The jRPG

Saw a post on this at RPS, and thought I’d retweet, so to speak.

Go play this game.  I’ll wait.

Now, unlike Kieron’s view of this game, I don’t think that this is a particularly ‘mean spirited’ take on the jRPG at all.  I do agree that the type of RPG Sophie is mocking here is definitely of the ‘classical jRPG’ variety (think Final Fantasy, Star Ocean, Lost Odyssey, etc.).  The reason I don’t think so is, firstly, I don’t think you can be ‘mean spirited’ about a genre, only a specific example of that genre.  It’s like saying someone is being mean-spirited about SciFi, you can’t really do it.  Secondly, This is what satire is.  You take something, strip it of the lace and trim and expose it for what is really going on behind the scenes as brutally as you can.  If you think that’s in poor taste, fine, but I would argue that you don’t really understand or appreciate satire.

Finally, while I love what Sophie has done here - boiled the RPG down to grinding along a line in order to read a poorly written story - I think she could go further.  Start by interrupting the player’s progression along the line every 2-3 seconds, randomly, and without warning, force them to watch the little stick figure dancing around (a 10 second process), and then to tap the same button over and over again until they are returned to the line, only to repeat the process again 2-3 seconds later.

It might dilute the message for those that aren’t familiar with the material at hand, but I would find it god damn hilarious.

Adventure Games

I was talking to Dan about this a couple of weeks ago, and I thought I’d share some thoughts about the genre.

From a pure game design standpoint, Adventure Games are not particularly interesting.  You have a game space, which can be seen as a very rigid tree, or occasionally a graph.  The job of the player is to manually perform a search on this tree until they reach a particular leaf node.

The method of node traversal takes different forms, but usually includes things like finding, combining, and using items, speaking to characters, moving to various rooms, and solving pre-constructed puzzles.  In 2009, there is nothing ludologically complex about this, for the most part it has been done.  We have learned certain lessons about the way in which you should or should not go about constructing your game tree (for example, having extremely deep branches that ultimately are dead-ends are frowned upon, as is progressing down a branch that is otherwise identical to the correct branch, but is missing some key piece, such as picking up an item, that does not become appearant until it is far too late, and the game prevents you from retracing your steps).  But assuming you follow these guidelines, making an adventure game does not involve doing anything revolutionary, from a game design standpoint.

Which isn’t to say they aren’t interesting or that people shouldn’t make them.  From a narrative standpoint, adventure games can be incredibly rich, and there are people (myself included) who greatly enjoy the excerise of traversing the trees you have made for us.  In fact, in the last few years, it is precisely because these games are so well understood and strictly defined that tools like AGS have been made available, providing one of the most direct routes for hobbiest game designers to implement their visions.  I’m a big fan of the idea that if anyone has the ability to write a book (as it stands today), then there will be a large pile of shovelware books, but also an increase in the amount of good material available for me to consume.  I feel the same way about games - although we are not at a point where making games is as straightforward as writing a book - Adventure Games are one of the best places to start finding them.

A final observation.  One of the reasons that the adventure game genre has been so threadbare in the last 10 years is a lack of market for them - they became a niche.  With the ongoing explosion of the market as a whole - especially in the realm of casual games, people who were ‘non-gamers’ 10 years ago and are ‘casual gamers’ now are beginning to discover this niche, to the point where casual portals like Big Fish Games are offering titles such as Syberia 2 - a very hardcore traditional point and click game - to their members.  That says to me that you may see this genre, commercially stagnant, have a revival in the coming years (to a point, you are already seeing this via Telltale Games, et al. on the Wii).

Some interesting recent or upcoming releases in this genre:

• The Chzo Mythos
• A Tale of Two Kingdoms
• AGD Interactive remakes of King’s Quest 1 and Quest for Glory 2
• The Whispered World
• Three Cards to Midnight, from the makers of the Tex Murphy series (Looking at a March 2009 or later release at this point)

Macho Posturing

Saw this story on Eurogamer today.  Apparently Kaz Hirai (SCE President) thinks that Sony is the ‘official’ leader of the gaming industry.  This status is conferred upon the illustrious lords of Sony, not because of retail sales figures (in which they are being thoroughly spanked), or install base (the smallest of current generation consoles), but simply in terms of an anticipated longevity.

