ProjectPerko

Beach Bum Business

2012-01-26T11:01:00.000-08:00

So, I had one of those ideas that brings along its own surge of adrenaline. You know, the kind that invariably means you're too excited and overestimating the idea.

To explore it a bit, I'm going to write up some of the details.

Over the past few days I have been visited by the Ghosts of Projects Paaaaast. Certainly, I do fail to finish most of the projects I start. But it is not my failing alone: the whole world fails to finish the projects they start. I've seen open source projects with millions of dollars of funding go into permanent stall as the team just... kind of... wanders off.

There's a lot of advice about how to stick to a project when you're bored of it or distracted or stuck. And one of the major things companies do is just that: they force their employees to work on the boring, stupid, shitty stuff. Hell, almost every company has, at its core, something that is interesting and cool to somebody, even if that somebody has to be an HVAC-obsessed architect.

However, I have had a number of successful projects mixed in with my failures, and I got to thinking. What if there's another way to approach the idea of a project?

Think of a project as a surfer. A surfer catches a wave and rides it until the wave is gone (or until he gets dangerously close to some rocks). Then he paddles back out into the deep water to catch another wave.

It may be possible to run your projects in the same way. A "beach bum business model" where you opportunistically wait for interest, take advantage of it to move the project forward, and when the interest fades, reposition the project to wait for more interest. If you had a number of such projects, you could probably always have some project that is currently riding a wave.

This is a slightly complicated thing to say, because when you give examples, you quickly stumble into the fact that it's considered unprofessional to treat your projects in this way. You're basically saying "do what you can while you want to, and then don't do any more until you feel like you want to again".

Let's shake that stigma, at least until the end of this essay, and talk about how we can do exactly that.

Let's talk about an open source project. You and your buddies start a project. You do okay, but you begin to get bored. This is inevitable - in a few months, you will get bored even if you get a fair number of customers. Your efficiency drops. You spend most of your time surfing the web and working on that toy you always wanted to build.

Then, suddenly, a big company tosses a few million dollars your way and you're back in the saddle! Wahoo! ...At least for a few months. Long before the millions run dry, you are again getting tired of it, bored.

Standard protocol? Work anyway. Beach Bum Business protocol? Stop! Reposition!

So you've created an open source project, but you're getting tired of working on it? Fine. Nobody can stay interested forever. Your priority now should be to make sure your project is ready to catch the next wave.

This involves two big pieces. The first is arranging your project so that it can catch the next wave. This means making it so that someone new (or you, after six months of not having touched it) can almost immediately begin making progress again. This is a bit different from simply creating documentation. Documentation is really a necessity, but this is more about actually creating a "modular hole".

The next wave comes with a sudden uptick in interest. You want to be able to start programming immediately. Filling the hole will be the first step for the new programmer (or you). This will, in the process, teach you of how everything around the hole works, and allow you to step into those shoes as well.

I'm using a software project, but this is equally suitable to something like a storyline. You create some short stories in a particular universe, then get bored. Well, getting back into that universe is going to be a serious hurdle unless there is a place where you can write a new story without requiring too much of the details of the old IP. By explicitly introducing that kind of gap before you get off the wave, you can prep to catch the next wave. This is also useful as it will allow you to change the medium or cater the message to the new wave.

To make the example explicit, if you were writing short stories about space nations at war with each other, you could prep a very rough scaffold for a story about piracy in a tiny star system in the middle of nowhere. When you write that story later, you simply have to make sure you don't go against any of the major pieces of your IP: you don't have to remember all the characters and places and starships and history of everywhere else. A software project is similar.

Okay, after you have created a modular gap, you need to reposition. Repositioning means moving your project out to where the waves are likely to start, and getting ready to catch a new one when possible.

Fundamentally, this does mean reducing burn. If you are a company, you would drop everyone down to retainer status. However, more than reducing burn, it actually involves repositioning your project.

If you just scale back burn, you're not going to catch the next wave. You're just going to languish with whatever users/audience you currently have.

So how do we reposition? Well, I'm open to suggestions, but here's some basics:

Keep your current users/audience. You don't have to make them dance with joy every day, but make sure they don't feel betrayed. Don't vanish, just scale back your involvement.

Keep your project alive. This means occasionally acting. The actions don't have to be meaningful. If our project is that space opera mentioned above, we might "front" one old story per month, meaning that anyone can read it for free. We might post notes, sketches, fanart, keep involved in the forums, run some simple contests... a quiet project is a dead project, and a dead surfer cannot swim.

Position your project to catch shifts in popularity and power, but don't forget that you want to catch a wave, not a splash. I imagine this is where all the skill comes in. In the case of our theoretical space opera, be ready to instantly ramp up and tackle our modular hole if your name comes up on Penny Arcade or whatever. Be ready to radically shift your message or media, as far as you feel comfortable, because a wave coming from Penny Arcade is going to be very different from a wave sliding in from The New York Times.

I think the easiest way to catch shifts in popularity is to have a simple Twitter/Google alert on your project's name. When things start to roll in, act!

I'm sure there are lots of other things that could be said on this subject, but I only thought of it a few hours ago, so that's all I've thought of so far.

The Local Convention

2012-01-10T08:44:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking more about augmented reality. In a sense it's difficult to do, because we haven't come up with any good way for the digital world to communicate with a human in a way other than them staring at their phone.

However, what if we turn the idea on its head? Instead of giving humans the ability to see the digital world, what if we focus on letting the digital world see the humans?

Augmented reality can be roughly divided into two parts.

The first is "helping people traverse the area". This is what I would call "slow AR". This is putting up a blue line guiding you to your destination, pointing you to a tasty restaurant, helping you find a hotel - all the things phones do today, basically.

The second is an important but underrated concept: "helping people interact with people". This is what I would call "fast AR". Fast AR is largely unexplored because of technical difficulties: it requires people to be in contact with AR basically all the time, and it requires a large number of people to be that way.

Let's talk about an example. Let's imagine a futuristic anime and comic convention. It has no set showings, only a few set events. Instead, it has a list of all the things it has a right to show. It's configured around many small, multi-purpose rooms instead of large theater halls.

When a group of a few people decides they want to watch a particular anime that the convention has the right to show, they tap their phones against the door of a theater and reserve it starting in half an hour.

On the walls all around the convention, that anime pops up as "showing in XXX in 29 minutes", with an arrow pointing the way. If you miss it because you're doing something else, no biggie: get together with some people who want to see it and show it again.

Seem limited? It's a simple example. Let's kick it up a notch: the whole point is to connect people to people. So let's do that more directly.

Let's say that some artists are chatting and get into a conversation about the topic of tangent lines in comic art. One pulls out a sketchbook and starts to draw an example. Well, the other can tap his phone against the door of a conference room and register a "workshop" - these artists, this topic. Even include a tag or avatar that allows people to see the level of artist they are. And now there's an impromptu, loose workshop for artists to discuss a technical point that is surprisingly interesting.

People can wander in and get involved, watch from a distance, whatever. You can even record the meeting for playback later if people want to see it after it happens, or catch up with it if they are coming in late. (Recording is, of course, a touchy subject that would need to be addressed well ahead of actually having the conference.)

These impromptu affairs would initially probably clash a bit with the old way - the idea of having a specific event at a specific time. Planning is a key component of today's conventions. And some things do require planning, such as the keynote speaker, or the big contest.

However, as most experienced con-goers can tell you, the real meat of a con is the meets of the con. The people you talk to, the things you talk about on the fly. Obviously, not all of those are suitable to become a recorded public meeting, but a surprising number are.

In addition, some conventions have roaming points of interest, such as cosplayers, and those could be tracked using a switch-onnable RF card. Switch it on, and now you're added to the wall maps as a point of interest, and if there are photographers whose video/photos are being CCed to the con as they are being made, you can find yourself on the walls...

I can definitely see a time where the convention staff are actually taking part in the con - stirring up interest in a particular topic or thing in order to get the events flowing smoothly. However, they wouldn't be trying to set it up using some kind of official meeting-maker system: they would simply be drumming up interest and then letting the interested parties use the scaffolds provided to self-organize.

If you think this is pure fantasy, well, there are a surprising number of unconferences already being run, including at least one in Boston - my turf. This is not a fantasy, it's just one baby step further than what we're already seeing.

The reason I used cons as examples is because a conference/convention is a lot of people interested in more or less the same thing all in the same place. It's very dense compared to, say, walking down a city street.

Start with the easiest targets - the ones that offer the most calories per bite. And that's probably conventions. Or unconferences/unconventions.

What do you think?

Phantom Town (Speculative World)

2012-01-06T08:04:00.001-08:00

This is part of the speculative worlds thingie. If you haven't read this link, do so now.

I was in a bookstore not long ago, in the science fiction section, looking at books. One talked about a city which was actually two overlapping cities that didn't interact. I thought "oh, interesting! Is it because of AR or..."

As you may have guessed if you've read a lot of books recently, it was nothing of the sort. It was a misfiled fantasy novel.

But it got me thinking about the idea in science fiction terms. The idea of a city where the classes don't interact. Hardly an original idea, but what if we approached it from the perspective of a technology which creates or forces this situation, rather than a situation where there is a hierarchy of classes that ignore each other. I guess you could call it "the filter bubble city".

Two things are necessary to see this city. First, widely available augmented reality - some people have it in their eyes, some people wear contacts or glasses, a few people are still holding up their eCellophane tablets and squinting through them.

Second, a reason for the population to have drifted into different layers. In this case I will be presuming that the economy as it stands today has vanished, and instead there are multiple economies in operation, each of which uses very distinct kinds of policies and practices, and each of which has serious technical and cultural barriers from trading with the others.

As you might guess, that second thing is the meat of the speculation. The first thing just enables us to frame and explain it.

...

We can introduce the fundamentals pretty easily: a main character is not wearing his AR glasses at the moment. The reason can be whatever plays into the plot, but the point is that without the AR glasses on, the city looks pretty much like any other city: storefronts, ads, cars sliding by.

When the main character puts his glasses on, all the ads vanish, digitally erased from the world, replaced by what the view would be if they weren't there. Similarly, names and icons float above people's heads, and the car-filled street is suddenly awash with red, yellow, blue - denoting safer and more dangerous areas to stand. The cars are also labeled - owner, destination, whether driven or automatic...

The point of this is to show how strongly his world is altered by AR. This becomes the basis for the way the different economies can ignore each other while literally occupying the same space. As the story or game progresses, it is possible to see the world through other people's AR, and most of them have the people who aren't members of their economy grayed out, and the people who are members of their economy are "painted". For example, the "digital collective" economy that runs almost entirely off of minifacturing and local hydroponics actually puts digital tattoos on their members, representing their specialties and standing. These are clearly visible on the outer layer of clothing, since they are digitally applied, not actually on the skin.

The main character is a "biotracker": his job is to monitor the ebb and flow of disease, pollution, and other health risks, as well as discover and counter any new diseases which emerge. As such, he is truly a local. To him, it doesn't much matter which economy a person is part of, they are still a disease vector. He actually gets paid piecemeal from each economy as he renders service, which, as he notes, makes taxes a real bitch. He could get paid in government scrip if he preferred, but he points out that getting paid by individuals in proxy (direct deduction from their owed taxes) is more valuable, since scrip is largely worthless.

The story is largely about his efforts to track and contain a new disease, which is difficult to track but not terribly serious. It's called the "tattoo bug" because its main effect is to create complex, almost mathematical depigmented shapes on your skin. It doesn't appear to spread from person to person, so he's searching for the vector and the source.

His tour takes him through most of the economies, allowing the audience to see each in turn, how it works, what it likes and dislikes, what sort of people it creates... and most importantly, the way it sees the city. It allows us to explore new ideas for economies, including how the economy will interact with foreign powers - in this case, the foreign powers share the same physical space!

We can also see how they treat research, development, intellectual property, personal rights... including all the ways they "break" traditional economies by having excessive computation and high-tech automation. For example, the "panhuman" economy relies heavily on continually and automatically renegotiated relationships. That is, when you wake up today you may find you are dating someone you've never met, but you can feel comfortable with that fact because your outboard brain knows you and your wants pretty well. Trying to ask a panhuman who they slept with a month ago when the tattoo bug first manifested for them... well, it's not as straightforward as you might think.

It also allows us to see how completely the economies and populations can self-segregate. The people on the street that aren't your people don't matter - you walk by them every day without even seeing them. But that can break down, such as in the case of a man who kept downrating a dangerous bicyclist from a different economy, only for the two to end up dating.

We explore the edge cases where the economies might have to bow to the greater good, even if it goes against their ideology. Comparisons can be made to class, but in honesty it's probably more like religious barriers.

Anyway, each economy appears to be a victim, rather than a source, and the disease is mostly an opportunity to explore how the world might be able to keep running even in a fractured and chaotic space where people can manufacture new diseases in their basement and the concept of 'money' has largely broken down.

As such, the plot of the book or game is really second fiddle to the excuse to try to explore exactly how something like, say, the panhuman economy would work. When people get seriously involved, maybe the automated negotiation keeps them together... but what happens if you wake up and find it's been negotiated away? Is it because your relationship was at its end... or was it just a blurp in the algorithm? What do you do in such a situation?

Fun questions, and a light exploration of some of the more obvious points that might arise in such a setting.

Speculative Worlds Summary

2012-01-05T11:59:00.000-08:00

A few people have expressed interest in the worlds I create, so this year I'll be releasing a few of them as posts. I'm calling it the "speculative worlds" project, just to have a tag for this kind of post.

The reason it needs to have a tag and an explanation is that I'm not releasing the worlds as any kind of strongly coherent narrative. It's a mishmash of notes, scenes, and sketches, depending on the nature of the world I've developed. So don't expect to find a beautiful coffee table book!

The reason I'm calling it speculative worlds is because these are not just generic science fiction universes. The idea is that a created world casts light on the beliefs and norms of the author. By creating a world, you can cast light into the parts of your brain that are hard to illuminate, explore your suppositions, and come up with interesting insights.

So I'm not trying to create "cool" or "complete" worlds. I'm trying to create "interesting" ones - ones which explore an assumption. I hope, if you choose to comment on any of them, you will do so understanding that this is my aim.

And I hope people do comment, because the same exploration turns out differently when done by a different person. I recommend following standard improv policy, though: negation's not a great idea at this stage in a world's development.

Lastly, I have no interest in controlling this project. If you want to do the same thing, feel free. If any of my worlds strike you as interesting, they are all available with a creative commons attribution license, so feel free to use them, too. Just link a lot, and everyone will be happy.

Buying Time

2012-01-05T08:12:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about ways to make money publishing stuff on the internet.

There are a lot of ways. Usually, I settle into talking about the "extras" method, where the core content is free but you allow the audience to pay more for more. This has been discussed lots before, so I'm going to skate over it here and get to a different kind of issue:

Publishers, rather than content creators.

Normally, my stance is "screw publishers, don't need 'em." However, that's an unfair stance brought about by bad experiences. A good publisher helps polish, check, distribute, and market your content. Those are valuable services, especially if you're the kind of creator who is bad at those things. Which, really, should be most creators: the only reason creators have to be good at that stuff is because most publishers have not been keeping up with modern technology and are hopelessly obsolete.

But in a world where content is free, how can a publisher hope to make money?

Well, "gating" is common. The idea that you're the publisher, so you're the sole distributor and can charge for the product. But gating is obsolete, and getting obsoletier each year. The only way to enforce gating is to try to use DRM, and that gets more hilariously awful with every passing month.

Another common method is advertising. By serving ads either in the content or around the content, the publishers hope to eke out some indirect cash. This is in some ways better than gating - YouTube has proven that most people will weather ads without going off and pirating the content, so a publisher can still be the primary distributor... at least for a while, until it actually becomes easier to find the content by Google search.

However, I don't like ads even without the coming Googpocalypse. What other methods are there?

Well, a publisher can offer bonus expensive goods in much the same way as an individual. A publisher can create a "standard" swag set - shirts, mugs, signed copies, and so on. This does reduce the price of creating the swag slightly, and the author might be happy to not have to handle it. But that seems like it wouldn't work, to me. Maybe it's because much of the draw to pay for swag like that is specifically to support the author, not the publisher. I think it would really decrease the amount of swag sold, although the larger number of interested parties might balance it out.

Even if the swag pays off, however, there are a lot of situations where it's just not viable. For example, a publisher that publishes scientific data sets. "Oh, I want the hat that supports trial 293101-B!"

How can a publisher make money on this kind of publishing?

I say: buying time. Or, more accurately, buying expedience.

Look, you can't gate your content. If you gate your content, you'll cripple your draw and lose tons and tons of audience. If your content is such that your audience really wants it, they'll get it or a nearly identical version from another source and you'll get nothing.

But you can gate it briefly. You can say "oh, this article on type B diabetes will be out on Monday. You can read it now if you're a member/pay, but if not, enter your email here and we'll send it to you on Monday."

See, this is a double - no, a triple win.

People who want the data fast, or people who want to support you, they'll pay. People who want to read it see it isn't available, but instead of just being told to fuck off, they're told "we'll deliver it to you personally ASAP." That's a promise of service and permission to contact them.

Now, that time gap isn't always ideal. But it serves a surprising number of media. Webcomics can use it, science publishing can use it, financial publications can use it - anything where there's a continuing stream of information that some people will want to see ASAP and others are willing to wait for.

The gap will, of course, vary in length depending on the kind of thing you're publishing. Webcomics might have a one week delay, while a science journal might have a three or six month delay. But that delay isn't determined by what you think the delay "ought to be", it's determined by how long it takes for the content to be pirated and distributed and how much damage each day of delay causes your adoption rates (if any damage is done).

There are other services you can provide for members, as well. Deals on swag, recommended articles, delivered articles based on their filter preferences, contact with the author or other experts...

There are ways to make publishing work. Flatly gating content isn't one.

Exploring New Worlds

2011-12-20T09:57:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about exploring ideas.

I make roughly one world setting every two months - that is, a fully realized setting for a game or story. Drawings, descriptions, rules if it's a game, the works. It's fun.

One of the reasons I do it is because I'm curious to know how far a given concept can be pushed, and in what directions. This is the sort of thing that an author means when they say "I write SPECULATIVE fiction, not SCIENCE fiction!"

As you create these worlds, you find some things you consider to be real gems. See, designing a world isn't just making a world that holds together. The point of designing a world is to make a world that says things, that shines at people. Anyone can create a world where the politics of the elven kingdoms make sense... it's far more difficult to make a world where anybody gives a shit about the politics of the elven kingdoms.

I guess you could say that the point of a world is to clutch the human mind, not to be rigorous or clever or even interesting, although all of those are often helpful at keeping your grip.

So the more recent of my worldish creations have mostly been about providing a scaffold: clear marks and leads stretch across the world so that players or storytellers can follow (as loosely as they prefer) and see what the world has to offer. All the pretty and ugly things I came up with when I was thinking up things that followed from the basic ideas of the world.

Is there any kind of common understanding of this concept? This idea of worlds as a scaffold, as a guide book? Is there any forum for people who want to trade worlds and fragments and explore and write down what they find? A kind of improv storytelling where the idea isn't to do stand-up, but to explore?

Because there are many worlds, and many concepts. And even within a world of my design, there are things I didn't think of.

Designing Fantasy Races

2011-12-14T08:10:00.001-08:00

"I don't want my world to be another generic fantasy world with generic D&D races!" you shout.

"Okay!" I shout, "Why are we shouting?"

How can you create fantasy races that are unique? (That includes, of course, fantasies that are modern or science fiction or any other setting - not just medieval fantasies.)

Stuck in a mental trap, you see every race you brainstorm up seems just like some other race somebody already made famous.

Let's go over a good way to create fantasy races.

Steal from Tolkien.

No, no, wait, I'm being serious. Instead of thinking "elves dwarves orcs hobbits", think about what those races mean to the story.

Each race is a lense to view the theme. In the case of Tolkien, the theme of the world can be thought of as "war against dark forces".

The orcs are those that have become dark forces. The dwarves are those that clashed and lost. The humans are those that are fighting right now. The hobbits are those that are getting drawn in. The elves are those that are above, that remind you that there is something besides the dark.

Quick and dirty, sure, but fundamentally the races can be thought of in that manner. Each race highlights a different part of the struggle, from a different angle.

This can easily be adapted to suit your own fantasy world.

For example, if your fantasy world's theme is "steam powered mecha fighting it out", you can create races to highlight it. In Tolkien fashion, you have a race that has embraced the abuse of mecha, a race that was destroyed after a long fight with mecha, a race that is currently fighting with mecha, a race that is beginning to fight with mecha, and a race that is above mecha.

From that you can expand the race into as human or inhuman a race as you want them to be. Classically, races in role playing games are pretty close to human, but every near-human variant is already established in your audience's eyes as a particular stereotypical race.

For example, our species that fought with mecha for a long time before losing and being destroyed. We can say that they would be adapted to fight in/with mecha. So they would be small (smaller pilots are better) and they would be good with machinery (repairing mecha) and they would be hardy (to live through smoke and steam and the steel mills).

Well, that's obviously fantasy dwarves, isn't it? Or maybe you could argue for gnomes. Either way, hardly original!

Now, if you want you could theoretically make them more unique by making them less human. But you have to go pretty far afield before you get to anything unique, and even then your audience will automatically lump them together with whatever popular race is vaguely similar. So even if we make our dwarflike people unique by letting them directly plug into their mecha through personal mechanical interfaces, now they'll just get called "borgs" or "shadowrunners", depending on the graphics we use to represent it.

Personally, I don't feel you have to make a race look distinct. They should look distinct enough from their other in-world counterparts, but it's basically impossible to come up with a visual that won't be automatically matched up with an existing, popular visual.

Instead, you should focus on making the race feel like a part of your world. Even if your races have exactly the same standard names - elves, dwarves, orcs, and so on - if they play a particular role in your world, they become a new and interesting species. And the main way to define a role is in how the species highlights your world's theme.

An example of this is Shadowrun, which has all the standard fantasy races, but uses them as lenses into the theme of a class struggle. This means that elves and orcs feel very, very different from Tolkien versions, because they represent elitists and the underclass rather than representing victory over and betrayal to dark forces.

There is no limit to the number of races you can create in this manner. Simply assign given regions different subthemes and make the races of that region highlight that theme.

For example, "steam powered mecha battling it out" might be a subtheme on the overarching theme of "use and abuse of technology". We could have another region which has the subtheme "oppression via technology", and create races for that. We don't want to use the same approach, because that leads to very samey races, so we might create lenses that highlight different actions that oppress, rather than different states of oppression. For example, we might have a race that specializes in surveillance, a race that specializes in computation, tracking, and paperwork, a race that specializes in "nonlethal" police actions, and so on.

This "theme-powered" method of creating unique races will result in races that feel unique and, more importantly, support the theme of your world intrinsically, making your world more immersive and profound.

Dialog Games

2011-12-13T10:09:00.000-08:00

Another day, another conversation about how dialog trees are pathetic.

So, you talk to an NPC in a game. You choose - for the millionth time - the "good" option. Well, that's how you decided you were going to play this time.

This is games offering "choice"? This is our concept of "dialog"?

Can we make dialog more interesting?

Sure can! Let's talk about how!

First, we have to ditch the idea of a dialog tree. We need a complex and shifting play field.

For example, look at Pac-Man. You don't simply choose to win or lose. You move left, right, up, and down in an attempt to eat all the dots. But even that would be boring: you have enemies chasing you, trying to eat you. So you've got to eat the dots while always keeping an eye on where the ghosts are. Can't let yourself get hemmed in... unless there's a power pill here, in which case getting hemmed in guarantees you'll get at least one of the bastards!

This is a game: a relatively simple set of inputs affects the gameworld in a straightforward way, and you need to handle the changing challenges. Whether it's a puzzle game where you try to put together a jigsaw, or a platformer where the challenge is in not falling, or a rhythm game where you have to tackle the beats as the flow down the stream. They are all the same: basic inputs to tackle a series of challenges.

A dialog tree, on the other hand, is a highly unique set of inputs for each sequence, and you have only the faintest idea of what the challenges even are!

To make dialog into a game, we need to A) make the inputs more universal, B) make the conversations evolving challenges, and C) let the player see further, so they can see what's coming down the line and how their inputs are affecting it.

There are actually a lot of ways to do this.

One is to simply map the conversation onto an existing game. For example, we can have you play Pac-Man every time you get into a conversation. The higher your score and the more lives you have left at the end of the conversation, the better the outcome. Something similar was actually tried with Leisure Suit Larry's recent game: you had to literally steer your conversation, hitting the right notes and avoiding the fails.

This isn't terribly interesting, though. It doesn't take advantage of what a conversation actually is. What are some other options?

We could make conversation a real-time situation where you control your basic body language using the left stick and the shoulder triggers. Instead of choosing to be good or evil, you physically move closer, show interest, doubt, encourage, etc. While this makes the controls more universal, it doesn't actually give the player any way to see challenges coming down the line.

The key to this whole affair is actually seeing what's coming. Once you have an idea as to how to do that, parts A (controls) and B (evolving challenges) naturally begin to suggest themselves.

For example, we could give characters subtle animations to give clues as to how they are reacting to your actions. This makes the game one of identifying a character's clues and chasing the positive ones while evading the negative ones. This essentially makes every character a puzzle - which is not a bad thing, although it's not one particularly high in replayability or diversity.

Another option is to flat-out display the conversation topics and emotions as physical objects with shapes and proximities to each other. Sounds similar to making it "Pac-Man Social Play", but in this case you can actually embed the social in the play very deeply.

For example, you can put in a kind of social "gravity": if your conversation steers towards a sensitive topic, the conversation is repelled by the instinctive redirection of the NPC. If the course is such that the repelling isn't strong enough and the conversation impacts on the sensitive topic, that starts up a whole new conversation within the "event horizon" of the sensitive topic as the NPC begins to defend themselves or panic or whatever.

So you can plot a course through their hang-ups, ideals, moods, and so on. Probably with an actual line indicator showing your medium-distance future, allowing you to tweak the vector of the conversation to make things go smoother.

This kind of conversation can be easily controlled using a simple "turn/accelerate" IO, where the IO doesn't directly relate to your own dialog, but instead makes your dialog reflect the setting somewhat. For example, if you turn your dialog-ship more towards someone's love of the king of their fantasy nation, then your dialog would naturally turn towards that king.

You could make it significantly more interesting - for example, agreeing with someone's views versus challenging them. It might be better to think of it as whirlpools that have a particular direction of spin, rather than simply blobs.

The point here is that you can invent a kind of game which actually reflects the socializing you're doing.

"But the dialog... how will you generate the dialog? Are you going to write a billion lines of dialog?"

Nah. During the conversation, you'll mostly be focused on the game of steering the conversation. The actual commentary during that time can be pretty generic - short and informative statements like "mumble mumble king mumble mumble?" "OH! Mumble mumble mumble!"

The only dialog you actually have to write at "full depth" is the transition dialog - the dialog you would normally get in a normal game when selecting whether to be good or evil, or when getting briefed on the situation. You don't need to write up every line for every possible position you could possibly be in.

It would be good to have more depth to your dialog than less. If you can write a few dozen lines about likely topics for that character pair, it'll be a lot more interesting. You could even mark them as colored spots on the map, so players can aim for them. Put some of them daaaaaaaangerously close to failure zones.

Until natural language generation improves, having characters with detailed, contiguous conversations is basically impossible. But there is something to be said for "more mumbling, more freedom of conversation" instead of the dialog trees of today.

Of course, focusing on conversation means that the dialog is the main point of the game. So you can't think of it as serving the same in-game purpose that dialog does today. Instead, you have to invent a new position for it...

Hm, gotta think more. This post is just in passing.

GITS and Anonymous

2011-12-12T08:10:00.000-08:00

I think this essay covers topics most geeks are pretty familiar with, but I can't remember actually reading an essay on these topics before. So here it is: the essay about self-organizing "hacktivists", futurism, and Ghost in the Shell.

Like most geeks, you've probably mused about the faint echoes in your mind between what you saw in Ghost in the Shell and what you've heard about Anonymous. I'm going to try to draw the line between them.

I will be using the term "meme" colloquially. Don't think about what a meme is too hard, that's not the point of this essay.

...

In Ghost in the Shell, arguably the most interesting plot line is the "laughing man" plot line. I call it "the plot line", but it's actually just one line in a theme that shows up many times in various GITS series and incarnations.

The basic idea is that people are not so distinct as they seem. They are easily manipulated into doing things either consciously or unconsciously. Obviously, this is not a unique insight. However, the spin GITS puts on it is interesting: the creation of a 'deep' internet allows this to happen with such fluid speed that the unconscious and semi-conscious actions of the participants can form a 'life form' with its own 'will'.

As an example, in one GITS plot line, people begin to do things for no discernible reason, but they all act towards a single aim. The people involved have no idea what they are doing, nor do they have any knowledge of the secret aim. They have been programmed - not by invasive surgery or brainwashing, but by the unending tides of memes they have been exposed to on their immersive internet. The memes are somewhat directed, but also have a life of their own, since the directives of the original source emerged from the nature of the memes, and are therefore echoed by the participants.

In another plot, one man serves as a hub, allowing participants to enter his personal brain/computer. While there, their sense of self is weakened and they can participate in projects such as sharing memories and computing whether P = NP. They can also be programmed to act in certain ways while outside his personal brain/computer.

This sort of thing is hardly GITS-unique. GITS may have been a popular and compelling example, but there are literally millions of science fiction stories with this same fundamental set of ideas. For example, it is a common conceit to have a VR MMORPG which goes crazy and begins to use/screw up/damage the participant's minds. This is super common in Japanese stories, perhaps because they usually cling to a spirit/body duality, but it also happens in Western stories. Finder did a particularly interesting job of it, for example.

I guess you could say it smacks of an "ascension" ideology. The idea that we can overcome our humanity and, well, go to heaven or whatever. However, I am specifically thinking of it in mechanistic terms. That is, I'm not posing some mythical energy state we can merge into, and I'm not relying on the concept of a spirit or soul. Just people who might become something different than what they currently are, within the limits of physics and biology.

...

Which brings me around to the other end of this rope: Anonymous.

Anonymous and the various similar groups operate in a way that was impossible without the internet. Decentralized, the theory is that any given Anonymous operation can take place with no leader, or perhaps with only a transient leader given a fairly minor role.

In a real sense, the "leader" of an Anonymous operation is largely a memetic broadcaster. Aside from posting specific meeting times if necessary, their job is to yell about whatever they feel is happening that needs to be smashed. And if enough other voices pick up the shout, it becomes an action.

The nature of the memes they broadcast is such that if another person is "infected", they will act in the interests of the original broadcaster. Not because of brainwashing or coercion, but because they will draw the same conclusions.

For example, Anonymous moved against the Church of Scientology. They did not do this because someone wanted to and convinced everyone else to go along. They did it because most people who heard what Scientology was doing reached the same conclusion: the church must be punished. This created a pocket of action, a group of people who, despite their anonymity, all wanted the same thing.

This is a very powerful tool. If there were leaders, not only would the targets be able to strike back, but the followers would also judge which actions they should join based on the leader. This would limit them - "oh, that leader believes things I don't agree with, this action can't have any merit..."

In many ways, this is a very close mirror of the GITS idea, although without the CG bling. This is a group of people who suppress their identities and sequester the majority of their personality and opinion off in a corner so that they can work together with other people doing the same thing very fluidly.

In a very real manner, the Laughing Man is fact. A science fiction concept that is not just possible, but is happening in the real world at this very moment.

To be honest, I would call them "Laughing Man Groups" if I wanted to give them a distinct category. That's the level of similarity I see here, even though Anonymous is only a tiny seedling of the concept.

...

What about the rest? What about where this is going? What about the next step? What about the fact that a lot of the stuff that these Laughing Man Groups are doing is horrible?

Well, a lot of the science fiction around this concept is based on the idea of subverting someone's brain. Forcing them to act. And I doubt that'll happen any time soon. But it doesn't have to: simple cooperation is more than powerful enough.

And as for horribleness, please remember that these are just groups of people. The jerks and assholes are over-represented at the moment because jerks and assholes tend to be the ones that delve into the darker parts of the internet where this kind of organizing is happening. When it becomes common, I can see it being used for a lot more positive aims.

I can see the methods of transmitting memes and forming task participation becoming a lot slicker. I can see people cooperating almost instantly, trusting their connections have a good reason for their requests. I can see people starting to get very good at prioritizing memes as to which ones are more important, not simply more offensive.

I can also see corporations and governments attempting to form or subvert these kinds of environments, which could be interesting.

Can I see something like a VR game which takes place inside the designer's head?

