Another facebook comment that got way too long

Accidentally ended up writing a mini-essay as my share text on a facebook link. Decided to put it here for posterity as I trust google to archive my thoughts very slightly more than Facebook. Also, the wayback machine works on blogs.

The original article (here) calls out some interesting trends in sales of small, independent, digital download games (a.k.a. indie games), citing it as the indie bubble bursting.

I wouldn't call it exactly an indie bubble but this article does a fair job of outlining how the market is changing. In my experience, markets -- especially consumer directed markets -- go in waves.

The metaphor that fits most in my mind is land. Whenever a new place is accessible, whether by new technology or changing circumstances or what have you, it's the wild west. Fill up your wagon, go out west, grab some land, do what you want. It might be hard to get there, or might require a specialized skill set, or the area might not be hospitable for everyone. Heck, maybe there were already some people there who had been living there basically forever but had less of a profit motive.*

Then somebody finds some gold, and maybe some folks back east take notice. Folks who have been camping once or twice and want to get rich quick saddle up. A lot of these greenhorn settlers die on the way out, but those who teach themselves how to survive have plenty of room to settle. Bigger enterprises who already own well mined ... well, mines ... see completely untapped resources. They train and hire their own people to go out and claim the abundant territory. If they have to push other people who have been there longer of the territory well, that's unfortunate but they were sitting on giant gold mines and just sifting a few flakes out of the river so, really, isn't it their own fault for not capitalizing on it? Also, how do you get blood off of suede shoes? 

And now the big mining concerns buy up everything that was sustaining an entire culture, and what they can't buy up they force others out of. At least, if the profit motive is there.

All of this means that, as time goes on, the skills needed to succeed shift from the ability to successfully work the land to the ability to bring resources to bear -- economics and politics.

The good part of all this is that the intellectual property world isn't a static, finite world like our own. A new business model is enough to open a new wave and, after that happens, it takes a while for the larger concerns and the greenhorns to even start caring. Kingdom of Loathing was out there doing it's thing long before Zynga and King camped out in Freemium. FTL kickstarted itself long before larger companies started seeing it as a way to offset project risk. Rolling Alpha is STILL a wild west marketplace with Minecraft, Day Z, and the great grandaddy of them all Dwarf Fortress continuing to work a crazy stretch of wild canyon river that none of the big fish have quite tackled how to work yet. As barriers to entry rise in one place, new frontiers are opening in another.

I guess what I'm really saying is that I need to finish watching Deadwood someday.

*Does this make board games indigenous peoples?

Unfortunate Sexism in Good Media, as Portrayed by GTA V

Nothing to see here

Mild Spoilers Ahead.

GTA does satirize american culture and the american dream. The quick buck, the easy fix, sex and violence. But, consciously or not, it is also satirizing women: not just our society's view of women, not just specific people who happen to be women. No, it satirized women as a class of people. I don't think it necessarily sets out to do this, and I don't think the people who made the game are evil for it turning out this way. But this is something that I find difficult to deal with, and something I wish there were a LOT less of both in the world and especially in the industry.

Let's look at how GTA uses satire. Take Jay Norris: the Zuckerberg/Jobs character who runs the game's version of Facebook, "Life Invader." He gives speeches that are essentially literal translations of a cynical interpretation of a Jobs keynote. The words, "peek, pry, populate," displayed behind him, the extolls the virtues of his company. He says, to a cheering crowd, "We have put a billion people's private information in the public domain, and we have milked every penny we could in the process."

Here we have an exaggeration of a real type of public figure, calling out the absurdity of the these cult-of-personality keynotes, and showing how companies like Facebook and Apple getting people to pay them for the privilege of eroding their private lives. He says they're average workforce age is 14, which calls out some of the questionable manufacturing conditions that have been reported at FoxConn.

This is pretty classic satire. There's an element of real culture dialed up to the proverbial 11 to make it easier to see and to show how absurd it is. And then, without spoiling too much, it gives us some lovely wish fulfillment.

Then there's the son of one of the main characters, Jimmy. He's a classic example of the second generation son of the hard working parents. Looking like a ginger Turtle circa Entourage season 1, he's a stand in for lazy millennials and entitled trust funders. He sits in his room all day yelling slurs at people over the internet and getting high. He sells his dad's boat because he doesn't have any spending money at the time, and has the audacity to at one point put a giant brick of marijuana in the family fridge.

This is the game mocking the college age core demographic gamers, and the easy target millennials. And it's not the worst mocking. Here we have entitlement, moral bankruptcy, and general dudebroness all called out for ridicule. When he calls people "gay" over the internet, this is mocking dudebros -- not mocking homosexuality. Once again, we've taken something problematic and turned it up to 11 to point out the flaws and have a good laugh.

Then there's the women. It's easy to talk about Michael's wife and daughter. I know, because I just deleted two paragraphs I wrote about them. But the truth is, that's talked about better elsewhere; the nagging, cheating, entitled housewife and oversexed underbrained blonde stereotypes aren't new. And the game doesn't do much new with them here. It just uses the same old vaguely offensive sitcom tropes without really making fun of them.

Oddly enough, this doesn't bother me all that much

The more interesting female characterizations, and the more toxic, are the "strong women" that show up. First of all, there's Franklin's Aunt who he calls crazy and with whom he owns a small house. All we ever see her do is hanging out with her female friends and performing various empowerment exercises and asserting her right to the house she half owns. She has the audacity to not want to move when Franklin wants to sit down, watch TV, and smoke a bowl. Her assertion of ownership over what's hers and her feminism are what is exaggerated here and, thus, are what the game is subtly saying is a character flaw to be made fun of.

