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.

Game Design Notes: Persona 4 - Dating Sim Technology

I never actually got the chance to play Persona 3. My attention span at the time it came out was dangerously short. I did get to experience a fair amount of it, though; my roommate at the time played the hell out of it. I enjoyed it vicariously, watching for long stretches of play and squeezing gameplay stories of of him.

You see, I love roguelikes. I have a longstanding fascination with tarot imagery. Throw in my guilty appreciation for dating sim style gameplay and you can understand why I jumped at the chance to play Persona 4. Sure, the characters no longer shoot themselves in the head to cast magic spells but aside from that disappointing change, Persona 4 is a successful iteration on a formula designed to appeal specifically to me.

For those who have not played either game, each modern Persona game is essentially two different games that play off of each other. The first is a straight up roguelike dungeon crawl. You spend your time going deeper and deeper (or higher and higher) into a dungeon. Most floors are randomly generated each time you enter them so you can't just memorize the map. Each floor carries more deadly enemies, and more valuable treasures, than the last. Occasionally there is an extremely powerful boss monster.

The second game is a dating sim/visual novel. Each day is divided into discrete parcels of time that the character can spend enhancing statistics like "courage" and "understanding", earning money, or socializing with other characters some of whom are friends some of whom are potential love interests.

The two halves are tied together first by the main plot. Both games have periodic time limits where, if some threat is not dealt with in the dungeon, there are consequences for one character or another in the "real" world. These are essentially the chapters of the game.

The halves are also tied together by the central "persona" mechanic. The system is, in fact, fairly complex. It boils down to this: player can take on the personality aspects of people he's formed relationships with, and can use those aspects in combat. For example, if he makes friends with the athelete, he can choose to be strong and resilient. The more he understands the athelete, the more resilient he can be.

This core idea is a little obscured behind some arcane tarot references and a "gotta catch 'em all" list of gods and monsters. If you're really into mystical symbolism, and I happen to be, you might get it kick out of it. I could also see where you could find the amount of detail needlessly tedious. Then again, needlessly detailed tedium is a hallmark of JRPGs.

But I digress. My point is that the dating sim half of the game provides a compelling way to link the characters and caring about the characters and the story to the gameplay itself. In general, dating sim technology is a powerful engine that can be hooked to a variety of different game types.

For an example of this take a look at one of my guilty pleasure games - Dead of Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball. Here's what you need to know: yes, it is blatant exploitation of women and their bodies. However, the core game is also fundamentally fun. In a nutshell you have to get a partner to join your team and you have to keep the partner happy so that her AI will play well. The hardest partners to please are also the best players. And to sweeten the pot, you can play as any of the players so any swimsuits you give away you can then use when you play as the other character.

Dating sim style play hooks into motivations that I don't think are fully tapped yet for gaming, unlike experience systems, high scores, other more common motivation mechanics.

Game Design Notes: Warhammer Age of Reckoning - Public Quests

There is a common misconception that people like to play MMOs because people like to interact with other people when they play games. It's true that people like to play MMOs; World of Warcraft hit 11 million subscribers not too long ago. It's also true that people can find playing games with others extremely fulfilling -- my own experience with tabletop rpgs, Left 4 Dead, and even running instances with friends in World of Warcraft has taught me that. However, many players, myself included, often enjoy playing by themselves.

People play MMOs for the recognizition by other players, not for the interaction with them. City of Heroes' badge system and, more recently,WoW's achievement system, give nods to this style of play. Vanity mounts, titles, and sexy, glowing gear all make sure everyone around you knows how awesome you are.

There are, of course, exceptions. The first are large raiding guilds and the second are small groups like my guild: friends organized social-network style where every member of the group knows at least one other person face-to-face. These kinds of groups, however, have something that pick up groups do not: they're not full of strangers.

Pick up groups are terrible 90% of the time. I don't care if you're playing WoW, Team Fortress 2, or tabletop d&d. If you're playing with a bunch of people whom you havn't vetted then you have a high chance of ending up with someone who just doesn't mesh with your style of play -- or sometimes with any style of play. In the real world you would not go into business with four random people off the street. You wouldn't plan a roadtrip by posting a LFG notice on the local bullitin board (ok maybe you would, but you would probably be desperate and would expect some issues along the way; there's a reason hitchiking is illegal).