It would seem, in fact, that Hirai-san does not even see Nintendo and Microsoft as competitors.  Nintendo, he claims, is in “a different world”, which I guess is how you address a company that has nearly matched sales of your best selling console in a third of the time.  Microsoft, on the other hand, “lacks longevity”, and I suppose is beneath contempt in this regard.

My favorite quote from the article is as follows:

“We don’t provide the ‘easy to program for’ console that [developers] want, because ‘easy to program for’ means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?” -Kaz Hirai

It’s very simple.  You WANT developers to be able to take advantage of what the hardware can do.  What that means is that for the rest of the nine and a half years, while PS3 developers finally learn to master the console and push it to its limits, Xbox 360 developers will have mastered the console years before, and can concentrate on Design.  If there’s anything we should have learned from this generation, it’s that you don’t get great games by forcing the developers to work against the tools you give them.  The fun comes from a great, polished design and execution.  Sony should be working as fast as they can to make it EASIER for developers to harness the PS3s power, not treating it as some kind of gauntlet to be overcome.

The Friendship Game

As NXE has launched and I spend less time at work, I’m trying to concentrate more time on side projects and game demos.  The first of these is what I call the Friendship Game.  Not all of the below features have been implemented as of right now.

I’m planning to revamp the site a bit to have a space for all my designs and prototypes, but for now you can find the current version here.

Technical Bits

The Friendship Game is built in Silverlight 2.0, using the Farseer Physics Engine.  The ball interactions are performed using custom springs that emulate electrostatic dynamics rather than spring dynamics.

 

Controls

You have a colored ball.  Your ball lives in a large triangle.  By clicking and dragging on your ball, you can pull your ball in the direction of the mouse.  Clicking on other balls will create a linkage between your ball and the other ball.

Rules

Balls may attach themselves to other balls.  Balls score points for each other ball that has elected to attach itself to that ball (e.g. if ball A attaches to ball B, ball B earns points).  Balls have a limited number of attachments that can be made at once.  If two balls become sufficiently distant, any attachments will be severed.

Balls have color.  Different colored balls interacted electrostatically, either by attraction or repulsion.

Each ball has a particular region of the map which is its goal region.  Balls score points for being in their goal region.  This region may change shape or location over time.

Balls also get points for being near other balls.  The amount of points allocated increases with the number of balls and the proximity of the other balls.

Concept

This is a game about personalities and relationships. 

As each ball is trying to maximize its own ‘happiness’, there are conflicting forces between life goals (regions of the map) and maintaining close relationships (attachments) to other balls.

A ball may, for example, be forced to destroy relationships with another group of balls in order to pursue life goals (and rejoin other balls with similiar life goals).

Dynamics of groups may change depending on the introduction of new balls or the removal of existing ones.  For example, in a group of balls with colors that are all attractive, some of them may be ousted completely, or pushed to the periphery by the introduction of a new ball that is only attractive with some of them.

Bad Designer, No Twinkie IX

Ernest Adams’ excellent annual paper has been posted on Gamasutra.  Just saying.

(Can you see I’m experiencing Writer’s Block?)

Rules of Achievement

In today’s episode, our hero picks a fight with Harvey Smith.

The Ellustrious Mr. Smith had a post up a couple of days ago in response to this article on the Psychology of Achievements.  I’ve written before about how achievements are essentially a psychological drug, but I happened to share Harvey’s preference.  When an achievement exists that highlights an unexpected area of gameplay - e.g. getting the gnome into space - I find that really interesting and exciting.

The problem I have with Harvey’s comments is that he sees any Achievement that doesn’t encourage “the right spirit of play” to be wrong, somehow.  It’s up to game designers to create fun spaces to explore, and nudge the players in the direction of the entertainment they’ve created.  Some people are going to do what you tell them to do.  Some people are going to build ladders out of proximity mines and escape your little world.  Some people are insane completionists and mostly just care about getting every achievement you provide them with.

And there’s a LOT of those people.

You don’t have to like that fact, but if you don’t cater to those people at all, then they’ll play something else.  Just because you enjoy open-ended game experiences doesn’t mean the entire world is looking for them.