The other character is a minor quest giver - a female jogger Michael can race against. She's an attractive woman in her late 30s. When Michael first approaches her she says she's not interested in him. She then goes on to assert that she's working out for herself and not to fill a man-shape void in a very "the lady doth protest too much" sort of way. She constantly berates Michael, who keeps replying, "You should meet my wife." The exaggerated elements here are her independence, her athleticism, and her hatred of men. The game implies that she's compensating for being an "old maid" with man hating and exercise and all but saying that she may just need a good fucking and she's be fine.

Yes, this is a game of terrible people. There are no female role models because the game doesn't have any role models. Except maybe Trevor. Here's the distinction: when male characters are satirized, it's usually for qualities that have little or nothing to do with their gender. The shrink is satirized for being money grubbing and uninterested, the yoga instructor for being in touch with his body (and anus), and Trevor's friend Ron for being a conspiracy theorist. When women are satirized it's usually for things that are specific to women: dressing too provocatively, being obsessed with being 39 and single, or marching around like the mother at the beginning of Mary Poppins. People are made fun of everywhere, but women are made fun of for being women.

I say this not to convince. As I said at the top, if you don't think it's a problem that the game satirized women as a class that's on you. I'm not here to try to evangelize. I'm writing this to let people who feel the same way I do, or agree with some of what I said, to know that someone else out there thinks the same things are true. Because god knows there are enough people out there who say there's nothing wrong with the way our media portrays women.

Now THIS is cultural satire:

http://kotaku.com/gta-v-needs-more-rickshaw-stealing-and-dick-punching-1441914031

In Defense of Same Sex Marriage

Just so it's out there on record - I don't do a lot of profile picture changing, but it doesn't mean I'm not massively in favor of same sex marriage, etc. I also don't wear flag pin but I love America.
We have a lot of issues in our society with how we tie gender identity and sexual preference to identity and to the relationships we form with other people, organizations, etc. I have so much respect for the people who choose to publicly be who they are and with who they love, meeting the rough and jagged edges of our culture head on, and bleeding on the cutting edges of our society and slowly wearing them smooth.

The "traditional marriage" that those who oppose same-sex marriage hold up as a sacred thing, not to be tampered with, is not the wholly unimpeachable tradition it's made out to be in such traditions. Like almost every other aspect of society, marriage has undergone continual change in the modern era as gender roles have been redefined to acknowledge the humanity and rights of women in the home, the workplace, and society at large. These changes have been hard, but they have been for the better, slowly peeling away the unconscious associations of sex/gender with personhood that are embedded deeply in our society.

I, and I suspect many other men of my generation and before, are brought up in this world and learn, are taught, a sortof “when-harry-met-sally” view of relationship to women: men and women can’t be friends, because no matter what, the relationship between a man and a woman is ALWAYS defined in terms of sexual coupling; even when a man and a woman are not together, it is viewed as them actively not having sex with one another at least on the male side. Thus, before you ever get to the person on the other side, there’s a ‘problem’ to be solved. An object in the way, a screen of rules and questions that makes it that much harder to see the depth of the person on the other side of it. Yes, of course there are biological bits to it, but biology is often a good goddamn excuse for what we don’t want to change because its hard. So we blame our dicks, or their dicks, or whatever, and we keep seeing these other people as complicated machines, problems to be solved, instead of as the reflections of selfhood that they are. And it’s fine. Because it’s our biological nature. Our original sin. Can’t be changed, only regretted.

There’s a passage from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians (the first one) that’s often quoted in traditional marriages. You probably know the one -- it starts out, “Love is patient, love is kind...” It’s a wonderful passage about loving another person; it is most emphatically NOT about traditional marriage as a special relationship in this regard. The context is that of loving EVERYONE in this way regardless of their unqiue qualities. It’s about not resenting those that appear to be better than you, or thinking yourself better than others in a different position.

Does same-sex marriage force us to reexamine and change our definition of what a “traditional” marriage is? Of course it does. But we’ve been doing that for over a century and with largely successful results. Same-sex marriage forces us to separate our ideas of what loving another person is, what being married to another person is, from sexual identity. In so doing, it forces us as a culture (or at least me), to stop using the gendered shorthand we use when thinking about those we care about, and might, just might, help us see each other as people. For love does not delight in evil, but rejoices in truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perserves.

FATE Supp. Rules for Lost Civilizations

Here are some rules that I'm thinking about using in the fate campaign I'm currently running. Background info: the world is far-future super post apocalyptic with ruins of lost civilizations dotting the landscape. I wanted rules for collaboratively fleshing out these ruins and innumerable lost civilizations.

Ruins of Lost Civilizations

Intro

Exploring haunted ceremonial burial grounds. Spelunking in buried alien spacecraft. Stepping through strange portals to terrible worlds where nothing seems right. A fun part of many roleplaying games and settings is exploring ruins or worlds of those who came before, unearthing lost histories and finding buried secrets and treasures.

This system is build for the Prosperity Gulch campaign world, a steampunk far future setting where there are ruins of many failed civilizations dotting the frontier, but could be adapted to any setting where there are ruins from a variety of possible civilizations.

When to use this?

Characters in Prosperity Gulch can frequently come across ruins. They may be trekking across land and looking for shelter and supplies, they may be prospecting for artifacts of hidden eras, the campaign may even revolve around a town built on the mouth of such a ruin, people living in the hollowed out ruins of ancient buildings.

