User Generated Quests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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