That said, I think there’s ways to structure acheivements (or Trophies, or whatever) in a way that can satisfy most people:

The Rules

For the Explorers

• Force the player to change the way they play the game.
• Create a trail into a gameplay space that might go unnoticed.
• Example: Essentially any game by Valve

For the Achievers

• Reward completing sets of things
• Reward maximizing or minimizing variables (do this without dying, get the highest level in that)
• Example: Bioshock

For the Socializers

• Do Nothing!
• Socializers care about creating relationships, any little badge you put on that simply makes it seem trite.
• Creating “Social” Achievements will piss off your Achievers.
• Counter Example: Settlers of Catan’s “Invite X people to play with you” achievement.

For the Killers

• Do Nothing!
• Leaderboards serve this purpose already
• Creating “Killer” Achievements will piss off your Explorers.
• Counter Example: Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter

For Everyone

• Make some achievements easy to get, early in the game
• Avoid tedious achievements that require you to grind for hours.
• A single playthrough of the game should net the average player around 50% of the game’s achievements

XBLA Game Pitch

James Goddard over at CrunchTime games has provided us with something very interesting.  Many independent developers dream of getting a title on XBLA (hobbiests have a better route through the upcoming Xbox Live Community Games).  Unfortunately, the path to that goal is fuzzy at best. 

Game Career Guide is hosting two documents that Goddard has made publically available, the game pitch, and the 60 seconds of gameplay documents, for his newly released game Shred Nebula. 

The pitch document is officially what allowed Microsoft to give the game the green light. The “60 Seconds of Gameplay” essay is a separate document that Microsoft requires of all its published games, whether developed in-house or out. In it, the authors must describe, step-by-step what the player does, sees, hears, and feels during a full 60 seconds of gameplay, which can be taken from any point in the game.

As a professor of game development, Goddard clearly understands and values the passing on of knowledge about game design to future generations, and it’s good for the industry to make the standard practices more transparent.  Hopefully more developers will follow suit in releasing their design documents in the future.

Jonny B. Good

I’ve not had the pleasure of meeting Jonathan Blow yet, but I get the impression that he’s the type of man who does what he does, not for the attention of the gaming media, but because he thinks that’s the way things should be.

And I’m going to have to agree.

I’ve spoken of Jonathan before, and if you haven’t heard any of his talks on design, you should, if that’s the kind of thing that interests you. Jonathan has made news recently based around many of his design philosophies. I had thought that these views were lofty and optimistic, it was difficult to point to any one of them and demonstrate a successful title that really embodied it. Then it came about that Jonathan was bringing a game to market, and I had intended to draw a bead upon it with a critical eye, looking forward to pointing out in his game where he was defying his own rules.

So much for that.

I realize that Braid is currently only available for Xbox Live Arcade, which I’m happy about from a business standpoint, but I almost wish it was more widely available in this case. I feel bad for friends of mine who would rather spend a few hundred dollars in coffee than own an Xbox, because they are missing out on an a profound experience. Braid is coming to PC later this year, but many of these friends own Macs (probably for the same reason they don’t own an Xbox 360). So let’s talk about Braid and Jonathan’s design beliefs.

Jon holds the stance that playing a video games should be a holistic experience - you shouldn’t need to be artificially prodded into doing one thing or another, rather the game play space should naturally draw you to areas and concept that should be interesting, and you should discover them for yourself. Braid contains no tutorials, and as the central game mechanic is about playing with the flow of time, describes a world in which things can happen which are not expected. Nevertheless, the game is built in such a way that you will naturally discover the quirks of this world, in a very organic fashion, and every time you do, you feel really good about it.

Jon is vehemently against scheduled rewards (a term I used, and I believe he coined). These are the little meaningless bonuses that at their best, try to get you to explore areas of the playspace you might not have, and at their worst, are a cheap mental trick designed to keep you in front of your box. Nearly all games contain these in some way, they’re so prevelant, it’s difficult to imagine a game without them. Braid is such a game. Taking them away gives the game a clean, minimalistic feel. It invokes the feeling that you’re free of distractions, and can be focused on the exploration at hand.

