Character-Driven Game Design

Well, another day, another trailer.

These days, a lot of video game teasers and trailers are animated shorts with no relation to the gameplay. Today, League of Legends posted a teaser about an energetic, funny space ship crew and asked you to join up.

Of course, it's not an energetic, funny space ship crew game. It's League of Legends, meaning it's a MOBA - a plodding arena combat genre known mostly for toxic team play. In short, not energetic, not funny, not character-driven.

This is not a one-off. Virtually every major action game has been releasing character-driven shorts of extremely high quality and pretending it has something to do with the game in question.

It reminds me of the old days, when the cover art sold the video game. Except, of course, the cover art would be some Vallejo painting and the game would be eight pixel high sprites jumping from platform to platform.

Given the response I and many others have to these teasers, it's clear there is an interest in high-energy, cinematic, character-driven experiences.

But no games like that ever seem to come out.

Let's talk about it!

Hangin' Out, Havin' Ourselves a Parrrrtaaay

There are games with strong characters. For example, Telltale-style adventures. However, you can't really "hang out" in those games. The narratives are character-driven, but the games are narrative-driven. This is a bad fit for me: I care a whole lot about the characters I'm hanging out with, and the distraction of being told to uncover some ancient secret while fighting off invading ninjas just weakens the experience.

There are games where you can hang out. For example, open world RPGs. However, while you can hang out in the world, you can't really hang out with the characters. They're programmed to only really respond to specific world events. Worse, semi-open RPGs like FFXV or Dragon Age often ruin the hangingoutness with dull filler and melodrama in equal measure.

But I mod games. A lot.

A modded party member has the disadvantage of not being in the core event structure. They aren't introduced in some blazing cinematic, and they don't have loyalty quests.

This means that the modded party member has to make their presence known during normal play.

A lot of modded party members tell stories, crack jokes, sing songs, and randomly comment on anything and everything the game has to offer. This ends up making them feel more real than the core party members, at least if you're the kind of player that randomly wanders the world and never bothers progressing the plot.

We script characters to respond to world events. When we have control over the world events, we script them to perfectly match the specific events we've created... but that's a flaw. We need to get out of that habit if we want to let the player hang out with them. Because hanging out isn't specific.

There are lots of games with "specific hangouts". For example, chatting at the camp fire in Dragon Age, or private actions in Star Ocean. But these are tightly scripted events that are a facsimile of hanging out rather than actual hanging out. They're expensive to make and limited to play, and I think we can do better.

Structural Issues

We think about hanging out as being unstructured, but the truth is that it is very structured.

In order to interact with a character, you need a medium of interaction. A task, basically. Most tasks have a set of progressions that can be used to move the hangout along a fun path.

For example, if you're drinking in the bar with a fictional friend, what happens? Maybe they get drunk. Maybe you get drunk. Maybe they start a bar fight. Maybe someone at the bar recognizes them, and then something unfolds. Maybe they get hungry for real food and you change locations. Maybe someone else you know walks through the door and the dynamic changes. Maybe you look for dates.

Alternately, if you're playing video games, there's a lot of flexibility as to what game you play, whether you switch games, who tries hard or not, who wins or not, whether you start betting, whether people start getting way too into it, etc.

These progressions are at the heart of "hanging out", and they are also at the heart of how a character can express themselves.

Each character in the game can prefer different progressions. They don't need to be completely unique: a lot of characters can get drunk at the bar. But if the progressions go on for several elements, you'll see their uniqueness start to manifest: person A gets drunk and starts a fight, person B gets drunk and hits on everyone, etc. These are small, simple things to talk about, but this is the heart of how hanging out has to be approached: there's a task, and different characters want to progress or change the task depending on their personality, mood, etc.

This spectrum of progressions allows the characters to contextualize the event as they see fit, and to recontextualize a generic event ("at the bar") with a specific in-character event ("picking up guys" or "getting shit-faced") based on what progression they want to see.

Adapting to Existing Games

For example, in Skyrim you might be wandering the world map with Lydia, your dull, dutybound housecarl.

Skyrim has progressions built into its systems and maps. If you're wandering outside picking flowers, you'll run into options to fight monsters, go into dungeons, see wonders, change biomes, get rained on, go from day to night, find an ore resource, find a town... these are all perfectly valid progressions.

By understanding what progression Lydia wants to see while on the world map, she can make comments about what's going on. For example, if she sees a bear, she might say "that bear might threaten travelers, maybe we should drive it away."

This would be different if she saw a monster in a dungeon, where it's not a threat to a city. She might say "some skeletons ahead, I wonder if we can get around them." Or, if she sees a monster in a town, she might flat-out rush to attack, to protect the people of the city.

