the game encourages this by making combat in which your enemy sees you punishing. Of course, since the level is linear and you must sneak, that means that playing through a level devolves into finding the correct path from point A to B that won't involve you getting seen.

In Assassin's Creed, you are also supposed to sneak, although combat against opponents that are aware of your presence is actually pretty easy, while sneaking involves going very slowly and doing nothing interesting (which would draw attention to you). Eventually, every player of Assassin's Creed reaches the limit of their patience with walking around trying to look like a scholar and begins charging guards.

What about Fallout 3? In Fallout 3 you're not "supposed" to sneak - a non-sneaky, heavy duty combat character is a perfectly valid build (I just tried one out for the first time the other day and it was pretty fun). However, sneaking does give you a definite advantage, in both combat and elsewhere. I mean, you get sneak attack criticals, but that's not really the important part, since you could instead invest those skill points from sneak into big guns, and I hear that tactical nuclear warheads also do a lot of damage. The important part is that when you sneak, you can find your opponent before they find you, and then you get to decide how the battle starts. Usually you'll choose to open combat by closing to a good firing range and then saying hello with 4 shots in VATS mode, but you could just as easily open by placing a mine or two conveniently in a path you intend to lure the enemy down, reverse-pick-pocketing a live grenade into your enemy's pocket, sneaking up and turning off a robot (assuming you're really good at science), searching for elements of the environment you can use to your advantage (like gas leaks, slaves you can free, existing traps, etc.), or just avoid the combat altogether. The point here is that sneaking is advantageous because it opens up new possibilities. In other words, sneaking complements the core gameplay philosophy of Bethesda, which is to give the player a high degree of freedom.

Outside of combat, sneaking allows you to get access to areas you're not supposed to be in and allows you to steal things. This might not sound like a big deal, but it means that sneaking around allows you to explore the various mini-narratives the fill the world (which I'll discuss below). This is what initially entranced me about Oblivion - breaking into NPCs houses and stealing their stuff gives you a reason to explore your environment, and a way to interact with it, which is what really brings that environment to life.

Mildly Turn-Based Combat

To avid role-players, one of the features of Fallout 3 that might stand out is that it's also a first person shooter. These have traditionally been antithetical genres: the FPS is all about hand-eye coordination while the RPG is all about resource harvesting and story. We do, however, have a couple precendents now (including one from the big name in American RPGs, Bioware), so what I find interesting is instead the fact that the game is, in fact, lying about being a first person shooter.

But, you object, the game is all first-person, and you shoot things, so how can it not be a first person shooter?! Like I said above, first person shooters are about hand-eye coordination, and Fallout 3 is not. Firstly, the effects of pointing a gun at any enemy and pulling the trigger vary dramatically based on your character's ability with a gun, but what's more significant here is that the dominant mode of combat is VATS mode. The way VATS mode works is that 1) Time pauses. 2) You select a series of attacks you want your character to make, which can be against different body parts of a single enemy or against multiple enemies. 3) Once you've spent your action points queuing up attacks, you accept and then watch your character attempt the various attacks. Hmm...is it just me or does this sound suspiciously like we're not playing a FPS shooter anymore? (hint: it's not just me)

Of course, you don't have to use VATS mode - you can aim manually and fire, although the effect and accuracy still depend on your character's skill. It's also true that after exiting VATS mode you have to wait for your AP to recharge before using it again, during which time you can manually aim, or run, hide, and otherwise stall until your AP is back. The point is, you can go through the entire game without ever taking a shot outside of VATS mode. This means that Fallout 3 gets to have the immersiveness of a first person shooter without requiring any extraordinary hand-eye coordination from the player, and it makes the game much more about what you want to do then about the player's reflexes.

Real Game Narrative

This is what I consider the meat of my argument for Fallout 3 being a good game - it presents stories to the player through gameplay, rather than having story occur between bits of gameplay. I'm not referring to the fact that you are always playing during story sequences, although that is true and valuable - you have dialogue, and events that occur while you're playing, but no cutscenes beyond the opening movie. What I'm referring to is the fact that there are stories in Fallout 3 that aren't part of the main story line (or any explicit storyline). For example:

I reload my pistol and give the area one more sweep with my eyes. All the raiders are down, so I holster my weapon and start to investigate my surroundings more thoroughly. I came here looking for food, but with all the years that have passed, it shouldn't surprise me that the raiders have eaten every can off the shelves, and turned the aisles into miniature fortifications. As I come around behind a desk, I find some stashed supplies. I suppose the raiders could have used this as a nice defensive position, if I hadn't slipped into the midsts and isolated each of them between the grocery aisles. There's an intercom here, and I'm tempted to say something silly into it, until I realize that any lingering raiders would be able to hear me, if there were any. I continue exploring until I find a locked door in the back of the place - here's where they keep their good stuff, I'm sure. Fortunately I've been keeping up on my computer hacking skills and there's a terminal nearby that unlocks the door. As soon as it's open I hear the intercom startle to life, "Ok, guys, we're back. Can someone open the back...wait a minute." Oh shit. I slide into the backroom and close the door I just managed to get open. Now what am I going to do? There are some nice supplies in this room, but I might not survive taking 5 or 6 more raiders at once. Then I notice a large tube in the room with a robot inside. The old grocery store security robot is still intact, apparently, and if I can get it running again...I may have a shot at this afterall.

This isn't elaboration - this is exactly what I was thinking as I was playing through this area. This also wasn't part of the main storyline, and though a quest did point me toward this grocery store, the only requirements to complete the quest were to "find some food." In other words, the quest was just an incentive to get me to explore - nothing dictated that I see things in a certain order, notice the details I did, or use the strategies I did to defeat the raiders: I was simply presented with an interesting environment to explore. Nonetheless, there was a story here, and it was because the environment had a sense of character to it.

This is what Fallout 3 does that's really interesting. This is where true game narrative takes form. It's not in the grandiose battles in DC, or in the moral choices your character makes, or in the story that unfolds about why your father left the vault. It's in the little moments that result from having a rich environment. It's when you kill a machine-gun toting super mutant, only to find that they had an unusually large collection of toy cars and teddy bears; or when you murder someone in their sleep and hear their lover's heartfelt stories about them after the fact; or when you explore a seemingly normal office building where every desk has ammunition for military grade weapons stashed in it, and eventually find a computer containing email correspondence along the lines of "OH GOD, THE FEDS ARE HERE." These stories are simply layered into the environment, and they make the world seem alive. When items feel like they were placed there by the characters, and not by the level designer, that's when exploring an environment becomes a story.

I'll take that over an hour long sequence of Solid Snake getting lectured to by a dying man any day of the week.

Final Note

In summary, Fallout 3 is chock-full of problems, great and small, but it's also probably the most interesting game I've played this year. The core gameplay is so fun and the environment so full of interesting stuff that I, for one, have no choice about liking the game. It also allows for a variety of play styles, and they result in very different experiences - if you made a strong heroic character and steamrolled through the main storyline, then you haven't played the same game I have.

One more thing: this obviously isn't an exhaustive list of good or bad qualities. These are just the aspects of the game that I decided to talk about.

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Tips

So since I posted this, I've been checking sitemeter and apparently a LOT of people are getting here searching for tips on playing Fallout 3. Because I'm just such a nice guy, I've decided to add a couple.

First: How to sneak. It's actually pretty simple - you just crouch and you're in sneak mode. On the PS3, you do this by hitting L3 (which means push in on the left analog stick - you don't need to hold it, just press it to start or stop sneaking). While you're sneaking, you'll get an indicator telling you whether or not you've been noticed.

If you see [Hidden] it means no one sees you.
If you see [Detected] it means a friendly character sees you (so don't try stealing that abraxo cleaner).
If you see [Caution] it means a hostile character is aware you're there, but not sure where you are.
If you see [Danger] it means that a hostile character sees you (and is attacking you - good time to hit L2 and go into VATS mode).

To determine whether or not you're hidden, there are a couple factors that come into play. First, your sneak skill - get it pretty high quickly if you want to play stealth (that means at least 50). Second is visibility - if you're in a dark area and/or the enemy does not have line of sight to you, you're more likely not to be noticed. If you run, you are more likely to be noticed than if you walk or stand still, and if you shoot at an enemy (even if you miss), it will almost certainly give away your position. The keys to stealth playing are patience and the ability to gauge how close you can get without being seen (to maximize your chance of hitting with a sneak attack).

While sneaking, you can pickpocket someone by activating them (walk up behind them and hit X). In my opinion, though, pickpocketing isn't worthwhile in most cases, because it carries an inherent risk of getting caught, whereas stealing objects lying about is much less risky (as long as you're [Hidden] you're A-OK). If you have the Sandman perk, and you attempt to pickpocket a sleeping NPC, you will also have the option of killing them in their sleep, which is actually pretty effective (as long as no one else sees the act), because then you can take their stuff at your leisure...I mean, not like you would ever do something like that, being the model citizen that you are.

The second thing I'll cover is hacking computers. First things first - each time you bring up the computer hacking screen, it randomly generates a puzzle, which means you CANNOT go online to find the password for each terminal in the game. You just have to figure it out from scratch. Sorry.

That said, I can give you some tips for how to figure out the passwords. The basic mechanic here is that when you guess a word, you're told how many of the letters from that word were correct. Note, that means letters in the correct position, so if the password is "Ellipsis" and you guess "Epicfail," you'll see "2/8", meaning that 2 of the letters were correct (the initial E and the second-to-final letter, i). One thing to keep in mind is that only full words are eligible input - all of the #$% and such you see is just filler - ignore it and find the next full world.