There is no ONE ancient civilization in the world of Prosperity Gulch; people have been around long enough that uncountable peoples have risen and died, civilizations lost under the earth. Every ruined city could be from a completely different ancient people, who lived life in a completely different way.

This system allows for the players and GM alike to participate in building the history of their version of this world, making the people and the world that shaped a particular ruin that they might be exploring. Whenever players are going to delve into an ancienty cave, city, find an ancient book or investigate a piece of ancient technology closely, it may be a good time to build a new Lost Civilization.

Step One: Determine Basic Technology Level

One of the first things to nail down about an ancient civilization is its level of technology. Did these people have writing? Plumbing? Energy weapons? Space travel? Does their technology appear to be more or less advanced than your PCs? Is it so advanced that it may as well be magic?

Talk amongst yourself, come up with a general idea of what the general technology level might be. Note that technology levels don’t have to be civilization-style tiers, nor do they have to conform to our history. Examples: Sailpunk, Space Opera, High Magic, Post-Scarcity. Once you have determined the technology level, make an aspect related to that. Examples, “Unstable Crystallize Matrices”, “Industrial Child Labor”, “Harnessed Rage of Demons”, “Trans-dimensional Trade Network”.

OPTIONAL:

You may all choose to have the GM, in secret, roll 4 fate dice. For each + she determines one element of the technology that is uncharacteristically advanced, and for each - an oddly vestigial element that seems like a throwback. For example, a + might have computers in an ancient egyptian setting, while a - might have the elite space monks wielding swords rather than energy weapons.

Step Two: Determine Social Structure

This step can be skipped if you like a little more mystery in your game - or if it’s more of a one-off civilization.

All civilizations can be ordered in a variety of ways. They may be hive civilizations of insects or mole rats, differentiated with a hive mind. They might be rational anarchists, with a strict moral code upheld by each individual (and maybe programmed at birth). Monarchies, Oligarchies, Theocracies, Communes, Lottery-Presidencies, Tribal Rule of the Fittest -- different societies have different social structures.

As with the technology level, talk amongst yourselves about what it seems like the people who made this place might have been like. Note that this can be either just the social arrangement of the local ruin or the larger society that made it; for example if its a massive crashed ship of democratic rebels against an imperialist star-empire, you might choose “democratic republic”. Also note that you DO NOT NEED to flesh out the whole history of this people - just give a glimpse of society and let the rest fill itself in. Once you have decided on a general social unit, make up an aspect to describe it.  “Devotees of Fire in All its Forms”, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”, “An Eye for an Eye”.

Step Three: Dark Secret Aspect

By now everyone probably has a good idea in their own head of what the people who made this ruin might have been like. This idea, however, may be different from person to person. This is where individuals have a chance to put a stamp on the civilization -- and to surprise the other players.

At this stage, everyone writes down another aspect describing a suprising, and challenging feature of the culture -- techological, societal, or just generally descriptive. Ideally, it’s something that won’t become apparent until later.

Players should each decide on a possible aspect in secret, write it down on an index card, and hand it to the GM, face down. The GM then picks one, IN SECRET, that will be an aspect of the ruin or the civilization that created it. The GM may, at her discretion, reword the aspect to make it more aspect-y.

Optional Step: The Fall

If you want to, you can now as a group determine how the civilization ended. This is optional as you may want to reserve this as an open plot point. You may choose to discuss it openly as a group as with the technology and social structure, or you may want to treat it like the dark secret to preserve some mystery for everyone.

Last Step: The Name

Finally, if you have not already, agree on a name for your civilization. Make it something easy to remember and ideally easy to pronounce. It may be what the people called themselves, it may be what archaeologists call them, it may be just what your players decide to call them based on what they had for lunch that day.

With the civilization christened, go forth and explore! Players and GM’s alike, use these aspects to flesh out the setting as you go through it. These civilizations may become long running parts of the game -- or they may only be relevant for a session. Have fun with them.

Example Lost Civilizations

The Tower Builders

Technology Level - Egyptian+ (robots)

Social Structure - Council of Elders

Tech Aspect: Solar Powered Machinery

Social Aspect: Age Before Beauty

Secret Aspect: (Dire Consequences for Ignorance)

The Fall: (Dust Clouds Blotted out the Sun)

The Goatpath River People

Technology Level: Cyberpunk- (no written language)

Social Structure: Corporate Rule

Tech Aspect: Remote Neural Control

Social Aspect: We Can See Your Desires

Secret Aspect: (Tailored-Viral Advertising)

The Fall: (A I Uprising)

Always On?

DISCLAIMER(ish): Hello internet! I've decided to necropost to my pre-Final Form blog as the facebook status update I was writing grew too large. This is, therefore, written as a status update - very little editing, fairly stream of consciousness.


Having had a little time to synthesize my thoughts and the rumors re: 'always on' 360x2, I have come to the following conclusions (note that this is all conjecture; I know just as little about the new console as the rest of the not-working-on-the-xbox-team public):

Whatever they do, Microsoft is faced with a big Xbox-live shaped problem in the next generation console. Xbox-live was introduced at an almost magical time when playing games on a console over the internet and with your friends was still a very magical thing. Remember that XBOX live started on the Xbox 1, and when they introduced the Xbox 360, it was the first console of its generation - most games assumed offline and online features were above and beyond; paying to use them was reasonable.

Cut to now, where many, if not most, of the big AAA titles have multiplayer built into them. Gone are the days when Halo was the only way to conveniently blow people up over the internet without a keyboard and mouse and a reasonable ($1000+) gaming rig. For many modern large-budget games, you are not getting access to the full product without an internet connection.

