Tag Archives: online games

n00b World Reorder, part 4

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

(This is the fourth part of an ongoing series  of skientific infestigations into the physics, chemistry and biology of Azeroth, the world known as ‘of Warcraft’. This will probably be gibberish unless you have read part 1, part 2 and part 3 first.)

The ecology of Azeroth, part 2

The strangest aspect of the animal life (and some parts of the plant life) of Azeroth is its physical nature. This section is based on the following observable phenomena:

  • Fauna (and mobile flora) cannot pass through physical objects such as rocks, walls, etc.
  • Fauna (including members of the PC races) can pass through other creatures and certain plants as if they were not there.
  • Carried objects including weapons can pass through creatures without effect except during specific moments when the item’s carrier is in combat with the creature in question. These objects include a combatant’s native weapons such as fangs, claws or fists. Objects fired from a bow or gun can pass through a creature not in combat with the firer, to then strike and wound the intended combatant.
  • Spirit creatures including ghosts cannot pass through walls, rocks, etc. but can be hit with any weapon, and can carry solid objects including coins and cloth. In other words spirit creatures are as corporeal as any other creature on the World of Warcraft, except for their partial transparency (though they still cast shadows—see below). This is not true of the spirit-forms of the PC races, who cannot harm or be harmed in the time between the death of their corporeal body and their resurrection, but which are also blocked by physical objects.
  • All animate creatures can recover from life-threatening wounds to full health in minutes, and return to their regular activities as if nothing had happened.
  • All animate creatures including spirits cast a shadow that is not influenced by the position of the sun or moon, other light-sources or other observable phenomena. Instead it always lies at their feet, as if they were being illuminated by a single point-source a short distance above their centre of gravity.

Based on these observations, we might hypothesise that there are two forms of matter on Azeroth. The first is ‘physical matter’, comprising almost all inanimate objects from mountains to fenceposts, major plant-life, and weapons. It is non-reactive, cannot be destroyed, and is essentially inert. The second is ‘animate matter’: if something on Azeroth moves or can be moved then it is made of animate matter, and conversely if it is not made of animate matter then it cannot move. Thus all living creatures, ambulatory plants, small vegetation, some small objects, ghosts and other spirit-based beings are all comprised of animate matter. Animate matter has a much lower molecular density than inanimate matter, and so any two objects made of animate matter can occupy the same physical space or pass through each other without interference or displacement.

However, this theory requires too many special cases and exceptions to be plausible. For example, it does not explain how weapons normally can pass through living beings without harming them outside a combat situation, but immediately combat starts will cause injury and death. Nor does it explain the movement of large pieces of Goblin engineering seen in Gadgetzan and Everlook, or zeppelins and ships which all move but appear to be made of physical matter. Besides, it does not fit any known theory of the way that the universe works, and there is another hypothesis that does, for a certain select value of ‘theory’.

Azeroth is a world in which all living creatures repeatedly retread the same paths to perform a small set of the same actions, often fighting and killing (or being killed by) adversaries that they have killed (or been killed by) many times before. Some have a wider range of actions than others, but none are able to break free and do what we would think of as ‘normal’ actions, either for animals—eating, breeding, dying of old age—or for intelligent humanoids—having a meal with friends, spending time with family, finding a partner, raising children, or retiring. We do not know why the animals do this; but the intelligent humanoids do it because they believe there is some kind of goal they are heading for, some kind of nebulous reward: power, reknown, perhaps an escape of some kind, a need not to participate in these actions any more.

When one combines these observations with the above notes on the fluid nature of living beings on Azeroth (their abilities to pass through some solid objects, for example) it becomes clear that there are parallels for this kind of existence in our universe, though one not properly understood or even recognised by most scientists. Nonetheless, in most cultures this state of being would be called an ‘afterlife’, and the people inhabiting it ‘ghosts’, trapped in a purgatorial netherworld where they must endlessly repeat the same actions, even if those actions include repeatedly dying.

This hypothesis fits well with many of the observable phenomena on Azeroth. It explains, for example, how in combat a sword can clearly be seen to bisect an opponent’s torso without cutting them in half or even leaving a visible wound. The only plausible explanation is that these beings are trapped in a spirit-based half-life of performing actions and missions that have been done a million times before, endless repetitions of violence and endless, meaningless deaths. Some conventional theories of such things would classify this as “Hell”.

We cannot hypothesise why this should be, or if there is any way for the inhabitants of Azeroth to escape from their situation.