So knowing this, a good strategy is to rule out as many choices as possible with each guess, by picking words with common elements. For example, if there are multiple words among your options ending in "-ing," then it's a good candidate to guess, because if the game replies that less than 3 characters were correct, then the password can't possibly end in "-ing", which rules out all of the other words ending in "-ing". So pick words with suffixes or prefixes in common with other options, such as "-ent," "-ed", "de-," "re-," or "con-". After you have some feedback from the system, you should only ever guess words that match that feedback, so check each word. I do this by imagining spelling out the word I'm guessing next to the word I guessed before, and seeing how many of the letters are the same (it should be exactly the same as the number the game told you were correct, or there's no point in guessing that word).

Aside from that, you just need luck (and to save before attempting the terminal, since it will permanently lock if you fail). Also, this might have just been a coincidence, but I noticed an unusual number of times that the correct answer was the second option. Worth keeping in mind.

I hope that's helpful, and I'll keep an eye out for any other questions people are implicitly asking by searching for them on Google...

Fallout 3: Part 1

2008-12-01T19:11:00.000-08:00

So I've been intending to make a post about Fallout 3 for a while, but I keep getting sidetracked by actually playing the game. That alone is probably sufficient to indicate that I'm enjoying it quite a bit, but what I find interesting about Bethesda's games is that while I thoroughly enjoy them, I also come away from them with a list of complaints long enough to form the basis of a doctoral thesis. I guess these are just two aspects of the same thing - obsession.

In any case, I'll start off with some of the complaints, both because I noticed them quickly and because I'd like to give some sense of credence to the good things I have to say later.

1. The Uncanny Valley, Uncanny Rolling Hills, and Occasional Uncanny Mesa

One of the things that I'm consistently surprised by is the widespread assumption that detailed graphics makes for good aesthetics. Fallout 3 is a fantastic example of "next gen" graphics producing awkward situations out of otherwise fine material.

The most clear cut example of this, in my opinion, comes in the form of humor that's hard to laugh at. The game has a certain over-the-top last-generation-fears-realized-in-an-unlikely-future setting, which is clear in everything from the vaul-tec mascot character, who has a smile on his face no matter what he's doing (and it's not always pretty) to the use of nuka-cola caps as currency. At the same time, the game can be creepy and atmospheric. This duality should be pretty clear to anyone who has seen the ads, which show cheerful propaganda fading away into the barren remains of DC, and I understand that the tension between the over-the-topness and the creeping sense of disturbing possiblities is intentional. The problem is that the things that actually provoke these sentiments in me are far too random and seemingly unintentional. It's hard for me to laugh at a situation when its rendered in such exquisite detail that I feel like I'm in the world, but at the same time it's hard for me to take combat situations perfectly seriously, no matter the context, because of the highly improbable amount of gore.

Speaking of gore, I find that the first result on a google image search is usually pretty telling - this is what I got for Fallout 3:

Wow, I didn't remember putting magic head-exploding bullets in my gun between the 15th and 16th shots I took at this guy...I mean, it's one thing when I shotgun a ghoul in the face at point blank range, but when I'm using a pistol at 30 yards, exploding heads are just a ridiculous outcome, especially since I just shot this same enemy in the head with the same weapon multiple times without seeing any such effects.

Note that my problem here isn't with the presence of gore - I'm ok with a game being intended for mature audiences with hardened stomachs. The problem is that the gore doesn't seem to have found any kind of balance or proper place for itself within the game. It doesn't make me reflect on how horrible gunfights are, add to the sense of realism, or serve as consistent comic relief to lighten the mood. Sometimes it makes sense, and it works, but just as often it feels out of place.

The uncanny valley is generally understood to be a fairly specific issue: human facial recognition is very good, so we notice when a face we're presented with approaches realism without actually being a realistic human face, and it bothers us. The basic principle behind it, though, applies much more widely - if you don't ask your audience to suspend their disbelief, they won't, and then they'll notice everything that's not quite right.

For example, the people and living spaces of cities are richly detailed, which on the one hand is great because it gives you more to explore and lets you look into people's lives. On the other hand, it makes you stop and wonder why there are apparently 30 residents of Underworld and only about 10 beds - oh right, because only a dozen of the residents are actual NPCs with names (and beds). For that matter, this is supposed to be THE city of ghouls, the one so great and successful that you can hardly find civilized ghouls living anywhere else...and it's got 30 residents? That doesn't really qualify as a city, much less a major melting pot for irradiated people from all walks of life. I mean, that's about how many raiders (or super mutants) live on an average DC block, but those areas aren't called cities.

By contrast, consider the typical toolbox in Fallout 3. I'm usually not surprised to find a paint gun, some psycho, and a couple units of scrap metal inside one. If you actually look at each of these items, however, you'll notice that a toolbox couldn't possibly hold all of them. This, unlike the small size of a city or the magic 16th exploding head bullet, will likely not be noticed by the player during the game. Why? Because the toolbox is presented to the player as an abstract entity - you can't actually open it up and see the contents of the toolbox - you get a dialog that informs you what is inside, which immediately triggers the player to suspend their disbelief (they don't mind doing so, all they want is to play the game), cue a resource management mini-game, and continue playing.

The lesson here? Abstraction is a powerful tool. Never forget that.

Before moving on, there's one other great piece of "realism" that I feel obliged to bring up. I'm a fan of headshots, so it's not uncommon for me to see the words "Raider's head is crippled," and then to see the same Raider in question pull out a baseball bat and come at me like a madman. I repeat, the game told me that his head was crippled. When I hear that, what I expect is that he's lying on the ground in the throes of death, when it actually just means that he has a minor combat disadvantage.

2. Meaningless Alignment

One of the things that seems to be noticeably worse in Fallout 3 than in Oblivion is the alignment system. The main problem is that it's too simplistic. Oblivion had fame and infamy, which implied an element of human fallacy - you could be evil without being infamous if you were subtle about it (or had the mask of the grey fox). In Fallout 3 there's just karma, and it goes up when you do something nice/noble/generous, and down when you do something mean/illegal/gross.

One problem with this is that it doesn't allow for any kind of substantive distinction between different "good" or "evil" acts. If I look at a computer terminal that I wasn't given permission to, I lose karma. If I kill a woman in her sleep, I lose karma. There's no difference. What's more, there's no limit to how low your karma can do for committing petty crimes, so after stealing hundreds and hundreds of boxes of abraxo cleaner, you'll be a Capitol Crimelord, and tales of you murdering and pillaging will be told on the radio, even if you've never killed anyone.

Speaking of the radio, while it at first seems cool that the game responds to your actions by having the radio report on how evil (or good) you are, it's really just bizarre. For one thing, what 3 Dog says about you on the radio has no relationship whatsoever to what he says to or about you in person. In fact, in a single radio broadcast, he called me an "evil bitch" and 90 seconds later said "so if you see the kid from vault 101, give her a pat on the back" - well which is it, 3 Dog? Do you love me or hate me?

The last thing that's just bizarre about alignment is that everyone, from 3 Dog to random children, know what your alignment is. If there's a "detect evil" spell out there no one ever told me about it, and I just have to guess whether or not the person I'm speaking to is trust worthy, but every single person in the capital wasteland just knows that I'm a bad person, even though they haven't seen me perform a single bad act and they don't behave any differently around me (usually) because of it.

Seriously, if I steal a nuka cola in the middle of nowhere, seen by no one, then I gain magic "evil karma" which can be detected by everyone and compels them to tell me I'm a bad person, but otherwise has no effect on their relationships with me (they'll still do business with me, give me quests, etc.). That's not consequences for my actions. That's just weird.

3. Navigation Nightmare

Megaton is hard to get around. That's what I thought before I made it into DC, and spent an hour trying to figure out how to progress toward that dot on the map until I realized that I was supposed to used the underground tunnels to reach it. Yay. That really made my game experience fun, having a marker on a map with no clear way to reach. Oh wait, no, it didn't.

Half the game takes place in a labyrinth that has no clear rules and filled to the brim with low-loot, high danger super mutants that punish you for making a wrong turn (which you do all the time). More generally, it seems that the purpose here is to control player movement within the city, in order to facilitate a scripted level flow as you move from one part of the story to the next. In other words, the difference between navigating the city and navigating the wastes exists in order to emphasize the difference between playing the main story and doing sidequests in the wastes. I for one find this distinction jarring enough as it is - I don't see how it's advantageous to remind me that all of the elements that make the game unique and interesting are reduced when I follow the main story.

Speaking of scripting, I was bothered by the "Behemoth" sequence early on in the story, in front of the GNR building. A wall is broken down and a giant monster appears, while one of the paladins screams to me "get the Fat Man off of that dead soldier while we hold the Behemoth off!" Of course, the Fat Man is a huge, gigantic weapon that fires nukes. I'm sure this would have been incredibly exciting to a player who used the Big Guns skill a lot, but to me, a sneaky character, it just seemed incredibly lame that the game is forcing me to fight in a way that is completely contrary to my character build, giving me a weapon that seems too valuable to throw away, but takes up 15% of my inventory space without seeing any further use, and trying to convince me that the line "It's a Behemoth!" is flavor and not cliche. What's worse, it's cliche from a different game, and seems like it's only in Fallout 3 because Gears of War/Halo is popular. Halo and Gears of War are both fun, mind you, but they aren't the game that I put into my PS3.

Well, I was planning on also getting to the good parts, but this post is already mildly epic, so I'll cut it off here and save the good part for next time...

Not So Lively Afterall

2008-11-19T20:42:00.000-08:00

I made passing reference in an earlier post to the fact that Google Lively (the virtual world from Google) wasn't usable, and elsewhere I've gone so far as to predict that it would straight-up bomb. Apparently I was right.

The problems with Google Lively are instructive: it drew a lot of attention, and even excitement in certain circles, but it simply wasn't usable. It was trying to sell itself as a "browser based" virtual world, meaning you could embed it in webpages. That sounds nice, I'm sure, but 1) it required a 10 MB download to work, 2) after the 10 MB download it took about 20 minutes to load a room (in my experience), and 3) it was a fully 3D world without any solid navigation controls. So if you require a huge download AND long load times for your app, it's not very effective as an embeddable widget, and if the user has to dedicate a huge amount of effort to moving their avatar across the room (much less around a corner, that was a nightmare), then it's not providing the kind of casual experience that users attracted to browser-based world were looking for in the first place.

