Tag Archives: game design

n00b World Reorder, part 2

Posted by under fiction, game design, geophysics, mmorpg, Uncategorized, world of warcraft

(This is a continuation of the essay started here and synopsised on video here.)

I note that my previous post has sparked some academic debate in certain circles relating to the validity of my research techniques and data. Therefore before we embark into a new area of discussion, I must address some of the comments addressed to my previous data. Specifically these relate to two areas: (1) is Azeroth, the World of Warcraft, spherical or flat? And (2) if it’s spherical, how can we accurately gauge how large a sphere it is?

To address point (2) first: there are two existing illustrations of Azeroth as a sphere: the globes that can be seen at various locations in the World of Warcraft, including in Dire Maul and Moonglade:

and the view of a planet assumed to be Azeroth that can be seen from Shadowmoon Valley in Outland:

...or is it?

Both give an equivalent view of Azeroth-as-sphere: the known continents occupy a roughly 180-degree arc of the surface, with the remaining area (in the Moonglade globe) filled with ocean and occasional small islands. That is the premise that underlay my initial observations and measurements.

But all this is moot. Other empirical evidence demonstrates clearly that the world of Azeroth is flat, the maps and globes are wrong, and the view from Shadowmoon Valley is an optical illusion. To illustrate this, here is a picture of a troll standing on a thin pathway that divides the Great Sea from the edge of the world. If the existing maps of the World of Warcraft are to be believed, this should be somewhere off the eastern coast of Dustswallow Marsh, between Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, and well south of the Maelstrom.

Since no sphere can have an edge with an apparently bottomless drop, this means the World of Warcraft is fucking flat, all right?

The pathway at the edge of the world shown above does not run around the entire perimeter of the world or even around Kalimdor, or we could have used the walking-measure described in part 1 to work out the size of the rectangle around the continent. But from visual observation, we have to report that Azeroth seems to exist on the end of a very tall pillar; possibly two or even three very tall pillars, one for each continent. In other words, please disregard pretty much everything I wrote in Part 1 because it’s balls.

We can make no firm statements about the length or breadth of the World of Warcraft, or its density, which leaves too many variables unknown to calculate the height of these pillars. We are not sure why the sea doesn’t fall through the side of the pillar, since it does not seem to be solid. We are also not sure what the bottom of the pillar is resting on, but it may well be a turtle. This is all so improbable that you should ignore the last three sentences of this paragraph, including this one.

However, we still have to accept that Azeroth (a) is flat, (b) is quite small, and (c) does not rotate relative to the stars around it. Point (d) is that its sun and moon behave in a manner that makes no gravitational sense. Azeroth has a single sun that rises in the north-west and sets some hours later, also in the north-west. Shadows cast by it point persistently south-east, though this does not seem to affect vegetation that grows in this perpetual shade. Azeroth also has a single moon, which also rises in the north-west and sets in the north-west. If it has phases and eclipses then none have been reported.

It is hard to explain this movement of Azeroth’s celestial bodies unless we assume that they are acting under the influence of gravity itself—rising above the horizon, reaching a zenith, and falling back below the horizon, where something reverses their momentum and propels them back upwards, once every day. Our personal theory is that beneath the level of the horizon is a very large giant juggling very slowly, but we have no hard evidence to support this.

(The cosmic physicist Doctor Myles Corcoran suggests that Azeroth could be an Alderson Disk, a large or infinite plane with holes of sufficient size through which the sun and moon oscillate back and forth endlessly. This implies two things: that at some point the plane of Azeroth, if such it is, loses its atmosphere and becomes frictionless vacuum; and the deity, intelligent designer(s), Old Gods, Titans or whatever other beings may have been involved in the creation of Azeroth are massive SF geeks. Frankly we prefer our theory with the giant.)