Well, now we're talking about a serious leap in technology.

Everything I've described in the past few paragraphs could happen with today's technology. Anything more is probably science fiction.

For now.

New Economies

2011-12-10T08:49:00.000-08:00

So, everyone's talking about how we're entering a "post job" economy, and how we need to grow a new economy because this one's broken.

I agree, so here's an easy-peasy crash course on a few aspects of the situation.

An economy isn't. There is no such thing as some kind of monolithic entity known as "economy". The thing we think of as an economy is a diverse set of very different things which happen to share some common reference points (money).

As people are aware, what we normally call "the economy" is faltering pretty badly. A combination of super-effective mechanization/outsourcing and corporate greed has led to massive and seemingly unending unemployment. A lot of people are languishing with no cash, even becoming homeless.

Of course, as many people point out, the factories and farms and homes are all still there, ready to house, produce, and distribute goods. The problem is that the control systems have gone haywire, denying access to those goods.

Some people would claim this is why we need to centralize control over these - to guarantee people don't fall through the cracks.

Personally, I disagree. While I think some things should be centralized, "the economy" is much too large and complex to manage centrally. Something like health care can be centralized, because humans are humans everywhere: if you get cancer in Texas, you need the same kind of care as if you got cancer in Taiwan.

But if you have an economic depression in Texas and Taiwan, the solution may be very, very different. Economies are far more different from each other than people are.

...

A lot of people have basically given up hope, insisting either that there is no economy capable of keeping everyone participating well, or that there is no point in looking because we'll all be dead in 2020 due to global warming.

Well, let's look at a few kinds of "economies". Or, more accurately, a few ways to try to manage the production and distribution of goods.

One way is the classic ultralarge marketplace, which is more or less what we have now (although it comes in some variations). Regardless as to whether it's capitalist or socialist or whatever, the structure of an ultralarge marketplace is that the strongest members are the largest members, and they can use their clout as they see fit.

A plus side of this is that you can really get an economy of scale going - find the best places to generate the things you need, organize the production line for maximum efficiency, and so on. You can also externalize the costs really easily, since you can destroy people or places on one side of the planet to maximize profits on the other side.

To me, the big problem with ultralarge markets is that when the big players start getting controlling, there's nowhere else to go. If they decide to fuck you, you get fucked. It doesn't even have to be a centralized set of authorities: the big players are strong enough, and have enough shared concerns, that even without a concrete central authority they will just automatically collude to screw over whoever they decide to screw over.

Ultralarge markets are enabled by global currency (and global currency exchanges), as well as the ease of transporting goods from nation to nation. There's nothing inherently bad about these things, but it's worth mentioning.

Now that the ultralarge market is starting to fuck us over, some people are thinking of self-sufficient markets. These are basically where you try to build yourself a farm and get ready for the coming apocalypse, your intention being to be as self-sufficient as possible while still allowing for some trade between you and your neighbors.

It may be technically possible to live this way, but it's not a way which is very comfortable or good. Putting aside the lack of variety, the lack of economic "slack" will kill you. If you get sick, what happens? No doctors. If there's a drought, what happens? No foreign food imports. If a bandit shoots you, what happens? No cops.

This kind of economy isn't an economy at all. It's desperate subsistence farming with the help of some vaguely modern practices and technologies.

However, there are plenty of other kinds of methods to use!

Local markets are a fairly well proven method. A local government (such as the town) prints up local scrip and sets it at a specific conversion rate to the national currency. This encourages locals to buy and sell from other locals. It is critical that the local scrip have a specific conversion rate, which is why this is typically backed by a local government, often with the help of a bank: it is quite similar to the idea of a bank lending out cash, and it is possible to have a 'run' on the scrip if you're too clumsy about it.

The reason a scrip is preferable to a simple "buy local" campaign is because it exerts far more pressure to buy local, to the point where locals can begin setting up or expanding local businesses due to their advantage over non-local businesses who will typically not accept the scrip.

Local markets are rarely as efficient or diverse as larger markets. However, when the large market is abusing you, a less efficient positive number is better than a more efficient negative number!

Local scrips are already beginning to bloom here and there, but they have a fundamental weakness. Well, two, if you count the fact that the federal government doesn't much like them. The actual, non-legality flaw is that they are only really useful when the larger economy is screwing you over. The efficiency of the modern workplace is high enough that once you get back on your feet, your local currency will not guarantee jobs. There's only so much business you can do locally, and the number of people it takes to do that business will steadily decline as the local economy becomes better established and begins to polish its performance.

The underlying problem we face is that all the jobs we used to do can be done more effectively by machines and software. Well, we could therefore try a protectionist economy, where advanced robotic labor and outsourcing to other nations is outlawed.

I consider this to be a terrible idea. Not only does it mire us in the nineteenth century, it actually doesn't protect us from the economies of other nations which run at a full robot-powered sprint. This means you have to put huge import tariffs on their goods to keep your local economy competitive, and that can easily lead (I would say "always leads") to isolationism, instability, and general governmental foolishness.

Well, is there an economy which allows everyone to participate while allowing for hyper-efficient production and service?

Sure: create a bevy of new categories of goods and services.

It's uncomfortable, depressing, and sometimes dangerous to lose your job, but that is made a hundred times worse if you lose your job because the whole industry you worked in is being automated away.

And don't think anyone's immune. Virtually every current industry is slated to be automated away, from construction to accounting. The seeds are there, it's just a matter of how fast they bloom.

The question is: how can you help someone who was fired from a dying industry to transition to a growing one?

Well, the answer is easy: make it a service. You can embed it in the unemployment office, you can make it an internet forum, you can do a social network for it. It doesn't have to be government-powered, it doesn't have to not be. As long as it is something that a 45-year-old factory worker knows exists and is willing to use, it'll really help. Adult education.

Of course, one issue is that growing industries these days aren't growing as fast as the old ones are being automated/offshored. However, that's a disconnect that doesn't have to exist. There are plenty of industries which could explode... if we wanted them to. We could repair all the roads. We could install solar panels everywhere. We could create a Citizens' BioBrigade which monitors and catalogs the local ecosystems and bacteria.

The real question is, of course, "where does the money to do that come from?"

Ahhhh. Now we're getting to the crux of the matter. Money.

The reason our economy is in the shitter is because of the companies that control the money. All our currencies are tied into the same network, and therefore whenever anyone rips out a part of that network, the backlash gets felt by everyone, everywhere.

So... maybe what we need isn't a new kind of economy, but a new kind of money. Or, at least, a new method of distributing money, since there are plenty of people who are doing reasonably well and are happy to help fund new markets.

Anyway, I don't have the answers. But I think it's time to start talking and trying everything we can.

And if you're a mayor looking for a solution, I strongly recommend looking into local scrip.

Participating in the Emergent Internet

2011-11-29T08:07:00.000-08:00

So you like the idea of the internet getting better and better. You want to do your part. You share cool things with your friends - and with strangers, you're not particular.

But maybe you could do a little more? You know, make the internet better without actually putting any effort into it?

Can do!

The internet of the future is not simply sites, but links. Who links to what? What links to who?

To help build this, simply remember that there are two kinds of posts - two kinds of content. One kind introduces new stuff, while the other kind reshares that stuff. Both are important. Creators are often not very good at the whole "resharing" thing, while people who reshare continuously get very, very good at knowing what will make a splash with who. They're different jobs.

Right now, you're a resharer. You find something interesting and want to share it. So you do.

Well, if you want to help the internet grow and flourish, you need to give credit.

Nothing about giving credit diminishes your reshare. Giving credit makes you look like not a dick. So let's give credit!

First and most importantly, give credit to the original poster - the person who originally created the content. If you're sharing directly, this is easy: just link to the page you got it from. But even if you are sharing a reshare of a reshare of a reshare, give a link or a name-drop to the original source. If you can't find the original source, say so.

Then make sure you give credit to the other resharers who, like you, are striving to make the internet more interesting. If you read someone's resharing of a Shatner video and want to spread the love around, link to the original video and to the resharer's post. Links are free. If it's a long chain of links, or of the sharer's link is not something you want to directly link to for some reason, no problem. Do a "via" and tag everyone. "via +doggydoggydoggy and @mobileskunkarmor" or whatever.

Pretty easy, right? Just link. LINK LINK LINK LINK. Links are free. Just get in the habit of linking. The more threads you connect, the better a netizen you are.

...

What, you want a more advanced course? Okay.

If you want to be a good citizen of the internet, one part of that is being a filter to purify all the bad citizens.

Bad citizen number one shares images and animated gifs by reuploading them to imgur or G+ or whatever. The cool image just pops up in his stream. Even if he doesn't claim he created it, he certainly doesn't give any link love to the author!

Well, simply post the link yourself. A simple reverse image lookup at http://images.google.com/ can give you the source. Don't make any accusations, just a simple comment that says "original source -> LINK". Chances are, the author isn't intending to be a dick, and if he gets upset at you, well... problem solved, he's going to lose a lot of followers and his reshares won't matter.

Bad citizen number two shares direct links to the original author, but never gives any "via" credit. Sure, maybe they stumbled across every single article on their own. More likely, they're leeching off other resharers, aggregating other, interesting people's work and pretending they did it. Make no mistake: finding and distributing interesting content is work, and these leeches are not doing anyone any favors.

A big giveaway is if more than 2/3 of the posts they make are links with no real added commentary. If someone links to a news article and says "I think this is probably a sign that France might be about to raise interest rates 0.1%", that's probably okay. If someone just posts a link to the news article, sans comment, they may be resharing without giving credit to the resharer they originally got the link from.

I don't know what to do in these situations, aside from keeping in mind that the guy probably doesn't consider a resharer's work to be of any value. Funny, considering they are a resharer themselves.

EDIT: There are some people who reshare privately. Maybe Maggie doesn't want her parents to know she's gay, or whatever. If someone has reshared privately, use your best judgement as to whether to include them in your credits or not. If you're thinking this deeply, you're probably not a type 2 bad citizen, no worries.

Questionable citizen 3 makes derivatives and post them without links to the original. For example, creating an animated gif but not linking to the video you ripped it from.

In these situations, I recommend simply linking to the video, if you can find it. Done simply, it should be okay. For example, "ha ha, I loved that bit. Here's the full video->"

Remember that the questionable citizen in question actually did a fair amount of work. They're not really leeches, just clumsy.

...

Following these guidelines will hopefully result in a culture of clear link love. Sort of a dawning of the age of Aquarius sort of thing, except geeky. Do your part for the internet: LINK!

Fictional Religions

2011-11-14T10:31:00.001-08:00

_{This post discusses the creation and use of fictional religions for video games/fictional worlds. Please do not view it as an attack on your real-world religions or religious beliefs.}

I've played a lot of fantasy games, read a lot of fantasy stories. They tend to have a lot of gods in them.

Normally, these in-world religions fall into two camps. 1) Religions that are funhouse mirrors of real-world religions (AKA the "crystal dragon space jesus"). 2) Religions whose pantheons exist to cover the facets of the game world that the players will care about. IE, simplifying your pantheon into "goddess of healing", "god of thunder", "goddess of trade", "god of evil", etc.

I don't really have a problem with the first approach, if you're doing it on purpose. However, the second approach is really pretty boring. So let's talk about how you might create some fictional religions that have some real heft.

...

Religions are not gods. This is a critical point to make. You can have gods without religions, and religions without gods. You can also have religions which have betrayed their god, or their god was killed, or whatever.

Religions serve a purpose to a group of individuals (not necessarily people). A god is just a super-powerful entity. The only time the two are very tightly linked are if you are assuming prayer-powered gods, a concept which was briefly popular in the late 90s and early 2000s. Nothing wrong with that idea, has some fun meat to it, but let's not limit ourselves to it.

So lets deal with religions and gods separately.

...

Here's my thoughts on gods!

Most of the time, our stories do not need gods that are extensions of religions, or religions that are extensions of gods. Instead, we need to think about A) what a god is and B) what purpose the religion serves.

In many fantasy settings, the gods are basically just big people. Big, immortal people. If that's the case, that's fine. However, if that is the case then it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for a god to have a single, specific domain.

Sure, Thor was the god of thunder. And he liked being the god of thunder. But he also had a hand in storms, oak trees, strength, protection of mankind, hallowing, healing, fertility, and drunken binges.

In the real-world religion, these were added to Thor as he merged with various predecessors and cult gods, in the same way that Tyr was demoted from highest god to "that guy that guards the bridge". Unless your fantasy religion's god pops down to say "hey, actually, I don't do that kind of thing you just prayed for, try the temple down the road", people will keep attaching new domains to their favorite god. Eventually, a favorite god can be promoted to "the high god" or "the only god".

In a fantasy religion, Thor could be an actual person running around doing things, and it's easy to see that his domain might end up much the same. It's the sort of eclectic mix you might get by looking at a real person's interests. So the two (worshipping a human-like god and letting a religion grow over time) can have very similar results if you like.

On the other hand, there's a lot to be said for gods that aren't human-like. Or maybe some gods that are and some gods that aren't.

Some of the most compelling gods in games have been gods of ancient religions that have a very alien tint to them. Not all the details can be teased out. Was Xikobaz the goddess of darkness? Well, the translation isn't so simple, and parts of the tablets have been broken, but that thing coming out of the well is on fire, so maybe not?

When you're thinking of a god in a fantasy game, you need to decide what sort of manifestations the players/audience is likely to find.

If you've got human-like gods, you may actually run into them out in the world, maybe even fight them. That can be fun.

But as you start stepping away from human-like, you start getting gods whose powers are more subtle. Maybe you'll meet Cmirkl, ancient sleeping god of shell and bone. But even before you meet him, you'll see the creatures his power creates, the landscapes his existence twists, the temples built to him by people long forgotten by time... or perhaps by people who failed to exist at all, in the end.

Generally, I rank gods on a "queasiness scale".

1) Just a big, superpowered humanoid. Or animal, whatever. Probably has an eclectic mix of powers. Example: Thor, Superman.

2) Seems like a big, superpowered humanoid, but has some crazy powers hidden underneath, such as time travel or infinite polymorphing or dream walking. Example: Loki, Odin.

3) May appear in a humanoid form, but only to interact with humans. Powers leak and bleed enough that being in their presence is probably not wise. Still, recognizably a god. Example: Crystal Space Dragon Jesus, Gaia, Dream.

4) Does not exist primarily in our universe, and doesn't really understand much about humans. Often called "sleeping", because "ignoring us" really doesn't sound so good. Bleeds power like a sieve, can be seen as either a god or a force of nature, depending on how you squint. Example: Cthulhu (sometimes).

5) Largely incomprehensible. Maybe dead, or doesn't exist yet? Anyway, treat it like a bizarre force of nature, not a god. Example: Cthulhu (sometimes), King in Yellow.

Now, what purpose does the religion serve?

1) Cargo cult bullshit. Try to deal with the chaos by worshipping. Has no real effect.

2) Contains the god. Or wards them off. Or sates them. The religion keeps the god from going ballistic on you.

3) Curries favor. The god gently exerts pressure in favor of their worshippers. This is a small but noticeable actual advantage. Otherwise it's just cargo cult stuff.

4) Explicit favors. The god grants magic, miracles, personal appearances, sends angels, whatever. The power of this religion is absolutely undeniable.

5) Respect. The religion doesn't offer up much in the way of powers, but exists out of respect for the deity. Functionally, this usually means the religion is a storehouse of best practices for a given domain, or for emergency responses when something takes a supernatural nose-dive.

...

Religions are fundamentally about the people doing the worshipping. You can say that a religion is a set of beliefs, rituals, and general practices. However, those don't exist separately from the practitioners. As time passes, the religion evolves in tandem with the civilization it is part of, and some of the older beliefs, rituals, and practices are downplayed or forgotten while new ones come around.

Since this is a fantasy setting, there may be some magical enforcement. For example, it could be that you worship this idol because if you don't, it will kill you. Really - if you miss a day, it will come awake at night, hunt you down, and stab you with a mystic spork.

However, in the absence of such pressures (and even with such pressures), religions still exist in a cultural setting, and serve a cultural purpose. To that end, we can split our religions into a few basic types, all of which can be monotheistic, polytheistic, deistic, etc.

1) Stable state religions. These are religions where, in theory, everyone is part of the same religion. These are typically very old, and are often the source of stability in societies more than 100 (fictional) generations old. These are typically extremely stagnant. The top is usually rife with corruption unless you're doing an idyllic view of things, but at the level of an individual town's church it can be as oppressive or friendly as your story demands. Keep in mind that really oppressive religions tend to get in trouble and become...

2) Unstable state religions. This is where there is a state religion, but it is losing its grip. This leads to much scrabbling in the form of witch-hunts, oppression, and other nastiness. This is often caused by the rise of other religions (often because of mass immigration), but can also be caused by severe trouble, such as a sudden spike in the number of dragons roaming the land. Either way, this religion is burning all its goodwill very fast, and it is unlikely it will ever recover. Eventually it may become...

3) Fractured religions. This is where the religions have the same core beliefs and share most or all of the same holy books/relic/magic. However, they have some rift between them which causes some of the population to belong to one, and some to belong to the other. How bitter this feud is depends on the age of the split: the older, the milder, assuming the religions continued to occupy the same lands the whole time. The split usually happens for tribal reasons, not liturgical ones - that is, you side with your kin against their kin. The differences are usually a list of very minor issues, plus one side tending to be more strict than the other.

3) Minority religions. When a small but significant number of the population belongs to a given religion. While the majority may not be completely happy about it, a minority religion is not an outlaw religion, and they are more or less left to worship in peace, aside from as much racism as you care to plug into your setting. Keep in mind that what is a minority religion here is often a more pervasive religion in someone's homeland, but the main religion and the branch are often under very different pressures, and their beliefs, rituals, and practices may change in different directions in only a year or two.

4) Outlaw religions. Whuh-oh, don't tell anyone you worship Xegelbaz, or you'll find yourself in the gaol for sure. Maybe the witch-hunt is ongoing. Maybe the practitioners have been rounded up into "work camps". Maybe it's just a standing order to report practitioners, but nobody really expects to find one. In the real world, this often happens due to a conquering religion, but in the fantasy world it may be because the magic resulting from this worship is sinister.

5) Conquering religions. This is a religion which is or was a state religion, but has decided that the world needs to be conquered. Conquering religions will use overwhelming force against other religions and the nations that believe them - the tools of the sword, the economy, and the proselytizer. The way this works is that the old religion is outlawed, while a branch of the conquering religion is created which incorporates some of the conquered religion's practices (a spoonful of sugar makes the religion go down). Please note that conquering religions are often rapidly changing themselves, as well: this is not a stagnant religion.

6) Secret religions. How many worshippers are there? Impossible to know. Often a conquered religion, or an inherited-by-bloodline religion. Any way you cut it, nobody admits it, they all worship in secret. If the fantasy world gives out magic for your religious worship, this can be a very powerful secret!

7) Rebellious religions. A minority religion or cult which decides to enter mainstream by fomenting rebellion, or attaching itself to rebellion which is already fomenting. The "us vs them" logic of a rebellion makes it very, very easy to recruit people and turn them into zealots for your church. If your rebellion succeeds, maybe you'll be a state religion in the new nation...

8) Bored-to-action religions. This arises somewhat rarely, but I thought I'd mention it. When society has plenty of people who are interested in changing (themselves or the world), branches of existing religions may pop up organized around that philosophy. Of course, just as likely are secret societies, NGOs, etc.

9) Cults. Everyone loves a good cult! Please keep in mind that a cult has a pretty specific definition. Rather than use it loosely, I'm using it specifically: this is a religion, regardless of size, which uses at least half of these techniques:

A) Assigns a new name or identity when you join/rank up.
B) Isolates practitioners from nonpractitioners.
C) Promises access to secrets if you can rank up enough.
D) Promises experiences not permitted by cultural norms/laws.
E) Has a single, obsessive leader.
F) Follows one core tenet, insists that all problems can be solved by it.
G) Uses physical or emotional stress to make people vulnerable to suggestion.
H) Subverts the hold of the government over its practitioners via secrecy or bribery.

10) Dead religions. Dead religions are a really interesting topic, and also include any religion which is mostly-dead (<20 practitioners). Because this is fantasy, dead religions may still have a lot of power. For example, stumbling into a temple to the ancient goddess of dreams and hallucinations may not be a very comfortable experience...

If you read this far, you're really, really patient. What do you think?

Flashlights

2011-11-02T07:41:00.001-07:00

I've been stuck on thinking about the flashlight projector. Original post included if you missed it.

I've been thinking about the sort of games and apps you might be able to create. This post will be pretty design-heavy.

The flashlight projects an image onto a surface. Fundamentally, that means you can put virtual things on the surface. These virtual things can be just something on the surface, such as a sticker or a logo. Alternately, they can represent things that aren't on the surface, but are only being displayed there.

Three examples of that are:

1) Displaying the piping and wiring in a wall by painting their image on the wall.

2) Casting a shadow on the wall from a virtual object between the flashlight and the wall. Shadow does not have to be actual dark patches - for example, the virtual object might be a stained glass bauble.

3) Showing what is beyond the wall on the surface of the wall. For example, a security guard could shine his flashlight on a wall and play the camera feeds for the room on the other side.

There is also the option to display simple virtual things on the surface, but use them in an information-dense manner. For example, painting a map on the surface, getting a footprint trail of people who passed through, or average rainfall displayed as inches of "water" splashing along the ground.

These are things which have nothing to do with a reality that currently exists, but are still deeply tied to the location, as opposed to simple virtual tagging.

So... what sort of games could you make out of it?

Tagging

Let's start with the obvious one: let people paint on surfaces, then let other people see what they have painted.

This offers some unique limits and opportunities. First off, the flashlight is a physical object, and most people aren't going to want to seem weird by hunting around Manhattan with a flashlight during the day. It follows that the majority of tagging will happen in places with some foot traffic, but not too much (the weirdo with the flashlight) or too little (nobody else will see it). An alternative is places with very few people plus some kind of guidance/seeking system, which would be useful if there were few users.

If you're painting on surfaces rather than in space, you can take advantage of the nature of surfaces. Some surfaces are the same day in and day out. However, other surfaces are temporary or recurring. For example, if you paint the side of a parked car, you can only see that image when a car is parked in that same spot. If you paint someone's shirt, you can only see the image when someone is standing in that same place. Perhaps you can see blurry shadows if your light shines through where the surface should be, and then there's the fun of looking for places there were surfaces that people painted on, and temporarily recreating those surfaces.

Painting doesn't have to just be painting. Like, with a finger. There are a variety of things it could be.

I like the idea of "stamping". You have virtual possession of a thing. You then stamp it onto a surface, losing possession of it. Someone who sees it can peel it off and stick it in their inventory.

In some cases, this is probably ad-driven. Through the central "inventory management system", you can manage the unique tags for every stamp, regardless of what it actually is once it is on your computer. So if an online game wants to put up stamps for custom armor and a month of free play time, they can pay the central database a per-item fee to register it, and then go around stamping them out. You could also do coupons for the local stores, or even just flat-out billboard ads.

It's actually less obnoxious than normal ads because you, the player, can rip them down and throw them away (by "taking" them). The central database still gets the ad money.

But it'd be a pretty dull game if it was just about ads. So we have to think about how and what people would want to share.

Let's put it in three categories:

1) I want people to see this cool thing - the display case reason.

2) I want to put out rare and interesting things that make the world a bit more magical - the unicorn reason.

3) I want to share and work together on this thing - the garden reason.

The first category would consist of content you created, or links you've found. Basically, you could slap images and youtube videos and stuff onto various surfaces. The world could get very crowded if they never faded, so I think most of these would fade slightly if someone viewed them and did not "thumbs up" them. So after, say, 20 unique views without a thumbs-up, they vanish entirely. "Peeling" these off would not remove them from the world, but simply keep a local copy (if allowed). Depending on the rules, you may report illegal/inappropriate content, which would be removed/gated in much the same manner as any other kind of hosting service.

The second category is driven by the urge to make hidden things in the world, hidden things that people can find. For example, you might stumble across a red "thread" on a wall, which if you follow it, leads to a real-world grotto and a geotag-style treasure box. Or maybe you simulate how the night sky would look if it were completely dark in this city, and then paint the eves of buildings with it. Or you paint a mural, a little bit every day, so that visitors feel the need to check back frequently.

This kind of sharing is generally not quite as "loud" as the first kind, and is often slightly secret or hard to find. They're half treasure hunt. That's fine, sounds fun. Imagine finding a mural in midair (by the shadows the mural casts), and then spending fifteen minutes using your hand and the flashlight to pan across it and see it.

The third category - the social and cooperative creation of content in this virtual world - is definitely the most interesting to me. Imagine if there was a garden in some downtown nook - a virtual garden. People could come by and plant things, harvest things, and so on. Or there's a cooperative scene, where people can drop their "Mii"s and watch them play around. Or any number of other things.

The problem with this category is trolls. I imagine every site would need an "owner" who could veto, roll back, and ban. That might get logistically irritating. But, on the other hand, it offers another way to monetize: "if you want something that runs and changes over time and isn't, say, a static youtube video, you need to pay $5 per 100m of sim..."

Hmm.

Narrative Games Redux

2011-10-31T08:49:00.001-07:00

If you're not familiar with the basic argument about the role of narrative (story) in games, this essay is not a good place to start. This essay is about a specific approach.

I'd like to talk about the idea of adaptive narrative. That is, a story which changes as you interact with it, and not with a dialog tree.

If you're like me, you've played Heavy Rain. If not, a quick summary is: the game has no real gameplay, it's mostly a giant branching path story where you try to figure out who the killer is. Spoiler: it's the one person who's definitely not he killer.

As games go, Heavy Rain is a bit of a bust, more like an interactive movie where you can choose which characters die, when.

If you're like me, you've played the old Blade Runner adventure game. There are several games where you are investigating a crime in something like real time, and the NPCs are also advancing in their own plots at the same time. Blade Runner is simply the oldest one I know about. Like most of these games, the way you can interfere with other characters' scripted timelines means that there are a wide variety of endings. Like Heavy Rain, it features not a whole lot of actual gameplay... but it's an adventure game, so that's par for the course.

If you're like me, you've played Catherine, known for its combination of box-pushing puzzle sections and fan service. If you haven't played Catherine, you may be unaware of its bar and nightmare plateau scenes, where you can talk to people, let time pass, and in general feel like you're impacting on their lives. Catherine has gameplay, but it could be replaced with any gameplay you care to name and nobody would notice: it has no relation to the story progression.

In my long history of failing to create adaptive narratives, I've tried many things. But I'd like to consider an approach based on these three games.

The core of the idea is that there are other characters, and they do things in some kind of (probably scripted) timeline. While time doesn't have to advance at a constant march, the point is that their stories advance when yours does.

There are three kinds of "inflection points" I'd like to consider. That is to say, there are three ways I'd like to let the player interact with the NPCs.

1) When the NPC's timeline brings them into collision with the PCs timeline during an event sequence. This could be happenstance (they rob a bank you happen to be at) or it could be that one of you is seeking the other out on purpose. Either way, the interaction offers a clear chance to change the trajectory of one or both characters. This is a common method used by branching plotlines today.

2) When the player, in his free exploring, sticks his nose into an NPC's life. AKA "sidequest syndrome". To be honest, I don't like this this method. Most games that use this method do not use it to radically alter anything, they are primarily subquests or only affect very minor characters. For example, the romance plots in Mass Effect, or the way you can try to free the slaves in any Jedi game ever. This is mostly distinct from type 1 in that they rely on the player exploring to the right physical place and then putting his life on hold to do some subquest.

3) Lastly, a subset of NPCs (and the player) can gather into one place when they are "off duty". These are quiet times in everyone's plot lines, and serve much the same role as a safehouse in a horror game.

In these sections, you can talk to a lot of different NPCs, perhaps in phases as the "off duty" time wears on. You will get to know them better as characters, and form a bond with them. There is also the option of interfering with their plotlines by giving them items, advice, or introducing them to other NPCs.

It's this "off duty" section I'd like to see more of.

Right now, most of our adaptive narratives are set around the idea of giving the player an illusion of freedom while, at most, offering them two choices. Basically, if you can imagine it, the current method is a lot of parallel lines that occasionally jitter slightly to one side or the other as the player bumps them.

The "off duty section" method is more like if those parallel lines converge - three meet here, five meet there. Then they separate and go back to being parallel. This has a lot of advantages, in theory:

A) Keeping up with the Joneses. Because the off duty sections are reliable as a heartbeat, the players can get updated on how the plot line of each character is progressing. It serves as a regular and centralized way to keep up to date with everyone. This allows for many plot lines to be active at once, and for a much longer period of time, rather than the short bursts of sidequests most games use.

B) Deflection as gameplay. By bringing everyone together, you can weave the plot lines in a regular fashion, such that the momentary lulls appear at more or less the same time for every character. The player then has to choose which characters will receive his resources and help, and in what way. So you take an ordinary set of simple branches, and suddenly there is choice and gameplay.

C) Closed-world. This system works great in a non-open-world game, where the player is not allowed to randomly wander into the NPCs' normal lives. In this way, a lot of the scenes and activities of the NPCs can be "just talk", rather than actually being represented in the game engine or with cutscenes.

That's my thinking. You?

Tactical Depth

2011-10-04T08:25:00.000-07:00

I've been having a fairly in-depth conversation among my G+ game design circle that's got me thinking about some of my instincts. In this case, I am making a casual tactical game, and rejecting or accepting various suggested improvements.

One of the things which arises fairly frequently is that I reject something that sounds reasonable. For example, because this game features retiring characters when they reach a certain level, you'll have characters in your roster that are all across the level spectrum. A level 30 knight and a level 3 pistolier.

To make it so these characters work together well, there are two basic options: a variety of techniques which allow characters to work effectively together even with low-level characters, or a mentoring system where the weaker character is artificially improved while within a few tiles of the higher level character.

Of these, I choice the mentoring system. I did this not because it had the most depth, but because it had the highest depth to headspace ratio.

What I mean by that is that it's very easy to remember "weak character within 2 tiles of strong character", and the resulting dynamics are quite interesting.

On the other hand, even though the tactical options may be even deeper using work-together abilities, they require a lot more memory. Now the player has to remember "strong knight A can click on weak knight B to enhance stat C if within D tiles", and "strong pistolier E can stand near weak knight B to automatically fire on enemy C if they attack using ranged weapons..."

In a casual game, you have to keep the headspace as low as possible, because people will only play it for short amounts of time and won't be able to track so many highly varied pieces. Because of this, I've cut a lot of complexity out of the game. The idea is to keep the core play tactically deep but not using up much headspace: two players who have never met should be able to simply swap cell phones and play each other's battle scenario from the midpoint and immediately understand most of how the team operates together. No difficult-to-grasp swarms of details like you get in Disgaea or Civilization.

"Deep play, not complex play." That's my motto here.

Shift shift shift

2011-09-28T09:47:00.000-07:00

As I was chatting with somebody, I realized that something I think is obvious apparently isn't obvious at all. So I'll mention it:

We're in the middle of a shift, a technology shift that is changing the way everyone does everything.

The "computer" is such a young technology. It took thousands of years for humanity to really feel the effects of the plow. Hell, the book is barely a teenage technology. How the computer is today has absolutely nothing to do with how the computer will end up being. They may look vaguely similar and sound vaguely similar when described, but it'll be like the difference between when books were hand-copied by scribes and when they could be printed cheaply enough that commoners could read them.

We've always pointed out that computers have changed society as much as the plow, as much as the printing press. But apparently some of us seem to think that it's past tense, as if how society is now is the final result of the changes computers can create.

*Bzzt* wrong. No surprise, if you actually think a bit: computers have a long way to go, and we are going to go that distance with them.

A lot of the devices and hubbub we are seeing are the emergence of computers as a complex ecosystem instead of as largely independent little worlds. E-book readers and cell phones rely heavily on other computers and communication to servers in order to do everything they do.

We (well, I) get upset about this perceived slavery to an outside force. In truth, it's just basic ecology. The fundamental pattern is unavoidable: we will be in a future where computation and content needs to be thought of as ecosystems rather than a standalone libraries. I would like us to create ecosystems that are more robust and less repressive, but even I cannot deny that ecosystems are coming: individual devices will become less and less distinct from the mass of computation floating around you.

We like to talk about embedding computers in our clothes and all sorts of other classic "future tech" stuff. But the truth is that those sorts of ideas are fluff. Maybe they happen, maybe they don't. Either way, the heart of our growing and changing societies is all about the blurring of the lines between devices.

Other changes?

Lots, I'm sure, but none I feel as confident about.