In other words, this was an example of a world that tried to use features to compensate for lack of a driving vision or solid design of any kind. Did they even have designers on this project? I mean the menus are all enormous, the camera and navigation controls feel like they're from the early 90s when 3rd person 3D was a peculiarity at best, and chat all occured in bubbles that flew as far as possible from your avatar, with a thin line connecting them to the speaker. The point is that core usability cannot be an afterthought, but just about everything else they did include can be.

I feel a particularly inappropriate amount of schadenfreude when I see this graphic:
That's right: Google Lively was 70% hype and 30% loading screens.

-Silent Ellipsis

Progress

2008-11-05T13:47:00.000-08:00

After the election, it's time for a political post! Everyone else is doing it...

So firstly, it's not at all surprising, but it's certainly heartening to see Obama elected. I'm not going to spend any time talking about the significance of a black president because you've read that fifteen times over - I just wanted to give him a nod before moving on.

Of course, more was decided than just the presidency. More than a third of the senate was up for election, and democrats expanded their majority in both houses of congress. I myself would have liked to see democrats get a filibuster-proof 60 senators, but I'm willing to concede that it might actually be just as well that they didn't (or seem certain not to at this point). Yes, I actually believe in pluralism and all that jazz, and bringing Republicans into the innovative "sane government" strategy is going to be very important to securing the future of American democracy.

But congress isn't really what I want to talk about, either. I want to talk about Proposition 8, the real downer of the evening. For those who don't know, Proposition 8 is a proposed amendment to the California constitution that would ban gay marriage. Even though San Francisco is one of the most liberal cities in the country, much of inland California is conservative, and many liberals in California are also religious enough to vote yes on proposition 8 even while voting Obama into office (who officially opposes prop 8).

As I suggested above, I am a pluralist, and I fully support the right of people to hold whatever beliefs suit their fancy. However, in this country marriage carries with it legal as well as social benefits, which makes it fairly clear that this is a civil rights issue - a minority of the population is being denied legal rights by virtue of personal characteristics that have no impact on the rights of the majority.

That said, there actually is another reasonable side in the debate - it's possible to be for gay rights without being for gay marriage, and it's a not a separate-but-equal copout. Part of the problem is that marriage is a religious concept for many people. A marriage is a religious ceremony, and typically takes place in a church (or other religious structure). Then isn't it fair to say that denying gays the right to marriage is itself a right - the right to freedom of religion? I say sure, but that carries with it a cost, for if marriage is a religious issue, then it isn't the role of government to be dictating who can and can't marry in the first place.

So the obvious solution (well, obvious to me) is to get rid of marriage as a legal status altogether. All of the rights now associated with marriage would be instead associated with domestic partnerships (or whatever we want to call them), all current marriages between individuals are immediately converted to such partnerships (so married couples aren't affected at all), and marriages are purely understood to be religious affairs, meaning that any church is free to decide who it will or won't marry (and can even offer special marraiges or super marriages if they want - I really don't care). While we're at it, we won't just define a domestic partnership to include same-sex couples, but to include any group of people who are close enough to extend rights concerning themselves to the other members - so if a pair of close friends or siblings lived together, they could function as a family unit like a husband and wife can. After all, why should a sexual relationship between partners be a prerequisite for what amounts (when you remove the religious terminology) to a legal contract about sharing rights and resources?

Of course, at this point I've gone far enough to be considered radical, even though I maintain that this solution should please everyone. Religious individuals get to hold onto their religious freedom, churches GAIN religious freedom by not having their right to perform religious ceremonies restricted by the government, and currently unmarried family units gain equal legal rights. If everyone gets what they want, what's the problem?

The problem is that anyone claiming that "religious freedom" is their reason for wanting to ban gay marriage is lying. They don't want religious freedom. They want theocracy. They're not voting for prop 8 to defend themselves from anything - they're voting for prop 8 to make the lives of other citizens worse (as punishment for their devious behavior). This will seem obvious to many, but it's also important to point out (again and again), because words do make a difference. It's easier to argue that you're "pro-life" than to argue that you're for throwing women who have abortions in jail. It's easier to argue that we should teach the flaws in evolution than it is to argue that we should teach religion in science class. It's easier to argue that we should "protect marriage" than to argue that we should "punish heretics."

We need to take hold of the language if we want to take hold of the culture. Here's a short list of terms we should adopt:

Liberal > Progressive
Conservative > Regressive
Global Warming > Global Climate Change
Intelligent Design > Creationism
Pro-life > Anti-choice
Same-sex Marriage > The Rights of Families

-Silent Ellipsis

P.S. To everyone who reads this for my posts on video games, consider posts like this "bonus posts," or if you prefer, "sidequests."

Waving Hands

2008-11-03T15:37:00.000-08:00

I was recently exposed to Spellcaster, or "Waving Hands," and was immediately excited to try it out. The logistics prevented me from trying it for a while, until I found a site that hosts automated sessions between players at RavenBlack Games (I'm Ellipsis on there, so if anyone wants to create an account and send me a challenge, feel free). Now that I've gotten to actually play the game (a dozen or so times) I can say that my excitement was justified.

Spellcaster is a game about dueling wizards. Nothing terribly innovative there, seeing as how an entire gaming medium (the collectible card game) was spawned by a game with the same premise. The innovative part is how you cast spells - by making gestures with your two hands (usually abbreviated as letters you can write down in sequence), combinations of which create spells. Now, this is conceptually very cool, but that's not what makes Spellcaster a good game. It's the fact that the gameplay is very simple (just consists of picking a gesture to make with each hand each turn), but very strategically deep. We can be a bit more specific, though, in talking about what makes the game good:

1) Micro-goals with feedback: Each individual spell is made up of several coordinated actions and could be counterspelled or otherwise interrupted by an opponent. As a result, every individual spell that you complete gives you a sense of accomplishment (proportional to the difficulty of completing the spell).

2) Engagement Level: The game allows you to control how much time you invest in it. There is no time limit between turns, so you can take as long as you want to make a decision. You can check on the progress of the game every once in a while (or just get an email reminder when it's your turn) and play at work. Alternatively, you can spend time strategizing, trying to figure out your opponent's plans, etc, and this time pays off. The ability of the player to control how they play can be very valuable.

3) Balance: Sure, the big spells are flashy and do a lot of damage, but one interruption from your opponent spoils the effort you put into preparing that spell. Meanwhile, the minor enchantments only affect your opponent for one turn, but they're easy to pull off and can disrupt his rhythm. What particularly pleases me about the balance is that even though there are different play styles, every spell is useful to every player - sometimes, a situation just calls for "remove enchantment" or for "anti-spell" and this is just as true for a defensive player as for a fan of the big, flashy spells.

4) Dynamic: You will never succeed at this game by picking a "dominant" strategy and going through the motions. The game relies very strongly on predicting what your opponent is going to do (so you can counter their attacks and make sure they're unable to defend themselves from yours), and the result is that play is very fluid and often unpredictable (your opponent is working very hard to make sure it's upredictable!).

5) Come Backs: The game does not provide any means for the winning player to secure and easily hold onto his lead. If one player has 5 monsters out and is invisible and immune to fire, cold, and physical attacks, all it takes it one dispel magic to level the playing field. Similarly, even if you hit your opponent with a strong spell, they might have something up their sleeve that they've been planning for a while that will take away your advantage. The point is that I've had many games where I was clearly ahead and ended up losing, and many in which I was clearly behind and still pulled out a victory.

This post, of course, isn't just an extended advertisement for the game - these basic elements that make the game compelling are elements that should be included in any game that strives to be strategic, because they are the elements that create a rich play experience. To balance out the post a bit, I can quickly point out the major problem with the game: steep learning curve. The only people who play this game are those who committed themselves to learning how to play it, and who are willing to repeatedly look over the 40+ entry spell-list trying to figure out what kind of options they and their opponents have, and what the advantages and disadvantages of each are. If a game had this kind of strategic depth and was able to lead players in and teach them the skills they needed in a more incremental way, it would be the stuff of greatness.

-Silent Ellipsis

Little Late Planet

2008-10-17T22:59:00.001-07:00

For those who haven't heard, the much-anticipated Little Big Planet is being delayed. What could cause Sony to delay the release of a title they expect to get so much out of? Apparently one of the background music tracks contained two lines from the Qur'an, and the mixing of music and lines from the Qur'an is offensive to some Muslims.

Now, I'm not going to pretend that this is an obvious or simple situation; offense for no reason is unconscionable, and we should respect all people whatever their beliefs. That said, I think Sony has terribly overreacted. A couple considerations.

1) The people that brought this to Sony's attention had asked for a patch to be released that would remove the offensive track. Sony actually went beyond this request and recalled all of the units that they had already shipped.

2) A statement along the lines of "we didn't mean to offend anyone," along with an optional patch to remove the track, would probably have been sufficient to appease Muslim players without upsetting the game's core audience.

3) This kind of response probably wouldn't have happened if the game had offended a similarly-sized contingent of Jews, Christians, Buddhists, or the like. I'll admit that I don't actually know how big the conservative Muslim LBP player contingent is, but the response isn't just for them - it comes from a general fear of upsetting Muslims. There's no doubt that incidents such as the Mohammed comic controversy are informing this decision.

4) I think it's relevant that the music was written by a Muslim artist, and wasn't at all demeaning to Muslims. This kind of work actually has a lot of positive work to do for the Muslim community - the possibility for art and music by Muslims, and even words from the Qur'an, to enter the mainstream American cultural consciousness. As long as vague fears keep this kind of expression at bay, Muslims will find it that much harder to stop being seen as the archetypal "other" in the minds of many Americans.