Despite the comparatively low surface gravity, it is clear that the atmosphere of Azeroth is much thicker than Earth’s. Without this density of gas the various giant insects and spiders would not be able to breathe, and the dragons, wyverns, hippogriffs, other large flying creatures and surprisingly small zeppelins would never get airborne, let alone carry large passengers. The ratio of gases in the atmosphere is unclear: the same flame that can set a massive stone creature or water elemental ablaze in an instant is unable to make the slightest impact on a tree, wooden building or field of dry grass. Ordinary fires will also burn underwater, which implies something very interesting but I’m not sure what.

The apparent density of the atmosphere also explains one of Azeroth’s more puzzling features: the fact that it is difficult to see clearly for more than a few hundred metres in any direction. While visibility over short distances is clear, large objects such as buildings and geographical features are either indistinct or completely invisible at distances of more than a few hundred metres. At closer range objects, mostly other living beings, come into sharper relief as the viewer approaches in a manner that suggests that either every inhabitant of Azeroth is strongly myopic, or there is something in the air that causes this effect. I will return to this subject in the third part of this paper, on the ecology of Azeroth.

Meanwhile my esteemed colleague Professor Sulka Haro of the University of Habbo has observed that the majority of the zones of Azeroth have no wind. In fact only one zone experiences wind, the desert region Tanaris, and that only sporadically, which may be due to factors other than climate. This must indicate, he hypothesises, that there is absolute thermic entropy in Azeroth. This is supported by the fact the lava one sees coming out of the volcanoes is so that characters can could safely walk on it (though this may be an artefact of the frictionless pads on their feet—see above). It may also go some way to explain how zones of intense volcanic activity can sit a few hundred metres from zones of perpetual snow without the former turning the latter to slush.

(Prof. Haro expands his thesis to cover insect life—”I haven’t seen any pollinators around, yet people are able to farm. The Azerothians crop must hence all be self-pollinating. But how is this, with no wind? Most baffling”—and the small animal life—“I’ve also come to the conclusion that the Azerothian rabbits are either herbivores that reproduce by seeds, or are parasites” but here we begin to impinge on the subject of the third part of this paper, the ecology of Azeroth, and we should hold back to let your minds digest the meat of this instalment, in much the way that the stomachs of WoW’s wildlife don’t.)

I am disappointed at the small number of essays I have received so far. More application and less fieldwork, class!

(Part 3 of the ‘n00b World Reorder’ series is now online here.)

n00b World Reorder, part 1

Posted by under game design, geophysics, mmorpg, world of warcraft

The text that made up my Interesting 08 talk ‘Brave n00b World’ was part of a much longer document that I’ve been working on for a while. I’m not sure it’s ready for primetime—I’m not sure it’s ready for anything—but to catch the tide of interest in the video, here’s the first part of it. This one repeats a lot of the material in the talk but bear with me: it gets better, and there’s a lot of new stuff still to come.

* * *

I have spent the last few months on sabbatical, visiting a persistent fantasy world known as ‘Of Warcraft’. During this time I have made some preliminary observations about the nature of the world, which I am going to publish here in a series of short papers. It is my hope that this work may lead to further examination of this curious habitat, and the foundation of the academic field of Azerothian Studies, with a nice chair and honorarium for myself, &tc. &tc.

BRAVE N00B WORLD
A PRELIMINARY SCIENTIFIC REPORT IN SEVERAL PARTS

Part 1:
The Physical World of Warcraft

The world of Warcraft, called Azeroth by those of its inhabitants who care about such things, is supposedly one of a handful of small spatial bodies in an area of space referred to as the Great Dark. It is comprised of three main landmasses: Kalimdor; the so-far-unexplored Northrend; and the Eastern Kingdoms. This consists of two continents, Lordaeron and Azeroth, the latter of which is made up of two countries: Khaz Modan and Azeroth. This confusing situation is analogous to the continent of America, which consists of the regions of South America, Central America and North America, the latter of which contains the country usually called America. One might think this indicates that there may be other interesting parallels between Azeroth and Earth. One would be mistaken.