(To be concluded, eventually in part 5)

Hearthstoning the discussion

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

If you’ve been commenting to my last few blog posts on the World of Warcraft, or you have a scientific hypothesis of your own about the nature of Azeroth and how it came to be that way, or you have too much time on your hands and enjoy thinking about stuff that doesn’t make sense, then I have created a Google Group to act as a venue for the continuation of the valuable discussions begun here. It’s called Azeroth Science and I urge you to sign up to it.

La Règle du Jeu

Posted by under game design, munchausen

I finally played Puerto Rico, Andreas Seyfarth’s award-winning boardgame from 2002, over the weekend. I’ve had it sitting on my games shelf for well over a year, but for some reason I’d forgotten I’d never got around to giving it a try.

On Saturday evening I was forcibly reminded of that reason. It wasn’t the long and complex game set-up phase, but the rules or more precisely the rulebook. Puerto Rico has the worst-explained set of rules of any boardgame I’ve ever played.

For those who don’t know Puerto Rico, it is currently the top-ranked game at Boardgamegeek. To give you some idea of the competition, that’s on a list of 3804 names, and chess is #186. It’s a resource-management game of building a mercantile empire in the eponymous 16th-century city, and in terms of complexity it’s on a par with popular German boardgames like Settlers of Catan or Carcasonne.

We sat there reading the rules, four adults educated to degree level and beyond, two of us being people who design games for a living, and after half an hour none of us had even grasped the structure of the game and what you were trying to do in order to win, let alone the minutiae of each part of each turn. Every part of the rule book is bad: the structure, the language, the layout, the terminology, the component descriptions. I defy anyone to work ouit how to play the game from that set of rules as written. It can’t be done.

In despair I turned to the web. The Wikipedia entry gives a three-line summary of the game that summarises its object and structure, which was better than anything in the actual Puerto Rico rules. It also provided a link to a 150-page PowerPoint presentation that not only explained the rules in a clear and systematic way but also gave a thorough example of play that had some good jokes in it. We read through that, everything fell into place, and we played the game. And it totally rocks.

Had my broadband been down, that copy of Puerto Rico would have been on fire. Literally.

I know that it’s an old truism in the computer-game world that nobody reads the instructions. But my design background is tabletop RPGs where the rules are everything, or at least they were. First-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was 512 pages, of which 509 were nothing but rules and games stats. Those other three pages were an example of play, and I maintain that without it the majority of readers would never have understood how the game should be played. When I published Nobilis, the notoriously ‘difficult’ (read: non-combat oriented) RPG, it had a 20-page example of play that walked the reader through all the major features of the game’s rules and showed them how to structure a campaign as well. And I’m intensely proud of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (which I wrote) and De Profundis (which I published and wish I’d written), both of which are genre-bending RPGs in which the description of the rules is also the example of play.

Video games, of course, don’t have examples of play. They used to have attract modes, a pre-recorded snippet of play that gave prospective players a rough idea of what and what not to do, but these seem to be preserved for arcade games these days. Some games do have tutorial levels, and some of these are better than others. Halo‘s first level, which wasn’t just an introduction to the game but many peoples’ first use of the Xbox controller too, is still the best I’ve ever seen.

These days what games do have is downloadable demos. Whether it’s Xbox Live or Manifesto Games, or a cover-disc for the Luddites out there, those gaming Amish whose view of the world has not been allowed to progress beyond 2003, almost any game worth a damn will let you try it for size. And I have lost count of the number of games I’ve played for maybe two minutes, quit and deleted because I couldn’t work out what to do, or how to do what I wanted, or simply because the game didn’t play the way I expected it to. Foomph, gone, and with it any chance of selling me a copy.

What’s the most depressing sight in a video game demo? A diagram of the controller listing fifteen or twenty different functions that the player is supposed to remember. What’s worse than that? Only displaying the diagram for fifteen seconds. What’s worse still? No diagram at all… in which case either your game had better have the most intuitive controls in the world or a tutorial level, or you’re stuffed.

Understand this, demo-makers: my investment in your demo is nil. It has cost me nothing. I have no emotional capital riding on liking your game. I am waiting for you to impress me, or at least to not piss me off. If you can’t structure the first two minutes of your demo to give me a smooth and enjoyable introduction to your creation and how to play it, why should I assume that you can do better with the full retail product? And you will not get a second chance.