Microsoft has been both clever and lucky to squeeze Xbox Live in under the wire. They can charge for something that on every other gaming system is assumed to be free because they got grandfathered into it. This is now their business model - they expect to receive this money every month to continue to do what they do as a company. They have a lot of experience with the business model and how to work within it. They have infrastructure dedicated to this business model, and I'm sure they have business relationships built around this assumption. The problem is, when it comes time for consumers figure out what console to buy next, how can they convince people to continue to pay a subscription? Because if they don't, they would have to essentially start from scratch in terms of figuring out how to turn the production of a modern gaming console into enough money to make the enterprise worth it.

Enter the rumored discussions with cable companies and the always-on Xbox. Here's the thing about cable: it's always on, and that is an acceped reality. You pay a flat fee and you get to use the content. You stop paying, you stop getting that content. What if the Xbox was a cable box? What if the Xbox live subscription was part of your cable bill? When you think about it, it makes a little sense - cable companies are I'm sure by now starting to look at how, in this age of Netflixen, they can continue to charge a subscription for television. The DVRs were a nice stop gap, and things like HBO still provide content that simply cannot be had without a subscription to cable. But how long is that going to last?

So, what if instead of paying for cable tv, I paid for xbox live? All the sudden my xbox is streaming shows for me, storing them, and letting me play games online. Maybe if I pay a little extra I get to use my standard cable subscription too. Xbox gets subscription revenue, cable companies get a service they can charge for on top of your base internet connection. Initially, yes, you will be paying BOTH for the new xbox and for the games that you buy to play on it. But maybe MS is betting that we're approaching the end of the standalone, pay-up-front game and planning to be ahead of that curve. In the meantime they add some 2nd run games for free, ala playstation plus. Also, maybe some in game currency for whatever f2p game of the future is hot.

In short, always-on is a risky stance and a rightfully controversial one, but it may still be MS's best bet to stay in the game. If I had the option to pay for an XBOX live subscription that gave me access to HBO etc. instead of paying for cable, I'd start listening.

Now at finalformgames.com

Final Form Games, my game development company, has a new website. We will be making most of our posts over there and all of the game review/design content that I would have put up here will now be posted on finalformgames.com. Enjoy!

Battleship, not Axis and Allies: Nintendo and the expanding market

News came down today that Sega's latest attempt to make a mature, hardcore-aimed game for the Wii, MadWorld, sold 66k copies in the US it's opening month. This is lackluster even when compared to relative flops for the 360; in it's first month Too Human, just such a game, sold over twice that number of copies. A similar piece of news dropped regarding GTA: Chinatown Wars, a mature title for the DS, which sold only 89,000 units in March.

Many have discussed the Wii and DS audiences' apparent resistance to hardcore games. Discussing the sales of Nintendo games in February, TWG News' said, "t will be very interesting to see how well MadWorld and GTA: ChinaTown Wars do on the Wii and DS in March. If these hardcore games can’t sell well on each of these systems, then people should just give up trying." I wouldn't go that far, but it's clear that, despite the fact that there are more Wiis out there than any single other console and the DS crushes everything else, the people that own these Nintendo platforms are not using their consoles in the same way that 360 and Playstation owners use theirs. To get a better sense of that difference, I find it helpful to think about board games:

You've probably played Battleship. It's a simple game where two players, unable to see each others' boards, fire shots at coordinates, discovering and trying to sink his opponent's ships based only on knowing whether each shot hit or missed. It's a classic for a reason; the game mechanics themselves are time-tested, having been invented in the early 1900s, and so simple you could play the game with a pencil and paper if you wanted to.

It's easy to learn, takes a minute or two to start up and to take down, and games last maybe ten or twenty minutes apiece. It has this in common with most of the other board games that you might find in the board game aisle at your local Target.

Contrast this with another game of naval warface:

Where Battleship's rules take a minute or Two to explain, the first time you play Axis & Allies you will likely spend ten to twenty minutes -- the time of a full game of battleship -- listening to someone explain the rules or reading the directions of Axis and Allies. After this, you will still need to refer to the rulebook or a knowledgable other player frequently to clarify details. Axis & Allies comes with charts, graphs, and cards that can change how a piece works in the middle of a game. It also takes 4-5 hours to play, which are often spread across several days as the board is left on a table somewhere.

Axis & Allies is by no means the most complex board game out there. There are a lot of great complex board games: pretty much any board game put out by Fantasy Flight Games, Avalon Hill, or any game company from mainland Europe is going to fit that description. All of these games require a lot of time buy in just to learn how to play the game, and usually take a lot of time to play through each game. Backbreaking amounts of time.

People love these games. Some people love to play them all the time. Other people, like myself, enjoy playing them every once in a while. Most people, however, look at an Axis and Allies board, or see the hour it takes just to break all the cardboard markers out of their cutouts when first playing Arkham Horror, and they run for the hills.

Many of these people who run away would happily play a game of Battleship, or Connect Four, or Pictionary, or Sorry, or, well, you get the idea. It is these people that form most of the audience for the Wii games out there.

When I use Wii games, I also use them more like board games. When I have a friend from out of town come to visit, and we're looking for something to do, I'll break out Steven Spielberg Presents Boom Blox. When my fiancée's parents come down for the weekend, I might put in Wii Sports. I played MadWorld, but I rented it. When I buy games for the Wii, it is to play those games with other people and, these days, the other people I play games with aren't usually "hardcore." I am not alone in this.

When you look at the top selling Wii games, you don't see a lot of single player or traditional game titles. What you do see are, for the most part, games that you can pick up and play with other people who happen to be around. Even Wii Fit, which I use mostly for personal exercise, has a serious set of minigames that can be enjoyed by a group of people.