Basically, the situation makes me sad.

-Silent Ellipsis

3 Kinds of Fun

2008-10-13T16:42:00.000-07:00

Wow, a lot of blogposts in the last week. I guess I've just been in the right mood for it...

Anyway, Raph Koster just made a post defending the idea that fun comes from learning new skills. This reminded me that I've been contemplating the issue a bit recently, and have some ideas to toss into the discussion. I'll begin by saying that I agree with the last point in Koster's post - the theories that have been presented don't necessarily conflict with each other. If you had a direct argument going on between an advocate of 8 kinds of fun and the learning theory of fun, I would say that the two camps are talking past each other.

First, I'll say something about "8 kinds of fun." They are sensation, fellowship, fantasy, discovery, narrative, expression, challenge, and submission. My immediate reaction the very first time was "aren't some of these more important to games than others?" At the time I thought that some seemed more "game-like," by which I meant that they were more particular to games. In particular, "sensation" doesn't seem very game-like, because books and movies can offer spectacles at least as well as games can, and clearly "narrative" is the kind of fun where literature is king. It's true that the narrative and the presentation of games can be important though, so this left me confused for some time.

I think I understand now the source of that confusion: the above list, though a good list, is mis-titled. They aren't "kinds" of fun...they're aspects of fun, or components. That is, they are the various parts that make up a fun experiences. While someone might look for games that have good stories, they're probably not playing the game strictly for the story (again, if all they wanted was to see a good story, they would just read a book). It may be true that they want to see a good story in the game, but that's different from just wanting to see a good story - the game setting changes the meaning of the desire. What I'm getting at generally is that the items on the list above can all greatly contribute to the funness of a game, but they just don't seem core enough to the game experience to properly be called "kinds" of fun. It seems to me like we skipped a step when we call them such.

The fun-as-learning approach is at the opposite extreme - it's so fundamental that it becomes limited in how much in can tell us. It's true, given a sufficiently broad definition of "learning," but it's far from being the complete story about what makes games fun. If we recognize that the 8 kinds of fun are really components of fun, and then combine it with the fun-as-learning approach we get a much better picture of the whole process - these elements combine in different ways in order to create interesting learning environments which we call games.

I still think we're missing an intermediary, however, which is the real "kinds" of fun. Like I said, I think that only something very core to the gameplaying experience can count as a kind of fun. I doubt I'll get this right on my first pass, but I have in mind 3 different core types of experience, all of which are built out of the 8 components of fun and all of which entail some kind of learning. What I currently understand to be the 3 kinds of fun are: creation, submission, and competition. These are actually each in the list of 8 components, so if you prefer, I'm just making the list more concise by eliminating redundancy.

If we recognize that games are sets of rules, then the relationship between these kinds of fun should be fairly intuitive: creative gameplay comes from control of the rules, submissive gameplay from exploring the space within those rules, and competitive gameplay from comparing performance within the rules. In reality, the boundary lines aren't so clear, and a game can have appeal as providing more than one kind of fun, but I think these can be separated out as three core kinds of gameplay. I'll discuss them in the opposite order I introduced them in:

Competitive gameplay is the kind that we're most familiar with, and is easy to understand. In its purest form, competitive play depends on the barest set of rules, which exist only to establish a sense of fairness between the competitors. In fact, the rules here are defining what is fair, and by choosing what is and isn't allowed the rulemaker is deciding what kind of player will fare best in the game, but at the least the rules should assure the players that they each have a fair shot of proving their superiority in the game. Probably the purest example of competitive games are simple feats of physical ability: races, weight-lifting contests, and the like. In these contests, the rules are not very interesting, so the interest is entirely about the competitors, their training, and what they're able to achieve. In digital games, competitive behavior emerges in just about anything that is multiplayer, but it can also arise in single-player games if the player believes that they and the computer are in a "fair" contest. This is largely illusory, since computers can be programmed to perform better or worse at a task, but it's interesting that it's nonetheless relevant to the player when they're in a competitive gameplay mode - they become angry when they perceive the computer "cheating."

Submissive gameplay is a kind of gameplay we've seen grow substantially since the advent of digital games, but exists in plenty of non-digital examples. Submissive gameplay involves accepting the rules of the game as law, and then exploring the space of possibilities left within those restrictions. This is common in digital single-player games, where the player accepts the rules of the world, the limits of their controller, etc., as essential parts of the game. He makes a silent pact with the designer, that in exchange for accepting these limitations, he will be compensated by a rewarding game experience. This happens in person in the case of tabletop games, where the players submit to the authority of the gamemaster (I joke to the GM of my most recent campaign that his title implies that the players are "slaves", but in retrospect, it's not a joke: playing a table-top game IS play-as-submission). The purest incarnation of submissive play, however, is puzzles. In a puzzle you have a set objective, and often only one solution, but if the path leading to that solution is interesting, then players will submit to spend their time trying to do exactly what the designer wants, and fun may happen as a result.

Finally, there is creative gameplay. The most obvious example is the game designer's career - really it's just extended gameplay that happens to produce something people will pay for. Another clear example is the role of the gamemaster in a table top game, as mentioned above. Sure, the gamemaster generally abides by the rules set out in the rulebook for whatever game he is running, but he is free to invent "house rules," and expected to flesh out the environment, decide what kind of encounters the players can reasonably be expected to overcome, etc. In short, the experience of being a gamemaster is fundamentally different from the experience of being a table top RPG player. Your feedback doesn't come in the form of experience and treasure, but in the reaction of the players to your game - when they have fun, you feel accomplished.

I may have missed a fundamentally different kind of gameplay, but every example game I can think of makes use of these three varieties of gameplay. An RTS game has submissive play and competitive play (it's a good example of a genre in which players are wary of the computer "cheating"), Oblivion has submissive and creative gameplay, etc. Also note that each kind of gameplay can appear in non-obvious places. If you are given a tool within a game that allows you to control an aspect of the environment, and it's not designed to be used only for one specific purpose, you are experiencing creative play - by altering the environment, you're getting to test out different rules to see what kind of effects they have.

There's plenty more to say on the subject, but this post is too long as it is. Let me know if you can think of a core kind of gameplay that is not one of these three.

-Silent Ellipsis

Mega Man 9

2008-10-12T13:46:00.000-07:00

I recently finished Mega Man 9, and overall the game was fantastic. It also brings me back to the issue of difficulty in games. Mega Man 9 is an extremely difficult game, but in general I felt less frustrated playing it than I have playing many less challenging games, and I'm going to consider here why. First, as a disclaimer, I recognize that I'm the kind of player who enjoys serious challenges, and that not everyone will - players who don't like to die more than a couple times on the same level will not enjoy Mega Man 9. That said, for those players who are looking for a challenge, Mega Man 9 does it right.

The hard part of balancing difficulty is figuring out the difference between a challenge and a frustration. I'll illustrate with a couple examples. It's a challenge when you're handed a portal gun, and you see that you're supposed to use it to get to the other side of a giant pit, but need to figure out how; it's a frustration when your high-level wizard is forced to crawl through a dungeon without being able to cast any spells, and risks getting killed by the kind of creature that they could normally off with one fireball (I'm looking at you, Neverwinter Nights). If you play a lot of games, then you've likely seen countless examples of both (and probably examples of both in the same game on many occasions), but it's hard to quantify the difference between a challenge that is fun and one that makes you want to throw your controller across the room. So let's attempt to quantify the difference.

The first thing we need to ask is, "what makes games fun to begin with?" Of course, this isn't an easy question to answer, and a many different ones have been composed (in some cases by the same person). I tend to agree with Danc over at Lost Garden, though, that learning is, if not the only source of fun, at least the source of fun most core the game playing experience. So why do players enjoy games that are challenging? Because if you've played many games, you've probably gotten pretty good at them, and if the game you're playing only includes elements you've already mastered, there's nothing for you to learn. If you're not learning anything new, then playing the game is just repitition (I'm looking at you, xp grinding).

So the issue is that in order to be fun, a challenge has to require you to master a new skill, but if the skill is completely unrelated to what you've been doing before, or just too much more advanced, then the player will become frustrated and stop playing. What's worse, if the "challenge" manages to decrease the odds of victory without actually introducing any new elements to learn, then frustration is the only thing it can achieve. This doesn't mean, however, that a challenge always has to come in the form of a completely revolutionary game mechanic - the truth is that even a small change (upping an enemy's hit points, or preventing them from staggering when hit) can actually make a substantial difference to the way you play the game, and thus provide a fun challenge, but this depends on how it's handled.

So enough with the generalizations, this post is about Mega Man 9. When you start playing the game, you will likely see its gameplay as "unforgiving." If you make a single misstep and fall into a pit, or land a spike (which are not in short supply), you instantly die, and are sent back to the last checkpoint. What's more, there are only 2 checkpoints in each level - one right in the middle (usually before some particularly challenging platforming) and one right before the boss, AND once you run out your lives, you have to restart the level even if you had made it to a checkpoint. What's more, the game doesn't try to make it easy for you to avoid these dangers - it's constantly throwing obstacles and tricks at you that force you to fall to your death. So even if you get past the difficult jumps, you don't get to save your progress? That doesn't sound very fun.

After you play for a while, however, you realize why this system works: reaching checkpoints isn't the primary form of progress you make in the game - learning how to traverse the level is. That is, most of the challenges in Mega Man 9, once they have been overcome, are much easier to complete a second time. This is because your victory or defeat is almost never the result of chance - when you die, it's because you made a mistake, and when you succeed, it's because you've mastered the challenge.