Superheroes

2011-09-24T13:13:00.000-07:00

Spent a painful afternoon in the comic shop. Every week I hear worse and worse news about superhero comics (especially DC comics), so I finally went to take a look, courtesy of incompetent electricians disconnecting my computer again again again.

Superhero comics have always been an interesting topic for me, because even though I read them, I was never a tremendous fan.

But dismissing them as "male power fantasies" isn't... well, no, wait. I think they can safely be dismissed as that. However, they have filled a different niche in the past: they told stories of heroes embodying modern culture fighting villains that embodied modern culture.

Superheroes spent a long time competing for space with other paradigms that fought for the same niche: pulp adventure, space opera, noir detective stories. You might claim that superheroes have this fundamental staying power because they express some facet of our culture and ourselves in some particularly good way.

The truth is that superheroes simply outshouted the competition. The only thing superheroes have going for them is versatility: you can put just about any superhero in just about any story, with no real concern for canon or restraint. So that's just what they did. For a century.

Superheroes are a volume product. Marvel's invention of the "mutant" was a brilliant way to mass-produce iconic characters for every kind of story ever.

But, like any aging market, the superhero industry giants have failed to adapt and controlled their products too tightly.

As you will be aware if you've ever actually tried to do anything in the superhero realm, it's basically impossible. Your superheroes, even if you manage to find a name that was never used before (impossible), are probably breaking some kind of trademark regarding their suit or powers.

Moreover, the fundamental idea of the superhero is fading. From a character representing the heroic ideals of a modern culture, it's pretty clearly devolved into a simple power fantasy with fetish elements. Nothing shouts this louder than DC's pathetic reboot. DC's reboot also shouts that the industry is at the edge, out of time.

Some people want to save the superhero. I'd like to let it die. There are many new kinds of heroes waiting in the wings, but they can't come into play until superheroes have stepped down, especially since many of them would be considered superheroes and marginalized by that association if used now.

Superheroes have nothing more to say. They never really had much to say in the first place, although they have been involved in some pretty decent stories, especially when they cover topics such as racism and terror. Still, there are a lot of other heroes waiting to step in, let's go ahead and give the spandex-plus-accidental-superpowers a rest.

Worlds to Play In

2011-09-19T08:09:00.000-07:00

Well, today's been a pretty big day for Star Trek vs Star Wars noise. Nothing surprising, but it's a good opportunity to discuss what makes a setting compelling for games and fans.

I've run games in many universes - Star Wars most, but also Star Trek and some others such as Serenity/Firefly. The games I run do not use the official rules for these settings, because those rules suck.

Fundamentally, this makes the games I run more like fanfic than, say, playing KotOR. I've personally found that what seems to make a setting draw in a lot of long-term fanfic also makes it rich for people who want to play games in that setting - whether they are unofficial games like mine, or multi-million dollar computer RPGs.

With that in mind, let's take a quick look at popular settings, flash-in-the-pan settings, and how you might adjust your own designs to make them more... fanfic friendly? Let's say "enduring".

...

The settings of Star Wars and Star Trek are both good examples, because they appear similar at first glance and utterly different at second glance. So we can pull out both similarities and contrasting elements, and discuss why both are so enduring and popular.

Please note, we're not talking about specific canon elements. We're talking about the fundamental pieces of the setting, as might be used by fanfic writers, game designers, and idle teenagers everywhere.

Both Star Wars and Star Trek share a specific trait: their Space Opera roots. Both involve traveling to new and interesting places, but rarely alone or penniless: you usually have a group of hyper-competent friends, a kickass starship, cool powers, and/or a whole government pretty much blanket backing you. Similarly, you are restricted as to how you can behave, or you'll find your backing pulled or your powers turning against you.

This is pretty much the exact same setting as all of the old "adventurer archaeologist", "Private Eye noir", and "great white hunter" stories, and so on. I'm sure that in the days of ancient Rome, they had stories about the Roman legion's escapades in far-off lands that filled the same niche.

Obviously, this "backed exploration" allows for basically infinite expansion, and even if you choose to do something which doesn't involve a lot of exploration (such as Deep Space 9, where you're actually stationary), you still benefit from the fact that the universe has that kind of wide net already built right into it, and you can bring the exploration to you.

I suggest that this is the fundamental method to making your settings more enduring.

Take a look at other popular franchises: in Hogwarts, students explore more and more of their magical world backed by the support of their fellow students, teachers, and artifacts. In Naruto, ninja range far and wide to discover unusual (usually ninja-related) cultures and situations, and fight them. In Avatar, small groups of heroes hop on a giant flying monster and explore their complex, highly varied world. In Ranma 1/2 (don't laugh, it was basically the Naruto of its day), the main characters encounter thousands of crazy martial artists and there is a distinct feeling that there are an infinite number of ever more unlikely challenges out there, but you always have your (admittedly pretty useless) family to help.

Are there any popular settings which aren't built around this basic principle?

If you choose to build a setting using this approach, your main concern is how you spend your time. You have to hook into your audience enough that they begin to imagine other adventures right away. You can't let them watch a few episodes and then escape.

Because of this, you need to develop your primary backing and your competing exploration teams right away.

Your primary backing should be obvious. You're not just exploring new places. You're exploring new places with specific kinds of people at your side, specific interesting resources, specific restrictions.

If you're in Star Trek, you're exploring with a crew of trained professionals and a top-of-the-line starship, as well as plenty of magic technobabble. If you're in Star Wars, you're exploring in a dingy ship, maybe only one or two companions, but you can see the future and have a freaking light saber. In both cases, you are also bound: you can play fast and loose with the prime directive, but any actively evil captain will get their ass kicked by the Federation. Similarly, falling to the dark side is an ever-present threat that will rip the character out of the player's hands and leave them a villainous NPC.

So quickly demonstrate those details in the very first story. Make it clear the ship is funded by a benevolent super-government. Make it clear that you have psychic powers but they can make you crazy if you step out of line. You are adventuring. You have resources, and you have restrictions. Show them.

While creating your initial adventures, you'll also want to establish your co-adventurers, your competition. The entities and cultures you first encounter when reading/playing will be the ones that are assumed to be co-explorers anyway, so make them with that in mind.

As examples go, in Star Wars the competition is not the Sith, but the Empire. Later, criminal syndicates are the main competition. Wherever you go, there is a risk that they got there first, that they are entrenched, or that they will seek to steal it away from you.

In Star Trek, you have the Klingons - the first other explorer introduced, and still the most durable to the day. Until the Klingons, there were really no co-explorers. The Klingons were the first entities that A) could challenge the Federation to some extent, and B) were interested in doing so.

Of course, Star Trek tends to mint co-explorers for each series. Nothing wrong with that.

This kind of competition - another entity that is exploring and searching just like you - is critical for several reasons.

1) It serves as contrast. 90% of the time, the competition doesn't have the same behavioral restrictions that you do. So you are competing 'at a handicap'. Except... it also gives the writers a chance to show why operating with your restrictions is beneficial.

2) It serves as pressure. Knowing that there is someone else out there - an evil version of you - means you can't just freely waltz around. Sometimes, you'll enter a contested zone. Sometimes, you'll need to fight tooth and nail. Without competition, each adventure is simply you tromping on the locals, or the locals tromping on you.

...

Are there other factors that are important?

Sure. Design sense, popularity, music, character design... lots of other things can help or hurt you. But the differences between the popular settings we've mentioned show that none of these things has a "best" approach.

The only thing that seems to have a clear "best" approach is the fundamental way you base your setting around exploring with backing, restrictions, and competition.

Physical Feel

2011-09-15T11:37:00.001-07:00

I've suddenly become very interested in physical games. Not like board games, but like these.

There are a lot of amazing things you can do with physical games that you can't do with a genericized controller, from the "snap" of the box closing itself when you lose to the feel of moving your body in the game's physical space. Even something as simple as those tiltable wooden "marble labyrinths" have a more immersive feel to them than their virtual variants.

It's fun to think of the cool things you could make. For example, that karate-chop game looks pretty amenable to modular design. You could have a lot of different modules and, as the game progresses, it demands that you put more modules on the base unit, to have more complex interactions.

But, being that my skills at actual electronics are nonexistent, I have to stay pretty much in the software world. This got me thinking about how you can add that kind of depth, sharpness, and immersiveness to a game using a much more generic controller (for example, keyboard or 360 controller).

Some games have done a pretty good job: Katamari Damacy probably reigns supreme at this, although I suppose the Kinect has bred some challengers. But I'd love to hear about others. What games can you think of that have interesting and immersive controls? How would you implement such a thing?

Inverted Economics

2011-09-01T08:27:00.000-07:00

Thought experiment time!

I'm sick of thinking about economics in terms of how goods are distributed. Instead, I'd like to try thinking of them in terms of how people organize to create goods.

As a quick example, in most ancient societies, local lords held control over the peasants and organized them into farm lots. The majority of people were on these farm lots, usually paying taxes in food.

There are a few competing theories as to exactly when and why cities arose, but it is relatively clear that the local lords had a tough time controlling cityfolk in the same way as rural farmers. If you think about it in terms of organizing people instead of distributing goods, cities allowed people to organize a lot better, but there was no suitable structure to help them organize.

A hodgepodge of approaches were tried, including limiting merchants to specific cities/zones, enforcing family businesses, supporting unions for craftsmen, and so on. But these methods were not really very good at organizing cityfolk, and cities had limited economic potential for a long time - springing up to support the local lords, or to support a mining operation, or as a trade region, or in support of some other pursuit that was not fundamentally about being organized cityfolk, but about supporting another kind of organized operation.

We like to use terms like "capitalism", but the term has no any precise meaning when you think of them in these terms. Instead of talking about how people organize to create goods, it talks about how goods are distributed.

If you look at what we have called "capitalism", you can see several underlying organizational methods.

If we start with the industrial revolution, we can see that the technologies of the revolution had been knocking around for a while. It was only when the culture figured out how to organize people to use them efficiently that we saw the era change. People began to organize into hyper-local groups near a specific factory or machine.

The need for people to be super local finally made cities useful in and of themselves, rather than as support for other pursuits. People produced large amounts of goods this way, whereas fifty craftsmen in the same building before the industrial revolution would not be significantly more effective than fifty craftsmen in fifty different buildings.

After not too terribly long, this simple focus slowly shifted into a new "develop/distribute" method of organization. While there are factories aplenty, they are not the driving method of organization. Instead, a factory is simply a chip in the pile of a corporation: a group of people who manage supply lines, distribution channels, product development, and so on.

A corporation is not hyper-local. While it has components that are quite local (offices), it also has quite a lot of travel as people move products, ideas, and employees around the world. I might call it "dendritic" rather than "local".

It makes sense that we, coming out of a develop/distribute era, think of economics in terms of development and distribution of goods. That's why we have terms like "communist" and "capitalist". But I don't see that it's a particularly fundamental approach to economics.

I'm not judging: the dendritic approach has allowed for science to flourish, which I consider a major, major plus. However, it has also allowed us to do some pretty outlandishly horrible things.

Nowadays we're still in that dendritic system. However, our "always on" communication grid (cell phones, internet, twitter, etc) is becoming more and more pronounced.

It's clear to me that we'll enter a new phase, a method of people organizing that would be considered odd and unlikely if we look at it right now. I'll call it "maelstrom" organization, although only because we're not actually in it yet, so we don't understand it very well. It is people organizing rapidly and (usually) temporarily to deploy a specific product in specific amounts to specific markets.

Exactly how it ends up working will depend on how technology progresses. If robotics become more standard and more useful, I can see a huge number of the jobs we have these days becoming fully automated. Starbucks is one human with five robotic baristas. His job is to make friendly with the customers and to maintain the robots.

Even our desk jobs will become obsolete as expert data systems and scrapers mean we can do a week of market research in ten minutes.

I think this is why we have this "new low" of economic production. Our economy is still stuck in its dendritic form, but that form is no longer very useful, because the people that normally organized at the heart of those nodes have been replaced by technology, or at least by people from far, far away.

Our economists all throw their hands up and talk about how goods are distributed, how money flows through markets...

But it's an interesting thought experiment to think, instead, about how people organize. Let the distribution and markets take care of themselves for a bit, and think about how people organize.

Edit: since writing this, I've decided to call the new kind of thing I'm talking about "laminar organization/economics" rather than "maelstrom organization/economics".

Asynchronous Participation

2011-08-23T08:20:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about creative games that use player generated content, and the various schemes to share and remix and use that content.

There are various "small scale" methods where the players generate some content in a limited fashion that is then used in the world. Eve Online is a great example of this: the player generated content is primarily limited to factions and corporations, and if the players want to generate physical goods they are limited to the goods in the master list.

But I'm thinking of a "deep" method where the players actually generate the majority of the in-game content. Second Life is the canonical example, and there are precious few others (Spore, the Sims, etc).

Most of them follow a "massively single player" model, where one player creates the whole of a given thing (for example, a house or hat or monster) and distributes it to others.

But what of an actually multiplayer model? Where content creation is actively multiplayer, with several people working together on something?

As I see it, there are three methods to multiplayer content creation.

1) Simultaneous participation. This is where players are working on the same thing with loose and informal boundaries. This is extremely vulnerable to griefing, whether on purpose or just because the other player has a different idea/is incompetent.

To minimize griefing in these situations, it's common to reduce player investment in the product, reduce algorithmic reliance between areas of the product, and restrict the participants to invite-only. All three of these are things I want to avoid.

2) Walled participation. This is when players work on the same thing, but with extremely clear boundaries. For example, if each player designs one of the characters that will end up in the party. Or if one player designs the starship model and the other designs the code that makes it move and fire. Or one person builds the level and the other builds the NPC bots within it.

Walled participation has some good points and some bad points, and it's worth keeping in mind. But I'm also not interested in that for this post.

3) Asynchronous participation. This is when one player will do a bit, then let another player do a bit, then another, and so on.

This is less subject to griefing than simultaneous participation because you can do strict version control and roll back to before the griefer did anything, or fork it to allow the griefers their own version. This is much harder with simultaneous participation because the boundaries as to what changes are what becomes very, very blurry very rapidly.

Asynchronous participation has the downside that the maximum "intent chunk" is pretty low, because each player only maintains control for a short piece of the whole project. If your intent is to build a starship in a Star Trek Federation style, and you leave and come back to find a beautiful starship built in Star Wars Empire style, it's going to be impossible for you to enforce your own intent without undoing or ignoring huge amounts of useful work.

Still, I believe this asynchronous participation deserves more consideration.

One thing to consider is that we may actually be thinking about it wrong. We're thinking in terms of big projects. What if we think in terms of little projects?

Instead of thinking about it like architecture, what if we think about it like improv? What if each player's action leads to a response which literally builds on that action?

For example, let's say there's a shared town and someone blows up one of the buildings in it (perhaps for fun, perhaps in the course of some adventure). Instead of rolling back and considering that griefing, you can use classic improv methods and build on it.

Move a bunch of squatters from a marginalized neighbor state into the rubble. Reveal a magic door to an underground area full of monsters. Have the explosion break windows in all the houses for a mile around. Send out an insurance hit squad to collect payment from that nasty team of adventurers. Small or large, just use the classic "yes, and" , "yes, but", and "yes, then" statements. Make the other player's action seem like it was perfect, cleared the way brilliantly, or added a kernel of a grand idea.

The idea here is to let go of your pure and lofty intentions. You don't need to build a city that is exactly like you want it to be: you need to build a city that people live in. It's possible to take content from other players who are interacting and use that to springboard in a new and vigorous direction.

A key reason this matters is because most players are not virtuoso content creators. Most players are only going to create/manipulate content clumsily, and often only in the course of doing other things. To pull them into the world proper, you need to have a way for those clumsy newbies to get pulled in with interesting new details, a way to make their contributions valuable.

On the other side, you may wonder how the players capable of creating good content would benefit. The answer is that most of the high-tier creators wouldn't benefit. They are people who enjoy working for a long time on perfect things, and then releasing them into the wild.

However, there is a type of content creator not really tapped: the event/questline coordinator. These are players whose content creation skills are probably mediocre, and may mostly be about choosing what existing content to replicate and stick into an area. But these are very valuable players, because they tie the player base together into a fun mesh.

So, what I'm saying is that asynchronous participation can A) allow beginners to contribute meaningfully, B) not interfere with high-level content creation, and C) give rise to a new kind of content creator that serves to bind the players together and build a world.

Synesthetic Math Toy

2011-08-16T18:39:00.001-07:00

I made a synesthetic math toy. You can find it here.

I'm interested in synesthesia. Many synesthetics see colors, shapes, and motion when they look at numbers. I decided that it would be interesting to see what a math toy that duplicated that effect would be like.

The toy I created doesn't attempt to closely simulate any kind of synesthesia, partly due to the limitations of working on a flat screen and partly because I developed it in a weekend. However, the dancing, colored, trailing numbers are reasonably similar to the sorts of things a synesthetic person might see.

My question was simple: how are numbers and math different if the numbers "speak" to you?

When you try the toy out, you may be very confused initially, but that's to be expected. Try playing with it enough that you begin to get used to the numbers, what the various permutations mean. There is no randomness in their colors or activities.

Let me know what you find, keeping in mind that this toy is definitely just a toy.

Caveats: it's untested. I made it in a weekend. There are no alternate sizes, use your browser's zoom function if it's the wrong size.

http://projectperko.com/Numbers/

Geeky

2011-08-11T14:26:00.001-07:00

Unfortunately, due to a mishap involving a bar and a randomized playlist, I've had Cee Lo stuck in my head. The best way to deal is to make a geeky variant!

So here's the aging internet meme called a song: Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy", except this version is Geeky.

I remember when, I remember my first telescope
There was something so pleasant about deep space
Endless twinkling stars make galactic lace

When you're out there in the freezing cold
Yeah, watching the stars
Endless distance marked by the passing of light
Scale gives me a fright

Does that make me geeky?
Does that make me geekaaaayy?
Does that make me geeeeeeekay?
Probably

And I hope that you are
Aware that your life is made
of starstuff
And that's enough

Come on now, what do you, what do you
What do you think you are?
Ha ha, cells and anatomy
And you pull out life's tree?

Well, I think you're geeeekay!
I think you're geeeekaaaaay
I think you're geeeeekay
Just like meeeeee

My heroes have the brains
To see the stars on a galactic limb
And all I remember
Is thinking, I want to be like them

Ever since I was little
Since I was little
It looked like fun!
And it's no coincidence I've come
I'll fly when I'm done

But maybe I'm geeeeeekay
Maybe you're geeeeekay
Maybe we're geeee-eee-eeekay
Probably!

Travel Guide RPGs

2011-08-08T19:43:00.000-07:00

I was recently reading an indie RPG rulebook when I began to get bogged down in endless pages of lists and descriptions. It got me thinking.

In a paper book, those lists are not so bad, because a book is fundamentally arranged into chunks. You can flip through a book. However, this was in PDF form. The endless pages broke my immersion completely. In my own works, I am also aware of this restriction.

I was thinking about the fundamental nature of this kind of data. Charts and tables and level perks and item lists. Let's think about them.

First, let's talk about it from the most fundamental level. We use these long lists and charts to inform the player of something. That something is a stack of specific and unique things within a given category. So let's think about that very thing: lists of specific and unique things.

I have seen plenty of tabletop RPGs that don't list specific or unique things. They rely on the players and the GM to develop unique things over the course of play. So it's possible to do it without lists.

But lists of specific things do provide an advantage. They provide a terrain of play. A bundle of experiences-to-be. They are a method for the author to plan out a party's experiences, highlighting interesting confluences the rules create, pieces of world ready for adventure, and the like.

The rules and setting provided by the game are rich with possibility, but the players and GM probably can't see them as clearly as the author. The design of an RPG doesn't end with rules and loose setting, but begins there: lists of unique things are stepping stones and landmarks to draw the players towards the interesting features of your game.

So we have lists. Critical hit charts to put color in your fights. Item lists to allow the players to weigh the pros and cons of various equipment. Monster lists to provide instant, prepackaged tactical mayhem. Race lists to provide options for a new character when the monster list gets a bit too unforgiving.

If we accept that a list of unique things is a landmark rather than a straightjacket, wouldn't that completely change the way we approach things, even if we still insist on a paper book?

"Here is a list of equipment" becomes "Here, these are balanced weapons". "Here is a stack of monsters" becomes "These are ingredients for your fights!"

I'm going to try to think of the bulk of a rule book - everything but the most basic setting and rules - as a guidebook to the dynamics of the RPG. Like any good guidebook, it doesn't tell you where to go, exactly. It just says "this place over here is interesting, and you can get a killer view of the waterfall on the way!"

But that doesn't change the fact that lists are total shit in PDF form. So... let's not use PDF.

Wouldn't it make the most sense to release a tabletop RPG as a wiki? Fuck the paper book. Give me a wiki, each list its own entry. A travel guide to your universe, wiki form.

Classes in RPGs

2011-08-03T09:35:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about class structure in RPGs. I mean classes like "warrior, mage, rogue", obviously.

Classes grow out of the kinds of resources and mini-conflicts that arise from the game's challenges. If games have similar challenges, they result in similar classes. D&D 4th is a notably refined version of this, where the classes are descended from super-clear tactical roles (controller, defender, leader and striker). But all games with classes have the same fundamental idea: every class addresses a particular opportunity or challenge within the game's framework.

This changes based on the framework in question. In early D&D, for example, you had clerics and thieves: both classes addressed the less combat-centric parts of the game. In modern D&D, these have been slowly co-opted into combat roles as the game has become more combat-centric.

Most modern games with classes revolve around a specific kind of challenge which I call "open combat". Basically, everything revolves around damage: giving and receiving and controlling it. The four roles in D&D 4th ed can be easily restated within in this framework. A defender excels at absorbing damage, a striker at dealing it, and a leader at increasing everyone's capabilities to do those things. A controller is probably better thought of as two classes - one which deals AOE/specialty damage and one which interferes with the enemy's ability to deal damage.

Some of you are probably holding up a hand and going "wait, that's not quite right...", but please don't get sidetracked by the particulars: I'm using D&D as an easy example, I'm not trying to analyze every nuance of a particular system. I'm saying that in general, classes exist specifically to deal with tactical challenges presented by the game rules, and D&D's classes are a good example of that. The thousand of other games which also revolve around dealing and receiving damage in open combat also divvy up classes in much the same way.

However, that's not the only kind of challenge which is available.

For example, in a game where range is an incredibly important factor and damage less so, you start to divvy up classes based on their optimal range, speed, and ability to interact with cover and terrain. This is significantly more limited in D&D, even using miniatures, because the damage dealt is still more important than the range it is dealt at. In military wargames the classes are often more delineated by their range and maneuverability rather than by health and damage characteristics. You have grenadiers, tanks, snipers, riflemen, short-range infantry for urban zones, and so on.

In fact, you could divvy it up the same way as we did before, only with "range and mobility" rather than "damage given and received".

A defender excels at surviving attacks from range - infantry, crawling along under cover. A striker excels at dealing damage at range - snipers, tanks, artillery. A leader enhances everyone's range and mobility - scouts, ATVs, command vehicles, etc. Controllers are either A) anti-tank/grenadier units or B) engineer corps to dig trenches and set up bridges and such.

Of course, this ignores things like air support, because I didn't include that kind of challenge in my theoretical game. By creating gameplay elements, you alter the nature of the classes required to cover them: if I added aerospace control, I now have to not only add in the classes for air-on-air challenges, but also the classes for gluing air and ground together (air infantry transport, anti-air ground vehicles, bombers, etc).

The more diverse your gameplay becomes, the more classes and the more specialized those classes will be. Hence the boringness of playing an old-style cleric or rogue: their specialties were outside of the "fun" part of the game, so they spent a lot of time just hanging around being bad at the fun stuff.

So... that's my design thought of the day. What sort of challenges will you base your game around? What sort of classes will be required to facilitate the strategy of those challenges? How fun is it to use those classes and manage the tactics required?

Degradation of Privacy

2011-07-27T07:45:00.001-07:00

I guess this stance is an unpopular one - or, rather, an unfashionable one - but I really hate when companies gather data about me and my friends.

I'm bringing this up here because I catch a lot of flak about it from even fairly geeky friends. So let me explain why I am against corporations collecting and retaining information. More specifically, why I think it should be illegal for corporations to use facial recognition software or otherwise "deanonymize" information.

Let's start small.

Point one: corporations cannot be trusted to keep data safely. Corporate IT practices are notoriously poor, and there have been hundreds of examples of accounts (even ones with financial information such as credit card numbers) being stolen by the hundreds of thousands. Sony is the most recent loud example, but Citibank and others show it is hardly a black swan.

So, even before we get to things like privacy, corporations can't even be trusted to keep the data they actually need to operate day to day safe. There are plenty of practices that can keep user data safe even if the corporate database is hacked or leaked. These all involve not keeping data. Only keeping hashes, discarding the credit card number except perhaps the last four digits for identification, and so on.

Some data are less critical. It's a pain when someone steals 500,000 client email addresses, but it's probably not going to result in your clients actually being harmed significantly - just an uptick in the amount of useless spam being caught by the filters. Except that's not actually true: that data can help deanonymize other data, which is a problem most people don't bother considering.

Point two: Data give corporations advantages. Corporations are businesses, 99.99999% of which are out to get as much money as possible. Even without any information about you, corporations build their products to lock you in and drill your pockets as much as possible.

While I don't like this much, I understand that it's not feasible to magically make corporations stop doing that. So let's proceed with the idea that any advantage the corporation can get will go to mining its consumers as much as possible.

Normally, this is moderated by competition. If one company is too abusive, you can switch to a competitor that offers a very similar product.

However, data are nontransferable value. It's best to think of data as the on-line equivalent of "location, location, location!" The reason eBay is popular is because eBay is popular: the mass of data it has - the number of transactions, the ratings history, and so on - makes it more valuable to post your stuff to eBay than a smaller competitor. The only competitors likely to succeed are those specializing in very limited fields where the noise on eBay is actually a downside.

This is true of social data as well. A big difficulty for most people moving from Facebook to Google+ was the need to recreate their social network. Google+ reduced this difficulty by offering up suggestions based on your email history. Google was able to (somewhat) overcome the mass of Facebook's data by leveraging its own, similar data. However, a social site such as Appleseed does not have data to leverage, and is therefore at a tremendous disadvantage.

This is not simply value-add data, either. Having information about your users allows you to advertise to them as well as actually make their experience better. Amazon is a great example of this, where it will advertise hundreds of targeted ads at you every page - "also bought X" "if you like Y, try Z" "EVERYONE IS BUYING A KINDLE OH GOD WHY WON'T YOU BUY A KINDLE YOU BASTARD LOOK HERE IS EVERY KINDLE EVER JUST PICK ONE BUY IT PLEEEEEEEEAAAASE!"

And so on.

This is a business advantage. Better advertising of related services and products is an advantage. It can generate revenue via ad fees or via higher conversion rates on direct sales.

Summary: think of data as location. The more data someone has, the closer they are to your house. That means that you're more likely to shop there, and if they open another store in their mall, you'll be more likely to shop at that new store. Data are a direct business advantage, and you're not likely to drive an hour to go to some interesting new place no matter how fancy-pants it is in comparison.

Point three: data can be combined, and it is easier to do so if you have more data. Some of you may have noticed I've been sticking to "data as plural", normally a pedantic and irritating choice. This is because I think one detail most people miss about data is that it is plural. Data is not like a bouncy ball. Data are like water in a cup.

Companies can combine data. This is one reason why companies frequently sell data to each other. To date, 99% of the data on the web about you has been more or less the same: your name and email address are the details that can get sold, your home address and credit card information are the details that cannot be sold.

But these days, there are a lot more details out there than you might think. What movies you like to rent, where you shop, who you phoned, what topics of conversation are common in your emails and social network chats, what kind of porn you surf for, which aliases are yours and not somebody else's, what your political preferences are, what kind of stupid shit you said ten years ago.

Most of this data is pretty useless to most people. Most corporations don't even care about it. But it is out there. It is really easy to trawl your Facebook or Twitter or Google+ account to collect a list of everyone you talk to and who talks to you.

Right now, your Amazon.com account is tied to an email address. Your Google+ address, probably. So Amazon can automatically, with no humans involved, look to see who is in your circles and visa-versa. And, next time you go to Amazon.com, it'll say "Hey, Greg bought this book, you should buy it too!" Of course, Greg bought "Animal Sex and You: A Practical Guide", so it might be a popup you wish you'd never seen...

Think it's outlandish? Here's a fun experiment! Go to Amazon.com, and search for wishlist. Just randomly punch in people's gmail accounts. I got a hit rate of around 20%.

Point four: no, really, data can be combined. I'm not joking. I don't really think I stressed this enough. Data can be automatically aggregated and combined. Even if you're not involved.

For example, if one of my friends posts a picture of me and then labels my face, I am now in the datastream. Especially if he labels me by email address or other unique identifier. Moreover, with fun facial recognition software, it's possible to then go and find out other pictures that are likely to be about me. Even if I'm not in the system as a user, the system has information about me.

Ever link to someone? "Oh, my friend Jerry posted this on Facebook: kalinkylinky". Congrats, your friend Jerry has now been linked to you, even if he's not even on the same service as you. Even if he has you blocked because you're a creepy stalker.

Think making your privacy settings strict will save you? Nope, it's pretty easy for me to reconstruct your social network using your friends who do NOT have strict privacy settings.

Let me make that clear: even if you set your account to strict privacy or don't participate at all, if you have any connections to other people who aren't quite so strict, your data can be easily reconstructed.

This is the same concept as "deanonymization". It's easy to take data that is supposed to be private or anonymous and link it up to a particular person using data from another source (or from the same source but another vector - IE, your friends' accounts).

Point five: data may be used to discriminate against you. Assuming that you don't care about all that above, let me remind you that data can be used against you, and already probably is.

Most employers will at least perform a simple search on your name when you interview them. Many employ a "drilling" service that will trawl for all accounts that can be linked to you and then trawl through their posts, looking for references to things like drugs.

These are services which already exist and are used reasonably frequently. It's only half a step to finding your circle of friends and, even if your account posts are private, finding what THEIR posts are about and what kind of comments you've left to their posts.

I use this as an introductory problem because it is one most people realize exists already. However, it is flat-out minor in comparison to other discriminatory activities. And here I don't mean racial discrimination, but the more general term meaning "judgment based on details or categories".

For example, we've already seen a few cases where people have gotten in trouble for Facebook pictures showing them carousing when they should be unable to work. Posts about your health are apparently court-worthy evidence when it comes to not paying out health insurance.

You have a side of you that employers, parents, government officials, and Amazon.com shouldn't know about? Well, your aliases are a fragile anonymity. Once broken, pseudonyms disintegrate. If you posted pornographic Twilight fanfic as a high school student under a pseudonym, the minute that pseudonym is linked to your adult identity, you are forever labeled as someone who has really, really shitty taste forever.

To those of us in a pretty swank position of privilege, this seems like a rather minor inconvenience. A) It's not, it's a major lifestyle change to give up all privacy to everyone who might want to track you for any reason. B) People who aren't rich white guys are much more subject to problems due to this kind of privacy invasion, so their issues will be 10x worse.

Anyway, the only solution I can see is to make it illegal for companies to deanonymize data or leverage publicly available data on their consumers. Otherwise, this stuff will happen if even a few of your friends are lax in their privacy settings.

Of course, that illegality doesn't spread to things like foreign companies and governments. But it should slow the spread if most of the major players that normally accrue data (such as Google, Amazon, etc) aren't allowed to accrue it in ways that endanger you. Having to compile all that data themselves is a significant stumbling block to any oppressive foreign power seeking to crack down on, say, demonstrations against them.

Most of us live in a very cushy world where we can't imagine data being used against us in any significant way. "It's just ads!" That's nearsighted and egotistical.

The Replacement Web

2011-07-08T07:02:00.000-07:00

I've gotten a fair number of comments asking about why I think Google+ is not competing with Facebook, but with the internet. So I'll go into detail now.

Let's think about how people use the internet.

Discovery

You need to look something up, find something. A reference picture of a cat. A house painter in DC. How AC/DC conversion works.

Right now, there are two ways to do this. Google search and Wikipedia. Google+ offers to radically enhance Google search: your connections and interactions in your Google+ network will validate you, so your travels carry much more authority than any astroturfer. Moreover, your connections will allow Google to guide you to exactly what you're looking for because your friends' friends' friends' already went there.

As for Wikipedia, I'm sure Google's coming up with an alternative. Probably +iPedia.

Oh, and some of you might use CraigsList for the more local stuff. Thanks!

News and Updates

I suppose a lot of users still go to, say, Wall Street Journal's or New York Post's site for news. Just browse on over at 9:30 AM and see what Murdoch wants you to know about.