In short, as consoles become more accessible and penetrate the market deeper, the difference between video games and regular games is shrinking in peoples eyes. The Wii is being used the same way that cards and board games have been used for millenia. Looked at in this way, the Wii isn't the odd man out, it's a "market correction," showing the hardcore gaming market to be the niche that it really is.

All of this is not to say that hardcore and mature games do not have a place on the Wii. Sega was, reportedly, happy with the apparently meager sales of MadWorld. Considering what they must have saved on asset generation in that game, between the lower res and polygon requirements of the Wii and a pallete made up of four colors (one of which is reserved for UI), I'm sure they are happy. The trick is to manage your expectations.

BattleForge - Card Based RTS

BattleForge, from what I've played of it, is an inherently fun game. It doesn't do everything right but then, as it does several largely "new" things, it can be forgiven for some of its flaws.

For those who don't know, BattleForge is an online RTS with two defining characteristics: 1) Unlike other RTS's, it is built around cooperative "PvE" play. 2) Rather than having defined "armies", (e.g. zerg, human, and protoss or GDI and Nod), players can mix and match "cards" of different types. You can have 20 cards total in your army and each card acts as a production source of that kind of unit or effect. There is no concept of a "hand" of cards. All of the cards in your deck sit along the bottom and can be used multiple times throughout the game, consuming resources each time.

Now, not all cards are created equal. Some are terribly powerful and some are basic infantry you'll want to use all the time. The cards and decks are balanced using techniques borrowed from the worlds of RTS's and CCGs. The game, in fact, borrows very heavily from Magic: The Gathering: the cards are divided into four types: fire, frost, nature, and shadow. In addition to an energy cost (top left on the card above, 100 in this case), each card has an "orb" requirement. The symbols on the card above indicate that it needs 2 shadow orbs (purple) and 1 orb of any kind (the empty circle).

You meet these requirements by capturing "monuments." Monuments are scattered across the maps, usually placed at regular intervals of when you will reach them in the course of a scenario. When you find a monument, you can spend some energy to claim it and attune it to one of the four energy types. You then have an orb of that color that lasts until the monument is destroyed. Thus, if you have two "shadow" monuments and 1 fire monument, you could summon the fallen skyelf above.

The other major balancing factors are card charges and card cooldown. Each card has a number of charges associated with it. The above card has 2. As long as you can pay the cost and meet the requirements you can produce a number of units equal to the card's charge cost without having to wait. In general, smaller more rank and file cards have a higher number - 4 or 5 - and the big nasty cards start at a single charge. After that, you have to wait for the card's cooldown to elapse. Cooldown is usually very short for rank and file cards -- your zergling analogues -- and is very long for your giant all-your-eggs-in-one-basket cards.

This all has the effect of making the game feel, unsurprisingly, like a combination of Dawn of War and Magic:TG. This combination is a great idea, but it has mixed results. On the one hand, you do miss a lot of the tactical pleasure of a deeper RTS. The deck building mechanic comes at the expense of the tech-tree real-time RPS feeling of a StarCraft. You simply don't make many tech tree/play style decisions in the middle of the game. All of those come during the deck-building phase. There's much less exhilaration of the unexpected, one of my favorite feelings in a good RTS.

Having said that, the deck mechanics are by no means all bad. The magic-like orb threshods ensure for a smooth power curve over the course of the game. Capturing another momument has a clear and immediate payoff unlike capturing another goldmine, etc., which gives you a delayed reward. Deck construction is a lot of fun. It has a lot of the pleasure of putting together a deck in a real CCG.

In his talk at GDC this yeah, Chris Hecker put forth the proposition that the notion of user-generated content covers a lot more ground than we currently talk about it covering. The juice we get from making our own little Spore creature is the same juice we get from beating someone using only Voldo's facehump. We are creating unique experiences, sometimes shared experiences, things that make us feel special and things that we can talk about, show to others.

Seen in this light, the joy of deck construction in BattleForge is very much an act of user creation and playing one's deck, especially in multiplayer scenarios, is a real act of displaying one's own "art" whether that be to impress someone with how awesome you are, or how ridiculous you are, or to just piss them off. If you've ever played a serious amount of any CCG you know the feeling.

The game has problems but the sheer freedom of deck creation and the natural ability to display creation to others simply by playing is an engaging core idea. The business model is a little off-putting but only a little in this day and age. My question is, can we have a game that has this level of "user generation" both in out-of-game time and in game as well?

Crawl - Usable Roguelike Gaming

Crawl is currently my favorite roguelike. I first got into the game when it was still called Linley's Dungeon Crawl during my computer-broke-moving-home-from-college phase where I learned how to use linux and played a lot of low-tech games. I recently became spontaneously nostalgiac for it while playing the recent real-time roguelike Triangle Wizard. I discovered that, apparently, Linley Henzell has left Crawl behind to develop things like White Butterfly and that a team of fine upstanding coders has picked up maintaining and adding to the game, turning it into what is now called Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

Yes, it is currently my favorite. Don't get me wrong, I've had a lot of fun with Nethack and *Angbands. But these are games built on complexity. Crawl certainly has its share of complexity -- it has more starting classes and races than I've seen in another serious roguelike -- but at the same time, the game is all about making the user experience as pleasant and simple as possible.

The game's manual contains a large section on philosophy that lays out these design goals:

" Major design goals:
* challenging and random gameplay, with skill making a real difference
* meaningful decisions (no no-brainers)
* avoidance of grinding (no scumming)
* gameplay supporting painless interface and newbie support"

They also mention striving for an "exquisite" user interface elsewhere in the documentation. These are design goals that I can get behind and reading these now, years after I came to enjoy Crawl, I begin to see why I fell in love with it.