There are also a couple of structural elements that support this gameplay. First, the levels are actually all pretty short - the density of challenges means that it takes a long time to get through on your first attempt, but once you've mastered the level, and go back again, you realize that actual space of the level is pretty small, and you can traverse it very quickly if you know what to do. This means that saving your progress at checkpoints isn't nearly as important as it would be if getting back to that point took an extended period of time. To illustrate this principle, note that it took me 5-6 hours to beat the game, but record times are posted online, and the last time I checked, the best time in which someone had beaten the entire game was just over 24 minutes. I guarantee you that they weren't using cheats and tricks, either - that's just about how long it takes you to go through all the levels if you never have to pause and attempt something multiple times.

There's another structural element that's just as important in balancing the difficulty - you get to choose the order in which you complete the levels. After the opening story, you're taken to a stage select screen where you see all 8 master robots, and by selecting one, you're taken to their stage. There is no first stage and eighth stage - they are all balanced, but you will likely find some of the challenges easier to complete than others. If a stage is too hard for you, you can leave and try another one. Not only do you have control over the order in which you face the challenges, but as you complete challenges, you gain new abilities, which makes it easier to overcome the stages that gave you trouble in the beginning. By arranging the levels in this way, the game has effectively built in automatic difficulty balancing. Rather than having to perfectly execute everything on your first attempt, you're free to explore the various levels (mastering the basics as you do), until you find one that you think you can complete, and as you begin completing levels, you're getting stronger (and more skilled), and gradually making progress toward overall completion, not just in terms of checkpoints passed, but in terms of gathering the resources you need to overcome whichever challenges pose the most difficulty to you.

The total effect of this design is that you feel like you're constantly improving and constantly making progress even when you fail out of a level and lose your checkpoints. Combine this with the fact that many of the challenges are creative, engaging, and amusing, and you have a recipe for a great game experience. Even though the levels try to "trick" you into falling into pits and onto spikes, the game is straightforward about it - it communicates, not through text, but through visual cues and samples of gameplay elements, that it's going to try and trick you in the next room, so keep an eye out for it.

Not every game needs to be as hard as Mega Man 9, and this certainly isn't the only way to structure a game in order to be challenging and fun, but it serves as a great example of a game that uses well-crafted design to deliver to their target audience (crazy oldschool gamers) exactly what they're looking for.

Besides, who can resist a game with a boss named "Galaxy Man"?

-Silent Ellipsis

Legitimate Outlaws

2008-10-09T19:44:00.000-07:00

I was reading an article by Ernest Adams about “Implementing God”* to punish griefers (or player-killers, as he called them). It reminded me that griefers, like many other emergent features of MMORPGs, are generally thought of as an inevitable but strictly negative part of the game that can only be handled through liberal use of the ban-hammer. Also on this list are gold farmers, players who use macros, and chat spammers. The MMO team simply sighs and assumes that it’s only recourse is to be reactive, trying to find and eliminate all such annoyances.

It seems to me that developers who take this approach (and that’s about everyone right now) missed something – that the real value of an MMO is the emergent features that come through player interaction. There’s a reason that people are spawn-camping, chat spamming, and using macros. The reason is very simple: the player wants something that the game isn’t providing, and so using “illegitimate” means to try and get it.

A post that tackles all these issues at once would be epic in proportions, so I’m going to stick to just one of these topics for now: outlaws. I find it interesting (or, if you prefer, appalling) that although “rogue”-like classes exist in a variety of MMORPGs, they don’t get to do many roguish things. Take as a particularly sad example the assassin class in Guild Wars: Factions. What does an assassin do in this game? They wield two-daggers…and they charge at monsters and hit them a lot. Really, the assassin is just a different flavor of melee-fighter, who is defined by wielding two daggers instead of one sword. How exciting.

Other games may do a better job of making rogues distinctive, but they still don’t provide any chance for a rogue to have non-combat gameplay, and they certainly don’t have any room for rogue role-playing. In theory, a rogue is an outlaw, someone who lives outside the normally bounds of behavior for his society. Sometimes that’s what a player wants – not to be a noble hero but to defy the arbitrary rules that confine him and rebel against the society he’s in. Unfortunately, most games don’t really have much of a society to speak of, so the only thing for the player to rebel against is the game itself. That is, griefing is the only outlet available for someone who is bored of being a cookie-cutter anonymous hero. Simply declaring that griefers are immature, even if true, ignores the fact that the game is failing to provide them with a “legitimate” experience that engages them. In other words, the game is demanding that the player behave according to an arbitrary norm, and many times the experience gotten by adhering to that norm really is boring.

The problem is that this isn't a "legitimate" outlet. The system doesn't support or recognize outlaw activities, even though the actions are permitted by the mechanics. The griefer will get a brief feeling of empowerment the first time they pick on another PC, but won't be satisfied, and in their desperation to get that rush again will resort to crueler and crueler behavior. Players may form vigilante groups to counter-grief, and it's possible that the player could be banned, but there is no immediate reaction from the system when you break the law. Ultimately, actions on all sides are emotionally heated and everyone involved just ends up being frustrated.

So what's the solution? Formalize their outlaw status. Provide in-game mechanisms for them to act outside the "law" while still playing within the greater game system, and what was previously a frustration becomes flavor instead. You can give the lawbreaker an "outlaw" status, restrict from them certain rights of proper citizens (they can't freely come and go in cities, for example), and make them fair game for anyone with the "police" profession (and if they've violated enough laws, fair game for anyone to take down). You might give them some benefits in return (like access to outlaw society, if it exists), but you don't need to, because recognition is their reward, and it's all they wanted really wanted to begin with. Some hardcore players will covet the right to be called infamous, because that status will actually mean something in a system that makes being outlaw difficult, but possible and a legitimate choice of play style. While the outlaws feel more satisfied, the vigilantes also receive a recognized status, and get the sense that they're not just righting individual wrongs, but protecting society as a whole. The entire psychological outlook on law breaking changes, and quite possibly for the better.

Of course, in order for this to work properly, there needs to be a society that outlaws can meaningfully be outside of (since that's what it means to be an outlaw). Creating a genuine sense of a complex in-game society is a topic far larger than the one I set out to discuss in this post, but having formal outlaws is one of the things that helps to shape it - for it implies laws, which are real and meaningful.

Perhaps later I'll talk about how I think similar ideas apply to the other "inevitable but annoying" features of MMORPGs.

-Silent Ellipsis

*Yes, I know it's pretty old, but the same ideas are still prevalent. Just look at how people at Mythic brag about banning gold-sellers. It's the exact same mentality.

Googlepedia

2008-10-07T14:59:00.000-07:00

Google's doing something pretty cool for its 10th birthday: it's made the index from 2001 available as an alternate search function. Not only does this let you see the big, blocky logo of yesteryear, but your search results will actually display the results you would have gotten in 2001.

In particular, I was very amused when I performed a search for "wikipedia." This is what I got. That's right, 681 results. This was literally back when wikipedia was new. I'm particularly amused by the quote, "Who knows where this will go?" on one of the results.

For comparison, this is what you get if you search for "wikipedia" today. With 284,000,000 results, I think it's safe to say that wikipedia's profile on the internet has raised over the last 7 years.

2001 was a more innocent time. A quick search for "September 11" came up with a mere 8 million results, none of which had to do with terrorism...

What kind of interesting things have you found in Google 2001?

-Silent Ellipsis

*Edit* I hadn't at first noticed that there are links to look at archived versions of webpages! Here is wikipedia's page in 2001.

Almost Greatness

2008-09-23T15:08:00.000-07:00

I've noticed a string of games recently that began with ambitious or innovative ideas and combined them with high production values. This seems like a fairly straightforward recipe for a great game, but each of these games has fallen victim to major design flaws that have kept it from achieving its potential. These "almost great" games are at once somewhat saddening, since they fail to live up to the gameplay they promised, and a little inspiring in that they show what kind of impact design decisions have (and thus how important designers are). None of them are "bad" games, but they began with ideas of such scope that you can't help feel that something important went wrong in order for them to end up as merely "good."

In particular, there are three games I want to consider here, for a brief time each (this doesn't constitute a full review of each by any means - I'm focusing on what's relevant to this conversation). They are, in chronological order: Supreme Commander, Assassin's Creed, and Spore.

Supreme Commander

First of all, that's a pretty dramatic title. You'd probably expect that a game with the title "Supreme Commander" is on a mission to be the ultimate game of its chosen genre (RTS), and you'd be right. Chris Taylor decried all RTS games that had been made before as "really being economy games," and planned to revolutionize the genre by changing the entire scale of RTS. Supreme Commander did this by literally increasing map size - the largest maps are 80x80 kilometers, a scale at which crossing the map can be, in itself, an accomplishment. This was combined with some really great high-level controls, such as the ferry system - you could tell a factory to produce 100 assault bots, and send them to a ferry point as they were produced, so that they could be picked up by a transport ship and moved to a deployment station, all automated once you'd set it up. It also had strategic zoom - a feature so compelling that after I'd experienced it I was shocked when I tried to go back and play other RTS games that didn't include it.

So far so good. What happens, however, when you actually sit down to play it? First, there's the technical problem: the game requires so much processor power that if you try to play on the largest maps, the game will lag to the point of never ending. As a result, almost all play took place on the smallest maps, which favored rushing strategies, and more or less defeated the purpose of having a huge scale of combat. This was a major problem, but since it was a technical problem it's not the one I'm interested in. I'm interested in what the gameplay looks like when the game is played the way it's "meant" to be played: on a largish map.

On a largish map, it's true that transporting your soldiers across the map is difficult, and this, at least at first, leads you to build forward bases and set up elaborate ferry systems to move your troops around the map. I say at first because it wasn't long before I realized that there was another solution: high-tech weapons with obscene range. Tech3 (and in the case of the UEF Tech4) artillery, along with "strategic missiles" are capable of hitting the enemy from the opposite end of the map even on a 40x40 kilometer map. If you're playing Cybrans, then you have another option - you can build Soul Rippers, which are flying fortresses of death and destruction that can cross the map easily and have enough health and firepower to take on the enemy army without any ground support at all. These are all very cool units, but they're also so convenient, compared to building and transporting a ground army, that they remove any incentive to play the game the way the makers originally intended.