Even though it has an advanced civilization capable of creating flying machines and an astonishingly advanced postal service—of which more later—Azeroth has no local system of measurement. The idea of lengths or distances are alien to its inhabitants, which makes them annoyingly bad at giving directions. Occasionally ‘yards’ are mentioned but nobody can ever point at an item or a distance in the world and say that it is N yards long; and there is no way of knowing if this ‘yard’ is equivalent in any way to the terrestrial yard.

Despite all this, it is still possible to determine the size of the World of Warcraft with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

The longest straight, flat line that an adult human can walk in Azeroth without being interrupted by obstacles, mobs or the Horde stretches from the eastern end of the north parapet of the bridge into Westfall, across Elwynn Forest to the southernmost of the Three Corners in Lakeshire. An adult human walking at a steady pace will cover this distance in 18 minutes and 15 seconds. Humans walk at an average speed of 5.6 kilometres (3.5 miles) per hour, and therefore this route is roughly 1.7 kms (1.05 miles) long.

Extrapolating this to the whole of the Eastern Kingdoms, and using the best maps available, the continent is 5.8 kms by 14.25 kms (3.6 x 8.85 miles) and Kalimdor is Kalimdor is 7.3 kms x 14.75 kms. Taken together, the two main continents have a combined area of approximately 113 square kilometres. In terrestrial terms that’s about the same size as the city of Newcastle, or the London Borough of Hillingdon.

And if we assume that the world-maps produced by Blizzard Entertainment show approximately the entire surface area of Azeroth then we can wrap it around an imaginary sphere and calculate the diameter of the hypothetical ‘planetoid’ of Azeroth at 12 kilometres.

To a subjective observer, gravity on Azeroth seems to be lower than on Earth. Once again it’s hard to given an exact measurement, but given the existence of giants (whose hipbones would shatter as soon as they took a step under terrestrial gravity), plus the fact that a typical adult human can make a standing jump approximately 90% of their height into the air, and most adult humanoids can not only survive a fall of over fifty metres but can land on their feet and walk away, it appears to be less than 1G. This is not quite as expected: though small celestial bodies typically have low gravity, for a planetoid of the size of Azeroth one would expect to see gravity of about 0.003 m/s² or, in the vernacular, buggerall.

We can calculate Azeroth’s gravity to a reasonable degree of precision. As noted, scales of measurement are rare on Azeroth but a chart on page 66 of one of the only authoritative works of Azerothian Studies to date (World of Warcraft Game Manual; Hutchens, Catalan et al, 2005) shows the heights of various humanoid races against a series of regular lines, allowing exact comparisons. Assuming that an average human on Azeroth is the same height as an average human on Earth, then a typical female Tauren is almost exactly two metres tall. We can therefore use a female Tauren—let’s call her Rula—as a measuring-stick to calculate the height of buildings, towers, cliffs and other tall things that can be fallen off.

According to the Rula scale, a drop from a measured point on the flight tower in Thunder Bluff is 33.5 metres. According to tests conducted by myself and members of my research group, the guild <unassigned variable>, it takes a given body—Rula—an average of 2.5 seconds to fall that distance. An equivalent fall under 1G would take 2.61 seconds. We will blame the difference on the approximate nature of the measuring processes and cheap stopwatches, and assume that Azeroth’s gravity is the same as Earth’s.

This means, if Azeroth really is a spherical planetoid with a diameter of 12 kms, that the planet must have an average density of roughly 5850 grammes per cubic centimetre. That makes its average density more than 500 times greater than lead. (I am indebted to Dave Morris for his assistance with these calculations.)

The extreme density of Azeroth would explain why it is impossible to pick up many objects from the ground, including ones that you have just dropped. As soon as a discarded object hits the earth we theorize that it picks up a thin coating of superheavy dirt, making it impossible to lift. Living creatures avoid the effects of this dirt sticking to their extremities by having evolved frictionless pads on the soles of their feet. This observable phenomenon, endemic to Azeroth, is known to virtual-world scientists and animators as “foot slide”.