As I said before, the game strives to be easy to use. For example, the autopickup function, which often proves to be a mixed blessing in other roguelikes, is indeed exquisite in Crawl. There is a mechanic where you must "butcher" your food before eating it - so, if you don't have a bladed weapon and walk over one, you will pick it up so you can butcher your food. You also automatically pick up small, nonperishable food that you can eat. If you are a Spriggan, and eat only vegetables, you don't pick up meat rations. If you are a ghoul and can eat only flesh, you don't pick up veggies. If you are a mummy, who cannot eat or drink, you don't pick up food or potions. etc. etc.

This simplicity allows the game to get very complex without it being overwhelming to the player. Instead, the player can use these details to make their character unique. There are several races and classes that offer completely unique play experinces -- the aforementioned mummy gains experience slowly but doesn't need to eat allowing for a thinking, exploring player to take his or her time. The ghoul must continually kill and eat his enemies to survive, indeed even to heal at some points. The demonspawn gains semi-random mutations making for a different play experience every time. etc. etc. The magic starting classes are just as varied, allowing for traditional pew-pew mages as well as for "transmuters" who distill potions from the dead and throw them like grenades at their enemies.

There are many more great things about the game that I'm not going to go into here except to say that the experience system is a fantastic blend of gygaxian levels and a skill-based system (a la Oblivion). Also, Crawl also has an excellent tile-set that actually enhances the play experince and integrates well with mouse use, a rarity in the rougelikes I've played.

Overall I've enjoyed going back to crawl. The big takeaway for me was that, by making a few systems that are discovered over time and handling them well, you can present a lot of different material in your game.

Short: Opera Omnia - Theoretical Engine

As the title suggests, this is a short post. I hope to post more of these, intermittently, in the future.

Opera Omnia is a small indie puzzle game with a genuinely inspired central premise: you play a historian. The central mechanic revolves around developing theories of population migration to support a given set of facts. You do all of this using a "historical model" program where you outline migrations between population centers over time.

For example, you might be given the job of supporting the theory that the population of Philadelphia used to be the same as the population of New York. You would be given the current populations (Philadelphia: 1.4M, New York: 8.2M), and a range that the city populations should be at at the beginning of the time line (say, 20k-40k for each). Your job is to scrub through the timeline and set up "migrations" between the two cities. For this puzzle, you might start a migration in the middle of the timeline from Philly to New York.

The puzzles get much more complicated, adding in famines and seasonal droughts, different ethnic populations within a single population center, etc. The framing story and the point fits the mechanics particularly well. It begins to get into the difference between theory and truth, and how facts can be bent to prove points.


Warning: it has a little bit of a learning curve. Don't let that throw you off. It's worth taking a look at, if only for a great timeline mechanic that I've never seen anywhere else.

Dawn of War 2 - Co Op Campaign Mode

Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War II is fucking sweet. It is, in many ways, a game that I have been waiting to play for a very long time. Why, then, am I coming so late to the party? The multiplayer beta's been available for over a month. I never played it. The fact is, however, that I wasn't waiting for the game's traditional RTS multiplayer. I was waiting for the co-op campaign.

I like RTS games a lot. I started right around the first Warcraft game - back when there were just humans and orcs, and the orcs were just humans in funny suits (even more so than they are now). I, like the great nation of Korea, fell completely in love with Starcraft. The thing was, with the advent of battle.net (and really starting with WC2 over Kali) I realize that I wasn't the best at them. I enjoyed the campaigns, and playing against an easy computer, but I would get throttled by real human beings. See, I liked to either spend all my time building my base, or spend my time microing a few small groups. I always loved the infiltration missions. But I never paid the right amount of attention to micro and to building at the same time. Thus, I got eaten.

As time went on, I got better. I got a massive crash course in college as most of my friends at the time were freakishly good at the game. College is where I learned how much fun multiplayer comp stomps were. The cooperative experience was amazingly fun, whether or not we were able to hold off the computer.

When I heard that Dawn of War 2 was going to have a cooperative campaign my ears perked up. I already loved the 40k universe. I already really liked the first set of Dawn of War games. Adding to that the ability to play through the campaign with a friend sounded like an amazing opportunity. This was all before I had heard anything else about the game. Once I started reading about the game, I began to salivate.


Dawn of War 2's coop campaign works like this: each player gets to control 2 squads. Each squad has a different flavor and is led by a named character with a distinct personality within the story. One squad is composed of just the commander. Another squad is specialized for long ranged damage. A third excels at jumping into combat zones and dealing hand to hand damage to what they find there. While the first player always controls the commander, the rest of the units can be swapped around throughout play as long as each player controls 2 total.

As has been said elsewhere, this makes the game feel almost more like an RPG than an RTS: more Baldur's Gate than Command & Conquer. Well, that and the fact that units gain experience and have basically the same levelling system as you enjoyed in Mass Effect. And there's equipment that you can swap out. Really, it's a lot like an RPG. But then, the original roleplaying game grew out of war gaming. In much the same way that dolphins and sharks evolved dorsal fins independant of each other, the changes from the campaign in DoW 1 somehow bring the game into the world of the RPG. And this is great, because it lets Dawn of War be a fun RPG without almost all of the bullshit.

No towns to walk around or NPCs to interact with. No walking around the world wondering where the fuck to go to next. Very little traditional grinding -- you can clear a map, or you can shortcut to the boss. Video cutscenes that are just long enough. And to top it all off, I get to play it with my friend from back west who I used to play Dawn of War 1 comp stomps with.