Jon is of the opinion that there is often a dichotomy between what the gameplay is trying to tell the player, and what the story is telling the player. The canonical example is Bioshock, in which the story tells you that the choice between saving or destroying the little sisters is critical, and the game play tells you it doesn’t matter (because the difference in rewards for doing one or the other are trivial). Braid’s story is tightly integrated with gameplay, and in fact it didn’t occur to me until the sixth world that the story being told was an allegory for what was happening in each level, and vice versa.

Finally, Jon believes that developers should think about what they’re teaching their players when they give them a game to play. On this point I think the world needs a balance, and in general we are lacking developers who live in Blow’s camp. Games have been used to teach people since time immemorial. As a tool for teaching, it is certainly important that what is being taught is a Good Thing. I think, however, that from a pragmatic standpoint, not everyone is interested in learning. There is a place in the world for people who want nothing but to be entertained, and someone will always be there to fill that desire.

So what is Braid? It is a world turning experience on both an intellectual and emotional level. Braid integrates complexity out of simplicity, it evokes a sense of wonder and delight. Free of distractions, you are brought into a masterfully crafted world where you are repeatly filled with a sense of delight as you learn. The feeling is much like the feeling of exploring in Portal, only more so. Jonathan values this feeling so much, that the official walkthrough simply urges you not to use a walkthrough - and he’s right. Using a walkthrough robs you of much of the experience you get out of this game, and you can never get it again.

Braid is a bittersweet, magical journey, and missing it would leave your hand off the touchstone of our generation. Jonathan Blow earns my respect in spades, and the world will never be the same again.

Linked Achievements

David Edery (whom you may know as the Portfolio Planner for Xbox Live Arcade) has an interesting post up about CliffyB’s announcement on Gears of War 2’s achievements being linked to things you did the original. 

This got me thinking about a concept that has so far been poorly explored, likely because there hasn’t been a good platform to launch it on until relatively recently.

If you recall the first time you saw Memento, there’s an experience of having an incomplete series of events handed to you.  You’re thrust into the middle of a series of events, and the logic of how you got there, and what’s going on, don’t become entirely clear until the end.  If you’ve ever read the Vlad Taltos series of books in the order they were published, you’ll experience something similar (or for that matter, read any other series of books with a sophisticated plot, out of chronological order).

It would be interesting to reproduce this sensation in game format - by having a series of games with linked content, as David describes.  Instead, however, of treating this content - hidden until certain events in a sequel are unlocked - as an easter egg, use it as the core of the design process.  Imagine a game where the central concept is the corruption of a timeline.  You play through the first game, thrust into the middle of a series of events, not really understanding what’s going on.  By the end of the first game, you have a grip on the immediate scenario, but there are a lot of plot holes.  Playing the second, or third game gives you a similar experience.  However, in each of these games, there are events you can trigger which will have causal effects in one of the other games, altering a timeline either before, or after the position in which you triggered it.  This effect unlocks further content in the other games, forcing you to go back to them and play that content.  The entire experience is understood only through playing all three games, and retracing what you’ve done with significant alterations.  Another alternative would be to run parallel dimensions at concurent timelines, so that the game mechanic would be the same, but instead of altering time, you alter space.

Creating a series of titles like this would be extremely high risk - if one of the titles doesn’t get made, the entire experience is ruined.  This is a risk that nearly nobody in the gaming industry is has so far been willing to undertake - and yet in other formats, notably television, this type of risk scenario is now common-place.  The risk could be mitigated by making the titles digital distributed at a lower price point through something like Xbox Live Arcade, and by using a common infrastructure such that most of the risk is entertained in the first title, and it will cost significantly less to make titles 2 and 3 (assuming a trilogy).

Now if only there were a large games company with significant financial backing that was trying to do something progressive and could afford to entertain some risk…

The Shifting Revel

Aside from my Achievement addiction, I have a profound love of Magic: The Gathering.  Over the years I have abandoned the game, stayed away for several years, and then come back to it, each time harder than before.  The last time I seriously got into playing Magic was during the Odyssey block, back in 2001.  I played reasonably seriously, going to tournaments occasionally and spending hundreds of dollars on pieces of cardboard.  Just before I began University, I gave up the game, and I haven’t played it since.  Most of my friends at the time sold their collections and bailed out for good, perhaps keeping a couple of really well built decks for posterity.