However, a lot of us get our news via less restricted feeders. Things like Twitter, various filter sources such as Gawker, and thousands of specialty blogs that cover any kind of news you like.

You can argue that these don't have the gravitas of a major corporation with political aspirations, but that doesn't slow them down any. Already Google is a pretty important player here, not just passively through their search rankings, but actively through their news search, "top stories" section, and so on.

Not just news, of course, but also un-newsworthy things that matter to me, such as whether a friend's startup succeeds, or whether Germany is increasing or decreasing investment in solar power, or whether somebody's getting married. These also come to me through feeds, but mostly through different ones.

Google+ offers to take this and centralize it. Through Google+ circles and the I'm-absolutely-sure-it's-coming "extended circles", Google can easily aggregate posts and links and topics right to your Google+ page. It's probably similar to the iGoogle home in nature, but much more contextual and intelligent, so it can give you a wider variety of The News You Want without getting exposed to The News That Makes You Uncomfortable and still getting The Irrelevant Crap That Your Friends and Celebrities Like.

IE, Google+ is Twitter, Gawker, and Facebook all rolled into one, plus a few more things too.

Videos, TV, and Entertainment

A lot of people use the internet as a TV replacement. Just cruise over to Hulu.com and see what Murdoch wants you to watch. What, you didn't know News Corp has fingers in Hulu?

Let's go to YouTube instead. Oh, Google already owns YouTube.

Outside of actual hosting, most of your entertainment links come from filters and friends. These are the same sources that pass you news and updates, so the same things that will allow Google+ to dominate that arena will allow it to dominate this one.

Shopping

A lot of people use the internet to go shopping. Buying books from Amazon, doodads from Etsy, shirts from Think Geek, and so on. Right now, a lot of us pop over to the store that we know carries what we want, and simply click "buy". The times we want a comparison on prices, we go to an aggregator site that trawls through a variety of stores, finds the pricing, and maybe rates them by reliability.

Google probably won't ever have warehouses full of shirts and books to sell you, but they do already have the "shopping search" which does all the rest. Combined with Google Checkout and, probably, a new service with a catchy name like "Google+ iNetCash Turbo", Google is perfectly capable of becoming the go-to for internet shopping, especially if they can break Amazon's grip on the books market by offering alternate sources.

Summary

Anyone who thinks Google+ is fighting Facebook is thinking way too small.

Hell, Google may even physically replace the internet, putting up fiber optics between Google-owned locations.

All of this is going to result in a much smoother, easier to use internet.

Owned by Google.

The New Internet Economy

2011-07-05T09:44:00.000-07:00

Like everyone, the release of Google+ has got me in a bit of a state. I don't use Facebook, because it's a nightmarish piece of social spyware. Instead of infecting your computer, it infects your life.

The lists comparing Google+ to Facebook are endless, and they always come out in Google's favor. This makes sense, Facebook is ancient and cobbled together out of random crap, while Google+ is a polished, modern, unified piece of code.

But in those lists somewhere is one "advantage to Google+" that really bothers me. It is this: "Google makes a better steward for your personal data than Facebook."

People are talking about "the attention economy" as if it's some far-distant future thing. But that economy is already here. Anyone who creates web content for a living already knows that. Google certainly knows it, better than anyone.

Google+ is a weapon in this economy. It is used to leverage attention: while it may not increase the amount of attention poured out by Google's userbase, it can deploy it far more effectively. Facebook could be said to be part of this "attention economy", but it wasn't weaponized. Google+ is weaponized Facebook.

This bothers me. The utter lack of privacy isn't really what bothers me, it's the utter lack of concern over it. Everyone's rushing to Google+ with glee. "What's the problem?" they say, "it's basically just Facebook, and I already used that!"

Google+ is weaponized. Google+ is not Facebook. It is a new layer of internet.

Google already tracks your searches, your youtube video views, your installed Chrome apps, your email buddies, the contents of your emails... it does this to better serve you. Ads.

While it is possible to block or ignore the resulting ads, you cannot block the monitoring. If you go out of your way, you can browse in privacy mode or such, but then you can't participate in the many kinds of content that rely on you having a valid (monitored) login. For example, YouTube won't allow you to view any videos with higher than G-rated content unless you let them (and Google) monitor you.

Google+ is simply the next step, helpfully allowing the users to build a context web. The contents of the internet as well as the individual Google users will be put into a vast and highly detailed web. Perfect for pushing ads, sure, and I think most people are thinking that. They go, "Okay, I don't really care, serve me some ads."

But the problem is the context web. This is an extremely valuable web of connections and preferences that can make your internet experience much more fluid and enjoyable. Unfortunately, the web of connections is wholly owned by Google.

Exporting your data won't help much, and Google knows it. It's not just about who your friends are, any more than your personality is about what genes you have. It's about the billions of links and cross-posts and retweets and conversations thrown about and followed.

That's the problem I have with Google+: it is an effort to build a new kind of social internet. I wouldn't mind if that internet were public - I think it's a fantastic idea. But they are aiming to build a Google-owned social internet.

Nobody seems to care.

Yay Indie Game Bundles

2011-06-23T07:24:00.000-07:00

I really like indie game bundles. With the Humble Bundle leading the pack, we've seen an explosion of bundles, and I buy almost all of them.

With that in mind, I'd like to look at A) the different methods of selling bundles and B) whether this might influence the sales strategy of non-bundles.

The classic "Humble" sales strategy is a DRM-free download for whatever amount of money you want to pay. DRM-free seems like the standard these days (YAY!) so I won't go into detail supporting it, but let's talk briefly about the "any amount" system.

Allowing people to pay anything is a brave foray into a new kind of sales. However, "pay anything" often ends up meaning "pay almost nothing", probably because our culture hasn't really developed a respect for the actual worth of something. If you pay less for a game bundle than for a meal, you're a total ass. Once our culture begins to realize this, we can expect "pay anything" to pay off better.

Until then, a few strategies have come into being to help nudge people to pay more. A big one I've noticed is the "average paid so far" marker, which lets people know what "normal" is. I'm not sure this works very well just on its own, but it is also possible to split this up into categories. For example, "Unix users pay $11.50 on average, while Windows users pay $6.40". I think this categorization is valuable, as I think it helps urge people to keep up with the best rather than just measuring themselves against the average.

In a continuation of that is the "leaderboard", where the top ten (or whatever) purchasers get their name and donation up for everyone to see. Often used as an ad, but that's fine, too. I think leaderboards can be very valuable, especially if you get a Colbert-style bump from somewhere. With the Humble bundles, the leaderboard frequently featured people who had paid thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. Obviously, your popularity matters a whole lot, but it's not that hard to code (you can even just update it manually if you need to) and is guaranteed to get you at least a few donations at a higher level than you otherwise would.

Another method (and my favorite) is the "pay more than average" reward. If you're monitoring the average, then offer a bonus for paying, say, at least $1 over the average. It could just be an art pack, or maybe you'll mail them a signed post card or something. Anyway, the existence of this will push people to raise the average, which in turn will raise your overall income dramatically.

Some people have posited some fairly complex schemes such as prices dropping or increasing over time. I think those may have a future once our culture catches up to our abilities, but until then, keeping it simple is probably best.

Some bundles aren't using a pay-what-you-want system. For example, http://www.buygamesnotsocks.com/charges a flat $5.

I think this is a mistake. If you want to do that, you might consider a pay-anything method with a $5 minimum. I think it's a weaker choice than the complex monitored feedback system the Humble bundles use, but it's still better than just a flat $5: I would have paid $20, but it's physically impossible. $15 in lost sales.

...

What does this kind of thing have to say about individual games?

Well, buying a bundle is inherently less risky and more attractive, just for starters. Half the games in any given bundle just aren't interesting to me. There's nothing wrong with Cortex Command, it's just not my style of game.

To some extent, you can think of a bundle as diversifying a stock portfolio. If you have games of varied genres and audiences, you increase your chance of appealing to any given audience member. The risk of failing to appeal to them is much lower.

If you're only selling one game, there's no diversity, which is naturally going to limit your appeal to a much smaller part of the audience. But that doesn't really mean anything horrible! After all, if you're selling on your own without the Humble-style pricing, you still have the same limited appeal. It's just that you need to realize the weaknesses in your offer: you can't directly compare an individual game to a pack of games.

Also, the bundles often come after the "primary" sales life of the game, so they are often thought of as a kind of end-of-life "bonus" instead of a proper primary sales method.

Despite that, I think that indie games might find themselves doing better with Humble-style "pay anything" pricing, perhaps with an absolute minimum if you can't bear the thought of someone paying $2.50 for your game. As our culture gets more comfortable with this kind of scheme, I think it will become more and more acceptable and profitable to do it this way.

It's also worth mentioning that Kickstarter and similar can often garner you funding at quite a surprisingly high rate. Attempting to fund your game on Kickstarter is not recommended, because most of us know that games cost more than you think and aren't likely to ever get completed. However, if you have a game (or 99% of a game) and want to take it a few extra steps, a Kickstarter project to polish the art or add in additional levels could net you thousands of dollars of investment before you begin, which is another valuable revenue source.

Unlike the Humble-style pricing, Kickstarter-style projects work perfectly for individual games. It's worth thinking about using both Kickstarter-style and Humble-style for your indie game...

I say that, but, of course, I've never tried to sell an indie game. So take the armchair strategy for what it is... do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Just take note: pricing strategies and revenue sources are changing. Indies in particular can benefit.

Fear Campaigns

2011-06-15T07:27:00.000-07:00

This is chief Paul macMillan, lord high defender of the MBTA. I'd like to remind you that danger is everywhere, and any of the hundreds of pieces of litter and forgotten bags could be terrorist plots to kill you. Despite the fact that the MBTA has never been a terrorist target and, in fact, no American buses ever have, I'm going to spend the next 55 seconds loudly telling you to be afraid.

It is our hope that with so many people looking for terrorists, you will be too busy to complain about what an incompetent job the MBTA does. Since the number of complaints about incompetence have been rising and the number of terrified peasants begging for protection has been falling, we have once again called upon the "fear" branch of our "baseless propaganda" division. You will notice that not only have we added an additional 10 seconds to this speech, we've added a 15-foot cube directly in the middle of the walking path and labeled it "it's never this obvious". Which is true, because things that don't exist aren't obvious.

So please, everyone, participate in our "hear something, fear something" campaign and carefully look at the floor around you, your fellow passengers, anywhere but up.

Games On Multiple Screens

2011-06-07T11:35:00.000-07:00

I'm a big advocate of multiple screens, or screens so huge that the idea of "fullscreen" is pointless. I like a view. Personally, I think that screen real estate is a major limiting factor on how well we "think" with computers - anyone who has done corkboard brainstorming is familiar with how much this sort of thing matters.

But right now I'd like to talk specifically about games on multiple screens. They already exist, of course, with Nintendo being the major purveyor.

In most Nintendo DS games, one screen is where all the action happens, and the other is a kind of status screen. Your stats, or the local map, or other status information. The idea is that you can refer to the other screen at a glance if you need that information. Of course, you usually don't. It's extremely rare that the "information screen" actually needs to be referenced live.

Some games instead make one screen an input screen and one screen an output screen. This is because of the hardware of the DS, which has one touchscreen and one normal screen. Personally, I don't like this very much, either: without tactile interfaces, it's almost impossible to use a touchscreen without looking at it, and the DS touchscreen is often very fickle about exactly where it thinks you clicked.

The upcoming WiiU is vaguely interesting because, like attaching gameboys as controllers, it gives each player their own screen as well as one large shared screen. But, for one player games, this is simply exactly the same situation as the DS: some buttons, a touchscreen, and a non-touchscreen. Size notwithstanding.

Many of the DS games which ended up being most compelling for the double screens were simply those that used the top screen as an extension of the bottom screen, giving you one long super-screen like an old arcade game. This, of course, has nothing to do with the fact that they are two screens - it could just as easily be accomplished by having a single screen that is twice as tall. Anyway, this won't be very possible on the WiiU, because the screens are not in fixed position with each other and not even vaguely the same size.

Still, the advent of multi-screen situations outside of the tiny handheld device market is reasonably important. I've been developing multi-screen toys on my own for a long time, since I have multiple monitors... But that's not the sort of thing most other people have, so it's kind of pointless. It'll be interesting to see whether the WiiU developers end up doing some of the same things as me or not.

One thing I have come to find is that the "details" screen does have an interesting variant. I call it the "context switch" situation.

Let's say you're playing a 2D RPG where you wander around the map as you see fit. Normally, when you approach a person or item, you press the "interact" button and some text box pops up to tell you that you grabbed it or they said something or whatever.

However, if you have two screens, it is perfectly reasonable to have the bottom screen be this navigation view while the top screen is the "what your character sees right now" view. IE, if you walk up to a bookshelf, you don't press "interact". The top screen automatically shows the bookshelf, including the book titles and so on. If you walk up to a person, you see a closeup of them on the top screen, including their facial expressions and body language. (Speech bubbles should ideally appear on both screens, so they don't require a player to switch which screen they're looking at.)

If you like, you can simply swap the screens, switching contexts. Now you have the person or bookshelf on your primary screen and the navigation screen is on the secondary screen. This allows you to do complicated dialog systems, pixel hunts, machine programming, or whatever.

"Wait, that's not fundamentally better than, say, a popup on a single screen!"

A third-person view substitutes for our personal spatial awareness. First-person jumping puzzles are difficult even if the same puzzle would be a snap in real life. That's because in real life, we're aware of our surroundings. In a third-person game, we get a lot of that same kind of awareness out of the game screen. Covering up the game screen effectively blinds that artificial eye.

Minecraft uses popup menus for all its crafting, which is okay-ish because Minecraft is first person: your situational awareness is already crap, you can't get any more blind. But Terraria, with its third-person view, carefully puts its crafting popups at the edges of the screen where they won't interfere much with your artificial situational "eye".

Unbroken situational awareness may not sound like much, but it's actually pretty important. It's the same reason why corkboard brainstorming is often very effective: you have that important detail off in the corner of the board. Even if you aren't looking at it, you can see it in the corner of your eye and you know it is there. It is a piece of the mental terrain. If you walk away from the corkboard and go to lunch, when you get back you'll probably have to spend a few minutes recovering that awareness.

So, some of my toys have been experiments in retaining situational awareness even when contexts change, and I think that's something that most games don't bother with. I'm hoping to see it become more common.

Augmented Reality and Imposed Reality

2011-06-07T07:47:00.000-07:00

There have been a few vaguely interesting articles on augmented reality, and they tend to be like this. "How will corporations abuse us in this new, augmented reality?"

I think this is a topic that needs to be addressed more fundamentally. Rather than talking about the types of ads that can be served, we need to talk about whether or not ads can be served at all.

Right now, if you try to use an augmented reality system, you have to use one of the primordial research projects that are floating around the web, like Google Goggles or Layar. Most people seem to be under the impression that that's just the way it's always going to be.

But that's not the case.

As we move into the future of AR, we're going to have a few basic formats for data to display, and we're going to have loads of competing browsers. Like Chrome and Firefox, these browsers do not exist to serve ads, nor do they exist to take us to specific sites of the corporation's choice and force us to view specific things.

Sometimes, these browsers do. For example, Chrome recently tried to sell me Angry Birds.

So now I don't use Chrome any more.

The point is that, like web browsers, AR browsers will emerge as open solutions for interpreting any available source of data. We won't be using Google(r) ChromeOS(r)(tm) Goggles (r)(tm) with forced reliance on Google(r) GiantFuckingDatabase(tm)(c). We'll be using whatever browser we want to access whichever data sources we want.

Serve us ads? Lock us in?

Not for long!

Personal Mesh Nodes

2011-06-06T09:16:00.001-07:00

One of the things I do pretty regularly is come up with science fiction settings. One feature that keeps intruding into my worlds is personal augmented reality. When everyone can look through their phone or glasses to see the world in another way, what does that mean for everyone?

One thing most people overlook is the fundamental technology behind this kind of widespread augmented reality. It implies that everyone has a strong computer - stronger than an iPhone - that is always being used to access local data. If we think in terms of a "super cellphone", we can see that the device must more or less always be transmitting and receiving tons of data from the cell towers. This is not ideal.

The solution I keep coming back to is local mesh networks. Since augmented reality heavily mixes in local stuff, it makes sense to communicate with other local devices instead of saturating the sky with long-range communication. While some stuff will still be non-local, a surprising amount of it can be made local with the assumption that nodes will have terabyte caches of random crap.

The key here is in the mix of mobile (personal) nodes and immobile (local) nodes. Your local Starbucks has their own (quite powerful) node that they make sure is always cached up-to-date with Slashdot and other geek media sites for maximum speed. It is connected to the Starbucks across the street, of course, and the Starbucks down the block... but these local nodes are also connected to every other random local node within range, including your apartment, the department store, that parked car...

Some of these nodes can connect to the internet, some cannot (except by routing through one that can). However, whether they can connect to the internet or not, they can serve up local information and perform local analysis.

...

Aside from developing this kind of scenario out of curiosity, what purpose does a distributed, largely anonymous mesh network serve? Isn't the internet a better choice?

When considering a scifi setting that's supposed to be reasonably hard, you have to answer these sorts of questions. Why did the mesh network come to be? What are its strengths and weaknesses? What purpose does it serve?

The answer is "an internet of things", to use an already-trite phrase.

"Things" can and will produce and ask for more and more data. Right now, we think in terms of price tags that automatically update and coffee pots that know when they're empty. But those are miniscule baby applications.

It's not unreasonable, especially if you're thinking in terms of scifi, to assume that things will become a whole lot more active. In a dystopian future, your TV watches you as much as you watch it, your clothes will whine and complain if you walk by their brand's store without shopping, your cell phone will constantly track and predict your paths to better bombard you with ads.

But dystopia is not the only place where objects are smart. Even in a utopian setting, items can be very smart and talkative.

Small ways are obvious - your clothes might track when they get tattered and alert you, your chair might detect that you are sitting in it (as opposed to someone else) and assume an ideal firmness and shape, your TV can auto-detect the signal and set its resolution correctly without you having to memorize the complexities of the menu interface...

But these reactive devices are not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about devices that buy and trade information. Huge amounts of information. Terabytes a day.

Your phone tracks the state of the network, keeping the mesh map up to date and plotting which hubs to rely on, always striving to get access to more restricted hubs for better speed. Your shirt constantly communicates with all the other clothes and adaptive murals in the region to cooperatively form a kind of mass artwork that expresses you as well as participating in the whole. Your AR gear constantly talks to the local nodes, "selling" them topological information that it can pick up with its camera in exchange for topological information it can't quite see.

The internet doesn't have infinite capacity, and cell phone communications have even less. Fundamentally, the centralizing protocols the internet uses are inappropriate for an "internet of things", no matter how many integers we increment them by. A mesh network is really the only answer.

Mesh networks have the issue that they are fundamentally decentralized, which is bad from the point of view of a corporation. Centralized information stores allow corporations much more capability to analyze, leash, and abuse their customers, so that's naturally their preference. However, less corporate devices will benefit most from talking to other devices of similar types, rather than simply serving as snoops for their hidden masters. In a utopian setting, talkative devices are largely loyal to their owners rather than their corporations, and may even be manufactured using 3D printers in someone's basement.

Right now, it probably seems like talkative devices are pointless and useless. However, they're almost guaranteed to be part of our future, much as your branded jeans and your lattes and your Youtube videos would be seen as pointless and useless luxuries fifty years ago. Unlike lattes and branded jeans, talkative devices might actually be helpful in the long run, assuming a view that is more utopian than dystopian.

Either way, in a scifi setting, mesh networks lead to a rise of things. In my settings, this is usually accompanied by a rise of AI agents and virtual pets - interactive things that the readers or players can get an intuitive emotional feel for. An equally interesting idea is that humanity will integrate the software agents into their personal feeling of self. Your shirt is an expression of your personality and will, there's no need for it to have an independent "face" for you to deal with...

Anyway, random talk.

The Things I Don't Have

2011-06-01T08:22:00.000-07:00

Today I read Seth Godin's opinion on why I really hate hearing about Steam and iPad games: because I'm jealous and regretful that I chose not to participate in these things.

To be specific, he says "The reason, I think, is that you're reminding people of a decision they made, a decision that might have felt right at the time, but when they made it, they didn't know about what you've got on offer. They actively decided to take themselves out of the running for this magic event, this extraordinary product, and marketing it to them belittles their choice."

It's true that I choose not to buy iWidgets, use Facebook, or use Steam. And it's true that I hate it when a cool game comes out that's only for iWidgeteers, Facebookies, and Steamfolks, and it's paraded in front of my nose day after day.

This is not because I regret not getting those things. In fact, two out of three of them are free. If I wanted to, I could get them right now. No difficulty at all. Seth says I'm upset because I'm a special kind of pampered jerk who chose not to get them and am now regretful.

I can't agree. Sure, I'm a pampered jerk. But the reasons I don't want to use those things isn't because I chose incorrectly or short-sightedly. I don't use those platforms because they are vile platforms.

Interesting things come out on those platforms, and I'm regretful that the publishers didn't bother to make their thing work on platforms that don't require me to get assfucked. I'm angry when I hear about Terraria because an otherwise awesome game requires me to cuddle up with a third-party piece of bloatware that exists solely to grab my hair painfully tight and scream ads into my ear while eating up my RAM, tracking my every move, and installing mandatory patches that never make things any better and usually make things significantly worse.

A platform is not simply a method for distributing or running software or games. It has good and bad points on its own. The idea Seth posits is that if they release good enough software and games, I should at some point be agreeable to them, want to use the platform.

That's a willingness to bargain away your freedom and privacy for a product. Really? You want to espouse the idea that, if only the things we were offered were a little bit higher quality, we would be happy to sell ourselves, our freedom, our privacy?

How about we come from the other direction, and say that a product is not enough to compromise our person. How about we point out that these platforms are not all equal, and many of them exist specifically to cut apart their users, extract anything they can, and either sell it or abuse it for the sake of further profit?

Social Agents

2011-05-21T09:01:00.000-07:00

Let's talk about NPCs intended to have elements of social play.

This is a difficult thing to do. Most games that include any kind of adaptive social elements do a simple "like rating" that goes up as you play minigames or give gifts. Fable, Oblivion, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, etc etc etc are examples of that. Some are a bit more complex in that they monitor your actions and rate you accordingly instead of simply reacting to your minigame and dialog tree choices - IE, Dragon Age 2's continual random gaining and losing of friendship points.

These are really pretty bad.

There are theories on how to do it better, but they are generally about how to make the NPCs more intelligent. Let's think about it from the other direction.

There are two fundamental kinds of social situations. One is a largely static situation that the player enters. For example, a school, a village, or an empire's court. The other is a fluid situation where the social dynamics emerge over time as the player acts. Primarily, this would be characters joining your party in an RPG.

It's a mistake to think that the same techniques can be used in both situations. They're as different as a first person shooter and pokemon, and it's important to realize that. However, they do have similarities. The biggest similarity is that they both involve socializing with NPCs.

Putting aside how the NPCs react and what the player's options are, there is the important question of why you want to socialize with NPCs.

Probably the most common answer is romantic. Many games allow you to be close to all the various characters, but it's pretty clear that one is your "favorite" and is your romantic interest, with an optional helping of partial nudity as a reward.

This has pretty serious and obvious restrictions.

A second method that is often used concurrently is to get a statistical advantage. Becoming friends with someone gives them bonuses in combat, or gets you special equipment, or whatever. Statistical options are also inherently limited, because they are very much a binary (you don't have it, well now you do, you're done) reward, which is largely incompatible with the idea of continuous social interactions.

A third method is flavor: the more friendly someone is, the more they tell you about their backstory, even to the point of opening up sidequests. This often also involves pseudo-romance or, more cynically, cheesecake.

All of these methods are reward-focused. Let's think about it slightly differently. What do we want the player do? What are the actual actions and progressions?

This is where the two kinds of social systems diverge.

Let's talk about an emergent social situation, such as strangers joining your RPG party. What play does socializing with your party members actually add?

One real problem with this in the past is that the game is always focused on The Hero. All the socialization in question revolves around the hero. The goal is always clear in the player's mind: raise the social scores until whatever bonuses you get are maxed out.

There are a few ways around this one-dimensional play, and they all add depth to a party-based RPG. The two I'll mention here are to change the hero-centric view, and to add conflicting social dimensions.

If your game is a tactical RPG with many characters, you can arrange the socializing to be between two arbitrary characters. The "main" character can be friends with everyone, sure, but he can't stand next to everyone in every combat. It's more efficient for other characters to be friends with other characters, so your combat tactics can use their synergy. Of course, this requires that friendships degrade so that you can't simply max out everyone's friendship with everyone.

You can add conflicting social dimensions by not assuming that "friendship" is the one and only thing that comes out of socialization. You can add a variety of roles. How about a friendly rival? How about a teacher? How about a student? How about a trusted adviser? You can come up with a bunch of roles that are well-suited to creating a depth of party beyond simple "everyone's friends!" Choosing what roles you want to work towards for what characters, and whether that clashes with other roles already settled into, that can make the game interesting. Especially since the statistical and flavor bonuses you get are going to be different.

Notice that we haven't talked about the actual mechanics of how the player socializes. That's because it isn't as important as the framework the play enables. No matter how complicated and nuanced your social simulation is, if the end result is simply a single friendship value and a skimpier pair of pants, it's going to be dull!

...

The other kind of social system is one where it is largely intact in advance. For example, if you are a prince in an emperor's court, the other members of the court already have feelings about each other. Or there is a class in a school, and everyone except the transfer student already has defined their roles in their high-school setting.

In games, this is normally not simulated at all. Instead, it is presumed to be absolutely static except for the quest lines that are specifically scripted. So, ask yourself, how does it improve if we use simulation? What can we enable?

Probably the biggest thing you can enable is freedom: prescripted plot lines are pretty limited from both the players' and the designer's perspectives. However, as you may be aware if you've tried it, players are notoriously good at not acting like people. Player characters have the supernatural ability to completely derail any social environment by a combination of inhuman persistence and knowing exactly what to do.

There are a few ways around that, but let's put off talking about that and get back to the question: what do you get out of it? Freedom sounds nice, but freedom to do what?

This is a really difficult question to just answer, because it depends on the game. What is the point of the game? How can people help each other? How can they hinder each other? You need to answer these questions, or no amount of clever programming will help!

Once you've decided that, however, there is a fundamental "pattern" to the social situation: the node graph of who is connected to who in what ways. In a fundamental way, the pattern is going to be a clustered graph: certain people are going to be much more central and important. While they may not have many more connections to other people, their connections are more dominant.

For example, if Jenny is the super-popular cheerleader, she will have a lot of influence over a lot of people. Her underling Sara may know just as many people, but she will not be as dominant over them: her relationships are more likely to be on even footing. The rank delta will be lower, or inverted, from what Jenny normally uses.

So the pattern of clusters dominated by individuals is easy to imagine, but you need to remember that there are a lot of secondary connections that muck up our nice pretty graph and make it possible for the player to edge in through a "back door".

A clustered graph like this is useful because it naturally creates specific peer groups that the player can get involved in (positively or negatively). This also creates a natural stability to the social pattern that can resist a player's interference somewhat.

Anyway, these are the things I've been thinking recently about social agents.

Here There Be Monsters

2011-05-19T07:50:00.000-07:00

Monsters and monster stories suit the culture that creates them. You can see this pretty easily by looking at the ancient monsters that ancient cultures created.

In western Europe, "eat me" monsters dominated, and the vast majority of both monsters and monster tales involved being killed and eaten. Vampires do not spread their state by a bite, they simply squat on your chest, eating your breath, until you die. Werewolves, similarly, just kill and eat you. Only later were new attributes introduced that made these monsters into their now-familiar forms.

On the other hand, eastern European monsters and monster-tales tended to focus a bit more on disease and freezing, things closer to their ancient culture's heart. On the gripping hand, Japanese monsters and monster-tales tend to involve enforcement of cultural norms. As one of many examples, the kappa that loves to eat children can be defeated by bowing to it. It automatically bows back and, in the process, spills its life-giving head-water and freezes.

You can see monsters change as cultures change. Our current obsession is with contagion. Most of our most memorable modern monsters are about being changed against our will, being forced to become something else.

Vampires are no longer simple eaters. Now they spread, turning you into a vampire. Werewolves, too, are contagious. Zombies as well. Classic Alien-aliens embed themselves inside you and use you for a host rather than simply eating you. Cthulhu drives you insane with its mere presence. Frankenstein's monster is just a man trapped in a horrific body. Grays do experiments on you, pull things out from inside and put things in that weren't supposed to be there. And Godzilla was a normal lizard until he was forced to change...

Sure, these monsters can also eat you, but that's rarely the point of the story. The point of the story is that you (or the monster) are being changed, forced to do or be something you don't want to do or be. Which we encounter a lot more in our modern culture than being eaten or frozen, so that makes sense.

Classically, a monster's defeat often comes at the hands of what the tellers consider their culture's greatest triumphs - expensive silver, holy symbols, respect... this, too, changes over time. Most modern, western-culture monsters are defeated by feats of creativity, high technology, or determination, things we hold in very high regard.

This is sometimes reversed, with the monster having attributes we regard highly, and using them against us. The terminator was a high-technology, very determined monster that could only be defeated by, you guessed it, creativity and determination.

Distilling the fear a monster causes and the thing which defeats the monster down into simple statements can allow you to create extremely creepy monsters by simply imagining a way to push those things a little further, a little purer. Instead of jumping out and going "boo!", the best monsters first highlight our fears, then our prides.

So instead of re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-reinventing vampires, why not invent a new monster that more purely preys on our cultural fears and is defeated by our cultural prides?

It's not as easy as it sounds, largely because our culture's emerging fears and prides often have no agreed-on terminology. For example, a lot of us fear the fact that the rest of us sell ourselves and our information into bondage in exchange for a new trinket. There's no real name for that fear. What would you call it? Eulageddan? iFear?

But I'd be interested in hearing anyone give it, or any other fear/pride, a shot.

The Educational Game

2011-05-18T08:08:00.000-07:00

_{This is a post musing about educational games.}

So, I've been playing SpaceChem recently. This is a beautiful puzzle game, and very long. Also, it has got me thinking about teaching via games.

SpaceChem is not a teaching game, it is a very earnest puzzle game that is more about space management than actually learning any kind of chemistry. However, it includes a (mostly correct) framework of fundamentals, such as number of bonds and fusion/fission. It isn't set up to be a learning game, of course: if you don't know the fundamentals going into the game, you're probably going to be completely lost from instant one. Plus, the puzzles are really freaking hard at times, I doubt a young child could do them.

But the concept made me think of educational games again.

How would you teach chemistry in an educational game?

There are two options used today: rote memorization and task memorization.

Rote memorization is glorified flash cards. Often it is glorified by embodying the flash cards as enemies or similar, so that the child pays attention and hopefully learns by osmosis. I don't much like this method, because even if it succeeds in teaching ten thousand facts, none of those facts will mean anything. If a child knows that oxygen has an elemental weight of 8, what does that mean? It's not important, it never was. It tells you nothing about the role oxygen plays in chemistry, and when you do need to know it, you can look it up in two seconds.

Task memorization is slightly better. This is where the game presents "challenges" that require the user (not necessarily a child in this case) to perform a specific task. For example, to teach that hydrogen and oxygen make water, the user might be urged to turn on the oxygen tap, turn on the hydrogen tap, and then turn on the flame. BOOM and water. More advanced tasks usually involve manipulating the amounts (twice as many H2 molecules as O2 molecules) or performing a specific sequence (then add sodium for another BOOM!).

Task memorization is significantly better than rote memorization because it teaches you what things actually do. In situations where there is no strong underlying logic or algorithm, task memorization may be the best choice. For example, learning a language, or an emergency response checklist for space shuttles.

But for most of the things I personally want people to be better at, there is an underlying logic. Chemistry, programming, scientific rigor, privacy/information awareness... all of these things have a fundamental algorithm which we can present, even if it has some holes in it sometimes.

For these things, I think an explorative game is more the speed we need.

Since there is an underlying algorithm and a lot of information about applied results, we can create open-ended scenarios as well as tasks, allowing the player to switch between them as they feel the need.

For example, the explorative chemistry game would give the players a basic set of chemicals and outside forces to experiment with. For example, seawater and a source of heat. The player is allowed to construct a desalination plant using simple pipes, tanks, and sources of heat. It is a tutorial mission that teaches you that different molecules are affected by heat in different ways.