Having said all that, the game does have some issues. For one, what I've seen of the story so far is just there as an excuse to keep fighting (to be fair, this does match the setting very well). The game as is could never manage the kind of stories that, say, Suikoden 2 or the aforementioned Mass Effect pull off. The boss battles do go on for probably longer than they need to, but then, so do all boss battles.

Most of my complaints are like this -- things that I would have liked to see but which are not strictly necessary to the game. I would have liked to see a broader loot tree. I would have liked to see a more involved story. But you know what? The compactness of it is a selling point. It's virtue lies in how boiled down it is.

In many ways, I think this game is the PC answer to the console tactics games. It has the same general misson based structure without fooling around in the middle. Yes, you lose the large armies to manage. However, I've never been able to adequately play a tactics game co-op with friends. There's a lot of juice that comes from saving somebody else's ass in real time, just ask Left 4 Dead.

As I said, it's not a perfect game nor is it my absolute favorite game. But then, I do love cooperative games, and I love RTS games, and this marries the two in a very satisfying way that I've been looking for for a while now.

Blue Lacuna - Usable Interactive Fiction

I've just spent the past several days Blue Lacuna. I won't say go play it now; it will suck you in and you may be in the middle of something. Also, it may not be your kind of game. I do, however, encourage you to at least take a look at it when you have a free moment.

Blue Lacuna (which you can get here) is a work of Interactive Fiction(IF) -- the modern evolution of now-ancient text games like Zork or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Unlike graphical adventure games like Day of the Tentacle or Monkey Island, IF games stick with the text based interface. The games have little to nothing in the way of graphics, and all interaction is typing things like "get rope" and "go west" (or "west" or simply "w" to the veterans).

Interactive Fiction is not a big budget business. It's no longer a commercially viable medium; Interactive Fiction is kept alive today by an incredibly active amateur community. As a medium it doesn't focus on graphical innovation. It can't because there are no graphics. Instead, all of the innovation centers around gameplay and story. Blue Lacuna is a wonderful example of this kind of innovation.

Some of Blue Lacuna's biggest innovations are in the areas of developing relationships through interaction with NPCs and in player decisions affecting gameplay. Others have written about this in far more depth than I can and I encourage you to read more there. What I'm going to talk about here are the simple gameplay innovations that are added -- the convenience measures that breathe some fresh air into gaming via typing.

The standards of the IF medium go back a ways, back to when games were expected to be hard. In many works of IF, you have to guess at the right verb -- "eat" or "taste", "punch" or "hit"? A good game is well tested so that the game recognizes most different words. Still, it can often be very difficult to pick the important details out of a scene -- to know what can be interacted with (is that painting important?), and what is just window dressing.

Blue Lacuna does something very simple to make this style of interaction more acceptable to the modern gaming pallete: it highlights keywords. For instance, the first description reads:

The tutorial pretty much says it all (and incidentally, the tutorial is another innovation that is missing from almost all modern IF, and is well done on top of it). Every object that you need to interact with to get through the game and to get most of the story is highlighted in blue so you're very rarely stuck guessing at words and objects that may be important, trying to lift the bed because you're stuck, etc.

The other big gameplay innovation in Blue Lacuna is player movement. Moving around the world in IF is generally a fairly klunky affair. Drawing from the dungeon-crawling beginnings of the medium, most interactive fiction worlds are set up as a series of rooms laid out in a grid. The player navigates between rooms by moving in compass directions -- east, west, north, south, southeast, up, down, etc. Older games often had mazes - dating back to Adventure's maze of twisty little passages, where players were expected to take graph paper and map out the dungeon.

In Blue Lacuna, you navigate by keywords and landmarks instead. Rather than going "east", you go to the "forest" or the "rocks" or the "rise" etc.

This offers a more intuitive way for players to remember what lies in relation to what especially when the number of "rooms" gets fairly large. This approach actually comes close to what graphical adventure games ended up doing -- certain objects in the world would be "exits" and when you clicked on them you would move to another location. The following image shows exits in a screen from "The Secret of Monkey Island" by LucasArts:


In addition to allowing navigation by keyword, the game also contains a compass that you find relatively early on -- when you open the compass, the game reverts to a traditional model -- all the sudden you can "go east" instead of typing "forest". When you close the compass, the game reverts to the default state.

In addition to the basic keyword navigation Blue Lacuna also features "Landmarks" which are general areas that you can quickly travel between. You might, for example, want to travel from where you are back to the "bedroom" but don't want to have to type "stairs", then, "bridge", then, "ladder", then, "door", etc. This works much the same way having a map with quick travel points might work. It cuts down on a lot of tedious typing.

Keyword navigation and highlighting important objects are two mechanics that could improve nearly all interactive fiction. Both features not only make the medium more accessible to the novice, they also cut down on frustration for the experienced IF player. I applaud Aaron Reed for his inclusion of these elements and encourage all those who create Interactive Fiction to think about including usability mechanics like these in their works.

Wii Fit - Motivational Mechanics

Recently my fiancee and I got a new Wii Fit. We'd been looking for one for a few weeks and we finally saw them on sale. For the past three days I have been on an exciting fitness journey with my Wii Fit, and I have come to share my experiences with you, the reader.

The genius of the Wii Fit is that it does essentially everything in its power to make you want to get fit. I would be lying if I said that I am in tip-top shape. The fact of the matter is that I have only ever been thin while I was a heavy smoker, and I have never really gotten into regular excercise when it wasn't a part of a medically mandated physical therapy plan.