Rare soils that do not possess this extreme density (pieces of coal, elemental earth, Un’goro soil) are prized by the locals and can fetch high prices at the auction houses. In addition, pressure within the superheavy crust of the planetoid causes deposits of comparatively lighter elements like copper, tin, iron, gold and mithril to be extruded through fissures in the surface, where they form regenerating nodes that can be mined. It also explains why, though many locals are seen toiling at rock-faces with picks and shovels, they never seem to get anywhere, and why there are never any root vegetables for sale.

More interestingly, the existence of such a small, dense planet has implications for the relativistic flow of local spacetime. Einstein’s theory of general relativity states that time runs at different speeds under different gravitational strengths, and the Pound-Rebka experiment has proved that clocks at high altitudes run slightly faster than those at low altitudes. On a small body with a very high density these effects will be much more noticeable over comparatively short distances. We believe that these effects of time-dilation and compression can explain the well-known Azeroth temporal phenomenon of ‘lag’, although we are trying to form a theoretical model to show how zeppelins can cross an ocean in the time it takes to draw a line across a map.

However, all this assumes that Azeroth is a standard astronomical body, and it isn’t. Despite the existence of in-world globes depicting its surface as a sphere, and that anyone standing at the Black Temple in Outland can see a small round planet in the sky that appears to be Azeroth, the world of Warcraft is in fact flat. There is no visible curvature of the world, which is unusual given its small size. Stars do not move across the night sky, indicating that Azeroth is static in relation to the rest of its universe. What’s more, dawn happens simultaneously wherever the observer is in the world, and sunset works the same way. Ergo it’s flat, albeit populated by a number of misguided “round-earthers”. Berks.

Conclusive proof on the matter comes from the research of the Canadian Dr T Paypayaso (I’m assuming from the quality of his research that he has a PhD, plus frankly they’re easier to get hold of than parking tickets these days), who has demonstrated by swimming to its edge and jumping around like a prat that Azeroth is (a) flat, (b) finite and (c) rectangular.

I will examine the implications of this extraordinary discovery in my next post in this series. Meanwhile I need your essays, a thousand words on “How can Azeroth be said to have a food chain when nothing ever eats anything else?” on my desk by Thursday.

(You can find part 2 of this essay here.)

Brave n00b World

Posted by under conference, game design, geophysics, mmorpg, world of warcraft

Roo Reynolds, the man behind Lego is Full of Win, not only videoed my presentation ‘Brave n00b World’ at Interesting 08 but has Done Computers to it and made it available on the internest. Lo!

I was originally going to call it ‘The World of the World of Warcraft’, but the Onion beat me to publication of that particular joke by about eight days. And as I said before, there’s a lot more where this came from.

(Edit: to take advantage of the number of hits this entry is getting, the WoW guild whose credit you can’t quite see  at the end is <unassigned variable>, and we’re a Horde guild on the European server Nordrassil. We are a friends guild, meaning you have to know one of the members in real life before you can join, but we are recruiting. If you know me or someone who recently received one of these postcards or someone who’s done some of this cross-stitching—you may gather that we don’t take this entirely seriously—then drop me a line.)

GameCamp

Posted by under conference, game design

Saturday was GameCamp, a one-day cross-disciplinary games conference in east London organised by the Guardian. Trust a broadsheet newspaper to fundamentally misunderstand what people do on a bank-holiday weekend. Anyway, 120 people invaded Sony’s 3Rooms venue in Shoreditch, and I forced my shiny new business card onto as many of them as possible. I have to say, whatever you think of Sony’s games consoles (and I try not to), they know how to decorate a venue.