By allowing her to decide what the current context is, she can choose what progressions she'd like to see. This gives her dialog a lot more vitality than simply yelling "yahhh!" and charging at any monster you find.

However, this is still very shallow. Since Lydia has only dialog and the player has only action, it's a lopsided mess where it's difficult for the situation to progress in any meaningful way. In the end, it boils down to Lydia making comments on what the player chooses to do, just like in later games such as Dragon Age.

The simple fact of the matter is that hanging out is collaborative. Lydia can't really collaborate with the player in the gameplay as it exists.

Stop, Collaborate and Listen

One thing we can do to make this more collaborative is to let the player give dialog responses. However, I don't think that's a good approach, as it will lead to very repetitive interactions as you hang out over and over.

Instead, I would prefer to do the opposite: let the NPC offer action plans.

When Lydia says "that bear might threaten travelers..." two action plans might pop up and be selectable. "Take it out, I'll support you" and "let's ambush it, follow my lead" might be the two options (with the third 'ignore' option implicit). These are represented as dialog, but they're not simply dialog: they're functional plans. Not only do they determine Lydia's behavior, they can also embed bonuses: Lydia gets an attack boost if you tell her to take it out, and a stealth boost if you say you'll ambush it.

Moreover, these plans are excellent at advancing several progressions at once. Not only is Lydia advancing from "outdoors" to "defending the roadways", but she's also advancing along her "Lydia, stealthy supporter" or "Lydia, front line knight" character progressions. She may also progress on her personal opinion of you if you do particularly well or poorly, although remember that all such progressions are temporary. You'll hang out again some other time, and things will unfold differently.

These action plans can offer things the player literally can't do without the NPC, as well. For example, Lydia might say "oh, this is such a rich iron vein. Let's claim it for the city!" at which point you'll have the plan to claim it for the city: something you cannot do on your own, or with another character. Other housecarls might also be able to do it... but for other cities.

This combination of factors will hopefully make the player want to participate in these collaborative plans.

Save and Load Contexts

One technique that can help us add depth to the characters is to allow contexts to be shelved and readopted as necessary.

Our instinct might be that Lydia following us around is Lydia hanging out with us, and the whole day is one "hangout session". But that leads to problems, because the context might not progress at all. The player might literally gather plants for three hours straight, and Lydia's constant talk about what she'd like to do will get repetitive and futile.

Instead, she can simply shelve an intended progression when it falls through.

So if Lydia says "that bear might threaten travelers..." and the player doesn't engage, Lydia won't follow that up with "that skeleton might threaten travelers" and "that treant might threaten travelers". Instead, that progression is on hold.

However, if the player does engage an enemy on the world map - pretty much any enemy - Lydia will be able to instantly pick up the progression. "You'll never threaten another traveler!" she barks as you smash down a mudcrab or whatever. From there, she's in her "cleaning up the wilderness" context, which can be built any way the devs want. Maybe one progression is to attack stronger monsters. Another, less preferred branch is to attack weaker monsters. Monsters in another biome. Monsters marked as 'evil'.

This context is active, so Lydia won't say "that bear might threaten travelers..." because she's not in that context any more. Instead, she might see a bear and say "let's clean up this forest a bit!" in an attempt to progress along the biome path of her "cleaning up the wilderness" context.

Of course, once the hangout period ends (spending a certain amount of time in another major context, like in a city or a dungeon), the contexts can reset and she can start over.

This isn't an ideal solution, but it effectively allows you to script character events that unfold naturally and opportunistically as the player plays, rather than being segregated into their own quest lines.

Parties, not Companions

Probably the easiest way around the collaboration difficulties is to have more than one companion. If there are several NPCs, they can discuss and banter. This is something Dragon Age does well, but primarily by using random snippets.

We can choose to anchor the banter to contextualized progressions, instead. As an example, if you're wandering Fallout 4 accompanied by both Piper (reporter) and Curie (science robot), they'll both contextualize the wandering and have directions they want it to go. You get a sense of this in Fallout 4 as it stands: they have a variety of generic comments on situations you might encounter.

But by allowing them to comment to each other, you can build up a sense of progression even if the player ignores their preferences.

For example, if you find a few talkative ghouls, Piper might say "hey, we should get their story!"

If the player chooses not to do that and walks away, rather than something like "PIPER -2 FRIENDSHIP", Curie can disarm the situation with an excuse like "We cannot be distracted by such tings, we have important tings to do!"