That's not the largest problem, however. The largest problem is that despite the existence of resources on the map to be harvested, the most efficient way to build up an economy is to get to the third tech level and then build power plants and fabricators that can produce resources no matter where you build them. Combine this with the fact that there's no limit to the number of these structures you can build and you realize the kind of advantage gathered by a player who spends all of his time building up his economy. What's more, automated base defenses are so effective that a player can hold off an entire army of enemy troops without every building a single soldier of their own - in fact, when I play, I usually don't even build a land factory, since you can create engineers from an air factory. What do we have here? We have a game where economy is king, and all of that sophisticated transportation and territory-acquisition strategy falls by the wayside - all you need to do is turtle. Build base defenses, build up your economy, and then build a super advanced super weapon that makes you win.

The ultimate result of which is that Supreme Commander didn't revolutionize the RTS genre like it intended to. It didn't change the "economy game" paradigm - instead it is the single most economy-focused RTS game ever made. It seems that a couple of these points were noticed by the designers, given the changes they made in the expansion, Forged Alliance, but from my experience, they didn't go far enough in changing the fundamental elements that prevented the kind of strategic play they were looking to create.

Assassin's Creed

I notice that the section on Supreme Commander is very long. Due to time limitations and the desire not to repeat myself too many times, I'll try to be much more brief in my discussion of the next two games. Assassin's Creed is another game that was looking to revolutionize a genre, but this time, the genre in question wasn't RTS games, but stealth games.

Assassin's Creed makes use of something that was utterly absent from all stealth games before it: social stealth. That is, in a game like Thief or Metal Gear Solid, the way you sneak is by crouching in the shadows and waiting until you victim turns his back on you. In Assassin's Creed the way you sneak is by walking around in broad daylight - trying to look as much as possible like a normal citizen. It's fair to say that Altair is following the advice of Asimov in Foundation, "It pays to be obvious, especially when you have a reputation for being subtle." Assassin's Creed also allows you an unprecedented amount of physical freedom, allowing you to climb on just about anything and everything, leaping from rooftop to rooftop feeling like a badass.

This was all great, but in a demo of the game made some time before its release, the presenter said "In Assassin's Creed, you can't take seven hits to the head, or even one, and keep fighting." They were going to have a realistic fighting system, where one false move could mean death. Well, that didn't happen. In fact, the opposite happened - not only can you take seven hits to the head and continue fighting, but as you continue fighting, your health (or "synchronization") will gradually regenerate, meaning that you can continue fighting indefinitely, even if you are making mistakes and getting hit. I happen to know a couple of people who did exactly that: skip the stealth entirely and just kill every single guard in the entire city. Now, I'm usually one for not restricting players to a single style of play, but the game is supposed to revolve around stealth, and to be honest, the combat is both a little shallow and very easy. Once you get the hang of counters, you can take an army of literally any size and win without breaking a sweat.

The problems didn't quite end there, however. The missions were all a little too repetitive, and several of the important features didn't seem quite believable enough (really, I only ever hide in rooftop gardens - why don't guards ever think to look in them?). What's more, playing the game "properly," that is by using social stealth left and right, is just too hard, slow, and inconvenient for the player, compared to hacking-and-slashing. Altogether, the result is that Assassin's Creed was pretty fun, and featured some awesome climbing, but failed to revolutionize the stealth genre.

Spore

Our most recent example is the highly-anticipated Spore. By highly anticipated I mean that when a demo video was released a couple years ago showing the kind of gameplay Spore would have, people thought this had the potential to be the most groundbreaking game of the decade. The scope was unprecedented: you begin as a single-celled organism, become a sea animal, move onto land, develop sentience, create a civilization, and eventually become a space faring race wandering the galaxy. It was going to be the ultimate sandbox, for once you’d mastered the creation tools every step of the way, you would have access to all of them during the space stage, and could create any kind of world you wanted.

The ambitions of Spore are highly praise-worthy. Unfortunately, once again, the game, though fun, fails to deliver what it intended. There are two fundamental problems with Spore. The first is that the game can’t decide if it’s supposed to be a sandbox or a goal-oriented game. If it’s a sandbox game, then there shouldn’t be any restrictions as you progress (such as the inability to edit your creature after the creature stage), and there shouldn’t be any gameplay features that force you to spend your time doing a particular thing (you get hungry in the creature stage, and so can’t ever stop hunting, or you get constantly attacked and have to spend your time defending yourself). In a sandbox game, challenges like combat should be challenges that the player can attempt when they want to and ignore when they want to. If, however, the game is really goal-oriented, then the decisions you make and the things you achieve should be more significant – as it turns out, whether I have on pair of wings or eight pairs has no gameplay effect, that I can easily make a creature that effectively dabbles in everything instead of having to choose, and no matter how many body parts I gather, as soon as I’ve acquired enough DNA to progress to the tribal stage, then I effectively lose my progress, because beginning a new “stage” is more like starting to play an entirely different game than it is like continuing the same game.

Interestingly, the second fundamental problem is a problem whether the game is sandbox or goal-oriented: the game stages are too disconnected. Not only is the gameplay different, but your choices and achievements don’t have much impact. I can gather every body part in the cell stage and hunt and kill every species I run across, or I can just gather the food that happens to be floating around, and either way, as soon as I get to the creature stage my body parts are all obsolete, and I’m starting a different kind of game. Similarly, if the game is a sandbox, you should feel free to go between the various modes, and play as a creature for a bit, and then switch to a space-faring race, and then switch to a single-celled organism. Currently, not only are you stuck with the creature you have when you progress past the creature stage, but you have a preset amount of time playing in each stage. That is, in theory you can play the creature stage indefinitely, but you aren’t accomplishing anything (since what you do has no effect on future stages), there are no more large rewards left to work for, and the game at that stage becomes much more challenging, eventually becoming too hard to be much fun for someone looking for a sandbox experience. Based on the greater design concepts, the lower-level design requires that the developers decide how long the player will spend in each stage, and inevitably you can’t pick lengths that will satisfy everyone (or even fully satisfy one person, since they’ll likely want to spend more time in the stages they like and less in the stages they don’t).

The gameplay changes present a problem of their own, however. One issue is that when you effectively are incorporating multiple game genres into one game, each genre’s gameplay is going to feel a bit shallow. What’s worse is that the player feels like the time they spend mastering each gameplay style is a waste, because they don't apply the skills they learned in future stages. The only exception to this rule is in the creation tools - as you master one tool, you feel more confident approaching the next creation tool. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there seems to be a general consensus that the creation tools are the most fun part of the game.

Conclusion

There is a trend running through these games. They begin with innovative concepts, but it seems that the rest of the design process revolves around mitigating the effect of these ideas, and trying to make the game more like other games of the genre, likely in the name of accessibility. RTS gamers are used to economy-based strategy, so Supreme Commander's revolutionary beginnings tend in that direction until it ceases to be revolutionary; players of 3D action games are used to HP and being able to hack away at guards, and Assassin's Creed heads in that direction until the creative stealth elements become optional; players like being given some kind of direction, and so Spore gradually moved away from being a sandbox game until it became a pseudo-goal-oriented game.

It seems to me that the same piece of advice can be applied to all of these games (and many others that I don't have time to discuss here): if you have a great idea, run with it. The remainder of the design process should be spent trying to figure out how to support and emphasize the good idea, rather than how to restrict it or make it seem less original. It's not like Supreme Commander gets to be very approachable and intuitive as a result of being so economy-driven; the learning curve is still very steep. Similarly, players of Spore don't get a deep, goal-oriented experience; it feels a little wonky, instead. If you have a really innovative concept that leads to new kinds of play, players will appreciate it, even if it takes them a little longer to get the hang of it - you want them to be willing to put in that time to get a truly original and compelling experience, rather than taunting them with the potential of a new experience, only to drop them in a game that feel suspiciously like many games they've already played.

-Silent Ellipsis

P.S. Wow, this whole post ended up being a bit more epic than expected.

Business "Solutions"

2008-09-10T16:59:00.000-07:00

I was going to make a serious post, but 1) I don't have much time before I have to go, and 2) I can't get this out of my head, so here goes.

Business lingo. It makes me want to simultaneously laugh and facepalm (see Exhibit A) every time I hear it (or see it). From my experience, business lingo is an elaborate exercise in trying to make your product and your activities sound more important than they really are. I guess it's a good thing that I'm not a venture capitalist, because I would be put off of investing in anything that has a transparently bull-shitty self-description, and just about everything does.

Exhibit A

In particular, business lingo makes excessive use of the term "solution." In the context of a business-lingo description, the word "solution" means, roughly, "our product does something." In other words, it doesn't mean anything at all. If, however, you make sure to include it in the description of your product, it's sure to sound more professional, and professionals will wonder why they haven't found a problem to apply it to yet.

For example, if I were trying to sell you on the idea that Gaia Online was a product that you should invest in, I would describe it using the following language: "Gaia Online is a highly integrated network-based virtual property acquisition solution for the pre-pubescent demographic." Wow, Gaia sounds pretty impressive, doesn't it?

Now if I were trying to convince you NOT to invest in it, I would describe it like so: "Gaia is a site where 10-year-olds go to pretend that they own things." Both descriptions are about equally accurate and descriptive.

And this is why I could never be in marketing. I would always be tempted to give the latter description, and that isn't likely to go over well. I only wish business and video games had nothing to do with each other...

The Massively Multiplayer Illusion

2008-08-17T20:34:00.000-07:00

My complement convinced me to try out Granado Espada recently, and one of the things I noticed while playing was that occasionally another player would walk by. Now, this might seem like a rather silly thing to "notice" since I was playing an MMO, but that's just my point - it struck me that a substantial part of my game experience DIDN'T involve interacting with other people, and even when they popped into view, they usually went on toward whatever monster spawn point they were heading to without stopping to say hello. It was funny, I thought, that I was playing an MMORPG and yet after a full hour of play had only spoken and interacted with NPCs and monsters. And by "funny" I mean weird.