But as you finish the mission, the chemistry you've done is put in context. You've created fresh water and salt. Some NPCs from the larger world should come up to you and give you game points for your desalination plant. The chemistry you've done is put in a larger context. You understand that you've created water for drinking and salt for... salting... rather than just accomplishing a faceless task.

As you explore the world, you will find new equipment (How about a laser beam? How about a fission reactor? How about an electric turbine?) and new chemicals to start with. Challenges presented by various NPCs can guide you to create specific chemicals for specific purposes, but you are also free to fool around on your own. When you create a chemical on your own, you see a demonstration of what the end product does (perhaps cataclysmically enough to scar the world at large), and then NPCs approach you to talk about potential applications, bid on it, or ask for a similar molecule with different characteristics.

A key element here is that there is a world here, a world you can explore and interact with, however shallowly. The chemicals you create play specific roles in the world, often in specific places. You are not learning in a bubble, you are learning in a larger setting.

I think this is probably the key to teaching games, and one we always seem to overlook. Even a simple world map where you can see your accomplishments is a lot more effective than just being told "good work!" and shuttled into the next task.

Why I Don't Use Steam

2011-05-10T06:21:00.000-07:00

Every time it comes up in conversation that I don't use Steam, I get asked why. So this post is an easy link to keep me from explaining myself over and over again.

There are three reasons I don't like Steam.

The first is the one that made me actually stop using Steam: the full-price ($60) games I bought from Steam never seemed to work. They crashed my machine, or they required third party spyware that wouldn't install - just a nightmare. Customer service was never any good - they have the standard "did you try rebooting your computer, I don't actually have any power to do anything like refunds" shit.

So I was getting leery of Steam. I saw the newest Civ available on Steam and said, "No, I'll go buy it from a store." With my shiny physical box, I came home feeling giddy and went through the hour-long installation process only to find... yeah, Civ required Steam, even though I had a physical disk.

Well, okay, that's fucking suspicious. Sure enough, a week later Steam force-fed me an "update" that broke Civ. With no way to roll back.

So fuck Steam.

The other two reasons are less severe, but in the long run they would have probably resulted in me using Steam a whole lot less even if they hadn't actively screwed me.

One is that I really hate the bloatware Steam insists on running in the background at all times, especially when you're trying to run a high-end game that needs all your system resources. I love the way that it is part adware, part spyware - I mean, "piracy prevention". It exists solely to screw the customer, rather than be helpful.

"But it helps you search for games! And manage your downloads!"

Yeah, those things can be done with web pages. Try gog.com or GamersGate - they use no bloatware, no ad server, and I highly recommend them over Steam.

The other reason I hate Steam is because of the fundamental problems with "always on" gaming. This is a blight, and creates dozens of issues. Steam is far from the only offender - all three consoles have the same problem. Always-on gaming really deserves its own post, but I'll quickly mention a few things that are wrong with it.

1) "Piracy prevention" that requires you to have an internet connection, the same computer, be logged in, have the most recent patch, have not modified the game I own, and so on.

2) "Dead man switch": when the central server goes down, nobody can legally play the game. Happens far more frequently than you think.

3) "Social at any price": breaking the immersion of the game to keep reminding you who else is playing the game and what their scores are. The number of games I've bought that I wanted to play with strangers? ZERO. This is also responsible for the rise in "trophy rewards"... my life has been much more peaceful since I learned how to turn them OFF.

4) "Paid DLC". This concept is, on its own, a very serious and horrible nasty shitty thing.

Paid DLC has a lot going against it, despite the fact that many people support it. I'll enumerate those, using letters this time.

a) The first playthrough is the most delicate. It's where the user forms an emotional connection to the setting. Added content is great for extended play, but paid DLC doesn't want to wait, and disrupts the initial playthrough with ads and metagame madness. I think this stunts the player's emotional investment.

b) Paid DLC usually means suppressing non-paid (IE fan-created) DLC. After all, it's competition. While it's theoretically possible to support both, I haven't seen many successful examples and I don't expect to see many.

c) It is often an excuse to release less content and charge for extra. For example, the only reason Sony didn't have my credit card info is because they wanted to charge me the price of the full game for the DLC for Disgaea 3. I love Disgaea, but it's being ruined by DLC.

d) DLC fundamentally doesn't fit into the "flow" of a game. Allowing the game to be extended and twisted at any time only works for certain kinds of games. Most games have a beginning, middle, and end. If you add crap in somewhere, you'll end up with the pacing and balance getting screwed up. This seems like a minor problem until you realize you've quit before the endgame because it's gotten boring.

Anyway, that's why I hate "always on" gaming, and Steam in particular.

Beat-em-up Bombs

2011-05-08T07:44:00.000-07:00

This is too hard to make a video about, so I'll do it in text.

In every beat-em-up there are moments when the tactical situation turns bad. So the designers give you the equivalent of a shmup bomb to get out of trouble.

I'm not talking about the emergency spin-kick that costs you 15% of your life. That's an entirely local effect for when you're really screwed. I'm talking about the larger picture, affecting a majority of the screen.

One method is the "magic spell" method, where you are given a tool with a limited number of shots. Whether it's a fireball or SWAT intervention, these serve two goals simultaneously. 1) They deal damage outside your normal range, and often higher than you normally can. 2) They knock down enemies at range and give you a moment to maneuver.

An example of a spell-heavy game would be the old Dungeons and Dragons beat-em-ups (Tower of Mystara, for example).

Another method is "throwing". Throwing locks your target while you act, and serves the same two goals as magic spells. It deals damage to the character you are acting against, and then you can usually hurl them to a point outside your normal range. In the process, they knock down all the other enemies they are pushed into.

Throwing serves the same role as a magic spell, but the restrictions are higher (requires nearby enemy, slower) and you can do it whenever. Also, I feel that using one enemy against another is fundamentally more interesting than just tossing magic death everywhere.

The obvious example of a throw-heavy game is Streets of Rage.

A rare option is the "dodge". This option basically makes you invulnerable for a short time and maybe moves you somewhere else on the screen. In some ways, this is the purest method, as it doesn't magically solve your tactical problem. It just lets you try again once the wave has passed.

Dodging is extremely rare, probably due to the chaotic nature of beat-em-up screens and the fast wind-up of the attacks. The only two that spring to mind are God Hand and Astro Boy.

...

Most beat-em-ups implement one of those methods well, and one shittily.

For example, the Dungeons and Dragons beat-em-ups did spells pretty well, but they also implemented blocking, which is a type of dodge. However, the blocking is shitty.

As another example, Streets of Rage implemented dodging really well. However, they also implemented a 'spell' - the SWAT team backup. Unfortunately, the SWAT team ended up being mostly pointless: the only use it has is to use against the bosses to knock off a bar and a half of their radically over-inflated health bars. Using it during the level is rarely a good option.

Plenty of bad beat-em-ups do two of them, both poorly. This may or may not be what makes them bad, but the correlation is high. Golden Axe implemented both magic and grappling, but implemented both in a very limited fashion. Whether you think it is a good game or not, you will admit it is a rough play.

So, how can you avoid implementing them poorly?

...

To implement spells correctly, variation is good, but not critical. The most critical thing to remember is that it shouldn't have a dominant use.

For example, in Streets of Rage, the only real use for SWAT backup is to soften up bosses. They are so useful for that purpose that wasting them on killing off dudes is considered really crappy form.

While the bosses are also good targets for spells in the D&D beat-em-ups, many spells are only useful in other situations, which spreads the pain around. To be honest, I feel that even these games are too boss-centric. These old games built their bosses to eat quarters rather than be interesting challenges, so obviously your resources will be at least partly reserved for fighting the sure-to-kill bosses.

To do throwing well, you need to have very few enemies (if any) that are actually immune to throwing. In most Streets of Rage games, literally every enemy can be thrown, including bosses. If you make immune enemies, you are sealing away a core move. It's the equivalent of an enemy that magically makes you drop your assault rifle in a first person shooter.

This is somewhat difficult if you want to do a fantasy beat-em-up, because it means the player would have to be able to grab small enemies and large enemies, ground enemies and flying enemies... so fantasy beat-em-ups usually play down grappling.

It should be noted that there's a difference in opinion as to how throws should affect multiple enemies. In classic Streets of Rage, if you grabbed an enemy in a pack of enemies, your grappling attacks would affect all the enemies. The actual throw might not, but the pre-throw head-smashing would.

However, in the remake, you will let go of whoever you're grappling after a single pre-throw attack, and I don't think you can throw them at all when you're grappling in a crowd. This has seriously weakened throwing, and moved my old favorite character (a throw-heavy character) to the bottom tier.

Personally, I feel this is a bad move, because I tend to marshal the enemies into a pack and then crush them with throwing. So, it totally blocks me.

As to dodges, I'm not sure about them. It's rare to see examples so there's not a lot to draw from. It seems like dodge-based beat-em-ups are very different. They're less about a complex tactical topology, and more about timing.

There, a technical post about beat-em-ups.

Wrightlike

2011-04-21T12:55:00.000-07:00

I've had Phoenix Wright on the mind on and off. I was really sick yesterday, and built a Phoenix Wright engine. It's certainly not something perfect, but it made me think that maybe I should explain some of the details about what makes Phoenix Wright games Wrightlike.

It's easy to say "the writing", but that's a copout. Let's go over some of the facets that give these games their particular feel.

The most important aspect is that these games are relentlessly linear. There is one specific route forward, no deviations, no branches, no nothing. While there is space to explore, it's 90% color. Because the game is so linear, all the writing effort can be spent on the scenes that will definitely happen, knowing full well the exact path the player took to get here.

This is quite a limitation, but like all limitations, accepting it can open up new vistas of possibility. In this case, the super-rich environments and characters are possible only because of this limitation, and the way each case ticks over into the next with a strong continuity is also because of this.

Nearly all the writing and gameplay elements stem from this relentless linearity.

For example, the pacing of a Phoenix Wright game is a simple but unusual factor. I think of any part of the game as having a pacing which is the risk divided by the exploration capability.

In "exploration" mode, the only real risk is that the player will quit. And there's lots of places to explore. So it's a low-paced part of the game.

In "court" mode, there is some well-defined risk of losing health if you do specific things, but there's also a fair amount of riskless exploration in pushing and listening. So this is a kind of medium-paced part of the game.

In "lockbreak" mode, every move you make is a health risk. There is absolutely nothing to explore. This laser-like focus makes this the most pushingly-paced part of the game.

In actuality, I split these three up into five, because exploration mode has three grades: "wander" mode in early midgame where you get to explore loads of places, "investigate" mode where the number of places is reduced and the amount of interplay between objects increases, and "inspect" mode, where there are only a few places you can go/people you can talk to (for example, if you're locked in a basement).

These pacing tricks can be extrapolated out into a wider variety of games - the amount of risky exploration/choice vs the amount of risk-free exploration. Through this lens, you can see a lot of games taking the same kind of approach. However, there are also games where you have risk-free zones that have no real exploration - hubs, basically. These hubs are very useful to a not-so-relentlessly-linear game where you might have the option to customize things or take different approaches.

Another factor to the Wrightlike games is their puzzles. The puzzle quality varies - it isn't rare to fall out of synch with the script writers and end up either stuck or trying desperately to solve a puzzle that isn't what they want you to solve.

However, setting aside the quality, the puzzles have a slightly unusual timbre to them. The puzzles are relentlessly linear, as mentioned. Unlike normal adventure game puzzles, there's not a world where several puzzles lie in wait. The puzzle coming down the line in a Wrightlike game is the only puzzle, at least at the moment. Other puzzles may be tied to it, but they cannot be dealt with at the present time.

This means that all the inventory stuff, color text, and hints you give out are focused like a laser on the next puzzle. This is a distinctively different feel than you get from an adventure game where there might be four puzzles itching at the back of your mind while you collect stuff.

I think this gives the Wrightlike games an unusually tight, fluid flow to them. Of course, it also gives them a clogged-drain-style flow when the player can't solve a puzzle, which is a downside. Being forced to replay a mission after losing too much health is also unusually onerous, since you have to go through things in precisely the same order again.

Anyway, I'm not normally a fan of linear games. However, to paraphrase Ebert, I may disapprove of a game for going too linear, and yet have a sneaky regard for a game that goes much, much more linear than merely too linear. Embracing this linearity is, I think, what makes Wrightlike games so unique and enjoyable.

The Old College Try

2011-04-14T07:49:00.000-07:00

One of my friends has gotten involved in the age-old "what's college worth" debate. My point of view is pretty unusual, so I thought I might as well spell it out.

In the broad strokes, I agree with the stranger he's trying to rebut. Not only is college overpriced, it provides very, very little actual advantage. To be honest, just the opportunity cost of attending college is higher than the reward of a diploma. IE, even if the education was free, college would still be overpriced.

There is, however, something very useful about college. If you know how to get the most out of college, it can be worth your time and money. Unfortunately, I think most people aren't ready to get the most out of college until they're in their mid-twenties - after having graduated and worked in the rat race for a little while.

Everyone will tell you to learn all you can at college, but in truth the things you learn either aren't very important or will be picked up even without classes. Classes aren't taught very efficiently, anyway. With the possible exception of things like doctors, you can learn everything in a quarter of the time by reading it on-line and doing projects. Sure, there's some pressure to work hard at learning while in college, but you could get that same pressure by hiring a random person to badger you about it four times a day, and I bet you can get that service for significantly less than $30,000 a year.

(New start-up idea: badgerMe. Have someone you don't know call you up several times a day (videoconferencing extra) to ask what you've accomplished towards your goal, and to bitch at you if you slacked... I'm taking investors!)

The real way college can benefit you is that it offers an almost unique combination of free time and companions with diverse but compatible interests (who also have free time).

Nobody really stresses this properly. Frat houses might stress the interpersonal relationships, and how they can help you get jobs and so on, but that's old fashioned. Not obsolete, per se, but only a tiny part of what can be accomplished.

These days, it is completely possible to publish a book, paint beautiful murals, write a game, create a social network, innovate a new kind of cuisine... all of these things can be done rather easily by a small group of people stuck in the same place with a lot of free time. Even if the final product sucks, you have gained a lot of really, really valuable experience. And, if you do it over and over, eventually the final product doesn't suck, and things can take off.

Unfortunately, most college students are right out of high school. A few may intellectually understand that they can do these sorts of things, but inertia pushes them to do the same things they did in high school. Even if they were honors students, it's unlikely they ever really tried to create something for the world. It's a different mindset, a very unscholastic mindset. One that can really only be learned by trying and failing to do so in the real world, first.

After college ends, it is much more difficult to start up projects with other people. You have less free time, and there are fewer people nearby, and the people nearby have less free time. We have very few of these "pressure cooker" situations where people can get together and create something over weeks and months. College is one of those situations, and instead we tell people either A) it's worthless, or B) you need to focus on learning.

You don't need to focus on learning. That's the mindset that makes it worthless.

In my mind, the ideal college setup would be:

Freshman: Spend a year working shit part-time jobs and desperately trying to make your hobbies into a business.

Softmore: Come and live on campus. Take a few classes, but more importantly, join a review/testing team for an industry that interests you, and take small roles in random projects.

Junior: Team up with other students to do lots of small, cool, shitty projects. Learn to promote your stuff as well as create it. Begin to pick up best practices and advanced theory from classes and random other students who need you to know it.

Senior: With a fat resume of shitty projects, turn your attention to somewhat larger, more polished projects. Cement your team of trusted allies. Take pseudo-classes to keep up to date with recent advances and shore up your weaknesses, but focus mostly on getting your projects out there.

Graduation: Does there need to be one?

Amazon's New Service

2011-03-29T07:59:00.001-07:00

Like everyone else, today I saw Amazon was starting up a new cloud music system. It's like iTunes, except your songs never actually get to your machine!

I hate this cloud shit. But maybe not for the reasons you might expect.

My problem isn't with "cloud" systems, believe it or not. My problem is with the systems Amazon and Google and Microsoft call "cloud" systems, which really aren't cloud systems at all.

A cloud is fundamentally a giant misty whatever of nebulous structure. "Cloud" meaning "web-accessible centralized server" doesn't make any goddamn sense. I know this is a lost battle, but I'll tell you what a cloud is:

YouTube is a cloud.

A barely-structured riot of always-available videos. YouTube is what "cloud" should mean.

Sure, there are users. Sure, people have favorites and can privately share things. But the structure is not rigid. Users can and will do almost anything: most of the structure is built by users, not by YouTube.

I'm not saying YouTube is perfect. I'm saying that YouTube is a cloud.

Amazon's music service is not a cloud. If it was a cloud, it would allow you to upload and listen to whatever music without thinking about payment. Instead, the "cloud" service Amazon is offering carves up the cloud into tiny little chunks and says "this square inch is your part of the cloud."

Really? That doesn't seem very cloud-like to me. That seems like a web-based rental store.

The numbers say music piracy is in decline. This is because the numbers don't bother to actually track what's going on.

It's true that people are torrenting less music. But they are still getting their music for free. From clouds like YouTube, pseudo-clouds like Facebook, and clear-sky streaming from places like Grooveshark.

This was inevitable. Torrents are not, fundamentally, very good for exploring music. The only reason they were so prevalent was because there was nothing better around. Now there's a bunch of good solutions for free and nearly-free music.

... But what about Amazon's toy? Why am I so pro-cloud and anti-web-rental-store?

The strength of the cloud is that its users self-organize. When I'm on YouTube, I can find pretty much anything. The threads linking various videos and songs together are surprising and sometimes unusually insightful. They contain a lot of metadata, it's always a rich experience. Especially if you turn off all downvoted comments.

YouTube is a living organism in the proper sense of the term. Millions of users constantly swapping videos and metadata like cells swapping chemicals and proteins. Interacting with a proper cloud is always different, always changing, and always full of interesting little insights. Also, it is resilient against imposed order: even with YouTube's sometimes crooked policies and vote-bot abuse, all the videos you want to see are still there, somewhere. Like a living creature, it cannot be truly controlled, just made vaguely presentable in front of guests.

On the other hand, a web-based store is not a living creature, nor is it a cloud. It's a store.

It might be a vigorous and interesting store, but interacting with a store carries none of the cultural weight and freedom of interacting with a life form given free rein. Anything you can find in Amazon's music store, you can find that or better on YouTube, with all the added interconnective metadata that makes it even richer.

That's why I hate these pathetic kinds of "services". They exist specifically to bend the user over backwards and gut them, all the while telling you how lucky you are that you can be screwed over personally, no matter where on the planet you are!

Try offering a service that does more for the users rather than less. Maybe then I won't be so angry!

Appealing & Appalling

2011-03-25T07:19:00.001-07:00

My feed has recently been slammed by a bunch of links to various people whining about whether Dragon Age 2 made the game too "gay friendly" at the price of being boring for straight people. After a moment's thought, I decided I didn't really get it. It's boring for straight people, sure... but I'm pretty sure it's boring for gay people, too. I think the characters are just boring.

I had a bit of a discussion on Buzz about it, but I'd like to expand on my thoughts. Before I begin, if you've played the game, try not to get upset if I have a different opinion than you. If you haven't played the game, there are spoilers here, but the plot is so poor that you won't care.

I'm not here to talk about the plot. I'm here to talk about the characters. Specifically, why they (with one exception) are so bad.

Every single character in the game is lovingly modeled out and animated. The voice actors are fantastic. The banter is great. But they are all... so... boring. None of them are appealing (with one exception), and I can't imagine very many people, gay or straight, finding any of them attractive deeper than their visuals.

My own personal dislike for characters and plot arcs ripped from Vampire the Masquerade aside, the main reason I think these characters come off as so dull is that their plots basically ignore the player.

I've been using the term "brain damaged" to describe two of the characters in particular: Isabella the pirate stereotype and Merril the elf with a bad accent. After thinking a bit, I realized why they both seemed so brain-damaged: their plot arcs require them to hold the idiot ball.

Isabella is constantly talking about how she needs to find this idol thing to appease someone she pissed off, and how much she wants a ship. Not too long into the game, I've killed off dragons and syndicates and demonic rogue mages. I've helped random people out for absolutely no reward. Why is it I don't say, "Forget the idol. I'll buy you a ship, we'll go sailing, and we'll off the guy you don't like. There, done."

Actually, they do let you basically say something similar to that, but Isabella just blows you off. Why? Because there's still another 10 hours of gameplay before you get to the next part of her arc, so she has to continue to be an idiot until you get there.

Merril's the same way. "I want to use blood magic to save my people, because it's strong!" My response: "Merril, I just killed 57 blood mages, their demonic zombies, and a spate of weird undead things they summoned. I'm a spirit healer - the exact opposite of a blood mage. You are not cut out to be a blood mage, and even if you were, there's no actual statistical advantage to being insane and weird."

Merril's response would be "Oh, but I have to be a blood mage. Because we need one mage of each specialty in the roster, and I drew the red straw!"

After a little thinking, I realized that the reason I didn't find any of the other characters interesting (except one) was for the same reason.

It's time for the big unsurprise reveal! The character I like is... Varric. Like every other player I know, Varric is my favorite character. Why?

It's not that he's a big smooth-talker. There have been plenty of smooth-talkers in RPGs that I've hated. No, it's something more fundamental.

Let's review the introduction plot for each character in one sentence.

Anders: "I have to hide from everyone because I'm possessed by a demon!"

Aveline: "I'm stuck with you guys and I'm so sad because my hubby was killed."

Fenris: "I'm being hunted by people, and I need to kill them to be free."

Isabella: "I lost my ship and need to fight off all the people who don't like me!"

Merril: "I have to leave my tribe because I practice blood magic!"

Varric: "Hey, *you*, join us. Let's go someplace cool!"

The only one of these plots that involves you more than skin-deep is Varric's. Everyone else is "I have an arc! Help me accomplish my arc!" Varric is "Hey, let's go! Let's do stuff, you and me and whoever else!"

Interacting with Varric is inevitably like interacting with someone who is a respected friend. Even in non-plot-related interactions, he is thinking about you as much as he is thinking about him. Varric includes the player in every interaction he has with the player.

The other characters do not. All of their interactions are "I need to do this for me, can you help me? We'll do it at my pace, you're basically a hammer for me to use against my enemies."

I have no problem with helping people in RPGs, but Varric's approach is much stronger. He doesn't want me to help him. He wants me to help us.

I'm pretty sure it was written this way on accident, largely because of the necessities of the framing device. But it's a valuable lesson either way.

Time Investing is Not Enough

2011-03-24T08:20:00.001-07:00

So, in the hours and hours and hours of commuting that Boston requires, I play a lot of DS games. Right now, I'm playing Radiant Historia.

Radiant Historia is a really good game, a lot like Chrono Trigger except that the battle system is significantly deeper. The two games are distinct enough that it's a mistake to directly compare them, but it made me think: fame is largely a matter of time and "space". Radiant Historia is better than FFVII, for example. It's definitely better than FFXIII, allowing for the graphical and interface restrictions of it being on the DS.

But Radiant Historia could never become famous like Chrono Trigger or FFVII. These games were released into a ripe position: there weren't very many RPGs around, they were king of the hill. Sure, Chrono Trigger was excellent, but importantly, it also had room to run. The only other significant JRPG-like released in America in 1995 was Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. While a good game, it didn't come out until 6 months later and was not even vaguely aimed at the same audience.

FFVII was the same way. It had to compete with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and one or two others, but it was really in its own class as a 3D RPG.

On the other hand, Radiant Historia has to compete with other JRPGs not just from 2011, but from the same month. The market is much more crowded. Even a good game doesn't have "room to run". If you were to pick up and play Radiant Historia, you'd probably say "Oh, it's pretty good, yeah..." and then forget about it in six months. There's not any space in your brain, no place for it to really take root.

We see the same thing in other industries. In the past, you would get a few catchphrases that would last a decade. You can still see hints of this looking back at older entertainment routines, where you could be assured of a "LUUUUCY!" or an "Ayyyyyyyy!" (finger-guns). Now we have a much, much larger set of memes that vie for our attention. Our culture has actually adapted to annihilate memes after a set period of time to make room for the next wave.

That's why when we use famous but aging internet memes ("All your base", "he's not me, but he could smell like me...") we are actively judged by our internet culture as being outdated. "Stop using those, here are the new memes..."

Angry Birds has sucked down more time than all of Wikipedia's editing since it began, by an order of magnitude or more. But in five years, nobody will remember Angry Birds very well: it'll be forgotten. Despite the time you spent on it, there was no "space". Your brain had no room for it to run. (To be fair, it's also not built to run even if you had space, but that's because they know there's no room...)

The only memes which continue to survive are those which produce daily variations, such as lolcats or "fail". While old memes by our standards, they remain viable because there is a continuous stream of widely varied content. They are more a method of expression rather than an expression.

These are memes which don't require room to run in order to stake out a piece of our brains. Instead, they continually chip-chip-chip away at our brain through repeated exposure from different angles of attack. If you think of Chrono Trigger as a cheetah that needs room to run, lolcats is a mole, patiently digging out a catacomb of thought and value.

It may be that the future lies mostly in "mole" memes - games and media which chip patiently away at the audience until they establishe a niche that lasts as long as maintenance continues.

Alternately, it may be that the future lies in emptying out lots of space in our heads and unleashing cheetahs of our choice onto those fertile plains. For example, it would be pretty easy for me to really fall in love with Radiant Historia: all I have to do is not play any other RPGs for a while, and maybe draw some fanart.

A hybrid option is also available. For example, in the form of the anime "Naruto". A continuous release schedule of new episodes allows the show to chip-chip-chip away at their audience's brains, although the flexibility is somewhat more limited than a proper mole meme. However, Naruto is shored up on the cheetah side as well, as it is the target of a hugely successful marketing campaign and a relatively small number of directly competing anime. These two combine pretty well with the active support of fanboys chattering like monkeys in insulated forums and circles. Fan art, fan fiction, and so on enhance Naruto's limited flexibility by stepping way, way outside canon to say whatever the audience likes. Naruto's simplistic characterizations and drawable visuals make it easy for it to be stretched to express different things as required by any given fan.

This is easy to contrast with other, less famous shows. The audiences of something like Desperate Housewives are A) buffeted by a lot of similar/competing shows, B) not as likely to form into fan groups and stretch the expressiveness of the show. The show itself is also much more limited than something like Naruto both in terms of how far it stretches in canon, and in terms of how easy it is for a fan to stretch it further.

If we were to say that lolcats is a mole and Chrono Trigger was a cheetah, Naruto would be a monkey, perhaps. Not particularly fast, not particularly good at digging, but able to live in the weird and complex garden built for it.

phwa. I guess that's all I have to say about that.

!Gamification

2011-03-23T07:58:00.000-07:00

Okay, I was waiting until the surge of "gamification" posts died down a bit before giving my opinion. Well, it's died down a bit, and this is my opinion.

For those of you who haven't heard the term, "gamification" is the idea that things which are not games can benefit from having game-like features that improve efficiency, user retention, learning speed, and so on.

The most common version of this is what I've heard called "pointification". That's slapping gamelike rewards (typically points or trophies) on otherwise ordinary tasks. As opposed to "pontification", which is what this post is.

Putting aside the putrid verbification of the root words, it's worth looking at these concepts a bit more carefully. I'm not planning on using "gamification" or "pointification" again, if it can be avoided.

The second is a word substituting in for other words that already exist and don't make linguists vomit in their mouth at all. "Pointification", or the assigning of points or other rewards of marginal relation to the task at hand, is really just a particularly limited subset of "reinforcement". The fact that we don't think about it as a subset of this term shows we didn't bother to actually do any research before spouting off.

If you've never bothered to read that Wikipedia article, maybe you should. It's got a pretty good overview, and you can clearly see where "pointification" falls: it's a generalized positive feedback reinforcer. The ever-popular "gamer points" on XBox is this plus some socially-mediated feedback as you see other people's gamer points and they see yours.

You can also learn more about the details of how to schedule these things. There's no need to mumble on and handwave: use the research the human race has already done. Sure, psychology's a soft science, but game design isn't a science at all. Learn from the sources available to you, even if they aren't (gasp!) games!

The term "gamification" is being used as an umbrella term for a bunch of concepts that really have no connection to each other, aside from being vaguely related to the same cultural wellspring. "To make like a game" is a very indistinct concept. It's far preferable to use more specific terms, such as talking about what sort of reinforcement you'll be using.

I usually divide "gamificiation" up into a few distinct categories which are so completely different that they should really be talked about individually and never clustered together under a single vague, undefined umbrella term as they are now.

Reinforcement tweaking is when you alter the task you're talking about to include more effective reinforcements. This is a super-set of "pointification", which is a horribly crippled term. I think on purpose, since when I read about it, it was cast very negatively. Anyway, let's talk about reinforcement tweaking instead.

Immersion tweaking is when you change the act of performing the task to better suit your needs. This may involve scheduling tricks, world/interface polish, or complexity adjustment. I'm sure there are other things it may involve as well.

Thirdly, culture alignment is when you adjust your task to be more in tune with the perceived culture of your target audience, such that they are more likely to participate. This may be a change in audiovisuals, a marketing campaign, or any number of other ways to improve the appeal.

Lastly is interconnectivity, where you adjust how the task relates to others, the world, and itself. A "social game" (another terrible term) uses interconnectivity extensively, as an example.

These categories are not entirely distinct. For example, interface polish may include visuals which are adjusted as a reward for participation. Classic example: strip poker. However, it is something you need to consider in more detail than just throwing up an umbrella term and hoping it sticks.

EDIT: Forgot to mention making tasks simulationist and interactive to allow for exploration and learning-at-your-own-pace and such... So, lastly is simulation-centric design, a phrase I'm not really happy with, but maybe someone else can come up with a better one.

Adaptive Social Inclusion Networks

2011-03-14T04:58:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit of a hermit, but if I go too long without hanging out with friends, I get a little buggy. As I've gotten older, it's gotten harder to hang out with friends. I think this is probably true of everyone: as people get older, their social circles seem to stagnate. Perhaps this is just because many people get married, and living with their spouse is a fair amount of social interaction.

Well, regardless of the reason, it got me thinking. If I wanted to hang out in college, I just popped down to the lounge and there were always people around. Even if I didn't know any of them, it was always easy to just pick out a geek and start up a conversation. Now that I'm over thirty, I don't do that any more. A) I'm not on a college campus, and B) most people my age aren't randomly hanging around hoping to get talked to.

When it comes to socializing, there are a lot of subtle challenges, largely falling into three groups.

The first problem is the age segregation culture. In American culture, we seem to have decided that the only people who can hang out together are people within a few years of age. This wasn't really a noticeable problem when I was young, because as long as you're in school, you're in a place where there are loads of people your own age in close proximity all the time. Now, I don't have anything against people my own age, but there's no incubator for my current age bracket. The density is too low.

This age segregation is a huge problem. I think it's probably one of the worst parts of American culture, and it spells demise for any circle of friends. Without a continuous stream of fresh blood, any group will wither away as the years pass.

Even though I'm perfectly happy to ignore any cultural norm that irks me, this age seg issue is a real barrier to people like me, who aren't really very social.

The second category of issues for social groups is pre-existing social mixing groups. For example, I can go to a skeptic's meeting, or a cartoonist's con, or any number of other existing groups. Generally, these groups break down the age segregation barrier somewhat, depending on their nature. The skeptic's meeting has a wide age range, but something like an anime convention is going to be mostly young people.

Social groups like this have existed pretty much forever. Any given church is an example. By joining a social group, you can get your socialization even if your best friends move away. And if you like your social groups to actually accomplish something, you can simply join one that accomplishes something.

However, these pre-existing groups are as much a curse as a blessing. They have two serious flaws.

One is that they have a defined set of parameters. Most of these groups meet on specific days at specific times for specific reasons. They don't really "hang out". Meetings are not my idea of socialization: there are too many people and too much noise. In order to manufacture a less aggressive setting, you have to make friends with people and manually arrange to meet them at some other time, a process which gets steadily harder as the age bracket gets older. This same problem is exacerbated by the fact that the organizers of a group want to feel like they are doing something, and tend to fill every minute of meeting time with stuff.

The other flaw with pre-existing groups is that they lag behind the times. These groups don't really use the internet very well.

Even if the group is really new, it is still a defined group. You can come participate, we plan for an event this Tuesday! How oldschool: it's almost certainly possible to enhance this kind of situation using a more adaptive scheduler that weaves together micro-meetings. Of course, that would feel very weird, culturally speaking. We're too used to these oldschool groups, which is why we keep doing them that way.

The third major set of issues is the internet.

It's very easy to make friends on the internet, and hang out with random people on the internet. However, I feel that this is not a good substitute for face time. Maybe when I have 3D wall projectors that make it feel like they're in the same room with me, yeah. But for now, face time is hundreds of times more effective at filling my need to hang out.