Last week, a bunch of us got together and decided to do a booster draft - a game where everyone buys three $4.00 packs of 15 cards, and the cards are cycled around in a systematic way so that it’s possible to build a functional (although not very good) deck with a small investment, and play using only those cards.  This has had much the same effect as a bunch of coke addicts deciding to do a line for old time’s sake.  The game is so addictive that with that one brief exposure, most of us are considering getting back into the game, and building real decks once again.

Scott Lynch, in his extremely excellent The Lies of Locke Lamora describes a scene he calls The Shifting Revel.  In order to defray tempers and choke off any uprising before it can gain traction, the Duke of Camor underwrites a giant festival which takes place at regular intervals in the local bay.  It’s called the shifting revel because the festival takes place in the form of hundreds of boats - those of the attendees and local merchants - who lash themselves together in the bay.  The attendance changes from revel to revel, as does the specifics of the entertainment - but there are always keystone features which remain the same and give the revel a grounding.

Magic is a Shifting Revel, and I think this is one of the reasons it’s both so addictive, and that it’s remained so popular over the years when nearly every other collectible card game has sputtered and failed.  There is no specific strategy in Magic that is predominant - there are several major strategies, none of which is better than any other in general.  The game is simple enough that the basics can be grasped in ten minutes, but complex enough that the building of a good deck requires knowledge of statistics.  There are endless combinations of cards that can put together to make a deck, and no two players will use even the same deck in exactly the same way.  The game is very well balanced, but this isn’t what makes it a shifting revel.

Most people who play magic at the tournament level play with what is referred to as “Standard Edition” rules.  Essentially standard play limits the cards you’re allowed to use to the two most recently released blocks of cards, each block containing three sets.  New sets are introduced every roughly 2 to 3 months.  The effect this has on gameplay is profound.  With any given set of cards, in a matter of weeks, tournament play solidifies around several ‘types’ of decks, based around the cards that are legal in the last two blocks.  Each type of deck will revolve around a particular strategy for winning and involve several major strategic cards from these blocks.

The trick is that every time a new block is begun, an old block of cards will no longer be legal in standard tournaments.   This typically has the effect of crippling all deck ‘types’ that are currently used in tournaments - and the scene shifts.  New deck types emerge as players explore the possible combinations of cards from what is left, along with the new cards being slowly filtered in every two months as the new sets emerge - in fact, as each of the new sets in the block emerge, new possibilities emerge as well.  These possibilities are not as severe as the shakeup when a block rotates out of use, but are enough that a fury of new deck styles must be explored.

The business potential of this strategy is huge.  Games are fundamentally about exploring a possibility space, and when that space has been explored to its limit, the game ceases to be interesting.  In Magic this possibility space is expanded at a rate that gives people time to master the space, but not long enough that it becomes uninteresting, and then is grown.  On a yearly basis (or so) the entire space is turned upside down, things you used to know no longer apply, and there are new details to take into account.  This is a shifting revel, and it allows the old to become new again, and again and again.

This is much to the profit of Wizards of the Coast, who have managed to create a game so popular that many pieces of cardboard sell for 500% of the price of a booster pack in the secondary market - some particularly useful cards can go for many times that.  That’s a lot of money for a card that won’t be legal in standard play two years from now.  The thing I find particularly interesting about this is that it hasn’t been done in online play (other than in the online version of MTG of course) for any other game that I know of.

Digital Distribution systems provide a very smooth way of rolling this out.  Any game that contained the addictive hooks of MTG and based around shifting revel - potentially fueled by micro-transactions - that rotated on appropriate basis in line with the exploration curve of the possibility space…  Well my friend, that would a license to print money.  Systems like Xbox Live provide even further hooks such as Achievements (Imagine getting badges for beating someone using only direct damage, by milling their library to depletion, by using only creatures, for using a particular combination of cards, etc.), and if it was done well, might even outstrip the fanfare that Wizards of the Coast has been raking in for nearly the past two decades.  This would allow for a game that is not only highly addictive, but extremely interesting ludologically as well.  In any given year, MTG is recognizable enough as MTG - there are certain rules that never change - but the dynamics of the gameplay are totally different, if you’re willing to pay the price to keep up.  There are very few games that evolve so organically over such a long period of time, and I think it’s time we had another one.

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