Let's consider another example: Guild Wars. In Guild Wars the only persistent environments are the cities. All explorable areas are instances that contain only the party that set out to explore them. This means that even though there are millions (I don't know what the specific number is) of people who play Guild Wars, and thousands who are online at any given time, throughout most of the time I spend playing, I only see 1-7 other players. Even then, you can fill up the empty slots in your party with henchmen, and in the newer expansions, heroes. What does all of this mean? It means that when I play Guild Wars, I play in a party of me, two friends, and a bunch of NPCs. Despite the supposed "massively multiplayer" nature of the game, my experience, as a player, is that of playing of a 3-person multiplayer game. That's not necessarily a bad thing - I prefer playing with my friends to playing with random 13-year-olds - but it's not really a "massively multiplayer" experience.

But, you object, like I just said, the cities are persistent, and there you can interact with many people at once. This is true. It has also lead to some fun multiplayer experiences, or as I like to call them, "social experiments." I one case, I decided to start running laps around Ascalon city, talking about "staying in shape" while I did it. My friend was amused and joined in, and then a random stranger joined...10 minutes later I had an entourage of 60 players, all running laps around Ascalon city behind me. Some of the people in the back of the line asked "where are we going?" Needless to say, I was pleased with the results. Nonetheless, that totaled about a half-hour of play, and clearly wasn't something the game designers really intended for me to spend my time doing. Outside of district 1 of Ascalon city, which is a 24/7 dance marathon, cities serve two purposes - to gather parties and to customize your character. The thing is, this exists in games that aren't MMOs, as well. Consider Counter-Strike, or just about any RTS game: you join a server where you can create games, customize anything you can control out of game (for example, your "deck" in Age of Empires 3), and chat with people. The only difference is that instead of usernames on the side of the screen, the players in GW have avatars in their giant server rooms.

This brings me to the crux of my post: why is there such a huge push to make games "massively" multiplayer? What happened to making games just multiplayer? The reason I ask is because it seems that most designers working on MMORPGs are under the impression that because they're making an MMO, they're greatly restricted in their options, and that they have to have feature x, y, and z. As I've tried to explain above, however, most of the multiplayer aspects of an MMO are available in games that don't count as being MMOs simply because they don't choose to present themselves as MMOs. In AoE3, you can not only team up with your friends against bots, but by doing so you gain experience and levels which carry over into your future matches and increase your range of abilities. Yet this is not an MMORPG. It's not even an MMORTS. It's just an RTS game.

I think what designers should consider for each and every virtual world they build are 1) just what the unique possibilities of MMOs really are, and 2) how non-MMO games get around the major pitfalls of MMORPGs. I don't have time to go into both these questions in detail, but I'll say something brief about the first one. I think MMOs present two elements that cannot be achieved in single player and "merely multiplayer" games: living economies and co-operative world creation.

Since you have many people sharing (and competing for) the same resources, the value of any item in the game is determined not by design-fiat, but by supply and demand. This is incredibly interesting, and some players are drawn to play MMOs specifically play with the game's economy. That said, most MMORPGs have terribly distorted economies. After the game has been going on for a while, the majority of items are worth either next to nothing or ludicrously large amounts, and even in games with professions and large marketplaces, the richest players are always the high-level players that have completed the highest-level dungeons, who then get to determine the shape of the economy with their enormous expenditures. In other words, economies in MMORPGs are actually very limited, and I'd be willing to bet that almost no MMORPG developers prioritize the economy as one of the most fundamental elements. Rather, they start with combat and quest design, and then get around to worrying about the economy later, when the core mechanics are already decided.

The other unique element that MMOs present is in an even worse position: most MMORPGs lack co-operative world creation altogether. The world that you play in a carefully crafted static world where you can have no impact on anything except your own resources. The static nature of the world is, of course, one of the aspects of MMORPGs that people complain about most often, and is often excused as simply an inescapable consequence of making the game massively multiplayer. I don't understand this excuse at all. As I just said, the potential for co-operative world creation is one of the unique things that MMOs have to offer. Think about all those hundreds of quests in Oblivion, in a world with only one hero running around inside it. Even a dedicated player is only able to explore a fraction of the world, much less the possibility space in the game for different character types, different choices at different turns, etc. If there were a couple hundred, much less a couple of thousand, players running around this world, stealing from people's homes, catching and imprisoning thieves, closing Oblivion gates, etc., you might get an emergent narrative.

The only games that take advantage of these features of MMOs are the ones with little or no gameplay, such as Second Life. Just imagine a game that has an economy and user generated spaces like Second Life, and interesting and dynamic game mechanics to back it up and make the world alive. Then go and play a massively multiplayer game, and prepare to be disappointed. What I want is either a game that's really willing to run with the "MMO" bit and explore the potential of large-scale user interactions, or else a solid RPG that's willing to settle for being "merely multiplayer", so I can play with my friends without having to deal with grind-based gameplay, simplistic quest objectives, and an in-world economy that's in worse trouble than our real world economy is.

-Silent Ellipsis

CitySpace

2008-08-12T12:21:00.000-07:00

Virtual Worlds News has an article today about CitySpace, a virtual world being developed by LivePlace. The long and short of it is that CitySpace is a 3D virtual world with incredible graphical detail that will require no download. I have no idea what kind of gameplay it will have, if any, but if the world displays like it does in the video, then it's a major technical achievement.

Of course, it won't work like it does in the video. Apparently there is some suspicion that the demo includes pre-rendered segments, but even if it doesn't, the thing is going to be as slow as molasses. If anyone has tried out Google's Lively, you might realize that even with such a big name behind it, it's going to be an uphill slog to get users to play in a virtual world that not only requires a download, but takes a full half-hour to load a room with the download. It kind of defeats the purpose of being able to embed the virtual world in a webpage if it doesn't load on a realistic timescale. If this is a problem for the relatively simple graphics of Lively, just imagine the wait times you'll face to get into a room in CitySpace.

This reminds me of a post I made on the RocketOn blog about why it was better for us to go with a 2D virtual world. I don't think that the primary market for social virtual worlds is the same as the market for ultra-realistic 3D environments that let you show off your fancy computer specs. That said, if by some miracle it is able to show off that kind of graphical detail rendered server-side without making users wait hours to enter a page, it will be pretty exciting.

-Silent Ellipsis

Undiscovered Pixels: Game Censorship

2008-08-11T15:05:00.000-07:00

So apparently I'm not the only person who was inspired to make a post about censorship today. I don't know if the folks at Penny Arcade were also motivated by the news that an edited version of Fallout 3 is going to be released in Australia, but one way or another it seems to be topical right now.

Aside from the Fallout 3 news, what really brought this up for me was running across uncensored versions of sprites from Final Fantasy VI recently, as I've been on a sprite-hunt to gather material for a game I'm making. Not only are these 32-bit pixelated images that were being censored in the 90s, but they weren't exactly the most offensive of images to begin with. Let's look at a couple examples.

Here we have one of the parts of the final boss fight, specifically the "Godess." She has gone from not-nude to more-not-nude, which is truly a profound change. I mean really, 60% of a pixelated female thigh is ok, but 80% of a pixelated female thigh is just asking for eternal damnation, apparently.

But FFVI didn't just include scantily clad women.

That's right. FFVI's last boss fight also included a bare-assed man. Oh, the humanity. Actually, both this picture and the manner in which it has been censored remind me of something...

To quote my AP Art History teacher, "See that cloth there? There used to be a big old shlong hanging out there." He later claimed that he was just trying to keep students awake when he said that, but I think it's a very informative way of putting it. Michelangelo's Last Judgement happened to coincide with the beginnings of the counter-reformation, and the artist was forced to censor his painting in order to maintain propriety. It was ridiculous, but worth pointing out that 1) The original figures were actually nude, and 2) They were very realistic, masterfully painted figures, not pixelated enemies (that's not an insult to FFVI's sprites - we're comparing them to Michelangelo's Last Judgement here). Does this mean that we (and by we I mean Americans in the 1990s) have become more prudish since the 16th century? That's quite an accomplishment.

Or is it because we believe that video games are a kids' activity, and therefore should be tailored to be consumed by children? Despite the fact that the average gamer is not a 13 year old kid, many people seem to be holding on to the belief that video games are fundamentally a child-oriented medium. The creation of games like Fallout 3 is evidence that this is simply not the case. Many games are being created for mature audiences (just as many movies and books are), and to account for the difference, we have a game rating system. Just as children shouldn't be taken to R-rated movies, they should be given M-rated games. It's not hard to find these ratings - unlike movies they're printed right on the front of every game released, in plain view. Instead of taking three seconds to look at the rating and try to gauge the game in question, however, paranoid parents want to make developers jump through hoops to release even mildly adult content in games, and in doing so limit the narrative possibilities of games.

What about the question of going international? In FFVI, we had a Japanese game being censored for American audiences, but in the case of Fallout 3 we have an American game being censored for Australian audiences. I can't fault Bethesda here: if in order to sell your game in another country you have to edit it, it just makes sense as a company to do so. Still, I can't help feeling like developers are losing something when they compromise in a case like this. I'd rather Australians get to play a censored version of Fallout 3 than no Fallout at all, but it saddens me to think that people there won't be able to see Fallout 3 as it was originally conceived. Note that in this paragraph I'm running on the assumption that Fallout 3 will be a good game - I can't say that for certain, obviously, but knowing it's being developed by Bethesda I don't think it's unreasonable to have high expectations.