The internet is a great organizer, but it is a poor taskmaster. While I can build a social tool that creates micro-meetups, if nobody goes, then it's a big waste of time.

This problem is made a hundred times worse by the nature of the internet itself, which actively discourages leaving your home. If you think NEETs are only in Japan, you are kidding yourself. Hell, the term NEET is originally a UK term.

Even people who are gainfully employed often spend most of their free time on the internet.

There's nothing inherently bad about this, but I think it's good to get out of the house. Hell, I use the internet for productive results, and I still would like to hang out with friends. I guess I sound like someone's mom, but spending face time with people is very valuable: you don't have to stop using the internet, but you should at least talk to your friends in person from time to time.

....

All this extensive chattering has been leading up to this thought exercise: can we create an Adaptive Social Inclusion Network? An ASIN fills one particular role: it gets people who have a hard time socializing to hang out.

In order for an ASIN to properly function, it needs:

1) No age barriers. It should welcome a wide variety of ages, preferably all ages. Not just on paper, but by the fundamental way it works.

2) No lifestyle barriers. It should welcome a wide variety of people living different kinds of lives. Someone who has only a few free hours a week, someone who just popped over from Indonesia to tour the area, someone who has loads of free time but spends the rest of it playing WoW...

3) No viewpoint barriers. It should welcome as many different kinds of people as possible. "Variety is the spice of life" is especially true when you're talking about socializing. If you're not irritated at a friend's stupidity at least once a month, you probably haven't really got any friends.

4) Fresh blood. It should actively welcome new members and strangers.

5) Adaptive meetups. It should schedule little mini-meetings to have random groups of 4-10 do something fun. For example, watching a terrible movie, or learning how to draw. This requires some amount of scheduling knowledge on the part of the software, to try and guess who will be available for what, where, and when. It also requires you to have a variety of mini-meeting subjects to keep people interested.

6) Taskmastering. You need to be able to pull in hermits. This is probably the most difficult, because it really can't be done with software. You need a real human to interact with the hermits to badger them into coming not just to the main meetings, but to the mini-meetings. This doesn't have to be aggressive: an email written by a real person would probably do the trick for anyone active enough to actually join the ASIN in the first place. A kind of karma system for people who email other people would probably work.

7) Acknowledging multiple kinds of social needs. People socialize in different ways. For example, I can't stand parties: if there's more than half a dozen people, I get a tremendous headache. Also, I prefer to talk about cool things and maybe work on small projects together, rather than just watch a movie. I'm happier sketching out a comic book with someone than playing poker with them.

a) Attention needs to be paid to people who are at a meeting or mini-meeting and not enjoying themselves. They don't necessarily need to be forced to enjoy the meeting, but you should at least change their category so they are invited to meetings that are more their speed/with people they are likely to get along with.

b) Self-improvement is a valuable goal that some people will want to pursue. It's worth mentioning this specifically, because it has to be handled gently. When people hear "self-improvement" they hear something desperate, but the truth is that most people want to improve themselves, and having friends of the right sorts is often the best way to go about it.

c) Cooperative tasks and "pester-helping" are also worth mentioning. There are many people who are working on something cool as a hobby or self-employment task. Having friends that pester them about it means it's far more likely to get done. If you stop working on a game and your buddy comes up, face to face, and asks you when the next stage will be done... you'll probably start programming again.

d) Sex and romance are always touchy subjects. I don't have any real opinion on them in this context, except to say that there probably needs to be a pretty strict policy about it. Do whatever you want on your own time, but if you're at a mini-meet, don't cross the line. Whatever that line was defined to be.

e) "Ally clusters": most people are very strongly influenced by their friends. A way to massage who hangs out with who would go a long way towards keeping people happy and productive, if that's what they want to be. This might be impossible, though: the software would need to be brilliantly designed to understand things so deeply.

...

So, that's the sort of thing I've been thinking about recently.

Small Worlds

2011-03-10T17:00:00.000-08:00

These days, games tend to be designed with the idea that bigger is better. A wider world. Vast expanses of space filled in with variations on standard content. Examples abound, especially in RPGs. For example's sake, take a look at Oblivion. Not only are there vast stretches of general terrain, but the majority of architecture (dungeon and inhabited) also reuses a lot of the same content.

While there's nothing wrong with this idea, let's briefly consider what would happen if you took those million man-hours and dedicated them all to a much smaller surface area. Say your entire RPG happened in a high school.

With the kind of content creation thrown at a game like Oblivion, every character in the high school - every student, every teacher, every janitor - they are all unique characters. You never encounter a faceless or cloned NPC. Every corner of the school is carefully designed. You never think one room is the clone of another room unless that's what the designers were going for.

The increased density changes a lot of things. The first thing it changes is the player's perception of the environment. When the player is in an environment that is (A) very dense in unique content and (B) going to be their major haunt for many hours, their awareness stretches. They will become aware of smaller details, smaller presences, smaller changes.

This is no surprise: players pay attention to what matters in a given game. In an adventure game, every pixel might matter, every word might be a clue. But in a vast open-world game, few things actually matter. Just keep your eye open for the cool car you want and listen for the game to start up the battle music that says you're being attacked. The other cars are unimportant, and you don't have to always look around you to see if bears are arriving.

However, there are loads of other things that a denser game environment changes.

The cost of content is dramatically changed because the content interacts with itself a lot more. In a game like Oblivion, every unique NPC only reacts to their own tiny corner of the plot. This is accepted: the NPCs don't ever do anything that feels like free will, and even if they did, they're separated by vast amounts of space.

But when you condense to a smaller space filled with the same number of NPCs, suddenly you can't ignore the fact that they see each other. The denser the space and the more mobile the NPCs, the more your NPCs have to interact with other NPCs and content. So each NPC becomes more expensive to build.

They're not any more expensive in terms of graphics, but they are in terms of scripting and testing. After a certain point, you'll need a kind of basic social AI for them since it becomes too difficult to script for every condition they may encounter. Even if you had a full-blown perfect AI for each character, you'd still have to configure the content carefully so the game unfolds in a way which pulls and entertains the player.

You can cut down on this by cutting down the mobility and density of the space. For example, in Phoenix Wright, the space is very dense, but the characters cannot move about. You'll spend most of your time directly interacting with unique NPCs in unique situations, but none of the NPCs are programmed to figure out what to do with themselves: every inch is carefully scripted.

This solution has obvious limits, but you could do somewhat similar techniques that aren't so restrictive. For example, imagine a game version of Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. There are hundreds of characters, but they are all variations of the same half-dozen fundamental characters reinterpreted on different worlds. So the different versions of the NPCs never interact: you're left with a fairly dense space and lots of interesting characters, but you don't have to worry about the crippling recombinatorial explosion of them interacting with each other.

There are also other concerns about "dense space" games.

For example, most dense space games have to have time as a major element. While player time is always important, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about game-world time that matters: changes to the state of the game world over time.

Because the game world is so much smaller, changes to the game world usually touch a whole lot more content than you might think. If you choose to nuke or not nuke that town in Fallout 3, either way the percentage of the content it affects is on the order of 0.01%. But replacing a single teacher in our theoretical high-school game will affect on the order of 2-3% of the content, since it is all much more tightly interwoven.

In addition, it's harder to do "disconnected" stuff. While you can kill 50k bandits in Oblivion, it's usually significantly harder to have those kinds of "fire and forget" encounters in a much smaller world. If you manage to write them in somehow, they often end up expanding the world dramatically in the process, sort of like the way that Persona games classically have a very dense home base but a completely not-even-vaguely-dense dungeon section. Anyway, a higher percentage of your interactions are likely to be world- or content-altering to some degree.

In the end, this usually means that dense space games will probably focus on a ton of tiny, incremental changes to the world. This is not how we normally think of game design: we usually think in terms of numeric systems and level maps, rather than tiny changes to NPCs. Our industry's inexperience at this is another reason that games with dense space will probably be more difficult for us.

At least, games with dense space that have loads of NPCs. There are plenty of dense space games you could make that have few or no NPCs. For example, Sim City is a dense space game with no NPCs. But that sort of game isn't really what I mean: I'm talking about RPGs.

And some RPGs are already condensing space, at least some of the time. For example, Dragon Age's relatively dense "base camp". Of course, the play in these parts is generally not really there: the NPCs don't interact with each other, time doesn't really pass, nothing really changes. It's just a handy way to talk to NPCs that aren't in your party. Still, it's a shadow of the sort of thing I'm talking about.

...

I've kind of babbled on a bit, but what I am fundamentally saying is that bigger doesn't necessarily mean better. There are advantages to having a smaller, denser space: the player feels a stronger connection to the space and it offers opportunities to have much more dramatic and subtle NPC events/arcs. There are also costs.

I hope to see more games use less space.

Chaos Marketplace

2011-02-23T10:02:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about the idea of a next-generation economy. I don't really mean some kind of fancy revolution where we use unique keys as currency. I don't really mean anything built to replace the fundamental economies that make sure we have access to water and expensive coffee.

However, I think there's a place for a new economy, enabled by more powerful technology.

This has been running around my head for ages, ever since I saw Kickstarter. If you don't know what Kickstarter is, stop reading this and go there. Don't bother coming back to read this until you've funded some projects. I doubt it'll make any sense unless you understand that there is a hell of a lot of money available for small projects, self-funded by random members of the community. It is not uncommon to see projects get double or even triple the funding they ask for.

But, to me, Kickstarter is kind of... a first step. I feel like the idea can go further, especially if you combine it with other modern "opportunity media" concepts such as Twitter and Groupon.

See, Kickstarter's stated intention is to get you enough funding to get your project "off the ground". Get you "started".

There's obviously more money in the community than that.

A community like Kickstarter's can probably be easily adapted to being the primary source of funding throughout the lifespan of the project. (In fact, that seems to already be happening in Kickstarter's projects, if you look around a bit.)

IE, you don't need to really launch your project into the outside economy. Your project can, in fact, be sustained by the community itself. You'll still want to integrate into the outside economy as much as possible, obviously. If you're writing a book, you'll certainly want to sell it to anyone who wants to buy it. But it's become clear that there's enough cash in the community that you could probably get away with zero Amazon sales as long as there is community support.

I'm trying to make it clear that there's more money in these kinds of communities than most people really understand. I'm not saying that these communities should form walled-off economies and try to be self-sufficient. I'm trying to say that these communities can be used as an extremely strong and stable foundation for a project, radically reducing the risk and decreasing the amount of business acumen you need to succeed in modest projects.

Furthermore, with only a little bit of thought, it becomes possible to create a structure allowing people to help each other. If you have a lot of experience and business acumen, then maybe you'll do better helping non-business people with their projects. Instead of them having to search out through Craigslist or Monster or whatever, they just go to your profile page and read up on all the projects you've already helped with. Then there's some kind of helper function which makes it painless to negotiate some kind of simple (royalty-based, perhaps) payment structure that can be relied on not to screw either party over, especially with the might of the community to help fix any misunderstandings and negotiate settlements when things go screwball.

When I look at what these final projects look like, I see a few things that are similar to Kickstarter projects today: movies, books, and so on. But Kickstarter as it is now fails on the more long-term projects such as housing and farms and such. Oh, it funds the seed, sure, but after that... good luck!

The next-generation system allows interested people to track the project as it continues, add in funding as they see fit, subscribe to something if there is something of value being released, and in general keep up with things. This radically improves the community's ability to keep worthwhile projects alive, and creates an economy of personal responsibility and reliability that is quite distinct from the cost-savings consumer culture of our normal economy.

This would hopefully create a niche economy where a large community of reasonably well-off and/or hard-working people can support each other in medium- or long-term projects without being subject to the complexities of government grants, marketing to the masses, or just plain bad luck.

Hmmm... I would love to see that.

Advanced Pacing

2011-02-13T14:17:00.000-08:00

I have a problem with most games these days, and that problem is pacing.

Not that the pacing in the game is bad. Oh, that's a huge problem in indie games, but experienced teams tend to have pretty good pacing in their games.

No, my problem is the pacing outside of the game. When you quit playing and come back. I'll call this "external pacing", just for the moment.

I've talked about this before, but today I'd like to talk about it in more detail.

At first glance, the main problem with external pacing is that you forget everything you were doing. This is a huge problem with complex games such as civ-style games and tactical RPGs.

Today's casual/social games show us one way to deal with it: reduce the amount of complexity in the game. If there's a giant sticker on the game telling you what to do next, you can always go and do it, even if you're gone for a month. However, this solution relies on the game not allowing the player to create anything significant.

In most open-world games, for example, your sandbox play is limited to collecting orbs or other almost zero-state situations. If you're in the middle of collecting orbs when you quit the game, and you forget what you were doing, it hardly matters. Orb-collecting will wait patiently for you to remember that it exists while you do other things. It is just as easy to begin collecting orbs again as it would have been if you had continued collecting orbs without the break. Hell, you could give it to a completely different player, and he would collect orbs just as effectively: there's no real unique state to the orb collection game. None that matters.

This is carried into every facet of the game. If you advance along the main quest line, it doesn't matter if you quit. When you return, the quest picks up with no more than five minutes of lost headway, and it picks up again with a crystal-clear "Do this next!" HUD element.

This is a trait of casual games, too. In fact, you can probably say it is the defining trait of casual games. Nearly all social network games are the same way, but with fun scheduling drama as well.

The point is, this is an extremely common practice.

A common practice I don't like.

If this "low state" method is used, it does allow players to drop and pick up the game as they see fit. But it means that players can't change the state of the game except A) in ways that don't matter or B) along the specific path carved by the designers.

Contrast this to a game of Civilization, where the state of the game is almost entirely determined by the player. If the player leaves and comes back, it's entirely possible he'll forget that he needed to build up Naples some more, or that Paris was about to be attacked. On the other hand, although it's hard to pick it up again after quitting, there's actually some meaningful play. It's not just meaningless zero-state play as you slide along the designers moving sidewalk.

Fundamentally, the more of the game's state I am allowed to modify, the more involving I find the play in a game. A game like Call of Duty doesn't appeal to me much because there's not a whole lot of ways to express myself. You can polish your skills so you kill the enemies better or worse, but in terms of the game world, there's no difference. Whether you just squeak by or whether you ninja them all to death doesn't matter.

I realize that's just my preference. This post is not about whether that's good or bad, it's about games that do want to include a lot more agency. For people who do consider agency important, the problematic fact is that external pacing is killer. Any game with real agency - such as Civilization - suffers dramatically from the breaks the player takes.

Some workarounds have been introduced from one side or the other. Call of Duty and the like shows us one method that works towards agency from an agency-free game: trophies. If you do specific cool things in the game, you earn permanent trophies. I guess it appeals to some people, but I actually find it a net negative. My hatred of the continuous popups telling me how far I am from another pointless trophy is renowned. I have quit games because of it.

Coming from an agency-heavy game to try to make external pacing work, we can look at MMORPGs. Most MMORPGs restrict the agency you have to very specific and numerical axes, while also keeping a strict record of all the things you are trying to do. It doesn't get along well with "open play" where you might just be doing something because it's fun, but it does do pretty well with most other situations.

The record is obviously helpful, since a player can just pull it up and read what the eight things they were doing were. However, the agency axis restriction is also very valuable. By restricting the player to expressing himself through equipment only, and not being allowed to make unique equipment, the MMORPG creates a very clean, mostly linear expression path. Players feel like they are expressing themselves by choosing hat A instead of hat B, but the way they express themselves does not require them to remember anything the next time they log in. Similarly, the skill sets are pretty linear too: you're not likely to screw your build up any worse after a break than if you had kept playing.

Personally, I don't like MMORPGs, either. Sure, a lot of good games have linear paths you follow, but those are normally backed by non-linear, relatively open play in other parts of the game, such as platforming or party customization. MMORPGs simply slap down a million fragments of linear paths to replace both the normal linear path and the normal non-linear play, and suddenly it's agency. I find that uninteresting. Less interesting than a game which is just linear, actually.

So, taking potshots at my personal dislikes aside, I thought about how to make a game with real agency that doesn't suffer from quitting and returning to it.

After some looking around, I decided the key is that you don't have to have all your agency in the same place. You can package it up so that it exists in different domains, each one of which can be reasonably managed when it comes to quitting and returning.

As an example, in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. You can express yourself by building a vehicle. Once built, the vehicle can then be used in the rest of the game. The vehicle part is not completely integrated: you're likely to finish the vehicle construction as an atomic operation, without quitting and reloading. However, even if you were to quit and return to an unfinished vehicle, it is reasonably easy to remember what you were doing and noncritical even if you do forget.

So the gameplay is partitioned - agency-heavy car building does not mix with exploring town for doodads which does not mix with missions. Each kind of play is reasonably agency-heavy, but not so intertwined that it suffers from quitting and reloading.

I'm not saying Nuts & Bolts is a great game, I'm saying it's an example of what I'm talking about. In the future, I imagine we'll see a game like Nuts & Bolts also have play elements that interact with you via the web, allowing for scheduling gameplay as well.

The idea here is to allow you to build up unique and interesting elements, express yourself as you see fit... and then compile it. Partition it. Instead of remembering everything all the time, you only have to remember a little bit... but your hours of play so far have been very agency-rich, made your world very unique.

There are certain kinds of games I think might be hard to do. Like tactical RPGs where you create two dozen characters. Even if you try to partition the character design into its own unit, you still have two dozen completely unique characters, each with their own specialty, each with their own optimal growth path. Who can even remember which ones you were going to use in the next fight?

It may be we see a descendant of this sort of game that does use play partitions, though. For example, you still make two dozen characters. But instead of being lumped into one monolithic list, you have to split them up into small units of 3 or so, each of which is located elsewhere, with their own concerns. Any given play session might be about any of these teams, allowing you to remember each of them and rediscover their strengths, without feeling like you're discarding 21 other characters.

Anyhow, those are my thoughts. What are yours?

The Opt-Out

2011-01-28T21:54:00.000-08:00

This is a rant. Maybe an unfair one, who knows.

So, I made a purchase from Etsy for Christmas gifts. I kinda like the place, and I have friends that do quite a bit of business through them. Today, I get an email from Etsy.

"We recently launched a new feature, Circles, that lets you connect with other people on Etsy. When you add someone to your Etsy circle, you can follow along with their favorites in your activity feed. It's illuminating!

Right now it's hard to find people you know on Etsy, and that's sad. Well, we're changing that. We're making it easy to connect your email address book to Etsy, so we can find people you know who are also members.

(If you don't want people you know to be able to find you, you will be able easily to opt out through your account privacy settings.)"

Wow, that is not at all something I'm even vaguely interested in. Okay, lost of good sites have features I don't care about. But read carefully: this is not a feature I don't care about. Turns out, I care deeply!

Let's review the severe problems in this message.

The only obvious issue is that they have decided to make my email address a public part of my account. This only becomes a real issue because they also automatically opt you into sharing your purchase history. Well, brilliant.

I can see how many people would find this a good new feature. For example, my friends that do a lot of sales through Etsy. But me? I find this an extreme breach of privacy. To the point where I am now significantly less likely to use Etsy.

I logged in and opted out of all that shit. Turns out there's no "delete account" option, by the way.

"Easy to opt out" is an oxymoron. "Opt out" is a poison term, it already means you raised a barrier specifically to make it more likely people will participate. Nothing can be "easy to opt out", because that's called "opt in". "Opt in" is the only responsible, ethical way to reveal client information.

The only points Etsy gets here is that they sent this email before enabling the new feature - it doesn't go live until next month. I don't think Etsy was trying to be sleazy... But linking personal email addresses to their purchase history in public? Yeah, that's not shady!

I'd stop using Amazon in a heartbeat if they did that, and I practically live through them.

Of course, I'm pretty touchy on privacy. I'm the guy who refuses to get a Facebook account. And I'm not really Etsy's target audience, or even a good customer. Still, it's a shame they took a sleazy route. I guess most people don't mind an utter and almost criminal lack of privacy. At least, I hope so, or Etsy's in trouble.

It's possible this is not sleazy, and they've just been really horrible about explaining it. However, that seems vanishingly unlikely given the reckless disregard for privacy shown by nearly every company these days.

Grrrr.

Terrain Play

2011-01-28T09:08:00.000-08:00

I've talked about this before, but I'd like to talk about it again. Constructive terrain games. That is, games where you build a base/s. Whether it's Starcraft or Evil Genius or Civilization.

In thinking about these games, I've tried very hard to come up with the methods used to make them interesting and challenging. The challenges I'm most interested in are those related to building the base, rather than those related to putting the base in the right spot on the map. So I'm not going to talk about map-tile resource allocations or complex topography much. I'm going to talk about the parts where the player twists himself up in a knot of his own making.

There are three kinds of challenges that relate to this. Most of these challenges are expressed via semipermanent, fixed structures that you can place.

The first is the arbitrary challenge/facility. This is a situation where the location on the map doesn't matter. For example, placing a research facility: no matter where you place it, the research happens at the same rate and is just as applicable.

Arbitrary challenges are often simple treadmills to extend the gameplay. Plunk this down to steadily unlock stronger soldiers, if you have the money for it. However, they can also serve as a gating mechanism, unlocking additional facilities over time. This forces the player to build up their core base with a complexifying crowd of fundamental buildings, making the placement of advanced buildings somewhat tricky. Advanced players will often leave empty zones in their base as they build, knowing that they'll want to put advanced structures in safe places well inside their core base zone.

Arbitrary challenges are usually made a bit trickier simply by resource allocation. An arbitrary challenge facility will siphon away valuable resources, and your strategy requires you to balance the upgrades/abilities it offers against your more direct unit/facility purchasing.

They can also be made trickier by having very awkward shapes. This is especially useful if you're playing a contiguous base game, where every facility must be butting up against another facility, door-to-door. While any facility can have an awkward shape, this is the best type to make awkward, as the other types should be reasonably easy to place anywhere.

Speaking of the other types, in addition to arbitrary challenges, there are ZOC challenges.

Zone of control challenge facilities are those that have a radius of effect, or whose effect diminishes as range increases. For example, you put the lumberjack shack next to the forest so the round trip is tiny. You put the turret on a path that the enemies are likely to use.

A subset of ZOC are those that are required in order to place your own facilities, such as Protoss pylons or Dune's concrete. I'll call these "extend ZOC". These are worth mentioning as their own distinct type simply because if they exist, they are critically important parts of your strategy.

ZOC challenges sometimes relate to fixed map resources, in which case the point is to build a ZOC facility very near the resource. Combined with complex topology and extend ZOCs, this can actually be quite a challenge. Protecting a particularly remote facility may also be quite a challenge.

Other ZOC challenges relate to non-fixed map elements, such as traveling enemy soldiers or random resource spawns. Knowing the paths/likely positions of these elements is critical, and there are often "layers" of these kinds of ZOC challenges. For example, this turret protects against ground units, that one against air units. You place them assuming the ground units will go around the mountain and the air units over it: the ZOC has very different weights because they are addressing different kinds of non-fixed map elements.

The third ZOC challenge type is when the ZOC relates to your own base. Extend ZOC facilities are one example, but there are often other buildings such as police stations, repair droid ports, energy broadcast stations, sewage treatment facilities, and so on. Games with a lot of my-base-ZOC challenges are typically not heavy combat, but are instead heavy on building.

After arbitrary and ZOC challenges there is a third type: pathing challenges.

Pathing challenges are when the point is to direct units or resources along specific paths. For example, walls of sandbags to force the zombies to come along a torturous maze. Or electrical lines to carry power to your distant buildings. Or roads.

Pathing challenges sometimes intertwine with arbitrary and ZOC challenges. For example, any contiguous base game makes the whole base into a pathing challenge, where you may have to be quite clever with your base design and where you extend to. Pathing challenges may also interact with ZOC challenges, especially if you are putting down a path for enemy units: the ZOC facilities will cover the path and bombard the enemy.

However, the deepest kind of pathing challenges are those that change over time, or butt heads with changing situations.

For example, in Evil Genius, you have a contiguous base. Your minions walk through the base in a strictly simulated manner. The pathing you provide in the early game will rapidly become unwieldy as you struggle with larger numbers of minions and desperately trying to keep travel times short rather than putting that new facility a mile away where there's actually room.

Oldschool RTS players will probably remember difficulties with base placement in old games: you would build a base, then realize you had cut the travel path, and units couldn't actually get out. Another example.

This is relatively rare with things other than travel paths, though. Electrical lines can always carry infinite energy, water pipes can always carry infinite sewage, and so on. Still, that's just convention, and it can be bucked.

Another fun complexity to add to pathing challenges is to have multiple kinds of paths that have to coexist. For example, roads and railways. Or even just local roads and highways. Underpasses and overpasses become common, and as the situation changes, the roads inevitably become too limited and narrow. This is especially common in train games.

There are plenty of other ways to make pathing challenges interact with each other if you want.

The point is, if the game wants to let the player twist himself into knots, the game has to allow the player to build his own base, and make that the fundamental restriction on his future expansion.

The core elements of that are:

A) Gate facilities, such that you have to build certain buildings before you can build others.

B) Use ZOC (and possibly travel time on travel paths) to force the player to consolidate.

C) Use travel paths with load limits and steadily increase the load. Optionally use multiple kinds of travel paths that can't perfectly coexist.

...

There's a subcategory of games where you build your base for another kind of objective entirely. For example, the self-styled bases of Minecraft players. Technically, they use these same kinds of challenges, but the weights are very odd and often selectively imposed. Not every base has to have water, for example, so the water pathing challenge is often simply ignored.

These "erratic challenge" systems are another topic for another day!

Shadow Puppets

2011-01-24T09:03:00.000-08:00

I came up with this idea while trying to invent a hacker game setting, and I thought it was an interesting thought experiment. So here's the deal:

Imagine that in the future, we have software that can analyze audio and video (and writing and pictures). By analyzing the media, the software can program a virtual entity with a personality and appearance very similar to the writer/actor/whoever is in the media you passed it.

The virtual entity is quite advanced. Assuming you have a good computer and the most recent pseudo-AI drivers, the virtual entity is almost indistinguishable from the original, at least in the context of media. The gaps in the seed media are overcome by careful guessing. That mean the virtual entity can act very reasonably even in situations not covered by the seed media.

In the game world I designed, problems arose when people began creating virtual entities of politicians and releasing very convincing fake videos of them saying or doing things they never did or said. It came to a head with a bevy of fake-porn cases in which the real versions of the virtual porn stars launched a whole lot of lawsuits for everything from character defamation to abuse.

The courts came up with a rather novel solution. Which, I guess, is the most fantastical part of this setting. It's called the "virtual volition" rule.

Basically, the courts ruled that everyone had the right to personal privacy. The programs were considered to breach that privacy by simulating that person's behavior and body in a way they did not approve. This was considered fundamentally different than drawing cartoons or even photoshopping lewd pictures because of the extremely high fidelity and accuracy of the virtual entities.

The misused virtual entities were labeled "shadow puppets" - programs that looked so much like specific real world individuals that they violated the privacy of those real world individuals. Shadow puppets became illegal. Later, the definition expanded to include virtual entities in breach of copyright, such as one fed on Mickey Mouse cartoons that looks and acts like Mickey Mouse.

Of course, it's impossible to ban a piece of software like this. Legal, open source software could be fed with publicly available media to produce a high-fidelity shadow puppet. Still, don't get caught: it's considered abuse or assault on the person being simulated.

Legal virtual entities abounded. Many simply were unrealistic, or a mishmash of media that didn't attempt to simulate any one person. Others were specific people or cartoons or whatever, but had very strict limits and would refuse to "fill in" the gaps and act beyond the "volition lock". IE, you couldn't convince your official Steven Fry virtual entity to strip down and sing show tunes.

In the game world, it had tons of ramifications and made the world a very complex place.

Anyway, there's not really any point to this essay. It's just a random interesting thing I thought I'd mention.

Connectivity

2011-01-23T17:39:00.000-08:00

I was watching this archived webcast today. It gets contentious about halfway in, but I like that, it makes me want to write about the subject. This is a borderline rant, I guess, but I hope you enjoy it.

A lot of the conversations we have about the nature of technology stresses, well, stress. Just as an easy example, the author of that webcast specifically calls it "panic architecture" which, like many other terms, is coined to make a point rather than be useful.

Assuming you don't want to listen to the hour of webcast, I'll cover the bits I touch on. In this case, "panic architecture" is used to refer to the theoretical stimulus overload from tweets and emails and IMs all popping up at you all the time.

I can't help but turn down this kind of shallow analysis. Not only is there no real evidence to support it, but there's also no sign that these clumsy first-generation implementations are the only ones we're going to see.

We've developed tools to let us share with everyone, everywhere, instantly. We're now using tools that let us "hear" without having to be listening.

Every kind of "panic architecture" interaction is actually asynchronous. That is, the computer tells you that there's a new message, and you can get around to reading it whenever you like. Some pieces of software are worse than others - Twitter is only barely asynchronous, since if you wait more than an hour or so, you'll have a backlog too deep to sift through. So you lose a lot of data down the tubes if you wait.

I guess you could say that's a high-pressure environment, but not really. The only reason it's high-pressure is because you've tricked yourself into thinking it's important to view everything, and view it fast. Trying to make sure you don't miss any tweets is sort of like trying to make absolutely sure you see every single person who passes by the Starbucks. It's not a sensible reaction.

If we feel stressed by these "always on" tools, it's because we've tricked ourselves into viewing them in the wrong way. Part of that might be pure neurochemistry, but I think it's mostly a cultural maladaptation which will fade in time as we get used to the technology and learn, as a populace, that it's okay to let the river flow by without trying to drink it all.

Also, there is another generation of tools past these "hear without listening" tools.

Phone calls extend our ears so we can talk over long distances. But that's only this very instant. So we use emails, RSS and the like to extend our memory: we can think about something long after it has been said.

And now we're going to get a new breed of tool: one which extends our thinking about something across vast distances. Already, we're seeing it. We don't get all our emails: we get only the emails our outboard brain doesn't discard as spam. Many of us have dozens of rules about which emails are further flagged and sorted. This lets us determine whether something needs to be read soon, or whether it can be put off until we feel vaguely curious.

In the future, more intelligent tools will have a system for cuing things up. If it's important, it tells you immediately. If it's interesting but not important, it'll bother you with a quick line and link every few days. If it's something good for you that you can't seem to sit down and get through, it'll keep pestering you.

Essentially, this new breed of tool is a computerized version of the thing in our brains that says "hey, the roof is leaking, maybe we should fix that before it rains again."

Right now, we often try to deal with a true deluge of information right against our brains. I agree that this is not really a very good idea. At the very least, it sets a very low upper limit to the amount of things we can consider. By creating smart tools to deal with that deluge for us, we can consider terabytes of information every hour.

I need to stress that this isn't some fantasy tale of strong AI. We already do this to a great extent by using RSS feeds - we sign up for the news outlets we like, whether they're brand names or individuals with blogs. We use them as our roof-is-leaking engines. I'm simply pointing forward and saying "there's gonna be more of this." For example: Priority Inbox

It is true that humans sometimes feel lost and confused by advances. But this is nothing new. People felt lost and confused when the king changed, or weirdos with funny accents started settling in their alluvial plains. Change makes people feel stressed out, regardless of whether it's technology or culture or any other source.

So, yes, a lot of people feel stressed out by the "constant bombardment" of our "always on" culture. Except that it's not constant bombardment, it's not always on, and the tools for dealing with it gracefully are evolving as we speak. As always, we adapt to our situations and find out the best way to take advantage of the opportunities we are offered.

To me, the real "panic architecture" is the way soft sciences and media outlets continuously scream about dangers that never arrive, dangers that were never even dangers. It interferes with adult's acceptance of change when you scream that every change is a disaster. Kids don't give a shit - a kid will use Twitter and Facebook even if their parents think it is pure poison. But adults have to work to learn these tools, to integrate them into their life even a little bit, and panicking about them just makes the task that much more difficult.

I don't, by the way, think that the webcast I mentioned at the beginning is an example of that kind of panicky statement. I don't know enough about the author to say anything about her, and at worst, the webcast itself is kind of ambivalent on the subject. It's just a handy turn of phrase to steal her words and make another point with them.

There are actually a lot of other things I want to argue about that were covered in that webcast, but this is long enough already.

(By the way, I'm going to coin a term in opposition to the normal way of coining a term. "Roof-is-leaking engines", or RILEs: that's a term that could be useful, but it isn't very good at making a point. )

Tool Using Play

2011-01-18T10:11:00.000-08:00

After a brief conversation about why some people don't consider Minecraft a game, I'd like to talk about it. Not Minecraft - about the use of play as a tool.