Of course, the player avatar could theoretically also say that kind of dialog, but the player might not be thinking the same thing. The player might be thinking "sure, give me a second to raid this treasure chest first", which is very different from the dialog claiming it's something that won't happen.

If a third party says the dialog, being wrong is acceptable and can give rise to more complex lines of progression.

For example, if you do go back and talk to them, it's relatively easy to have remembered the original dialog, and now have different dialog. This can be quite generic. For example, as you approach, Curie might say "I remember zees people", then Piper can say "Now do we have time?" Or, if you're now just adventuring with Piper, she might say "hah, now that Curie's not around, we can do some snooping and scooping!" These are fairly generic dialog lines that can be deployed in a lot of different situations.

If we consider hanging out to be a task with a variety of progressions, then we can again run multiple contexts at the same time. We're progressing this specific subquest. We're progressing Piper's "search the wasteland for news" context, which may lead to her wanting to go home and write about it. We're progressing Piper and Curie's relationship with each other - again, it must be stressed that it's a hangout context, not a permanent progression. We're progressing Curie's "focus on the science" context.

By having many contexts which can be progressed, shelved, and activated at the same time, we can make the experience as character-cohesive as possible. From the player's perspective, it doesn't matter which context gets progressed next: they all have Piper acting like Piper or Curie acting like Curie, and for reasons that make sense.

It will require a bit of effort to create the engine to do this, though. You'll need to figure out the right generic dialog to switch or resurrect contexts, just for starters. It's not something I've seen done before.

New Hangouts

This is all about adapting the concept to existing games, but the truth is that we don't need to do that. We can make new games.

If they're intended to allow for this kind of thing right from the start, there's no struggle to make sure all the metadata you need exists or all the conversations have to work within some specific fiction: it's all designed from the ground up to work.

Moreover, it allows us to radically reduce the amount of content and gameplay we need to support, because this context-centric approach can use much smaller amounts of gameplay to accomplish the same thing. Rather than gameplay strongly relating us to the world, the gameplay is more about collaborating with a friend.

For example, you could decide to hang out with someone and spend the afternoon assembling ships in bottles. It's basically a minigame, but it's made much more interesting because there's a character-driven progression in play. The actions you take affect what the other people do, and what they want to have happen. Doing well at the minigame may be a bad idea... or, rather, doing well at the minigame may not involve actually building the ship in a bottle.

Hanging out and making ships in a bottle is not just about the progression of the task of ships in a bottle.

We've already talked about longer-term contexts like "Lydia's stealthy follower progression". Well, the whole point now is that the event progression is more about the personal contexts and progressions that our friends are going through. Rather than having one preferred contextual progression, the progression they want from this event is influenced by the progressions they want from their other, personal contexts.

You've going to have very different "ship in a bottle" minigames depending on whether your friend is drunk, angry at her parents, mourning the loss of a friend, nervous about a piloting test, or embarrassed that you found out she likes a terrible TV show. The progression of the minigame is not the point: the point is the progression of her personal contexts, as expressed through the progression of the minigame. Hell, she might even play the minigame without the player's input at all - the player can just watch.

We can spread this idea even further, into the world's overall state. Her personal context affects how well she can fly the ship, or how aggressively she fights. Whether or not there's actual gameplay involved with those or if it's just some flavor dialog, it will convince the player that there's a world and stuff happening.

One possible example leading towards this would be Dragon Age 3, just the parts where you decide who to send where, and for what purpose. You could hang out with someone, and then when you send them on a mission, they get better or worse results depending on how they feel. Their personal context will then be altered by the mission they just went on, so it's a good time to hang out with them again...



Anyway, those are some of my thoughts.

What do you think?

Play Echoes

I wrote this essay a while back. The basic idea is that you can save chunks of worldstate, then use those chunks flexibly in context-sensitive applications rather than having to use some kind of natural-language system or whatever.

Then I read this long essay by Ian Bogost about Darmok, the episode about those Star Trek aliens that talked only in references to old stories. He came up with the idea that they are actually talking about process - context-heavy processes stored as references to situations where such things played out before.

Then I read these tweets by Zach Gage, and things started to slowly congeal, like ideas sometimes do.

So, let's start at the end, then I'll describe why it is the way it is.



This is an open-world sci-fi RPG. You can make friends with any NPC, and they can join your team. But the universal translator is only capable of so much, and communication is difficult.

So you create and share memes.

You and Hjilsb are together, fighting against an onslaught of voracious, hopping fungi. Together you best the fungi.

In another game, Hjilsb might gain a "friendship point". Maybe she gains one here, too. But more importantly, in the quiet time later, Hjilsb is talking to others - or perhaps to you - and she does a flumpy hopping fungi impression, then goes "BLEAAAHHH" and fake-dies.