The reason that physical therapy worked for me was because I had 1) serious back issues that prevented me from being productive 2) a damn good physical therapist 3)enough free time to set aside half an hour a day to exercising.

Twice a week I would go to the therapists office, he would walk me through my exercises to make sure I was doing them right, and he would check in on the progress I made. When I had been working he would approve, when I slacked he would know about it. After a while I noticed the progress I was making myself. After that not only did I do my exersices, I actually pushed myself. About a month after I stopped therapy, I stopped doing my exercises.

The Wii fit provides the same kind of structure that my therapist did. For one, it gives me a small scale pat-on-the-back reward message every day that I do it, and reinforces more if I practice every day. This is just enough to make me think about how to fit the Wii fit into my daily schedule, or at least has been enough to do so for the past few days.

Next, it provides a look at progress over time. I can see where I started weight wise (I'm not telling), and "Wii Fit Age"-wise (40) . While my weight has not dramatically decreased over the past three days, I have noticed a significant drop in my Wii Fit Age (to 27) and, you know what? This is enough to make me want to keep playing.

Thirdly, it actually monitors my progress in each of the exercises I'm doing. Now, I'm not going to fool myself into thinking that a balance board is going to tell me whether I'm doing an exercise exactly right or not, but between the balance feedback and the model of the person doing the exercises on screen I no longer have the crippling "I can't be doing this right" feeling that I get when trying to do exercises on my own.

The last thing I want to talk about is the co-motivation it uses. Every time you see your score on a particular exercise, you see it in a full leaderboard of everyone who uses the wii fit. If my fiancee does better than me in an activity this gives me a powerful motivation to do a little better. It also periodically asks us to notice how the other one is doing, encouraging co-motivation outside of the game as well.

As my studies have shown me, motivation is the biggest component to education and behavior change. You want someone to do something, you have to make sure they want to do it. So far, Wii fit is doing a great job of really making me want to spend a little time every day exercising.

At the moment I don't have any real criticisms of Wii Fit. Yes, it requires exercise but I signed on for that. Yes, it's more of a tool than a game but, you know what, it's a really neat tool for motivating exercise at a fraction of the cost of a personal trainer. What I would love to see is an in-gym version of this kind of program with the same constant support, schedule flexibility, and convenience factor.

We'll see how I feel about it in a couple weeks.

Tower Defense

My first exposure to the tower defense genre was the bonus tower defense map included with either Warcraft III or the expansion. I'll give a short description of tower defense shortly but the quickest way to get a handle on the genre is to go play desktop tower defense. Seriously, go now. It will take you like five minutes. Then you can skip the next paragraph.

Tower Defense is a fairly self-explanatory concept. You are in charge of guarding some objective against waves of enemies, which I'm going to call creeps. You do this by building and upgrading towers. Towers shoot at creeps and, depending on the game, might be used as walls to guide creep progress. Every time you kill a creep, you get more money to build more towers. Every time a creep gets through, you take damage. Take enough damage and you lose.

It's a survival game. The creeps themselves get harder and harder to kill and/or more numerous with every wave. Typically different creeps will be resistant to some forms of damage and weak against others. This forces players to build different kinds of turrets and to generalize their builds.

Just this past year commercial tower defense games have started to hit the market. Defense Grid is a great example; a well playing, polished looking game available over at Greenhouse for $20. Lock's Quest, a recent DS game, has many aspects of tower defense gameplay. And, of course, there are a few iPhone implementations, Fieldrunners capturing the feel very well and Crystal Defenders cashing in on the FF Tactics license (don't get me wrong, it's still fun, but I paid for fieldrunners).

This rising tide of tower defense games is due in large part to the success of Desktop Tower Defense. RTS map mods and flash tower defense games have been around for years as I mentioned above, but Desktop Tower Defense refined the formula and somehow caught a wave of public opinion that got it played by a lot of game designers.

Tower defense is fun. Incredibly fun. When you think about it it would almost have to be -- otherwise it would still be some forgotten mod map on someone's hard drive. Instead, someone saw something fun they could do with an RTS engine and map editor and other people, finding it fun, made flash versions. These were refined until commercial game designers took notice, and wanted to make something fun. Tower defense isn't engineered to be entertainting, it's naturally selected.

What makes it fun? First, tower defense successfully captures the feeling of base building in an RTS without nearly as much micromanagement. Now, a lot of people like playing RTS's and like micro. I can find myself in that mood from time to time. But mostly I like building. I was a big SimCity fan and when I played the single player Starcraft campaigns, my favorite maps were the ones where you had to defense yourself from a neverending Zerg onslaught until the dropships showed up. Tower defense distills this aspect of play, letting the player stay focused on base building, allowing them to feel that groove instead of having to constantly switch attention between offense and defense.

The really addictive quality of Tower Defense is not, however, the building. Rather, it is the constant presence of the approaching apocalypse. Destruction is always around the corner, the tide is always rising. I've always loved this element when I find it in games -- one of my favorite examples being Fantasy Flight's remake of the classic Arkham Horror board game. This keeps the players constantly engaged. There is no downtime in tower defense. You are always on guard, always just short of the resources you need. It's a feeling similar to survival horror, a genre that some say has been on the wane for a while now. You are going to die, it's just a matter of when. I hear Gears of War 2 has a mode that captures this feeling as well.

Tower Defense recaptures that fear of death and the feeling of going against impossible odds that I love about hardcore games. Moreover, it is a genre in its infancy, a genuine mutation into something different from the nth generational shooters, rts's, etc. I'm excited about its future.