There are a fair number of games that feature content creation as a major play element. There have been some pretty much since we figured out how to draw space invaders to a computer screen. Let's talk about the way games integrate content creation.

In the "classic" style, games integrate content creation as a stand-alone editor and/or importer. For example, Pinball Construction Set in 1985 (one of my favorites as a kid) had a level editor you could play with. It's become pretty typical these days.

Many modern games feature an edit mode switch in the game proper. For example, Little Big Planet and Second Life both feature an "edit mode" where you can create and alter objects from wherever you're standing in the level.

But the method steadily gaining in popularity is when the edit mode is tightly integrated with the gameplay: as you play the game, you edit the game. An obvious example is Minecraft, which is basically impossible to play without editing the level. In such cases, you initially use the editor to survive and explore a bit, but once you get good enough, you begin to use the editor to do increasingly self-driven things, such as building a giant garden or the USS Enterprise.

Another example of integrated content creation is when the act of playing the game ranks content and makes other players more or less likely to see it. Later, I foresee a fair number of games where you'll run into random mutations of content and rank it simply by playing, allowing a fairly large number of players to participate in an evolving ecosystem of content. So you don't absolutely have to be creating content yourself: ranking and sorting content is a valuable form of content creation in and of itself. Well, assuming you have the requisite foundation of content to rank and sort.

In my mind, this final form of content creation is the future. Integrated content creation. It has the highest "pull" - you'll get more content per player (on average) and you'll get better sorting and distribution if you use integrated creation and ranking. Much more efficient than mode-swap content creation, and almost infinitely more efficient than level-editor content creation. (To be fair, I think most games will use all three to some extent: they have different specialties.)

Since content creation / player-sorted content is such a powerful tool, I expect to see more of it in future games. Therefore, how to do it best is also an important topic.

I'm not as expert as I would like to be on this matter, but here are three areas I feel should be on everyone's list:

Base content creation: how does your player base create content as they play? The more restrictive the framework, the lower the barrier to entry... but the lower the maximum quality of the content will be. Minecraft uses a rigidly square grid and almost no moving parts, allowing players a fairly easy time of it, but also crippling some high-end content. For example, no NPCs, no elevators, no swinging pendulum traps...

Distribution and sorting: how do your players share content? The more helpful your distribution system (IE marketplace), the happier your moderately skilled player base will be... but it will also be very crowded and full of crap. A sorting mechanism driven by player preferences can be very handy, but can also brutally suppress starting players who are still getting used to the editing system.

Content cooperation: how can your content be used in relationship to other content? For example, create a shirt, and you can put that shirt on any humanoid frame. That's cooperative content. The more ways content can interact with other content and/or rules, the deeper the system will be. If you create an axle with wheels, can you only use it with cars? Or can you staple a hundred of them to the bottom of a house? If you create a shirt, can it be torn up, made wet, transformed by the environment, mutated, tailored, or painted? Obviously, the more kinds of interactions content can have, the more potential to draw players in.

The primary drawbacks are A) the amount of time it takes to code those interactions and B) accidentally forcing players to wade through details when they just want a quick result. IE, if they're making a skyscraper and you force them to choose every door, every carpet... that's a big barrier.

Anyway, that's content creation as I see it. You?

Skyrim

2011-01-13T18:12:00.000-08:00

I posted a very dismissive comment on Skyrim, and I've gotten a fair number of people telling me not to be so dismissive. So, I'm going to talk about it a bit. By "talk", I mean "rant". (Edit: I really mean rant. This is a way over-the-top rant. I only clarify this because now there's some outside links leading here. This is not a measured discussion of merit. It is a rant.)

First, I'm sure Skyrim is going to be an extremely popular game with very high ratings. It'll certainly get game of the year. What I'm saying is that you will enjoy Skyrim if you're even vaguely the sort of person who likes things like Oblivion or Fallout 3. Hell, even I might enjoy it, maybe. It's not a gamble, it's not a mystery, there's not even any need to see gameplay videos. It's a well-funded game from an experienced studio that has put out many of the most successful games in this genre.

But let me tell you why I don't like it.

There's a stench crawling up from below, and I smell it in every press release and article. The stench of... streamlining.

Let me start with the most obvious example: they've taken out the the "restrictive class system" and allow you to gain points in skills just as you use them. Of course, the earlier games had a class system... and still improved your skills as you use them. So we can ignore the "improve your skills as you use them" chaff. All they're doing is explicitly removing classes.

At first glance, you shrug and say "why not? Sounds fine. A lot of successful games like Fallout 3 don't have classes. They're an outdated design philosophy."

So, let me ask a simple question: what was your favorite part of Oblivion and Morrowind?

So far, most of the people I've asked have said either "the first ten hours" or "character customization". Which are basically the same answer.

I played Oblivion for at least two hundred hours. The vast majority of those hours were the first ten hours over and over. This was possible for several reasons. One: character design is fun and has ramifications. So you can simply change your design and be playing a different game, right from the start. Two: you can easily strike off into the world in any way you like, so you're not stapled to the same starting narrative. We'll leave that bit alone for now, except to say that you'll probably be stapled to a starting narrative in Skyrim.

Character design - choosing not just your visual look but also your stats - is a core part of RPG gameplay. The "class" was simply an extension of this, allowing you to radically alter your growth curve and quickly develop different ways to play the game. If I want to play a warrior, I walk out the door as a warrior and do warrior things right away. If I want to play as a thief-mage, I roll it up and run with it.

On the other hand, in Skyrim that's not what you do. At least according to the press releases, you start with potential in everything. Like Fable, perhaps.

It is still possible to become a warrior, or a mage, or whatever. But not until you're ten hours into the game. The first ten hours are almost always nearly identical. You can't skip them: you need to grind character skills during them.

Oh, yes, those restrictive straightjacket classes. Oh how I hated the way they let me play the game any way I wanted. I really hated being allowed to be competent right from the starting gate. It's much better to ditch replay value in favor of locking characters into a sluggish, long-term path that you won't know whether you like or not until ten hours in.

...

I guess that might seem a bit overstating it, but it's not. That's the purpose classes serve, and the damage done by ditching them.

There are a million things I react poorly to. For example, they say that there are X spells - a specific number, something like thirty.

Whut.

Um, why? Where did spell creation go? I really hated being able to create my own fun custom spells! I especially hated being able to enchant stuff, I hope that's gone, too.

They mention there is a focus on blunting and preventing exploits.

Um, why? A single player game doesn't have to be balanced. The exploits are a big part of why all the other Elder Scrolls games were fun. The only reason I can think of to aggressively balance the game is that there will be some kind of ranked multiplayer situation where game balance suddenly matters. I actually hope that they just did it out of a random brain fart instead.

They mention they dropped mysticism. Because who needs a school of magic about magic? Well, obviously, not our avatar. Since he can't roll his own spells or anything.

Three fewer skills? Stinks the same way. Let's guess: is alchemy one of these missing skills, or is it just blunted to the point where you might as well just buy healing potions from the shop?

My complaints could go on basically forever. I have loads of more tenuous concerns. For example, this being a cross-platform RPG, it will almost certainly have "the Console Blight". This is a disease where custom content is verboten, and PC installs come with a gig of malware to keep you from accidentally having any fun. Sure the earlier games didn't have it so bad, but that was then. There's a universal trend towards the console blight, I hardly expect this game to ignore it.

The menu system is mentioned as being more "in game". Like with Fable III and its hilariously, game-breakingly bad "in game" menus? They mention the "horrible" menus from Oblivion. Which menus were those? The ones that let me see the things I needed to see within two clicks using distinct icons? The ones that didn't make my character seem like he was having a psychotic hallucination? The ones that didn't take a second to scroll between submenus? The ones that actually allowed for complex gameplay?

Ugh!

So, yes, Skyrim. Game of the year, guaranteed. You'll love it. Maybe I'll even like it. But it throws away a lot of good stuff in the name of "streamlining".

Because players are retards! We hate designing our characters, having fun with exploits, and playing with complexity. I mean, sure, those'r universally considered the best parts of your earlier games, but those people were all deluded.

... it's been a while since I've done quite so much ranting on this blog. I'm probably the only person on the internet who dislikes what I see about this game. 50% marketing speak and 50% lowest-common-denominator game design. Ugh.

Going Home

2011-01-10T09:07:00.000-08:00

Some friends and I had a bit of a talk about home bases in video games. There are many examples. The Normandies in the Mass Effects. The Suikoden games often had castles or similar. The Overlord games had castles. Mario Galaxy had the space base thing. Many more.

In talking about them, we found we all had completely different opinions. So I started thinking, and I came to some conclusions.

First, there are four distinct functions of a home base. These aren't exclusive: you can mix and match. The four types are hub worlds, enhanced menus, art galleries, and gardens.

Hub worlds are simply homes where the point is to have a central place from which you can go anywhere. Hub worlds are usually a "safe" point in the game world, allowing you to recharge, recover, and save. Their other function is to shrink the size of the world by allowing you to reach various points very quickly.

Enhanced menus are homes which could be replaced by a simple menu system, but are instead spread into various rooms. For example, you might have a travel room, an equipment room, a few shops, and so on. These are getting more common, and the most egregious example is the newest Fable game. A less nasty example is the Overlord's castle.

Art galleries are homes where you can make all sorts of aesthetic changes, such as doing interior decorating or displaying trophies. These are becoming extremely common, probably because they are both easy and effective. Many of my friends - and many gamers in general - love the idea of expressing themselves by redecorating their homes.

Gardens are homes which grow over the course of the game. These homes reflect your progress through the storyline(s), but also frequently allow you to access optional content such as unlocking NPC personal quests, growing/crafting rare items, participating in challenges, and so on. The core idea behind a garden isn't that it allows you to do these things, but that it steadily grows in its capabilities to allow you to do these things.

The Normandy in ME2 is a weak but easy example: there are many subquests to do, and as the game progresses, you get more. A better example would be the starship Calnus from Star Ocean: the Last Hope. The Calnus allows you to change who is rooming with who, wander around randomly and talk to your crew, forge items, and many other things. The potential for all these grew over the course of the game. That said, the Calnus was an extremely high-pressure implementation, since it is very definitely possible to end up missing a huge amount of content if you don't have a walkthrough.

Anyway, those are four things a home base generally can do: hub world, enhanced menu, art galleries, and gardens.

If you want your home to have an emotional kick to it, you need to make sure to allow for both art gallery and garden elements. A key is to keep the player coming back to the home for the sake of interacting with the home. This can be pushed a bit by enticing the player to come back for other reasons (such as needing to shop at the store or open a new gate), but those enticements are not sufficient in and of themselves. The player needs to want to interact with the home.

Another factor to consider is the architecture of the home. Architecture is important for several reasons. One reason is that people remember rooms and places really well, so you need to have unique and varied rooms and places connected in interesting but intuitive ways. Another reason is because cunning architectural design can radically enhance the art gallery aspect of the game - for example, if you change the flags in the main hall, that's fine. But if you then notice that you can see down into the main hall from the top of the tower, that change becomes a bit more interesting.

Anyhow, just some thoughts on creating home bases. What are your favorite home bases? Your thoughts?

Bringing Up the Average, Pt 2

2010-12-22T09:19:00.000-08:00

Had a good talk with Jansen. I thought it might be interesting, it contains some further ideas to further refine the pay-what-you-want pricing model.

It's a chat log, so pardon the format. I have edited it somewhat, to reduce clutter and skip over stuff that doesn't matter. I've added some [editorial notes] as well.

[Stuff skipped]
me: The point isn't to keep people from being asses, or to put them in a bad spot. It's to make sure that people realize the value that they're actually getting.

Jansen: however, i think they're going about raising the avg the wrong way
the way they have it, they've set a bar for amt to get extra stuff
everyone's just going to pay $7.40, which will do almost nothing to raise the avg. prolly should have been $10. b/c, with that bar in place, fewer ppl will pay between avg and $10

me: You have to pay more than whatever the average currently is, as I understand it. That's an excellent way to bring up the average.

Jansen: Help us bring up the average! Everyone who pays more than $7.38 gets the first Humble Bundle as well!

me: Refresh in ten minutes. It'll be a different number. The "bar" is moving, and is based on the average.

Jansen: which is the problem. it limits the $8 to $10 range donors, they will prolly do $7.40 instead

me: I agree that the idea needs polish.

Jansen: okay

me: However, the fundamental idea is brilliant. "Bring up the average, get more stuff". Most people are strongly influenced by the average price. It's a big win!

me: Hopefully keeps the downward spiral these things tend to suffer from from happening.

Jansen: i haven't really noticed a downward spiral. the avg's increased since i bought mine. i'm not saying it doesn't exist though, it's just not happened in the past week or so

me: At some point, it settles into a saddle point. Something with as high a buy rate as the HIB2 settles very quickly.

Jansen: but, if everyone has the incentive to go above avg, then the avg will be higher

me: Exactly! [The saddle will be at a higher price.]

Jansen: however, the avg can easily go above ppl's price range

me: That's fine, it's pay what you want.

Jansen: it's penalizing ppl who are less wealthy, rather than less generous. there's little difference between $5 and $10 (unless you're lacking in any income at all). but if the avg were, say, $40 (just spouting a figure)

me: It's true that that might theoretically be able to happen, but the chances seem extremely remote. It's far easier to bring the price down than bring it up.
Plus, if you can only afford $5-10, it's still pay-what-you-want, so you can still afford it.

me: Although you'll feel like a dick. And you won't get the extra.

Jansen: this is true. so, the answer is this: the extra needs to be less than the main bundle. bundle of five games, one or two games for above avg payees

me: Well, I think that's probably true, but it hasn't been tested. It may be that there's actually a sweet spot where the bonus is better than the default. Then you essentially have a "climbing bid" situation.

[Technically, the extra could be anything at all, including things like swag or even just a web-comic-like "voting incentive" image. Having a bonus worth more than the baseline would probably be bad, but it hasn't been tried, as far as I know.]

me: That WOULD penalize the poor. [To have a better bonus than baseline.]

Jansen: it's truly a penalty for ppl who cannot pay above avg in good conscience to their finances

me: Yes, I agree. However, I'm not sure, from a business standpoint, which is better. Poor people can't buy some things, and that's just the way it is.

Jansen: i assume the HIB ppl don't directly want to screw with poor ppl lol

me: It may be ten or twenty times more profitable to accept that.

Jansen: that's true

me: If you're getting along on a shoestring budget yourself, you might need that extra cash to keep making games. Or music.

Jansen: yar

me: Also, there's the HIB option more directly: The awesome bonus this time is the standard next time. So if you don't buy it now, you can pay what you want in a few months. [This better-bonus stuff has screwed up the language a bit, but the basic idea is sound.]

Jansen: interesting

[Clip]

me: Here's another interesting thing you may not have noticed, just so it's in the chat log: Did you look at the highest payments? The top ten list?

Jansen: they're by ppl who think along your same lines about the avg (most notably Notch of Minecraft) and are deliberately trying to raise it

me: No...

Jansen: i noticed that when i saw Notch up there. no?

me: Look again... They're mostly ads. That's an... interesting kind of ad space... So that's just one more way to bring up the average, if you implement it.

Jansen: it is. one of the ads is by a company that's involved in the bundle

Jansen: however...
Jansen: ppl paying more than avg to get kool stuff and increase the avg == good
Jansen: ppl noticing the avg is low and deliberately trying to raise it == good
Jansen: companies artificially increasing the avg to buy available ad space == BAD
Jansen: it only happened thrice this time, so that's fine

me: I'm sure it happened lots, and they just fell off the bottom.

Jansen: but, if you're suggesting utilizing that on a larger scale.... i'd not think that was a good idea

me: Why is it worse than normal advertising?

Jansen: b/c it directly costs the user money, kinda

me: It raises the average at least a little, which in turn probably causes the buyers to spend a little more. But let's reframe it just a bit.

me: Have you ever seen a pay-what-you-want that seemed too high? Ever?

Jansen: that's true. so, assuming the avg is too low, it's alright

me: With the understanding that it's not quite as pure-summer-breeze as giving out extra stuff for raising the average, it seems a valuable tool.

Jansen: assuming it's implemented in a way that causes the avg to skyrocket, it's bad. it all depends on implementation

me: Hah! Wait, let's think about that. If the advertisers actually cause the product's average to skyrocket out of control, then they are your primary target audience.

me: Once you've reaped your money from them, give the product away for cheap later.

Jansen: which defeats the purpose of a "humble indie bundle"

me: Yes, it certainly wouldn't fit for them. [And it seems unlikely to ever happen, a note that was removed when clipping the chat.]

Jansen: [first-day sales pitch is] "top ten commercial contributors get the ad spot!" so, it's a competition. it raises the avg to, say, $50 (given the commercial contributors and other buyers eager to get in on it)

me: Well, if you really want to get a bidding war for ad space going, then you allow them to add to their payment later. Classically, this kind of bidding technique can get people to pay $4+ for a $1 bill.

Jansen: yes, that' fine. but commercial bids end first day of sale

me: Hm. Why?

Jansen: so the avg steadily decreases after first day of sale. you get the commercial revenue, and then the price tapers down with time

me: I'm not sure I follow your no-commercial-bidding-after-day-one argument, but I do like the idea overall.

[Clipped tangent about wagering on price decreases]

Jansen: that way, the price will eventually get to a lower level

me: I think that will always happen, though.

Jansen: and so ppl who can't pay more are just losing time.

me: The wait-and-pay-less idea is valuable, but mostly if either the wait is longer than a month or if the thing you're buying is extremely time sensitive.

me: Anything sold today will be free tomorrow in this kind of world, so I'm not sure it makes sense to overcomplicate the sales.

[clip]

Jansen: ^.^

Bringing Up the Average

2010-12-22T07:52:00.001-08:00

Although I love the Humble Indie Bundle 2, I'm in just the right spot to get utterly hammered by news of it. For the past week, virtually all my feeds, friends' chat statuses (stati?) and so on have all been about the Humble Indie Bundle 2. So I was getting pretty damn sick of it.

But my interest is renewed! They've done something way more interesting than release a bunch of indie games. They may have found an interesting technique for price management.

The HIB2 is pay-what-you-want, which means that many people pay crappily. The average payment is indicated when you buy, and I would bet it strongly influences what other people are willing to pay. However, I would also bet this is a negative spiral: if the average is $10, cheap people will pay $8, and the price will go down. When the average is $9, cheap people will pay $7...

I think pay-what-you-want pricing is the next big thing for indies who want to make any money. But the prices always go too low. For example, at last glance, HIB2 had an average of around $7.30. Anyone who buys HIB2 for less than $10 is, frankly, a tremendous ass. But they don't realize it, because the only indicator of value they really have is the average payment so far. Since the average payment is so low, most people must be paying at least that low and, therefore, they are all being terrible jerks. Any one of those games should be worth $7.30.

The HIB2 folks aren't quite as aggressive as I am, but they came up with an incredibly clever idea:

If you pay noticeably more than the current average, you get extra stuff. In this case, the original HIB.

Oh! That's fucking brilliant.

From now on, every pay-what-you-want pricing scheme should have this same idea built into it. I bet the average price may be improved by as much as 50%. I think this may actually increase profits substantially. IE, to a point where you might actually be able to live off them as an average indie developer or musician.

I think it's an amazing idea. It's too bad the HIB2 crowd didn't think of it before they started, but even coming in late, it's a valuable technique.

Let's do that from now on.

EDIT: The point of the technique isn't to keep people from paying too little. It's to drag the average up so that they realize the value of what they're getting. If someone's gonna pay $5 for a bunch of games regardless, that's fine, it's part of the pay-what-you-want ideal. But everyone should hopefully understand that the thing they're buying has more than $5 of value, and they should realize that they're being a jerk by paying so low.

Ad Hockery

2010-12-17T09:19:00.000-08:00

Being a geek, I love thinking about the next technologies that may make a splash. One technology whose time is slowly approaching is wide-range ad hoc networks.

We're nearing a point where ad hoc networks among personal devices will become very common. You're probably already using wireless keyboards and connecting your phones to wifi networks - both of which are examples of a nascent, budding ad hockery between our various devices. Your thumb drive is only an inch away from not needing to be plugged in. Your DS is only an inch away from being able to interact with people playing the same game on their phones.

In addition, the technology has reached a level where individual people can create/deploy large numbers of ad hoc wireless nodes. Hell, we're maybe a year away from being able to print them on our home fabricators, aside from a few generic parts like batteries.

It seems to me that, even though nothing has really started moving yet, this is about to explode. Especially when net neutrality fails and the EU passes its internet censorship bill.

A lot of people want to fight against governments and corporations screwing up the internet, but I'm more interested in what comes next. It seems far more likely that geeks can come up with a new technology that slowly replaces the internet, and far less likely that geeks can oppose all the money on the planet working against them. So, I'm betting on ad hoc networks.

What I see initially is ad hoc networks largely limited to your personal devices - your computer recognizing your phone, and your lights detecting your iPad, for example. Already happens to a large extent: every time someone turns on the 360, my computer tells me I should share my media with them. If my DS is near another DS playing the same game, it often pops up and offers trades. I simply predict more of it.

I see this network expanding to allow approved foreign devices. Your friend's phone automatically connects to your phone and tags your friend's location when he's in walking range. Hold up your phone, and you see markers where your friends are. This voluntary sharing requires fewer privacy breaches since A) your friend is only reporting his position to you, not to a central network, B) your friend is free to obscure or hide his presence in any way he sees fit (or lie), C) you do not have to report your position to him.

This kind of connectivity will rapidly grow into a painfully insecure ad hoc network that supports your game playing habits, connects you to random passerbyes because you signed up for the same dating service, pops up today's menu from the restaurant you're passing, and trades computational data about traffic patterns.

At this point, the ad hoc network will shoulder more and more of the bandwidth that a user tends to use. Not because it's good at it, but because it's available. A lot of products will come out that rely heavily on short-range ad hockery or extending ad hoc networks to wider areas. Ad hoc networks will begin to integrate with internet connections, such that a phone browsing the internet might connect to a node through an ad hoc network instead of relying on a 3G connection.

The nature of ad hoc networks of this size strongly favors individuals and open source products. Even if a corporation or government seeds an ad hoc network with a few thousand nodes, it's unlikely they'll keep up the project, and it's also likely they'll have misimplemented something (on purpose or on accident). Individuals are likely to deploy their own devices (either stationary or carried) to take advantage of better technologies, better implementations, and higher security. In addition, owning a reliable ad hoc node will probably give good karma and interesting tidbits of information.

Once a baseline ad hoc network reaches a certain level, it essentially replaces the internet. It may use many of the same data backbones for ease of long-range high-bandwidth transmission, but even if you are surfing "the internet", you are surfing through a largely anonymous connection via an untracked route. Similarly, you probably won't be surfing that obsolete old thing any more: a large ad hoc network will support applications and data presentations we will have a hard time imagining. But they'll be just as much part of our day as the internet is today.

(There are some REALLY wacky things you can do with large ad hoc networks, especially ones with moving pieces. But that's definitely a whole other article. Lets just say that the most straightforward few of them are augmented reality.)

Anyway, I've spun a tale of large ad hoc networks springing up in the relatively near future. Let's say... five years from now, it'll be obvious they're starting, and in ten years they'll be a major part of many lives.

As predictions go, I'm pretty comfortable with it. There are a lot of barriers in the way, but most of those barriers go away instantly if individuals can manufacture low-energy wireless relays in their spare time, or buy open hardware versions on the cheap.

I just can't imagine the internet remaining as it is today. It's so... seventies. And the only route I see away from the internet involves massive ad hockery.

Fortunately, if there's one thing we geeks are good at, it's ad hockery.

Everything is Game?

2010-12-08T08:13:00.001-08:00

The idea has always been lurking, but I've recently been bombarded by it actively, so let's talk about the idea of games as things other than entertainment.

I hear a lot of people saying things like "learning should be a game!" I use learning arbitrarily - there's loads of other things people also think should be a game, such as working, finance reform, engineering, watching TV... anything and everything is a fair target for the "should be a game!" folks.

STOP!

"Game" is a hopelessly vague term that carries an awful lot of baggage. When someone says "learning should be a game!", what they actually mean could be any number of things.

It could be "learning should be fun!" or "students would learn faster with a progression of tasks and rewards" or "learning would benefit from a strong set of social interactions with other students such that students are exposed to many possible view points while they learn" or "this is an algorithm which can be represented in a computer program, and the students can learn it by simply making the inputs and outputs clear."

These are all great ideas, and I'm sure there are loads more. However, these are not games. When someone says "game", they often end up meaning "something that teaches so I don't have to". And that's not something you normally want to mean.

Games use a wide variety of techniques to entrain players in many different ways. What techniques are used vary from game to game. Some techniques are great ideas nearly all of the time, others have significant drawbacks. Simply saying "game" is vague enough that it isn't very helpful, especially since when people think of a "game" they usually think of something that includes techniques that aren't suitable for most non-game purposes.

For example, most games have a feedback system that trains players to become good at the game. Good at the game, not at what the game is trying to teach. This is so common it rears its head in non-games, and we call it "gaming the system". How easy will the system be to game when it is a game?

It is possible to design a game that keeps players carefully on task, but this has many drawbacks. For starters, it's normally a deadly dull game.

Instead of saying that "such-and-such should be a game!", think about it a bit more. Which techniques do you actually want to use? Make sure you understand the potential drawbacks. Once you understand what you want, just do that. There's no need to make a real "game" out of it: just take what you need, drop the baggage you don't need. Call it a game if you like, but don't take the baggage that normally comes with the title.

Let's say you want to teach children math. But children are notoriously uninterested in math, so you want it to be a game! Well, what you actually want is for the children to want to learn math. "Game" is irrelevant.

What common game-related techniques would be useful to you? Well, that depends on the age bracket. If these are young children, they might benefit from simple aesthetic rewards, such as being told the problems and results in a fun way, or given balloons or stars for getting right answers.

Sound familiar? Yeah, these techniques are common. Because we're not idiots: we already use a lot of these techniques commonly, without calling them "games".

But we can learn from games in more advanced cases. For example, if you're teaching algebra to high school students, giving out stars and talking in a squeaky voice is going to do the opposite of make them want to learn.

Fortunately, games have figured out some good formulas for appealing to high schoolers. It's somewhat difficult to create a challenge/reward progression, since it's difficult to find rewards that will be even vaguely universally appealing. Time off, passes on homework, and fragments of upcoming tests are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head, but they might be especially good if you allow students to trade or upgrade them.

Getting the students to work together and teach each other can be extremely valuable if you can get them to do it right. Game techniques can be used here - techniques pioneered by multi-player games since time began use a combination of competition and cooperation (often only meta-game cooperation) to drive both the teaching of gameplay and the pioneering of new gameplay. This same technique could theoretically be replicated by mixed teams of two or three where the members are periodically required to do individual tasks that affect the grade of the group. Alternately, "gating" such that advanced students have to bring up the grade of a weaker student before they can get a particularly nice reward.

Obviously, there are a lot of logistical problems, but that's one of the reasons you don't just say "game". "Game" brings with it a bunch of solutions to completely different logistical problems. Such as the logistical problem of not having a teacher.

One thing you can inherit, if you choose to, is the way that games often have a variety of tasks types and understand that any given player will only be interested in a few of them. While this may be difficult to do in a structured classroom environment, I did mention that "learning" was an arbitrary choice. Having many interactive threads that appeal to many different kinds of people will allow a wide variety of people to participate together in their own way.

Scheduling is another factor you can steal from games. Games use a variety of reward scheduling tactics that are suitable for many situations, although you need to be careful not to seem arbitrary or erratic if you're an actual person handing out rewards. One key is having multiple concurrent threads for each person, such that they can receive a reward for an accomplishment in one thread while they continue to work on another thread. This eases the long gaps between rewards in any particular thread. However, you need to keep the threads carefully interlocked, or the participant may simply speed ahead on one particular thread while leaving the boring or less easy ones behind. Again, a kind of "gating" is a fine solution. Something like "you can't work on the next task in this thread until everyone in the group has accomplished that other task in that thread". Classic CRPG stuff.

Creative play can be rewarded in the same style that open market games such as SecondLife or 3D chatrooms use. Creating fun expressions of whatever you're working on and sharing it with the rest of the players is rewarding, fun, and leads to a lot more involvement from everyone involved. Structuring this can be quite difficult since it is so context-dependent and you need to make sure nobody feels afraid to submit creations. But, done carefully, you can easily find the players forging ahead far past where you expected any of them to go.

What I'm trying to say is that talk like this, regardless of how thorough or slapdash, is hugely more effective and useful than saying "should be a game". Take the parts of games that seem to work for you and drop the rest.

Because it shouldn't be a game: it should be whatever it is, but better.

This make any sense?

Christmas Song

2010-12-01T07:14:00.000-08:00

This is the season of Christmas songs. And more Christmas songs. AND MORE! MORE! Fortunately, I do have a favorite. It's a little old fashioned, but it ends like this:

Darkness falls across the land,
The midnight hour is close at hand
Reindeer crawl in search of blood
And terrorize your neighborhood.

The foulest stench is in the air,
The funk of forty thousand elves
And grizzly ghoul from northmost pole,
Is closing in to eat his dole...

And though you fought to change his list,
You weren't completely good
For no mere mortal can resist
Snacking on Santa's food.

Ho ho ho ho
Oh-ho ho ho ho!
HO HO HO HO!

CHOMP.

Social Games and Such

2010-11-17T07:02:00.000-08:00

It's getting popular to talk about social games again!

Of course, as should be clear, we're not talking about social games. We're talking about social NETWORK games. Games which leverage your existing social networks, usually through existing software. Usually through Facebook, to be precise.

I admit that I like the idea of social network games. But I don't much care for what people are actually talking about. When you actually look at a ~~social game~~ social network game design by one of these people, it's either completely pie-in-the-sky impossible or a standard game. It's sad when an ancient game like Parking Wars actually leverages your social network better than any modern design.

Another thing I don't like about social network games is Facebook. I'd like to pretend I can be neutral, but being Facebook-centered makes me angry. I hate Facebook too much to give a Facebook-centric game the clear look it may deserve. So, I'm biased.

I'd like to talk about what a social ~~network~~ game might be. I'd also like to talk about how we might make a cool social network game, but I won't have the space in this post.

A social game - no network - commonly refers to social play, such as children playing house or tag together. I think this is a fine place to start. If we want to make a social computer game (no network), we can think in those terms.

A social computer game has a fairly major flaw in that the social bandwidth is pretty restricted. Even with voice chat, you're missing out on about 90% of the depth you get from face-to-face interactions. Much of the struggle for realism seems to be the pursuit of that 90%, making the characters seem more like people standing near you and interacting socially. Of course, the characters aren't people, so they have bigger problems than low social bandwidth.

Anyhow, once we acknowledge our limited bandwidth, we can try to leverage our advantages.

One major advantage we have is virtual worlds. Using virtual worlds, we can allow players to express themselves and have shared experiences. While not as tangible and highly social as playing tag or house, they are more rigorously shared and have easier-to-see fantastical elements. IE, the world can be anything we want it to be, and the other players will all be in the same world.

Correctly constructed, the world can create shared emotional experiences. Right now, these are largely limited to big experiences, such as when someone builds a lava fountain and fires magma two hundred feet into the sky. That's an impressive shared experience, but it's not exactly a subtle one and it's somewhat limited in terms of emotional range. It's more difficult to share something like a personal story, because such things tend to develop at a particular player's speed and in his screen. From other points of view, it is very hard to see what's happening or it feels distressingly like it's on rails.

There may be many solutions for that, and one obvious solution is asynchronicity. Two players can go through the same world, but sharded such that they do not directly influence each other: each one gets their own version of that world. You don't need to completely block communication. This is a social game, and allowing the players to chat with each other can be extremely valuable, as long as it doesn't break their immersion. Which it shouldn't, if the other player is in the same world, even if it is a different version of the same world.

Actually, this is a good time to talk about "legendizing", which is a word I made up that has nothing to do with marking up a map.

A legend is a story that gets told and re-told. It's not always precisely the same. In fact, it can vary quite wildly. For example, we've pretty much forgotten about the wicked step sisters cutting off their toes to try and fit into the ~~fur~~ glass slipper: legends are adapted to suit whatever audience they fit.

A modern legend would be Superman, or any other old superhero. Their stories have become hopelessly complex. The idea of a "canon" storyline is the major problem. Superheroes don't have a canon storyline, they are legends. They star in whatever stories suit them and their audience. For example, we've pretty much forgotten about how much of a total dick Superman was in the beginning, coming from a culture where such actions were not really considered unusually dickish. Actually, a modern-style Superman would probably come off as a real pansy to the early 20-th century culture that spawned him.