This is a nascent meme. It is a tiny piece of your relationship, your past. It is the part of that sequence of events that Hjilsb remembers most - her personality was most drawn to that particular thing. If she had a different personality, she might have re-enacted the back-to-the-wall gunfire moment, or the fungus dropping from the ceiling in their initial surprise attack, or the flat "whut?" look you gave each other when you first saw them, or the "click-click-" moment she ran out of ammo and you saved her.

These are not simply "oh, we had an event together" markers. They represent a specific start state, progression, and end state that struck that character as personally and emotionally important.

Hjilsb remembers the start state of a goofy enemy, the progression of shooting it full of lead, and the end state of it goofily dying. If she had a different personality, she might remember a different tiny portion of the fight. As the events of the fight stream by, the personality filters for whichever events seem most interesting, and forgets the rest.

At time goes on, that goofy little "bleah!" might fade from use, only a momentary idiosyncrasy. But it could easily become useful.

Yeah, useful.

You can't talk to Hjilsb very well, and she can't talk to you very well. The mocking "bleah!" can potentially stand in for any situation where Hjilsb wants to say "let's kill these idiots". If she remembered the "click-click-" out of ammo thing, she might use that whenever she wants to tell you she's totally screwed. The back-to-the-wall blammies could be used to say "we can do this if we do it together".

Because the personality algorithm chose these events to remember, the personality algorithm knows what sort of situations echo it: the ones that have the same algorithmic response, or are predicted to.

You can use the memes yourself. Once you see the silly "bleah!" you can use it as an emote yourself. Hjilsb knows what the emote means to her, so she assumes you are talking about the same situation. You can use this not simply to establish camaraderie, but to actively change her thinking about a situation. After all, it's hard to be scared when your boss is making fun of the enemy.

There's no reason the "bleah!" emote can't be used to other NPCs as well, although it may not translate well into all personalities.

There's no reason the emotes can't be used on other PCs. There's no reason the emotes can't be used in constructed challenges or quest lines to specifically tint content so an NPC will judge it in a given way.

What's more, there's no reason that the "bleah!" emote has to continue to represent stupid jumping fungus.

Every time a similar situation comes up, Hjilsb won't create a similar emote. She already has a response to dumb-looking creatures getting shot, she doesn't need a new one. She just adds it to the mix, with a sly sideways glance at you and a "BLEAH!"

A new starting state, a new progression, and a new end state added in. Not just hopping fungus, but also purple wombats and big-eared mouse-mecha.

Why keep track? Why does it matter?

Because each progression adds more vibrancy and variation to the meme. If you decide to use the "bleah!" meme when constructing a quest line for your friends, the quest will vary from instance to instance, each time choosing a different flavor out of the giant roster of "bleah!" instances. Not necessarily different monsters or guns or whatever, but a different exact progression, or exact numerical value.

And if "bleah!" happens on a mission that another player is experiencing, his NPCs will use the "bleah!" emote, and it will spread to his game. Creating a shared reality, without any shared content. And when he goes to the forum, or records a YouTube video, "bleah!" will be there, too.

...

Now, what am I talking about?

Well, for starters, I'm not actually recommending that game design. It's a bit clunky. I just wanted to be clear what we're talking about.

The kind of... meme-like thing we're talking about is not exactly a process, nor is it solely a stored context, nor is it simply a feeling, nor is it a combination of all three. It's a bit complex.

We do this all the time. In GTA, you and a friend might be playing together. You leap a car off a riverbank and onto a boat. Your friend says "whoa!" and decides to one-up you. Soon you're trying to jump cars onto the wings of flying planes.

This is what gives an experience life. Not just that something happened, not just what you felt during a given moment, but how you refined that feeling and experience and time passes. Long after you've stopped playing GTA, you'll probably remember those epic jumps fondly. It's the same with scripted events: you play FFVI, you probably have strong memories of the opera. But these memories are not simply your memories. They have been tinted and reinterpreted many times, and the opera in FFVI has come to have a shared meaning among those that have played the game.

This sort of thing is becoming more and more common as YouTube and Let's Players grow in popularity. I have revisited games I disliked because I saw someone enjoying them, and since I was now "in on it", I was able to enjoy them the same way.

I don't have a good name for these bundles of shared, refined experiences. Something like "experiential clusters" would probably be accurate, but it's not very catchy. How about "play echoes"?

For now, I'll call them "play echoes". These are events that catch your eye, you have an emotional response to them, and in some manner merge this with other people's similar responses to similar events.