I admit I have been wrong before, and famously. Two notable card-games were launched at Gen Con 1993, Magic: the Gathering and Once Upon a Time, and once I grew tired of demoing the latter I went to see what the fuss about the former was. Joanne White (later editor of Scrye magazine) offered to show me how it worked. She cracked a new deck and we played a game in which, due to being dealt a truly sucky hand, I was unable to cast a single spell. I walked away thinking, “It’s a shame about Wizards of the Coast, they’ve done some nice stuff in the past but this Magic thing is going to kill them.” But that experience had everything to do with poor luck and nothing to do with the quality of the demonstrator.

Because, of course, the way that most gamers learn a new set of rules is not from reading the rulebook but from having the game explained by friends. If everyone had to learn to play Puerto Rico from its rulebook it wouldn’t be topping the charts on Boardgamesgeek right now. It was Jonny Nexus who observed that almost nobody plays Monopoly by the proper rules because almost nobody has ever bothered to read them: they just absorb them—along with interesting variants, omissions, errors and house rules—from playing the game with other people.

It’s the same with video games. Anyone can use a demo to play, but to learn to play well you’ve got to watch other players, or at least ask their advice. In the days before Gamefaqs there were tips mags, and in the days before them we used to cluster round arcade machines to witness and take notes. Video games, of course, can’t be changed by house rules but the secrets to beating them are passed on the same way. I defy anyone to work out all the secrets, tricks, hidden areas and easter eggs in any game purely on their own.

Games are social. Not necessarily in their play—though Puerto Rico is pretty dull solo—but they encourage interaction, working with others to map the territory of gamespace and dig up its secrets. Which is why the stereotype of gamers being lonely or loners is such complete tripe. A good game is a treasure hunt, and a good treasure hunt is a party.

And that’s enough about games, treasure hunts and parties for the moment, before I shoot my fat mouth off.

Footnote: my brief moment as a conduit of game wisdom, or at least my best one, concerns Area 51, the 1995 Atari arcade light-gun shooter involving zombies and aliens. 1995 was about the time that John Woo’s movies were breaking big, with Chow Yun Fat’s two-fisted pistol stylings, and Jose Garcia of Daedalus Games showed me that it was possible to emulate this in Area 51, with one person playing both Player 1 and Player 2, a pistol in each hand. Later, in a London arcade, I worked through the game this way and turned away from the machine to find—for the first time in my life—a crowd of onlookers, who all now wanted to try the same thing.

The room is spinning very gently

Posted by under Uncategorized

Have a look at Prakbot. Take my word for it, it is unutterably cool. It may seem a bit techy, but what it boils down to is this: lately I’ve been playing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Infocom, 1984) over Skype.

They (Ben and Mind Candy) don’t seem to have released it into the wild yet, but it’s a wily beast, I’m sure it’ll work out an escape route.

Things to do in game design #1: cheat

Posted by under game design, street games

(This post is a follow-up to “Things not to do in game design #2: cheat“)

Because it’s not about fairness or balance or level playing fields. It’s about the user experience.

Let me tell you about a game you’ve never played. It’s called StarPower.

StarPower was created in 1969 by R. Garry Shirts and published by Simulation Training Systems as an educational game for use in schools, colleges and training situations. It’s a face-to-face turn-based game for 18-35 people that models a simple market-based society. Players draw random counters from a bag and must trade them in order to make combinations that score points. High-scoring players get Square badges, mid-scorers get Circles, low-scorers get Triangles, And from the third turn onwards the Squares can change the rules, altering how the game functions and what players can and can’t do.

What happens, of course, is that the three groups stratify and insularise quickly and the Squares make rules that keep them in the lead and force the other players to continue to lose. The Circles work to consolidate their position in the middle and appease the Squares, and the Triangles begin to feel oppressed, apathetic—or angry.

StarPower is often used to teach historical and sociological principles like class stratification, the abuse of power, and the roots of popular revolutions.

Here’s the big secret-that’s-not-a-secret-at-all: the game is fixed. The draw of the counters is not random. Once the Squares have started to win they will continue to win. Once you’re a Triangle it’s almost impossible to move up a group. StarPower is, by all conventional standards of game design, broken.

In educational-game circles StarPower is a legend.

No matter how liberal the players, the Squares always take advantage of their position, and when the Triangles gets angry, often they get really angry. Though I’ve been unable to confirm it, a senior member of ISAGA once told me about a game of StarPower in an American university where a member of the faculty who’d become a Triangle became so overwrought about the state of play and the abuse of power he was witnessing that he walked up to a member of the Squares and stabbed him.

He didn’t attack the people running the game. He didn’t walk out. He became so involved in the experience that he actually stabbed another player.

How’s that for an emotional response to a game?