The thing was modelled on Barcamp, which is to say its organisation was ad-hoc and self-regulating. As a result there were loads of simultaneous sessions and people tended to gravitate towards the ones by their mates or on subjects that they already knew something about. This was a shame. A few broke out from the pack—Simon Rogers’ overview of the cutting edge of tabletop RPG design was one, as was Tom Armitage’s hilarious and thought-provoking description of how an MMO based on Jane Austen could work—but the majority didn’t. The audience for Tassos Stevens’s talk on real-world politics and ARGs was, for example, pretty much identical to the audience for my later debate titled ‘ARGs: are they fucked?’ The only places where people crossed over and just chatted were around the food table, the Rock Band setup, and in the pub afterwards.

Still, the quality of the talks and attendees was fantastic. I ran into many old faces, some who I’d been hoping would attend, and others who I didn’t know had gone into gaming and who are now quite senior at large companies. Before the conference I suggested to the organisers that having a gathering about the UK games scene and not inviting anyone from Games Workshop was like having a party in a zoo and not inviting the 800lb gorilla. There was nobody from Games Workshop there. It would have been interesting to hear their perspective.

Nothing on pervasive gaming either, not that I saw, which was a surprise given its general news-trendiness over the last year or so, nor board-games. But at least I was able to run a session of the Peoples’ Revolutionary Committee, which was suitably cathartic for all involved.

Thanks to Bobbie Johnson at the Guardian for pulling the event together. My pics here, other people’s here.

Blow your own

Posted by under game design

The nominations for this year’s Origins Awards are out. Once again the system’s been changed: this year, instead of nominees, there are ‘semi-finalists’, ten to a category.

Gratifyingly, in the non-fiction publication group I have pieces in three of the semi-finalists: 40 Years of Gen Con (Atlas Games); Hobby Games: the 100 Best (Green Ronin); and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (the MIT Press).

I know this is a very self-aggrandising post, but now Humphrey Lyttelton’s dead there’s a shortage of good trumpet-blowers around.

My guy, Gax

Posted by under game design

Some years ago, someone—it could have been Andrew Rilstone but I’m honestly not sure—commented that he wished Gary Gygax would hurry up and die, so people would stop talking about what he was doing now (which at the time was Dangerous Journeys, a tedious rules-heavy fantasy RPG at a time when the market was making it clear it wasn’t interested in such things, and dreadful fantasy novels) and remember him for the good stuff he did.

Gary Gygax created modern gaming. You cannot move these days for games with class-and-level systems: even modern FPS games like Call Of Duty 4 are grabbing RPG elements and building them in as an integral gameplay. The class-and-level system dates explicitly to Gygax’s work, and specifically to the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974.

(Yes, I know Dave Arneson deserves co-credit for the creation of D&D. But Dave Arneson didn’t write Chainmail, which D&D’s rules drew on heavily, and he also didn’t die today.)

By today’s standards, after thirty-five years of refinement and polish, the original edition of D&D looks incredibly clunky. But if you look beyond its unclear rules, its incompleteness and its tendency to assume existing knowledge on the part of the reader, what’s astonishing is how much of the game is right. It wasn’t the concept of roleplay in D&D that birthed the genre, it was the way the rules encapsulated the core ideas behind it—not, to the chagrin of many of us who considered ourselves on the cutting edge, ways to encourage players to inhabit their fictional avatars more fully, but ways to keep players playing and interested in progressing in the game.

And that same energy went on to power Mines of Moria, and Ultima, and the Final Fantasy series, and countless other tabletop and CRPGs, and is making Blizzard a billion dollars a year through World of Warcraft. It taps into something very primal at the heart of the gaming impulse and wraps it in a covering that has been nicked, borrowed and retrod so many times since that it pretty much defines what we think of as ‘fantasy’ today. Not that Gygax didn’t nick most of that himself, but at least he acknowledged his sources. Pretty much everything in World of Warcraft that isn’t straight out of Warhammer is straight out of D&D.

Now, at last, we can forget all the crap he did later. Even if he only had one moment of genius, it’s such a moment of such genius that it instantly elevates him into the very highest echelons of game-design greatness. His work built not one but two industries—how quickly would computer games have moved out of the arcade without the likes of Colossal Cave?—a genre, and a language of shared experience in fantastic worlds shared by hundreds of millions of people.