These vary wildly. For example, the strained puns of Dark Souls etchings are a kind of play echo. So is the deep hatred for Road To Hell. In Dark Souls, the etchings are shared in the game, through the game engine itself. But in Road To Hell, the derision is shared via the internet, with videos and posts laughing together, sharing the same judgments.

Play echoes can easily make or break a game. Sharing your game world with others can add a lot of depth as it attunes you to details you wouldn't have noticed, or would have judged in a less interesting way. But sharing can also pollute the experience, screwing up the sense of place, the level of loneliness, and the fundamental skill progression (you learn too much).

So, I have a few questions:

1) Can you create a game where players can create and share play echoes in a way which maximizes "making" the game and minimizes "breaking" the game?

2) If so, can you create a game where the game understands the concept of play echoes?

3) If so, can you create a game where the players can script new content, quests, and so on out of play echoes rather than painstakingly scripting and balancing everything?

Crew Play

This post has been a long time in the making, because I wrote half a dozen essays on the nature of gameplay, science fiction, and open-ended missions and ended up here. However, those essays were all pretty academic and dull, so I didn't publish them... instead, I'm just going to talk about one set of mechanics that arose from that thinking, and why.

Because that won't be dull at all... sigh...

My big problem with most science fiction games is that there's no human element. Science fiction, in any medium other than video games, is used to explore the human condition. You can highlight some aspect of human life by creating some slightly magical setting that lets you focus on just that. In video games science fiction is used, exclusively, to shoot aliens. In every other medium, the aliens are standins for other humans that you don't know very well, so this makes video game sci fi pretty annoying to me.

In the past I've created some nonviolent sci fi prototypes, but I never really considered how to make the human side of things feel more human. How can you create gameplay around being human? I mean, you can script in some stuff, but I'm talking about core gameplay.

There are a few options. For example, you could make an entire game around parenting an android you built - sort of a Princess Maker: Android edition, or something.

But what if we wanted to have really open gameplay? I mean reaaaaaally open. Kerbal-level unguided play.

Okay, let's make it about starships. We'll set it in a zeerusty 60s space serial sort of environment. Science fantasy.

The core mechanic is not about creating the ship, but about creating the crew.

Let's start with the foundation: the chain of command. Or, rather, the tree of command, because below the leader it splits into three branches: security, science, and culture.

As your crew parades around the universe, they are exposed to stresses. For example, they might be chased by an angry dinosaur, a situation worth 80 "danger" stress.

It starts at the captain, who bites out a big piece, say 50%. This reflects her quick judgment: "RUN!" The remaining 40 danger is passed down to the security branch, since it's a security situation. The head of security takes another bite, say another 50%. This reflects him blasting at the dinosaur to try and scare it off. The remaining 20 danger is passed down to the final person on that branch, who similarly reduces it to, say, 10.

The 10 remaining danger is standing stress, and therefore reduces everyone's inspiration (basically health) by 10 points. Everyone starts with a lot, but you never regenerate any, so every point is valuable. More than that, however, one of the scientists is "clutzy", which means he is injured by danger-type stress, and receives a 10-point injury as well. IE, he got bitten or trampled or fell in a hole.

This will slowly recover, but while injured the scientist cannot participate in the chain of command.

Let's say the next stress is a scientific one - trying to figure out whether these dinosaurs are proper earth dinosaurs or what. The stress of not knowing is 80 points of science stress.

The captain's actual class is "scientist", so she takes a big bite out of that - say, 75%. Normally, she would then pass it down the chain of command... but the other scientist was injured, and can't participate. So the 20 science stress slips through and stands. This reduces everyone's inspiration 20 points, but the lead security guy is "dense" and takes "injury" from science stress. So he gets confused and panicky because of this weird, unknown situation, and will be useless until that "injury" heals and he calms down. This is a very bad injury, and will take quite a while to get over. So wandering back out into the badlands might be a bad idea.

You can see the bare foundations of the gameplay in this, but let's explore some more.

The key to making this kind of challenge interesting lies in making it predictable. The player has to know more or less what she's in for so she can create her crew for that purpose. This is not a game where you have a starship full of hundreds of crew that goes on interminable missions - it's more like Kerbal, where a mission is a huge event with a custom ship and a custom crew. Similarly, it is possible to chain and combine missions in interesting ways - the game doesn't ask you to, but it lets you. Hopefully this provides a graceful and endless learning curve as you choose to tackle ever more difficult and complex combinations of missions.