People form social groups for a reason: to find like minded people easily and to keep people you can't work with at arms length. While mainstream mmos are getting better, many games still throw you into a world and expect you to commit to partying with strangers. Noone wants to do this. Occasionally you get really desperate and either go looking for someone else to help you or answer some msg or plea to help. This usually results from the same kind of desparation that makes people think it's ok to ride in the same car with a stranger for 8 hours, and usually has about the same results.

Enter Warhammer: Age of Reckoning's Public Quests. In brief, these are quests that you can participate in simply by being in the right place. You don't need to join a group, you don't need to start an instance. All you have to do is show up and start killing guys.

These quests have multiple stages. The first stage is almost always soloable by someone of average level for the zone. The second stage is sometimes soloable but is often a 2 person gig. The third stage requires multiple people -- anywhere from 2 up depending on the difficulty and the scale.

Participating in these as a solo artist can eventually give you access to some nice reward gear. Being involved when the third leg of the quest is completed gets you in a drawing for some pretty swank gear.

The result of this is that solo players come to the first leg of the quest to defeat it. If there are a few solo players there together, they might stick around for the second leg. As happened with me twice, they might start hanging close to one another -- a tank tanking, a dps staying farther away and picking things off. If they succeed at closing out the third leg they might stick around for the last section, other players might even come in an join for the chance at the loot roll.

In other words, it encourages players to get to know each others play styles without putting up a requirement to party that gates so many single players. This is not a perfect solution, but it does provide not only something for solo players to do without committing time to strangers, it also provides a foundation for building relationships organically, the way real people do.

Game Design Notes:Castlevania Order of Ecclesia - Discrete Dungeons

The new Castlevania(Order of Ecclesia) now has a world map instead of the giant sprawling single castle -- a first for the descendants of Symphony of the Night. This is a big departure and is, as I see it, part of a larger movement.

Having played only a few hours of Ecclesia, There are some problems, but they're not as bad as I thought they'd be. For example, playing the same section feels a little more monotonous this way. This, however, is my own dementia I think and not a wider issue. I thought that I was going to be dissapointed with It's still really hard to get to certain places, and the individual chunks are still about as big as the distinct different parts of the castle, it's just way easier to get to them. In general, the advantages outweigh the bad.

Some of the benefits are obvious. First, it's easier to get everywhere, which I was skeptical about at first but now consider to be a complete win. From a game design standpoint, it makes it much easier to vary up the world as well. Fitting everything onto 1 map is a huge design constraint that this game just doesn't have to deal with.

There are, however, two BIG wins. First, you ALWAYS know where you're supposed to go next. Metroidvania games have in general suffered from at least one or two moments of game where you have to scratch your head and try to remember where, "mist could pass," after you get the ability to turn into mist. Some of these are good -- special weapons etc. reward players who remember all these little places. However, gating the main progress of the game with these is another matter entirely. The new design lets them put in special areas you can access with special powers without making overall game progress require you to routinely search the castle for places you might have missed.

The second big win is that successes come in smaller packages now. Previous castlevania games, and most video games for that matter, have put the boss at the end of the level in order to give the player a sense of accomplishment. Several Ecclesia bosses are at the BEGINNING of the level. This gives the player something to overcome right off the bat that gives them the juice to play through the rest of the level. After all, the boss doesn't need to be at the end if getting to the end is all the sudden its own little accomplishment.

Order of Ecclesia is not the only game to make the break towards bite-sized game play. I've already mentioned how the new Prince of Persia has an open world style, and how the sections of that open world are all bite-sized challenges. Persona 4 has done something similary, taking the single tower dungeon and broken it up into several smaller dungeons -- moving from Nethack to Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. It's a trend that started back sometime around the original Mario 64, and has, I think, grown as games have become more mainstream. By parcelling out wins this way the games remove the need for a certain delay of gratification on the part of the player and, I think, is part of the same trend that is making games easier as a whole. Is it good for games and gamers? Maybe. But no matter what I think, it's the direction the industry as a whole is going and is worth paying attention to.

Game Design Notes: Prince of Persia - Fertile Grounds

Summary:
The nonlinear level structure of the new Prince of Persia doesn't provide the gradual skill ramp up that makes the series so satisfying. It does, however, give new pleasures.