I admit that frustration, hatred and homicidal rage are not necessarily the emotions that we as games designers want to create in our players. But still, the designer of StarPower created a game that cheats and managed to focus the players’ resulting feelings not at the game but at the other players. I know I said that two paragraphs up. I’ll keep saying it until the implications sink in1.

Of course games cheat. Computer games have cheated since the original single-player Pong. Of course it’s possible for the computer to play a perfect game of Pong, implacably batting the pill back at you until you falter and miss. But nobody would have played it if it did. So it cheated and missed a few shots on purpose, and voila there’s the games industry.

Because it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you experience the game. Good experience means repeated plays, more quarters in the slot, whatever. I mean, if I only bought boardgames that I can win I’d have a much smaller collection than I do.

The most obvious contemporary example of cheating is rubber-banding in racing games: letting the AI opponents exceed their supposed top speed and performance so they can catch up with the player. Because racing on your own around a track isn’t nearly as enjoyable, particularly if your vehicle has forward-mounted weapons. Rubber-banding is occasionally frustrating but crucially the player doesn’t feel that the game is cheating. You may suspect it is, or treat the reappearance of an opponent with momentary disbelief, but did the game cheat or did you over-brake on that last corner?

On Friday I played Journey to the End of Night, an urban chase-game that’s essentially British Bulldogs with checkpoints. Players had to race across London via six checkpoints. If they were caught by a Chaser, they became a Chaser. I was a Chaser. Here’s the thing: we started chasing from the get-go, but we deliberately didn’t catch any players till checkpoint 3. Two reasons: too many chasers early on unbalances the game; and secondly it’s not as fun for the players to be caught. Of course, the players didn’t know they were initially safe: they still ran like rabbits (or in one case froze like rabbits) as we swept down on them, yelling. We were—or rather the game was—cheating, but it was a better game for it.

Back in the day when tabletop RPGs were still fresh one of the first big debates to rage was whether rules should emphasise realism or playability. The argument wasn’t just simplicity vs complexity, though that’s often the way it worked out: the perception was that the more complex the game, the closer to verisimilitude it was. There was even one game, The World of Synnibarr, that was so keen on fairness and transparency it insisted that after a scenario was over the GM should give the players his notes, and if they found any discrepancy between the game as written and the game as played they could claim extra experience points for each deviation.

Twenty years on and the argument’s dead, as is the realistic end of the market and thankfully The World of Synnibarr too. Nobody wants realism or player/GM balance in an RPG any more. They want something that models its genre in an interesting and amusing way, and that’s fun whether to play or to GM.

I’m not going to pretend that the roots of all good game design lie in tabletop RPGs—

Bwah hah hah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

oh, I’m sorry…

hah ha ha ha ha ha

heh.

—but every genre of games has lessons to teach and lessons to learn from every other genre. And tabletop RPGs, at least some of them, are very good at using rules to model their genre. So if you’re designing a racing game, what the player wants is racing, and racing needs opponents. If the game has to bend the rules to get them to catch up with you, the good outweighs the bad. Same reason that the player always starts at the back of the grid: it makes for a better game. Not necessarily a more realistic or believable one, but more fun in the long run.

…course, if you’re taking a long run then there’s no need for rubber-banding. Slowcoach.

1 Boardgames, or some of them, draw players in and elicit emotional responses possibly better than any other type of game. Kids kick boards over. I’ve seen a friendship end over a game of Junta. Cat’s parents, diplomats on a foreign posting, once played Diplomacy with the Russian ambassador and his wife: a furious row broke out between the two and they got divorced shortly afterwards. I suspect that the bloom was already off the rose there and the stresses of the game just exacerbated an already damaged relationship, but for the sake of the anecdote I’ll pretend it was down to the ever-tricky problem of controlling the Mediterranean.

 

Richard & n00by

Posted by under mmorpg

Richard and Judy, king and queen of the late-afternoon chat-show and freelancer bunk-off hour, did a segment on World of Warcraft today. Richard was enthused, Judy predictably befuddled. I missed it. Fret not: it’ll be on Youtube soon.

The spur for the piece was Caitlin Moran, the tabloid journalist who writes for the Times, who had been lent a copy of WoW by someone at work (with the editor who persuaded her to do a piece on it standing right behind him, and the marketing guy who’d arranged the paper’s free WoW demo disc give-away this Saturday behind the two of them, fiddling with his Blackberry).