This means that if you land on Venus' plains, you'll always be chased by an angry dinosaur. But there are a lot of variables: you'll keep getting attacked by dinosaurs if you keep wandering around the plains. So you might venture into hills or forests, where different challenges await. Similarly, you might do research while in orbit to become adept at fighting dinosaurs, or keep someone in the orbital craft to watch for dinosaur herds and mark them on your map so you can avoid them...

But there need to be clear "success" states, not just an endless array of challenges. When you go to Venus, there has to be a reason. In Kerbal, the reason is always just to land on the surface. In our game, the conditions are a little more complex, so I think we can determine "success" by having specific modules on our starships or landers and fulfilling their requirements. For example, a zoology bay where you can examine dinosaurs in detail. A zoo bay for shipping them back to earth. A bacterial analysis chamber, a cultural exchange center, a gravitonic research chamber...

In this way we don't force the player to have a specific mission - in fact, they could just fly out there and dick around to learn the patterns of the world. But they can also choose which mission to undertake by attaching the proper module to their starship. And they can attach multiple modules. Or fly multiple starships out. Or use the same module on several different worlds. It's all very open.

The actions required to fulfill a mission module are predictable but not necessarily easy. For example, the zoology lab might require you to collect 3 samples from each Venusian terrain type - IE, survive 3 stress events from each terrain type. Others might require you to win by a certain amount, or leave crew behind, or get infected and then get healed, or any number of other conditions. These apply evenly to all applicable worlds - if you fly to Mars, you have the same kinds of requirements. Of course, not all worlds support all missions. Venus might not have any intelligent life, and a science base in the asteroid belt won't have different terrain types.

To reiterate, one of the biggest advantages of this approach is allowing the player to choose which mission modules to bring and letting them decide how to try to achieve them. This is powerful and easily modded, and a very good way to push the player to take on difficult challenges.



As you can tell, this isn't some kind of heavy-hitting plot generator. The stresses are pretty much limited to "in this kind of terrain, you get this kind of stress", with occasional bouts of "if you have X on you or Y with you, you get that kind of stress". The core challenge is to survive the stress you are exposed to. Since you never regain stress, it's basically the "fuel" of our game, and how quick you burn through it will determine how much you get done. Since everyone on the team suffers the same inspiration damage when stressed, it also really rewards you for breaking the team into smaller teams.

But the gameplay isn't simply building a hierarchy and then sending them out to the planets you want. There's a lot of other factors involved to make it more interesting.

One of these is technology, of course. Ships are built out of modules. The exact topology doesn't matter, so starships are just spines with each module as a donut, and shuttles are just tablet-shaped jets with a certain number of cylindrical internal slots. It's pretty simple, because our complexity is in the crew creation. Although simple, it is important and full of tradeoffs.

The heavier your ship, the slower it goes and the more fuel it burns - fuel regenerates, but you have to stand still to do that, so it comes down to more time wasted. And being stuck in space slowly eats away your inspiration, so it's best to minimize wasted time.

Many of the ship modules are about crew management, from simple crew quarters to security stations and even chapels. Some of these reduce the inspiration penalty for time passing. Others change the crew's stats (for example, giving them +10% against danger-type stresses). Others allow them to change relationships. Some of them help to repair injuries. Obviously, some of these are really nice to have on shuttles, but space is even tighter there.

Many of the modules are about interacting with the world. Sensors, cultural exchange centers, dissection labs, hospitals. And, of course, shuttle bays.

Many of the modules provide resources that allow other modules to function better. Computer stations, comm centers, gardens - these provide resources that other modules can burn to work faster and more efficiently.

Even though the ships are quite simple and abstract, they can get quite complex if you want them to. It might even be worth sending out unmanned ships/shuttles and connecting with them later...

But the ships are not the focus.

The crew is a bit more complex than a simple chain of command.

First off, each crew member has two aspects - a job and a weakness. Any crew member can try to deal with any kind of stress, but each job is best at a given kind. For example, a scientist will absorb 75% of science stress, 30% of culture stress, and 10% of danger stress. Or maybe you would prefer an academic? They absorb 50% science, 50% culture, and 10% danger. You can choose how focused or general you are. Certain kinds of very advanced modules can only be operated by a specific class, but that's unusual. It has no effect on their place in the chain of command - you can put anyone anywhere.

The weakness, of course, determines what injures them. Now, if someone's inspiration hits 0 they're disabled anyway, so nobody is completely immune to stresses of any kind... but everyone is also very vulnerable to particular stresses. There's actually more than 3 stresses - probably 9, although I haven't really settled on anything - so it's possible to have quite a large crew without repeating a weakness if you like.

Of course, each crew member also has an appearance and gender, which are only aesthetic.