Silent Ellipsis

P.S. Didn't get around to mentioning the most hilarious examples of censoring in FFVI. In one area, a sign that says "Pub" is changed to "Cafe," and one enemy smoking an opium pipe is censored - to not include the smoke (the pipe is still there). Really, what are we supposed to expect the pipe is for?

Virtual Worlds and Moral Choices

2008-07-31T17:22:00.000-07:00

Raph Koster had a link on his blog about a week ago to a pos t about a family of monsters slain by adventurers in World of Warcraft. It’s very interesting, and led me to read an insightful, though much older post by Raph, “The Evil We Pretend to Do,” and ultimately the Terra Nova post, “The Horde is Evil”, which claims that the choice to play an orc or undead in World of Warcraft is a morally significant decision. This series of posts together have led me to consider the following question: what does it mean to make a moral choice within a virtual world? Rather than considering the specifics of World of Warcraft, I’ll try to discuss this in more broadly applicable terms.

There are a variety of ways we might answer this question, the first of which is presented by “The Horde is Evil.” We might think that there is moral significance to a choice of character type in an MMO. By choosing to be represented in the world by a character associated with evil, you are presenting an implicit approval of that evil. This doesn’t seem right to me. Choosing a character type in an MMO, especially if by that we mean a character’s race, is a matter of choosing a setting. You’re not choosing any actions your character has performed, but choosing the cultural and historical background of that character. If that counts as a morally weighted (and negative) choice then you could just as easily say that choosing to play World of Warcraft is a morally negative choice to begin with, because you’re choosing to play a game in a world that includes not only evil, but rampant warfare. You could instead have chosen to play a game, or even an MMO, that includes no war, no combat, and no evil. Insisting that a choice of setting in a virtual world is morally weighted is tantamount to declaring that MMORPGs are, on the whole, morally evil, which beyond being simplistic isn’t an argument that’s going to have any traction among gamers.

So if I disagree with the thesis of “The Horde is Evil” does that mean I don’t believe that decisions in a virtual world can have moral weight? No it does not, but we might mean something else entirely by that. Many people will agree that a decision that affects the happiness of others carries implicit (or explicit) moral weight, and online virtual worlds allow users to affect each others’ game experience. If I stick around a spot where a rare treasure appears on a timed basis and continually gather it, I might be preventing other players from gathering it; if I use a macro to collect massive quantities of a valuable resource, I devalue that resource that other plays have earned legitimately. Beyond these unintentionally side-effects of my actions, there is the phenomenon of “grieving.” Grievers are bored or insecure players (or both) who intentionally go out of their way to ruin the game experience for other players. This could entail verbal harassment, repeatedly killing another user’s character, joining a party and then refusing to help when they run into trouble, or a variety of other activities intended to provide amusement by frustrating others. As grieving is an activity that directly affects other real, living people it’s clearly a moral decision, but is it a very weighty one? In the majority of cases the worst consequence of grieving is temporary annoyance and frustration. What’s more, this behavior isn’t really specific to virtual worlds. Even if it takes a particular form within a virtual world, the behavior is essentially harassment, and the virtual world in this case is simply a medium through which the harassment occurs. The virtual world is playing the same role that a phone does in a prank phone call: the content of a prank phone call does tell us much about the moral nature of telephones.

There might be a third thing that we mean by saying that a decision in a virtual world can be a moral decision – we might think it’s moral or immoral not because of the impact it has on players, but because of the way it affects the virtual world itself. This strikes me as the interesting concept, because it’s not immediately clear what to make of it. On the one hand a virtual world is fictional, so it seems that the events that occur within it shouldn’t be any more weighty than they are in a book or film. However, the nature of a virtual world is that it is participatory: many people are invested in the virtual world (emotionally and financially), and they can shape it through their actions.

We may need a few more conceptual tools before we evaluate this idea. First, I will suggest that what is fundamentally capable of being moral or immoral is choice. When we say that a person is moral, we mean that they are a person who makes good moral choices. Part of the reason I reject the thesis of “The Horde is Evil” is because of this. I don’t think it’s coherent to suggest that a race (such as orcs) can be inherently evil – they can only be evil by virtue of their choices. The second idea that I am going to put forward as useful for our purposes here is that morality, at some root level, depends upon value. What I mean is that whether you are a deontologist, a consequentialist, or virtue theorist, you should think that what it means for a decision to be moral is that it promotes something of value. The exact nature of this question can be debated, but I don’t think it makes sense to talk about a decision having moral import without suggesting that something of value is affected by it.

Now let’s see how these concepts fit in with our thoughts about virtual worlds. If we’re going to judge something as moral, we’re judging a choice to be, so the actions taken by the computer can never be considered moral or immoral (though the decisions of the designers and programmers that resulted in the computer performing that action might). Rather, we’re concerned about player choices, as manifested in the actions of their avatars. What’s more, we’re concerned with how these choices affect things of value within the virtual world. Given that the world is, as its name implies, virtual, and exists primarily in the minds of the players (as mediated by the game), it seems to me that the only kind of value to be found within it is instilled in it by humans. This kind of value is easy enough to find, however: virtual worlds are largely about identifying with the interests of your character or avatar, and acquiring possessions, experience, and the like for them. A player might also identify with the interests of their guild, faction, or with the virtual world as a whole.

So what kind of effect can a player have on things of value? In truth, in most persistent worlds the answer is “very little.” In every persistent world I’ve ever seen, player characters never permanently die, NPCs cannot be killed, and monsters and NPC allies will eternally respawn. In most worlds it’s also not possible to take territory or possessions from other players, and all factions in the game will exist for as long as the world persists. These static virtual worlds actually disarm most of the moral weight of decisions within them, but if a world were designed to include more significant consequences of actions, then the idea of morally weight decisions by virtue of their influence on the world would become very real very quickly.

Let’s look at a concrete example. In the posts I referred to above, one topic of discussion is the fate of monsters called murlocs at the hands of adventurers who slaughter them in huge numbers in order to complete quests. There is something disturbing about how this is presented to the player – you are committing acts of genocide – but within persistent world, there are no lasting effects of a player completing the quest. The moral impact of killing murlocs is only the impact it has on the game experience of the player(s) killing them. Let’s consider an alternative possibility: the number of murlocs in the world is limited. Perhaps the murlocs reproduce at a certain rate, and if the rate at which players kill them exceed the rate at which they reproduce, their population will dwindle. Now we have the possibility not only that a player can have the visual experience of killing a murloc, but that their choice can have an effect on the world. If murlocs are slaughtered in large enough numbers, they might become extinct on that game server. What about a world in which player characters can die permanently? In these situations it seems like the possibility exists for in-game decisions to have a real impact on things of value to other players.

More generally, what I’m suggesting is that if players can shape the virtual world that they are in, they have the potential to promote things they value within that virtual world, whether that be immersive gameplay (in which case playing an villain could actually be a morally positive decision, by allowing for a more dynamic game world), the aesthetic features of the world, or murlocs. In this situation a destructive player can make a morally significant decision within the context of the virtual world, as can a constructive player. Given the nature of most worlds today, this is more an issue of the potential of virtual worlds, but it is still of immediate interest, at least to people like me.

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This is, I think, the second and last cross-post from rocketon.us (at least for now). The other posts I've made there are application specific, and not of as much general interest.

-Silent Ellipsis

Games and Game-likeness

2008-07-31T17:17:00.000-07:00

This is the first of a series of cross-posts from rocketon.us, from June 13:

Reading Craig Perko’s month-old post – or rant, if you prefer – about “message games” reminded me of one of the topics that I find really interesting: what is it that sets games apart as a medium? The kind of games Perko is talking about are simple games that involve clicking through a scene, or performing a single action, and may include moralistic points. The problem is that one click does not make a game – it makes an animation that you have to click on to see.

In reality, there is no universally agreed upon definition of a “game.” We can describe them in general terms, however. Games are interactive; games offer player choices; games either have built-in goals or a means for players to develop goals as they play. There are a variety of features that are common in games, or important in certain genres, but I think these are the most fundamental features that make an experience a gaming experience.

Here’s a different approach. Marc LeBlanc has compiled a list of 8 aspects of games that make them fun: Sensation, Fantasy, Fellowship, Discovery, Narrative, Expression, Challenge, and Submission. If we consider, however, not just what makes games fun, but what makes them uniquely fun, we see that other media can fulfill some of these kinds of fun just as well, if not better, than games. Movies offer plenty of sensation, novels contain compelling narratives, and any kind of social networking site can offer fellowship.

So the real question is how can games offer these kinds of experiences in a unique way? By approaching them in a game-like manner. For example, if a story isn’t linear, or preset, but branches or can be traversed in a non-linear way, then it is not just presenting a narrative, but a game narrative. This makes the narrative more than just a story – it’s a way of exploring the possibilities of gaming. A compelling game narrative doesn’t just present the player with a story – it lets the player see the story being created as the game progresses. Similarly, every kind of fun on the list above can be approached in a game-like way.

Why should we care if a certain experience is game-like or not? Some of us like to call ourselves gamers, or say that we love gaming, but if we don’t know what goes into a gaming experience, what do we mean when we say that? Games may very well be the medium of the 21st century in the same way that film was the medium of the 20th century, but if so, then games need to have a clear sense of what it is they have to offer. If we ever want to see the full potential of games, we need to find and explore the parts of an experience that make it into a good gaming experience.

Opening Dreamscape

2008-07-31T17:09:00.000-07:00

Hello. Since I intend to add a smallish flood of posts immediately after this, you're likely only reading this if you were very curious to see what the first post looked like, or if you've actually read through every single post (in which case I'm impressed, and maybe frightened).

In any case, I began posting some of these on the Rocketon blog, but upon reflection, that space seems to be somewhat strange, and in flux, because it's connected to a virtual world whose target audience is not likely to be interested in academic-sounding blog posts.

So I'm moving my own posts over here, and I will maintain this as my personal blog starting now. We'll see if this ever goes anywhere.

-Silent Ellipsis