And if anyone disagrees, I will fight them. Roll for initiative.

Second Life for Second Person

Posted by under game design, narrative

A couple of years back I wrote an essay on games that create a story as part of the gameplay, which was published as part of the excellent collection Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, MIT Press, 2007) which I have huckstered here before. The contents of the book are slowly migrating online (didn’t like the weather in the real world is my guess) and my piece has just gone live. You can read it here.

I’ll warn you now that much of it was written in a small hotel on Skye that turned out to be run by a man who had taught me history some twenty years earlier, sitting in the lounge after a tour of the Tallisker whisky distillery earlier in the day, in a tearing hurry to (a) meet the deadline and (b) to find somewhere with internet access that would let me plug a USB stick into their machine. It turns out the Scots aren’t big on giving foreigners access to their ports, not since they learned their lesson in 1072.

Nevertheless I think the piece holds up, and raises some interesting points about a neglected area of game design. I believe there’s a way to make comments on the MIT site though I couldn’t find it; have a poke around and if you can’t locate it then do come back here and we’ll chat in the comments.

Praise the Lord and pass the MMO

Posted by under game design, mmorpg, world of warcraft

Raph Koster has been talking recently about RMT (real-money trading, or buying in-game items and currency for actual cash, often from gold-farmers) in MMORPGs. And beyond the basic principle of ‘It’s not FAIR!’ I really don’t see what the problem is.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem. But the real impact of RMT to 99.9% of MMO players isn’t the fact that player X is more powerful than he ought to be, it’s gold-farmers and spammers in the game-world. And during a particularly over-spammed session in Azeroth this afternoon, I began to wonder if there isn’t a solution.

Imagine the ‘open a ticket’ or ‘summon a GM’ box had a special button: ‘report spammer/gold farmer’. You target the offender and click the button. It links directly to a human moderator who can inspect the target’s behaviour or recent dialogue, and flag them as ‘spammer’ or ‘farmer’.

That gets the offender account banned, of course, but it does one other thing: the in-world character instantly becomes a target, worth the same amount of experience points as a decent-ish quest to the PC that kills them. So what was previously a nuisance to PCs suddenly becomes an opportunity. And I reckon at the cost of a couple of mods’ salaries, you could clear your MMO of offenders in a month.

Merry Christmas, one and all.

Heroics

Posted by under game design, narrative

I’ve been musing recently on the nature of courage, bravery and heroism, and their role in games and game-narrative.

It’s been spurred by this photograph: Life magazine’s photograph of the week from October 1949.
Sea Fury on fire

It was taken by an automatic camera on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious, during trials of a new design of Sea Fury. The pilot has come in too high, the undercarriage has caught on the crash barrier, and the plane has somersaulted and burst into flames, trapping the pilot in the cockpit.

It is the job of the man at bottom left to get the pilot out.

Does the fact that it’s his job make his action—rushing into that inferno in a thin asbestos suit—any less brave? Of course not.

Let’s talk about this in the context of a videogame. Can we as designers replicate the sensation that must have gone through his mind: the conflict between duty and stark terror, the very real risk of injury or death? It’s a yes/no choice: either he goes in, or he funks it.

Players, of course, face no actual risk. But even so games have, in recent years, lessened the amount of virtual risk that the player faces. It has become progressively harder to die, and the ‘punishment’ for doing so has been reduced. Therefore, as the games themselves have become more action-packed and realistic, the opportunities for the player to experience any sense of risk, or of consequence of failure, have almost evaporated.

(One notable exception—possibly the only one—is Steel Battalion, the g-robot simulator for the Xbox, with the dedicated and terrifying three-foot controller. If your bot is destroyed and you fail to punch the ‘eject’ button in time, your save-game is erased. Brutal? Absolutely. Awesome? Oh yes.)