Aside from their personal statistics, you also have interpersonal relationships. The chain of command is the biggest one. It can be reconfigured whenever you return to your ship, so it's pretty malleable. However, you can also define one personal relationship per crew member. For example, you can define person A as being the son of person B, person B as having married person C, person C being ancient rivals with D, and D being the mentor of A.

While each person can only spawn one relationship, relationships are two people, so people can and will be part of more than one relationship.

Each kind of relationship has a specific effect on the way stress and inspiration propagates. For example, a married couple will always "equalize" their inspiration. While no added inspiration will be gained, you could have one person exposed to a lot more stress and it would equalize to half on each. Because of this, married couples are usually split up into different teams so they suffer different amounts of inspiration damage. A parent and child relationship works such that the injuries they suffer regenerate faster when they are on the same team, and so on.

These relationships cannot be changed easily. However, it is possible: several modules produce social points, which can then be spent to establish new connections or break old ones - although which kinds of relationship depend on the module in question. This is invaluable on very long missions, because you'll lose a lot of inspiration on the flight and you'll need as many perfectly configured social links as possible to survive.

Anyway, that's the idea.

The core point is that we let the player create her own arbitrarily complex missions, but with crew instead of rocket parts.

Social NPCs

How do you make social NPCs? Here's a new approach.

Fundamentally, social is a matter of conversation. It's not back-and-forth: it's simultaneously offering a bit of your mind and looking to see how the other person is receiving it. You may simply offer bits of your mind over and over and over, with no "balance" of them offering pieces of their mind in exchange. All they are doing from the perspective of an outside is listening, but from the perspective of the talker they are offering feedback. They are offering their judgment and acceptance and incredulity and so on, all in line with the conversation.

So, to simulate social NPCs in a game, isn't it necessary to allow for this kind of conversation? The kind of conversation where you respond not by taking control of the conversation or having your line-item dialog tree option, but instead allowing the player and the NPC to understand each other's intentions via an ongoing passive response.

Here's an example. An friend comes up to you and says "My front window broke last night!" As this is being said, the player enters their response. It comes out as "oh?" or "whoa!" or "huh!" or "so?" or whatever. Then the friend goes on... but what they go on with depends on whether they think you care, what they think you want to hear. So they may go on with "... so, that was odd, yeah. How's life?" or they may go on with "I woke up and there was glass everywhere!" or they may go with "Maybe someone is throwing bricks at my house?!" It all depends on whether you seem to want to hear more.

There's a lot of stuff you need to do in order to build this into a game. You need to give it both clarity and texture. So the player understands that answering "oh?" and "whoa!" are going to have two different results, or at least result in two different perceptions of the player by the NPC. Moreover, the actual conversation needs to be flexible enough to adjust to the emotional or personal interest given. This can't realistically be done with a dialog tree - the explosion of options makes it impossible, especially if you use the rule where if you hit the same interjection button multiple times it makes you give the interjection more emphatically. Having four different options per line is bad enough, but having 8 or 16 would be impossible.

You can do it by writing several chains of dialog, though. For example, you might write a technical chain and an emotional chain. Each link on the chain is heavier than the last.

So if the NPC says "My front window broke last night!" you might indicate technical interest: "oh?" or you might indicate personal interest: "are you okay?" This would determine whether the next line is taken from the technical or emotional chain.

Moreover, if your interjections are more emphatic, it simply means to skip some of the links. The NPC feels comfortable presenting a heavier link because she knows you are interested enough that you won't consider it a burden or boring. So if you hit the technical interest button a bunch of times, you might interject "wow, that must have been a hell of a mess!" And rather than simply taking the next link on the technical chain ("there was glass everywhere"), she'd respond with a link a distance down the line, something like "well, cleaning it up was a sure annoying. That stuff can cut you!"

When you are feeding one chain, pulling down links for conversation, the other chain remains still. So if you express technical interest for a while, but then say "are you okay?" they won't skip to the 20th emotional link, they'll just move to the first one. However, you can stay on the technical chain by expressing more technical interest but still expressing some personal interest, which might end up pulling the emotional chain along without actually causing any of the links to be brought up in conversation. Or visa-versa.

The key to this is that both technical and personal chains have in-game reasons to pick them. A link that is brought up in conversation has an in-game effect. A technical link would improve the NPC's ability to resolve the situation faster and perhaps grant them skill experience or emotional stability. An emotional link would deepen your relationship with the NPC, but cause them to get emotional, upsetting their efficiency at in-game tasks or losing some skill experience or extending the duration of the situation.

The conversation isn't unlimited, either. Your relationship or their energy level or whatever determines the maximum number of lines they'll say. So you may want to leap ahead to the heavy links as soon as possible.