I recently started an account with GameFly so that I could save money by downsizing my absurdly large gaming budget. With a rotating rental service, I lose a lot of the excuse I had for going down to the store and buying $70 games on a whim.

So far the experience has worked out. It has allowed me to meet my goal of playing what's coming out in a reasonable time frame while still staying solvent in the global financial implosion. Time budgeting is another challenge I hope to tackle soon.

This morning I dropped Prince of Persia (2008) in the mailbox after having played it as much as I am likely to play it. I finished the game, something I rarely do anymore, which means I must have at least enjoyed it. Of course, I also finished Too Human, a game that I liked but that was nowhere near worth the money I paid for it. If I had paid full price for Prince of Persia, I would have been disappointed. Fortunately, I did not and thus I had a pretty good time playing the game.

Prince of Persia is an ancient IP by video game standards. As a result the differences between it and its predecessors are going to be the most obvious things about it to anyone who has followed the series. This group of people includes me.

By the way, before I really get into things, I am assuming that the audience of these notes has a familiarity with at least the Sands of Time series of Prince of Persia games. For those who don't they mostly involve running around on things and doing impossible acrobatic wall run/double jump style platforming. For more depth I encourage you to seek out other sources.

The most obvious departure from the Sands of Time series of games, aside from the storyline break, is the addition of a Map. Previous entries in the Prince of Persia series played pretty much like standard, railroading, platformers: jump through a level, maybe kill a boss, move to the next level, rinse, repeat. PoP 2008 does not do this. Instead, the world is divided into four major regions each of which has five Fertile Grounds in it plus a final area.

A Fertile Ground is this game's answer to levels. To get to each Fertile Ground a player must go through some significant platforming sequence which may or may not involve special powers that are unlocked through the course of play. At the end of all this platforming he must defeat an incarnation of the area boss. Recall above where I said that there were four major regions - each one of these regions has its own boss that guards each Fertile Ground and also must be defeated in a final sequence to "beat" the region.

After defeating the boss, the player "cleanses" the Fertile Ground which means all of the ugly dark textures are replaced with bright sunny grassy textures. It also means that the region is now filled with "Light Seeds".

A Light Seed is, basically, a coin from Mario 64. Each area has a finite number of them and, once you collect enough of them, you can get access to new areas that themselves will have more light seeds. Also, like coins in Mario 64, Light Seeds let the game developer get a lot of milage out of repurposing levels and getting you to go through them again.

So there you have the basic engine of the game. You start out with access to four Fertile Grounds. You cap these, gather a bunch of light seeds, and gain access to the powers that unluck the next four fertile grounds, and so on until you've capped all the regions.

This central mechanic is actually pretty compelling. It has, after all, been basically proven in very popular platforming series. It gives the player a lot of freedom in how to play through the game. Almost an unprecedented level - you can play through the stages in essentially any order as you can pick up the powers in any order. And yet they still manage to ramp difficulty over the course of the game by making bosses harder (by giving them new moves and stances) and by making platforming harder (adding obstacles and other constraints).

The game is, however, different from predecessors and not all the differences are good. As has been mentioned elsewhere the game is easy compared to other entries in the series. There are some difficult platform sequences, mostly in the final section of the game and in the "boss" levels of each region. However, it doesn't match the feeling that the previous games could give you.

One of the great joys of the Prince of Persia - Sands of Time games is that as you played through them you felt yourself becoming more and more of a badass. Platforming and combat ramped up as the game progressed to the point where, at the end of the game, you were doing platforming sequences you would have balked at at the beginning. Sequence that strainb you towards the beginning become second nature by the end. This is a deeply satisfying feeling, and a feeling that this game's structure makes it unable to capture.

The difficulty scaling measures are good - they do add some depth, but they don't measure up to a thoughtfully constructed measured skill ramp up. The add timing elements and pressures to complete but, if you're playing reasonably well these obstacles don't even make you blink. They don't make it more difficult by the time they come around.

The platforming also feels a little too discrete -- a little too much like its on rails, which is a feeling I never had playing earlier games in the series, but that's more of a side note.

Like I said, I enjoyed playing this game. There are lessons that can be taken away from this level design and layout and I think they did a lot of things right. However, the constraint of having to make the great majority of levels playable from an early point in the game prevent it from living up to its predecessors as a gaming experience.