Without risk, without the possibility of failure and loss, there can be no sense of bravery. Sure, the sargeant can tell the rookie private that he’s a gutsy kid, and the cut-scene can show the GI studying the photo of his wife and the new baby he’s never held before plunging into combat, and the genetic supersoldier can understand that the fate of millions rests on his actions to try to create the story-context and emotional state for an act of heroism. But if the character’s cut to ribbons in ten seconds, and comes back to life at the last checkpoint, then you’re not going to feel like a hero, you’re just a pawn trapped in a tactics-puzzle. Your bravery is irrelevant. It’s taken for granted that you’re going to rush into the fire-fight. And yes, the Royal Navy took it for granted that the Naval Airman in the picture would run into the fire, but he knew there were real consequences that went beyond his own physical wellbeing or likely punishment if he refused.

It’s primarily sandbox games like GTA and World of Warcraft that let the player avoid anything that smacks of bravery. Find a fight that looks like it might be a bit tough, why not wander off until you’re a couple of levels higher or you’ve picked up a better gun and some more health? It’s the tightly scripted, linear stuff that moves closer to capturing the essence of heroic action, and that’s more by punishing a lack of adventureousness—’No more gameplay for you!’—than by presenting challenges with actual risk involved. There are, at present, no good solutions.

Of course, a lot depends on how the player views their avatar, whether they regard the game-character they’re controlling as ‘me’, as a companion who they care about, or as a disposable camera and weapon-wielding tool. I’ve got a long post in the works about that.

But basically players don’t like risk. They like the appearance of risk, the semblance of heroism, but they really hate it when you make them feel like failures or take stuff away from them. Try telling a player that because they screwed up they broke their magic sword, or they’re going to have to sell their plasma-armour to pay for their half-body med-regen. They want to progress on all fronts, not just story and accomplishment but stats, equipment and fortune. It goes back as far as traditional tabletop RPGs: D&D lets you heal away injury and even death with cheap spells and potions; while also-rans like Runequest, T&T and Traveller were far more stingy with their cures.

Is there a way to get past this give-the-player-what-they-think-they-want mentality, this spoonfeeding of pseudo-emotion rather than the actual exhilaration of taking a real risk and having it pay off? Yes, yes there is. Actually challenge your players. They’ve bought your product, they’re locked in, they’re going to experience the gameplay and narrative the way you want them to. Don’t pander to them. Let them invest in their damn character for a change.

And give them a real narrative, one that lets them actually fail. If they screw up a set piece, don’t respawn them ten paces back and let them try again and again. Move on. They wake up in hospital a week later, and Pode, their hated rival from Company B, has grabbed all the glory for storming the machine-gun nest. Does this mean that they could play through the whole game the first time in thirty minutes of stupid, ignominious deaths? Yes it does, and they’ll get the suck-ass ending: the war ends, they go home to their girl, and she’s pregnant with Pode’s ugly baby.  ”Try again. Fail again. Fail better”, as Beckett said. Let them know that the possibility of failure exists, not just in game terms but in narrative terms as well, that screwing up affects the story, and the successes will be that much sweeter. Better than bottlenecking them at a hard part until they get it right through luck or quit through frustration, I think you’ll agree.

As for the man in the asbestos suit, Naval Airman Simon Wallis was my father. The Sea Fury pilot lived, and Dad received the King’s Commendation for Bravery. My dad was not the bravest man I’ve known, but he was proof that ordinary people can and will do extraordinary things if it’s demanded of them, and if they’re given a chance.

The shape of things to come…

Posted by under game design, narrative, street games

…may very well be hexagonal.

The cat is not fully out of the bag yet, but I think we are finally at a stage where we can admit there is a cat and a bag, and the two are in proximity, and the cat is very much alive. Not so much Schrodinger’s cat as Humdinger’s.

Also, look out for a very interesting ARG-related announcement on 1st October, which will explain why this post has the ‘charity’ tag.