To me, the key to making a real social game is "legendizing" our content. World 3-B always has a zombie horde and a scared child and maybe even a specific protagonist. However, each player is welcome to unfold the story as they see fit, either through play or through fiat. Sharing it with other players is a key: once the story is told, others can see it and interact with it. Over time, certain "grooves" are worn in the world, where specific storylines are the most popular and fun. This isn't one story that someone told, or one playthrough: it's fragments of dozens of people and dozens of runs, the best from each, assembled by thinking players.

Because this is a computer game rather than a freeform story, there are limits to how creative you can be. But that makes sense: if you're telling a story about Loki and a tank shows up to shoot Odin, that makes no sense and will probably be judged pretty stupid. The limited capabilities of the world are not necessarily a disadvantage, especially if you allow players to build new worlds and the seeds of new legends.

A major advantage of this structured world is that players can be at any point in the story they like. Their friends can also be whenever they like. In fact, they can be where they are and where you are, criss-crossing the story, looking from any angles they please, exploring and creating variants.

And they can be talking. "Did you ever try going through the fireplace? Try it!" "Hey, this princess is kind of a jerk..." "I beat that dragon with a fork!" "I made a version where the princess is a prince, try it..."

We can also modulate this sharing to keep our immersion and pacing strong. If our environment would suffer from another player distracting you, we might actually reduce the bandwidth even more. Perhaps to simple ghostly lights hovering near things other people have found interesting. Even then, the "social" is there, it's just included gently so it doesn't distract.

Exploring the world together, that's social. Revisiting an old story with the advice of a friend. Seeing tags left by your friends (perhaps only on repeat playthroughs), adding new content to existing worlds.

I'm talking about "stories", but that's also needlessly restrictive. Simply building and exploring a world together is enough. It's just less easy to talk about.

So, a social computer game has the problem that the social bandwidth is very low. However, it has the advantages of virtual worlds which can be viewed from any direction and explored together, manipulated together, either at the same time or asynchronously. This does require that the virtual worlds be legendary worlds.

...

I was going to talk about social network games next. But I think I've already gone on too long.

What do you think?

Why I Don't Buy

2010-11-07T14:54:00.000-08:00

I normally don't do completely me-centric posts, but I'm going to talk about my purchasing habits.

I spend a lot of money on games: I buy at least two a month, normally much more. Not all of them are full-price. For example, the 40 games I own on gog.com never cost more than $15 each. However, I'm fine buying full-price games: I recently bought Fable III and the most recent Street Fighter for both 360 and PS3.

Right now, I buy literally every western RPG I find, indie or published, and quite a few of the Japanese ones. However, I'm going to change my policy: I'm going to stop buying RPGs or tactical games that came out on a console. I won't even be buying them for the computer. It's just gotten too painfully terrible.

There are many reasons, and they've finally combined in enough force to completely kill my interest.

First: "authentication". The plague of computer games, I buy many games that have minimal authentication - perhaps they require you to enter a code or something. However, I have found that all games that are released for both the PC and a console invariably have excessive authentication in the PC version. It's an old argument, but I'd like to point out that I don't even bother stealing these games: there are plenty of games with less excessive authentication, I just play them.

Second: "distractions". For some reason, RPGs for the console have started to get excessively metagamey. This includes continuous, repetitive, and invasive fourth wall breaking of every sort. The three most common types are A) begging you to spend real money for DLC. B) Constant and obnoxious accomplishment flogging. Just giving you an accomplishment for everything is stupid enough, but it's particularly bad when they pop up messages telling you that you're a bit closer to getting a pointless accomplishment.

C) is the most distressing: ruining the game by introducing elements from your console account. For example, in Fable III, the hero promises to make things right for the villagers. Up pops a contract-like thing. It says, "I, craigp, promise to" and shows my damn account icon. WRONG. The hero promises, not the login account. This is a ROLE PLAYING game, not WiiFit. Ugh.

Authentication and distraction are just the two most minor problems.

The "social invasion" is a plague for role playing games. Whenever you play a console RPG these days, it continually reminds you how well your friends are doing (automatically picked from the list), sends your stats to them, and lets you send gifts around.

Having a multiplayer mode is one thing. But continually reminding you that the RPG world you're adventuring in is just a shallow game? What kind of idiot decided that all games, even immersive RPGs, should have Facebook-style networking?

This social invasion actually has other characteristics: the games tend to act as much like a Facebook game (or set of games) as possible. To mention Fable III again, you are not a hero or a revolutionary. You are a landlord. The main gameplay is not the combat, but the retarded color minigames. All of this play inherits largely from casual games.

Again, casual games are fine. But I want to play an RPG. As far as I can tell, there are literally no Western RPGs released for the console in the past few years that aren't primarily collections of minigames.

This walks hand-in-hand with a general dumbing-down of gameplay. You can actually watch each western RPG chain get dumber and dumber. Mass Effect 2's gameplay was maybe half as complex as Mass Effect 1's, which was pretty simple already. These RPGs are sacrificing complexity in favor of simplicity, and often in favor of the worst parts of MMORPG play.

The last major problem I have with console RPGs is the lack of user generated content. If an RPG is released for a console, then even the computer version won't have much customizability. Gone are the days when you could make your own missions, add your own art. Even in games which are about customization, such as the Sims III, the scope is dramatically reduced compared to what is technically possible. These limitations are imposed.

These factors have finally become too much to deal with. Buying console RPGs is just guaranteeing a failure. I'll probably try to buy more Japanese console RPGs, but they have some other flaws (such as 5,901,503,053,915,913,051,390 hours required to beat them).

Right now, I think that RPG video games in general are in a trough: there aren't very many good ones being released. There are lots of pretty ones being released, but they're so crappy.

So I'm focusing mostly on indie games these days.

How about you?

Inhuman

2010-11-02T06:53:00.000-07:00

I've been randomly puttering around with tabletop RPG ideas (as usual), and I've run into an interesting problem.

When you're making computer games, the game can be pretty much about anything. Many famous games don't focus on any kind of human life. Even games like Sim City (which is theoretically about humans) don't actually have any humans shown up close and personal. These games work fine: a game can be about a machine, a yellow dot, space ship fleets, microbes... they may or may not have a human element to them.

However, I've yet to see a tabletop RPG that was fun to play and not focused on the human element.

I'm trying to write this short, so forgive me for skipping a bit. Basically, tabletop RPGs and LARPs are "low structure" games. Computer games and board games have a very rigid structure, and the player is only allowed to express themselves within that structure. Move to A or B, buy A or B, roll for A or B.

Low-structure games may have very intricate rules, but there are large amounts of "free time" between them. Times when the rules are very relaxed, and the players are left to express themselves in any sort of reasonable way. This is the "role play" part of the game.

Most players are human, and so most players will naturally think of their avatar in human terms. Their avatar expresses themselves in human terms, has human goals, develops human relationships. Even non-human avatars still act like humans, just some particular personality type.

The rules generally tie very strongly to this avatar and the personality it bears. Most RPGs are about fighting because that's the most direct route to being directly about the avatar. If you do badly in a fight, your avatar directly suffers. If you do well, your avatar directly benefits. It's a very tight symbiosis with the player's emotional investment in their avatar, especially since you can express your noncombat personality very clearly through your combat actions.

This also explains why "once removed" RPGs are so rare. It's very rare for an RPG's main mechanic to be starship combat, for example. Even if each avatar has a clear role to play (and dice to roll), there's no tight connection between them and the space combat. Oh, there's a connection, but it's loose. This is why most RPGs with space ships focus almost entirely on personal combat instead of vehicular combat, using the latter only for major plot points and breathers.

Similarly, hacking RPGs are rare, because there is a similarly loose connection. What is arguably the most successful hacking system is the Shadowrun system. You'll notice that it includes direct feedback: if you do badly, your avatar can take physical damage. Also, the environment of the hack is strong VR, usually featuring humanoid avatars (or, at least, things-with-human-elements). Even with this, Shadowrun games rarely have much hacking in them.

So I've been thinking about how to create games which give the human players their self-expression and knot avatars tightly with the primary play rules, but aren't actually about humans/metahumans/near-humans.

Depending on your school of game design, you may end up throwing off some ideas right away and considering it solved, but I find those ideas are generally surface solutions that don't end up being very fun.

The issue for me is that I love elegant rule sets. But the challenge here is the opposite: I need elegant lack of rule sets. I need the part of the game where the players are freestyling to be great. I need it to guide the players into expressing themselves without limiting their expression... but I also need it to remind the players that they are not necessarily human.

It's a tough problem. I tend to fall back on my Bastard Jedi scaffold, but I don't think that's elegant enough. What are your ideas?

Idle Hands

2010-10-27T07:14:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, Darius posted a link to this, a video game where the players are all cooperating bridge crew. The details are a bit scarce, but the basic idea is pretty clear.

This got me thinking about games like this (including tabletop RPGs). Games where there are a fairly large number of players cooperating. I've run scads of them, so I have a pretty good eye for how party dynamics tend to develop.

The difficulty in any party-based game, whether it's a bridge crew or a team of adventurers, is that not everyone is always busy. It's very easy to end up with a minimal role - a mistake made in a lot of old LARPs. "Color characters", we derisively called them. The same problem applies to characters that have the same amount of business but dramatically different amounts of tension.

The classic example of a color character is a LARP in which a few characters are simply "henchmen" or "thug". It's possible to write such characters to have an interesting role, but classically their role is just to follow the boss around and be muscle when they need to be. 90% of the time, they do nothing.

This is "realistic", sure. And some players can turn this kind of crap role into something entertaining, but rarely without upsetting the whole boat. In general, the use of color characters is a sign that your LARP design is painfully oldschool.

The classic example of the "tensionless" character is the cleric in a D&D game. The cleric can fight and heal, but it's pretty rare for them to feel tension: healing is rarely tense, and they rarely have an actual dog in the fight. They're just playing fighter support, and they know it. Even though they get the same number of rolls and have access to the same complexity of combat as the fighter, the tension just isn't there. They're just fighting to pass time between throwing heals and turning zombies.

These two kinds of characters - tensionless and color - are the banes of every team game. They are going to plague a game like a "bridge crew" simulator especially hard, because there is very little crossing over from one role to another. If you're an engineering officer, you might become important if things are going badly, but you're basically a cleric: you have no 'natural' role to play unless things get bad.

...

So far, I've been casting tensionless and color characters as uniformly bad, and I think that they are. However, it's also possible to make the opposite mistake, and desperately try to keep everyone busy all the time.

If we fall back to the bridge crew example, not every player needs to always be working flat-out. The immersion is quite strong due to the physical setting. Momentary downtime could be useful to build tension and immersion, as players sit by helplessly awaiting the next moment. This is generally quite difficult to do in a low-immersion setting, but in something like a LARP it can be fairly effective if your setting fits your setting. Physical setting fits your game setting.

A major difficulty is the modern person's reaction to a lull: Facebook.

Trained by almost two decades of on-line games, players have learned that the game is only one of the ten things they do while playing the game. They fill the empty grind time with random internet doings.

This will prevent immersion. If you are playing a game in person, absolutely ban non-game activities, especially if people are using computers. They can do non-game activities if they need to, but they need to leave the game arena to do so. Otherwise, even momentary lulls will sabotage the flow of the game as the party is torn apart by their secondary pursuits.

Ahhh, such concerns are at the heart of LARP design, and LARP design is at the heart of in-person AR games like the bridge crew example.

It would be interesting to do more of these designs, but it takes a large number of players with a big chunk of time on their hands, so you basically need a college.

Empty Worlds Plus

2010-10-24T08:09:00.001-07:00

A steadily increasing number of indie games are following the Dwarf Fortress trend: the point of the game is to build. The world is normally a randomly generated mess to give everything variety, but the focus is definitely on construction rather than exploration.

This is part of a trend towards larger game worlds in general, but games with an actual budget tend to try to populate their large worlds themselves rather than relying on the player. However, I'd like to focus on player-generated worlds for now.

Most player-generated worlds are generated for the entertainment of the player generating them. If you play Dwarf Fortress, you're probably mostly interested in seeing how far you can stretch the game world.

A few newer games are beginning to add human (by which I mean player-human, not game-world human) elements. For example, in Minecraft it is pretty common for players to get together on a shared server to build. Even in Dwarf Fortress, shared fortresses and long, amusingly-told war stories are common.

It's clear that sharing player-constructed worlds with other players in various ways is a concept with legs. One way to do this is through shared construction or management of a world, and another way is through creating artistic sets and allowing other players to experience/use them. Both of these have merit, and they both have, at their core, something that isn't in the game: other humans.

Whether you're interacting with other humans in real time or delayed, whether they have management rights or are just here for the view, these humans are experiencing the world through their own filters, their own judgment.

This sounds painfully obvious, but this is actually an important point that isn't addressed well enough in these games with player-generated shared worlds. What we could really use is some mechanism for helping players to share their thoughts with each other in game space.

Text or voice chat is more or less all that exists right now, and it serves well enough that people don't tend to think about better options. However, if you look at any out-of-game sharing, you'll see an immense amount of emotional value added through pictures, music, camera control, snarky voice- or text-over that's linked to specific times or camera angles.

This kind of machinima is certainly not unique to shared, constructed worlds. For example, there are whole series using this kind of stuff with the Halo engines. However, I think that shared, generated worlds have a much higher need for this sort of thing and need to have it integrated into the game itself.

It's a kind of scripting. Can't use normal scripting languages for an interface, though, because they're not really suited for what we want to do. We almost certainly need a scripting language to actually control the world, but it's overly cumbersome for sharing our emotions and judgments.

So what can we use?

Well, what do we want to do? We want to allow players to inject their own values to the experience of other players. For example, if there's a part of the map with an incredible view, we want to lure players into looking out over the map from that viewpoint and hopefully have them struck by the same sights in roughly the same way. Or we want the player to be able to tell a story about the people who lived in a given place through tiny details that can be discovered by investigating, leading you on a cross-map treasure hunt.

To a large extent, a simple tagging system would work - allowing players to add text or other media to in-world locations or objects. Of course, you would also have to be able to add a camera vector and a "flag" to alert nearby players that there's a thingie to trigger.

Unfortunately, the sort of experience we're talking about isn't really "chunky". It's theoretically possible to cleverly put down triggers such that they cause a more continuous flow of... what other people think... but it would require an extremely deft touch.

Instead, we might want to think about how to allow players to sculpt the world on not just a spatial way, but an emotional one.

The problem isn't the sculpting - there's a thousand ways to do that. The problem is how to give it to the other participants as they pass through the world without (A) stealing their control or (B) being irritating.

The three ways I can think of are music, avatar animation, and companions.

Music is probably the best way, since music is so good at causing emotions. If your game has a music generator in it, it should feed partially off the "emotional sculpting" the players have been doing. It probably is less about the exact spot you're standing on and more about the emotional content of the spots you can see. So if you look out over a vast plain of nostalgia-covered lands, the music should get extremely nostalgic. If you're in a tight space, able to only really see walls, the claustrophobic lack of other areas with music triggers will be reflected in the music.

Still, adaptive music may not be something you can do. So two more options.

Avatar animation is suitable for third-person games. By allowing people to make "points of interest" or "ideal camera angles", you can get the avatar to look in that direction, signalling to the player to do the same. Emotional values in the landscape can affect the avatar's gross animation or coloration as well.

The last option I can think of is similar to avatar animation: a companion follows you around or, at least, is nearby. The companion would be scripted to do specific kinds of things, but this scripting should be open to disruption rather than rock-solid. Companions might be ghosts, people, fairies, dogs - anything that can move around and can show an emotion. They can be aggressive like Navi, or completely passive inhabitants of the region.

The companion option requires a pretty powerful pathfinder and adaptive scripting system, though, so it's not quite as easy to do as you might think.

Anyway, those are my quick thoughts on the matter. What are yours?

The Proxy Publisher

2010-10-22T06:42:00.001-07:00

I've been reading and viewing a lot of stuff, and I've recently seen the Creative Commons license popping up everywhere. Even in paper books! If you're not sure exactly what Creative Commons is, I recommend this as a first read, keeping in mind that it's three years old.

So CC is spreading, and it's popular. Yay!

With that said, I also have seen a lot of people make the same mistake.

Keep in mind that the Creative Commons community is large and diverse: my opinions are my own. However, my opinions are not unique.

The mistake many people make is right at the beginning. They decide they're going to wade into the Creative Commons waters, so they release something under a Creative Commons license. They feel good, they're participating, they're "next wave", yeah!

The problem is that they publish under the most restrictive version of the license they can imagine: CC BY-NC-ND. This is the "proxy publisher" setting. It says "spread this around, please, but don't change anything!"

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this license, and in some cases it is what you might actually want to do. However, in most cases, it's a mistake.

The problem is that ND: "No Derivatives".

I understand the idea. These artists would like to keep control over what they release. They don't want it mutating out of their control. BUT. This is a flawed presumption. In many cases, it is the wrong way to come at the situation.

The question to ask yourself: what does the ND license actually protect me from?

Has a CC-released work ever been derived into something that upset the author and was popular enough that it got noticed? I know a few derivatives have been pretty crap, but the community simply ignores them. No harm is prevented by taking the ND license.

Also, derivatives (in the unlikely chance you are that popular) are what give your product (and your personal brand) serious legs. The ability for people in various circumstances to adapt your work to suit their needs means that your work can reach them - and everyone they touch.

To be honest, the only thing I think might be better released as ND is intensely personal art. Even then, I would probably argue against it. ND protects you from something that isn't a threat and cripples your circulation.

I know that a lot of artists have problems with piracy. But that's a completely unrelated issue. Completely. The two aren't even vaguely related, and ND will not protect you from pirates, or from tweens who make your pictures into avatars, or fanfic writers - all it will do is discourage talented people who actually want to build on what you've created.

What I'm trying to say is... think carefully about what you're releasing. Do you really need to maintain an iron grip? Don't you think the community has something to add? Do you really think you are the only person with useful thoughts on this matter?

When you release, go whole hog: leave off the ND. Release with SA, instead. The worst that could happen is that people are led to your work through screwball videos or parodies, and is that really so bad?

Social AI Redux

2010-10-13T07:07:00.000-07:00

I've talked a lot about social AI in the past, but it's been at least a year, so here's another post about it. Please note that by "social AI", I really mean "the appearance of social AI". I don't have any intention to solve any fundamental AI challenges.

One issue with social AI is that it requires really dense, nuanced information to react realistically. On the order of hundreds or thousands of times more nuanced than today's video games. Perhaps the Kinect will provide enough human feedback, barely, but in more general situations you're going to have to synthesize a lot of the density out of the game world without many cues from human input.

As an example, if your friend touches you, the exact meaning varies hugely depending on the location and type of touch. Arm, shoulder, head, back, waist, chest, hand, etc, etc. Each location gives a different impression. Is it a tap, a pat, a reassuring grip, a restraining grip, a rap, a friendly punch, a warning punch, a caress, a guiding push?

To say that there are N ways to get touched, or even N thousand ways, is a mistake. The fact is that there are an infinite number of ways to get touched. You can't list them all, and even if you could, you don't want to try to interpret them based on a big list. Instead, you want input that is sufficiently dense so as to allow the program to figure out the nature of the touch based on context.

By the way, this density is also important to humans. Humans who are stuck in simple and restricted environments tend to have simpler and less nuanced responses. They often go a little bit batty, like an edge case in a simulation. For example, being stuck in an arctic base for six months. This is fairly well documented, to the point where there are specific recommendations for how to keep your people from going nuts when you station them somewhere with so little stimulation.

Well, aside from that, there's also a ton of interpretive complexity. What is a friendly tap in one country might be an aggressive warning in another, or even a flirty move. Even within one country, different people will react differently. Even the same person will react differently depending on the moods of the people involved and the surrounding context.

The normal method of trying to make a social AI for a game is to give you a variety of interactions, and the AI responds to those interactions in a fairly straightforward way. At its peak, this consists of basically building up a tremendous expert system which takes the mood and the situation and the type of tap and then spits out a response.

This is not a good way to do it for the same reason that carefully scripting every branch of a plot is not a good way to do it. A) it creates distinct 'paths' or 'branches', rather than giving real freedom. B) it gets radically more complex with every choice or branch you add.

So, to quickly state where we are:

You need to do social interactions with a culturally and contextually aware algorithm, rather than using a state machine or expert system, if you want really adaptable social interactions.

You need extremely varied and nuanced inputs to feed that algorithm, or you'll end up basically creating a state machine. AKA "The Arctic Base Issue".

Very few or perhaps none of the human input devices available to you can actually transmit that much nuance.

...

That's really only a tenth of the story. It's the foundation on which you start to talk about social AI, or the appearance of social AI. But it's plenty long as is, I think.

Interactive Movies

2010-10-09T18:43:00.000-07:00

I've always been a fan of Quantic Dream's aspirations. The games they create are always worth playing, if just for how unusual they are. For those of you playing at home, Quantic Dream is known for creating games that are interactive movies. Heavy Rain was the most recent one.

I think it's a genre waiting to unfold. But I also think that Quantic Dream's games so far haven't started the unfolding process.

When I play their games, I am happy to play them. But the instant I set them down, there's absolutely no draw to pick it back up. In fact, there's a barrier.

To me, this feels the same way as when I play a long, constructive game like Civilization. If I don't finish the game in one stretch, I start over. Trying to pick up a half-built world is no fun. All the details that kept you interested have faded. You can remember the big strokes, but there's not much emotional investment any more.

Of course, when I lose track of a Civilization game, I can just start a new, random game. With an interactive movie, that's not really the case. Starting over means retreading the same steps, and it gets more boring each time.

What I'm saying is that I love playing interactive movies, but they're like movies: you don't watch half a movie and then come back to it the next day. At least, most people don't, and it's not really recommended.

The techniques you use to establish emotional investment in a movie or world-building game like Civilization revolve around details. The good acting, the interesting setpiece, the particular way he talks about her, and exactly what that city is building right now. This works well, it really gets us going. But it fades fast.

Games that are intended to be dropped and picked up again use different techniques. The Gears of War and Halo goons don't have to have nuanced relationships and excellent body language. The draw is in the quick drop into gameplay. It doesn't matter what the details are, the algorithm of the gameplay is what brings you back.

Or, in the case of things like StarWars and Star Trek, setting. I think that strong settings feel like gameplay in some ways. A setting with strong, evocative points that all the details hang from seems easier to immerse yourself in, especially on repeat visits.

At least, that's my feeling.

What's in the future for interactive movies and story-games?

Well, I think we'll find they become strongly episodic, and the episodes will be very short - four to five hours. Maybe the episodes will be built and sold in distinct packages, but I think it's more likely that the engine that runs the game will know how to build the next episode based on what happened in your last episode, within the limits of the dramatic arc.

We already see this a bit in Heavy Rain, where the game's progression is radically different depending on exactly what your characters do. I think Heavy Rain accomplishes this through insane amounts of carefully scripted events, but our techniques for doing some of this generatively are steadily advancing. As they do, I expect the game to make very clear distinctions as to the game's internal episodes.

I also think that story games will have to be built around settings rather than stories. The stories are important, but I think that a really vibrant setting with very clear "centerpieces" (such as the Force, the Enterprise, Mordor, etc) will be what draws the players back in after each episode, and I think most games will lean that way.

The biggest problem with creating a game like this is what to do at chapter ends.

Players are notoriously unreliable. Some players will happily play for twelve hours straight, while others will only eke out maybe forty-five minutes. You can ask them how long they plan on playing - and I expect we will start to - but even that is only vaguely accurate.

The ending of a chapter is therefore something really irritating. If your player quits halfway into the chapter, that can still be salvaged, although it's not ideal. But if a player quits fifteen minutes before the end boss? Or what if the chapter ends, but the player wants to continue playing for another twenty minutes?

I think there are two solution, one for each of those problems. Here are my suggestions.

For chapters ending early, I recommend an adaptive progression. If your player breaks it off, then when he comes back, make sure there's at least an hour of chapter left, even if he quit literally at the final fight. This hour of chapter gives you time to reintroduce the player to all the tiny details that get the moment-to-moment emotional investment. Similarly, you have to assume that they have forgotten all the little details from the first part of the chapter.

I don't mean that Gloria is trying to level up her fireball, or that Sven loves Sue. I mean the emotional touches - Gloria's husky voice, Sven's nervous coin-rolling trick, and the way Sue struggles with her umbrella in the rain. You can't just rush back into the scene where Sven is declaring his love for Sue, you've got to re-establish both Sven and Sue as characters worth caring about.

The other side of the problem is the post-chapter play.

Done right, an ending will really kick you down. There's a feeling like you just want to sit quietly for a while. As gamers, we seem to discourage this feeling. These days, our games either never end, or have endings that immediately scoot us on into the rest of the IP. It's rare that a game ends with as much emotional force as Chronotrigger, Beyond Good and Evil, and so many other famous games.

I recommend that we do not allow players to instantly move on to the next episode. I recommend that there is a second type of play where the players basically play house. Allowing the players to do some neutral gameplay like walking around the town, designing costumes, and playing around with move sets will allow them to decompress from what was hopefully a fantastic ending.

SO, that's my prediction for the future of story games. You?

Simulating the Early Years

2010-10-07T09:58:00.000-07:00

As you know, I'm a big fan of creating worlds and then colonizing them. Some of the research I do towards this end is interesting enough that it can stand on its own. Like this post about the very early years, when hunter-gatherers gave way to sedentary farmers.

If you have any familiarity with the subject, you might have the impression that this was an explosion or revolution. Poom! Now we're all farmers and we have cities, high population density, specialization, and so on.

That's not really true. Farming flickered on and off for thousands of years before it really took root, and even then its spread was pretty rough. I don't think there's any textbook-endorsed reason for this "flickering", but a little thought yields an obvious answer.

The stuff we grow on farms today is not wild stuff, it's tame stuff. It's domesticated, just like the dog: we brought in wild barley and bred it decade after decade until it behaved like we wanted it to.

So the first farmers were starting with wild plants. Wild plants that grow perfectly fine wherever they currently grow in the wild, and don't really grow much better if carefully tended. It's easier just to go pick raspberries than grow bushes of them. Sure, you might plant some raspberries along the river bank so that when you swing by again in a few years you'll have plenty of raspberries, but you aren't going to sit down and watch.

In order to successfully go agricultural, your farm needs to produce an immense yield compared to the wild land's yield. Factors that can improve your relative yield are: plant domestication, irrigation, and having crappy wild yield (or being unable to range very far to collect it). I imagine that early farmers would often need all three of these factors in order to really consider agriculture as a way of life.

You may think that plant domestication is kind of one-way - once someone domesticates it, it stays domesticated. However, that's probably not really true. Unfortunately, even a successful farmstead is in a tremendous amount of danger. Not just from raiders or weather, but also from soil degradation and salinity buildup. Every year, your field probably produces less than it did the year before. The farm goes bust, the slightly-tamed crops interbreed with their wild brothers.

Eventually, there were enough pseudo-domesticated strains of cereal grass running around that farming could finish the job and properly take root. This seems to have happened on earth about 10,000 years ago, although there are signs that it took root and then un-rooted many times before.

The Fertile Crescent is the famous "birth of agriculture" spot, and this is because the crescent has long dry seasons and short rainy seasons. Grasses grow in these locations instead of dense forests, and that has two effects. 1) long grasses produce excellent farming soil, and 2) cereal grasses are pretty adaptable, and can be domesticated to higher yields very easily. The highly variable terrain also makes settling down a bit more attractive: it's harder to range very far on foot.

These three conditions happen to satisfy two of the three preconditions mentioned, and irrigation was also possible, so the crescent was an ideal place for agriculture to set in.

In Africa, things like millet and coffee were being domesticated, although not at quite such an early date. The places these agricultural revolutions took place in (such as the Ethiopian highlands) have many of the same characteristics as the Fertile Crescent: wet season and dry season, variable terrain, available water.

Asia and America followed in the same kind of pattern.

Why does this matter?

Well, if you're putting down initial settlements in a world-building game, and you're starting at the agricultural revolution, then this tells you precisely where to put them: on variable terrain with a wet and dry season.

Moreover, it also gives you a new lever. Normally, farms are treated as farms. However, farm technology is not simply irrigation and crop rotation. The crops themselves are a technology. The products we grow today have spent thousands of years slowly shifting from the original versions. Over time and as long as war and ruin don't interfere, that technology will improve.

If you really want the game to rely on food, you can also work in soil degradation and salinity. The middle east wasn't always a desert: many of those lands were lush and fertile until they were catastrophically overfarmed. There's quite a bit of evidence that many of the mostly-forgotten great old empires from across the world collapsed due to overfarming.

Anyhow, I actually wanted to post on weather simulation. Maybe some other day.

The Future of Tweeting

2010-10-05T07:17:00.000-07:00

_{I was going to call this "the Social Network", until I realized there's a movie out now by that name. This post talks about potential descendants of Twitter and the like.}

I just had a conversation with a friend, where we talked about the difficulties of actually finding the right things in this world full of stuff. As a quote:

"They understand they want a cube that's two inches to an edge and blue, but they don't know what that cube is called, or what its manufacturer would market it as. They know they want a material that is liquid at room temperature and has a viscosity somewhere between water and grapefruit juice, but they don't know who would make such a thing, or what market its currently being sold for."

This is something that does crop up fairly regularly in both large and small cases. For example, I met a man who needed a "poster-quality technical illustration", but didn't know the terminology, so he was searching for "data visualization" and other keywords that kept leading him down dead ends.

My response to my friend was "I think a descendant of Twitter will solve this problem."

His response was "I don't think this is one of those problems that social networking or its derivatives is going to help with. We're not searching based on who knows who, or even who knows what, or even for people at all (expect to say we're searching for the person who makes the thing we want.) We're searching for an object, process, or intellectual property that meets certain parameters."

My response was "I'll write a blog post!" and his response was "facepalm". And now you are up to speed.

The future of everything is the social network.

First thing first, the term "social network" is being radically misused. Facebook is not a social network, it's a web site that enables social networks. Twitter is not a social network, it's a web site and API that enables social networks. So, when I say "social network", I don't mean "Twitter". I mean the underlying mass of connections between the participants on various social networking sites, and all the context those connections contain.

Right now, social networks are seen as just that - social. But that's just how the current generation is marketed. In reality, a social network is about connections that you know how much to trust. The people you follow on Twitter, you follow because you value their input at some level. Maybe you follow Gibson because you trust his judgment, maybe because he throws out interesting links, maybe because you hate him but you want to track what he says. The point is, you understand how much he can be trusted on what subject.

(As it turns out, Gibson is mostly a retweeter, so most people that follow him are using him as a source for filtered links. But we trust his filter to do as we expect it to, letting through certain kinds of links and not others.)

Things go the other direction, too. If you look at the Freakonomics blog or Warren Ellis, you'll find that these people use their readers as a vast resource. They constantly ask for information - what's a good band, give us quotes from 1930, send me your pictures, what do you think of this analysis... people with a lot of readers tend to be very interactive with those readers. If Freakonomics people had posted "I need this kind of data visualization..." they wouldn't have needed to search for the right match for days: some of their readers would have instantly known what they were asking for, and they would be hooked up inside hours.

It's not that these people trust their readers. I'm sure a lot of their readers send in crap, and I'm sure they get a lot of spam. But they have a lot of really great readers specifically because their readership trusts them (in specific ways) and therefore wants to impress them/participate.

That's the state of the world today.

It's not really that much of a jump to imagine the next generation of software will help with this sort of thing, will be more useful for the kinds of meaningful interactions that really make social networking worthwhile. Of course, you'll still be able to hear that Anne just ate a sandwich, if you want. Those interactions have value, too.

The other half of this is that I don't think it's much of a jump to imagine companies (or people within companies) using social networking software to figure out exactly what they're looking for and a good source of it.

Social networks have been used for thousands or even tens of thousands of years for precisely this purpose. The purchasing manager wants to buy Ye Old Paste, so he asks his friends if they know a good paste maker, maybe someone who'll hook them up at a discount. It continues today - my company regularly get requests from people who want to know more about what specific panels they should buy, even though we don't sell or install them. It's because they know us, and we know these guys...

It's the exact same as Facebook or Twitter, except without the technical assistance of a piece of software.

Sure, if your social network fails (or is hopelessly inadequate) you fall back on reading advertising or Google-combing. But those are techniques I would like to render obsolete. If we can radically expand social networking software to the point where it allows people to talk to each other in a businesslike way without feeling the stigma of "found it on the internet", we may very well end up making that desperate and blind search for an answer a thing of the past.

Actually, I've already hired people via Twitter, so I can't imagine it'll be long coming.