Moran’s piece is exactly what you’d expect: she’s amazed by the experience and dismissive of those who enjoyed it before she did. Phrases like “people who are into goblins and wizards are people within the autistic spectrum of behaviour” and “the entire fantasy genre is the domain of the sweaty, white, nonintellectual Herbert, and has very little to offer me” are thrown around with customary glee in the opening paragraphs, and then she finds herself staying up till 2am and flirting with a female gnome—see, she’s chosen a male character and is surprised when a girl comes onto her. Well done for not freaking out, Caitlin, and welcome to the online world of 1993.

In short, it’s exactly the same nonsense that one expects from the Times: the tone is split between “this is brilliant” and “this is strictly for dysfunctional nerds”. In fact the biggest loser she meets online turns out to be her brother, who says “Pwnz” a lot and doesn’t known what it means.

Oh sod it, just read the bloody piece for yourself. You’ll see what I’m saying. Then if you’re a WoW player and you see a ginger dwarf called Scottbaio, please pwn him/her immediately.

But all this, plus the Times‘s offer and the Richard and Judy thing seems to herald WoW‘s assault on the mainstream, or vice versa, and the coming of eternal September to that particular world (the Times sells 650,000 copies: even if only 10% of those demo CDs get used, that’s a lot of n00bs). I sympathise with the inhabitants, though if there was ever a MMORPG game that worked for people with no foreknowledge of computer games, WoW is it. I give it weeks before the first high-profile brand realises that their Second Life island may make for great press releases but isn’t getting traffic, and announces a partnership with Blizzard and a presence in every major community in Azeroth.

Meanwhile I wondered out loud (that is, I mentioned it on Twitter, that being this season’s ‘out loud’ among the e-elite) when Richard and Judy were going to do Second Life and the omniscient or possibly more-freelance-than-me Ian Betteridge informed me that they had, back in January, and that Richard had looked ‘baffled’. A shame: I would have thought that Richard could have been relied upon to stray accidentally into the seamier side of town and get propositioned by a furry.

Notes found in an abandoned directory

Posted by under game design

TIPS FOR MEDIA AGENCIES ON WORKING WITH EXTERNAL GAMES DESIGNERS

(I jotted this about eighteen months ago, probably while on the Tube. I think I had the intention of working it up into a proper document and circulating it. Evidently that didn’t happen.

If you’ve got any tips that would fit in the list, bung them down below. If you know of any media agencies that would benefit from this advice, feel free to pass it on.)

1. If you’ve not done a game before, then say so. We will not laugh and point, but on the other hand we will not assume you understand basic principles that actually you don’t.

2. Stage one is to sit down with the designer and agree the development schedule, how much time there is to delivery, and how that time will be divided up. You should do this before you’ve even begun working out whether this is going to be a BAFTA-winning work of dazzling originality or another arcade knock-off with your client’s brand on it.

3. Whatever stage you’re doing next, do mention it to the designer.

4. Liaise closely with your designer. Yes, closer than that. Game design is an organic, holistic process, yet games designers are not mind readers. We need to know what’s going on in your heads, and you need to know what’s going on in ours.

5. You cannot speed up game development by throwing more staff at it. It may improve the quality of the end product (as long as the staff understand games, see point 1) but it won’t make it happen any faster.

6. If you employ a games designer and then don’t show them early builds of the game or consult them during playtest, you’ve wasted your money.

7. A credit would be nice.

Addendum 1: Know who you want. A games designer will design you a game. A games writer will work with a designer to plan and create all the plot, character and narrative elements of a game for you. A script writer will write the actual words that will appear in the game. The three do overlap but they are not the same and they get paid differently. Don’t ask someone to script-write a game and then expect them to design the games systems.

So what have you been working on, James?

Posted by under roleplaying games, Spaaace

I’ve been working on quite a lot, thanks for asking.

My current major project is publicity for the forthcoming Crime Scene game for the Office of Criminal Justice Reform. I designed the game last year, and it’s due to go live in early March. Right now I am writing five blogs for five in-game characters, which interweave to create an ongoing narrative that sets up the game’s back-story. The blogs are here,
here,
here,
here
and here.

I’m working on a revised edition of my game The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Hogshead, 1998) as well as Dragon Warriors (Dave Morris/Oliver Johnson; Corgi, 1986), and the first edition of my much-delayed D&D-parody Frup, originally due to be released in 1995, for my new imprint Magnum Opus Press.

Those unable to wait for the revised, expanded Munchausen can find the original game reprinted in Second Person (MIT Press, 2007), along with a paper by me on story-making games, and much more good stuff on the subject of roleplay and storytelling in games.

Plus some stuff I can’t talk about yet.