I would actually make the links visible on the screen for the player to see. That way you can put in broken or damaged links. Conversational bits that will abruptly end the conversation or cause offense or something. You need to avoid having them brought up, so you need to skip over them or spool past them while on the other line.

In this way, the conversation becomes an actual game, where you are talking to someone and it has flexible in-game results. It's not just a matter of +10% bargaining or whatever.

More complexly, this system could be built to allow the player to talk and the NPC to interject. This would be a matter where the NPC can see the broken/damaged links in the conversation and their interjections are partly based on personal preference and partly to give the player hints that there might be damage on a given chain in a certain number of links. So the player chooses which chains to advance how many notches, taking into consideration which links he thinks are broken and how much the NPC gives a shit.

It could also be adapted to allow for back-and-forth conversations, although this would require an actual conversation generation system.

Hm.

Narrative Games Redux

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?

Connectivity

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. )

Ad Hockery

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?

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?

Social Games and Such

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?

Inhuman

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?

The Future of Tweeting

_{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.

Social Play and Superheroes

I was thinking about a way of creating adaptable social play in games - the sort of thing where the NPCs are social algorithmically, rather than in a scripted manner. This is not the same as a plot or drama engine, but it's still a hard problem.

Classically, the real problem is not that the social aspect is hard. Plots and real drama are hard, but just general social activity isn't. In fact, the problem is the opposite: it's far too cut and dry. When implemented, it ends up being painfully simplistic. This is because the basic idea of "he likes you, she doesn't like you" is a very simple one. Switching from one to the other is very basic. You can hide the simple nature of the switching behind complicated minigames or weird requirements. You can hide the simple nature of the like/dislike axis by adding lots of things that can happen when they like or dislike you. But, fundamentally, it's a very simple axis that moves in very simple ways. This makes it too basic to really use.

A few years back I ran a LARP-y board game where the players were psychics. They each had unique psychic powers which could only be recharged when they were in specific situations.

Some of these situations were social. For example, one person might recharge one of their powers if someone nearby laughed. Another might recharge if they agreed to help someone. Other situations weren't overtly social, but ended up shaping the social landscape. For example, in order to recharge his power, this person has to end the turn alone (out of sight of the others). Another charges her power if he takes a point of damage, while another charges his power by healing someone.

It occurs to me now that that might be a suitable way to get social interactions out of NPCs. Each character in the board game had four powers and four ways to charge, which seemed to be plenty. Imagine if you had a superhero game with the same basic philosophy: every superhero has four powers, and any one gains an experience point if you fulfill the situation related to it.

This is a way to give characters "personality", because they want to cause the situation. Our Wolverine analog might gain XP by being alone, being injured, going berserk, and being stealthy. Our Spider-Man analog might gain XP by quipping, seeing happy citizens, hanging out with friends, and rescuing people. These two heroes would have fundamentally different personalities, and would play the game completely differently (whether an NPC or a PC).

When a hero gets a good response out of a person, mission type, or situation, they'll prefer to hang out with them, go on those missions, get into those situations. So if Spider-Man and Wolverine go on a stealth mission to rescue people, Spider-Man will gain XP due to the rescuing and Wolverine due to the stealth. Spider-Man's actual powers are very good at stealth, so Wolverine will probably gain quite a few stealth-mission points, which will actually make him likely to hang out with Spider-Man in the future, which will in turn give Spider-Man his "hang out with friends" XP, and they'd end up hitting it off pretty well.

It's not an empty "we're buddies" status, though, because Spider-Man is continually quipping to get his quip-XP, and Wolverine has no love of quips. So there's going to be a "why does Wolverine put up with him?" vibe. The answer is "because missions with Spider-Man are likely to be stealthy and let me go berserk and get injured."

Villains are simply the same sort of thing, except that the way they earn their XP is less positive. Spider-Man is unlikely to end up as a villain because of his "smiling citizen" XP gain, but, then, the Joker has the same thing. Wolverine would seem to be primed for villainy, but it's all about who he teams up with, who he falls in with.

Anyway, I think it's an interesting idea. I wonder if it would work.

Wickerwork

I've been thinking about the internet. And things that aren't the internet.

Specifically, I've been thinking about safety nets.

In the past, humans have innovated many kinds of safety nets to make sure that they can survive a temporary misfortune. For example, brotherhoods, fraternities, and "secret societies" such as Freemasons largely served the purpose of binding working men together such that they could ride out any personal storms with the support of the group. Many such societies explicitly spelled out the support they would offer, while others (such as the Freemasons) didn't. But either way, you could expect some support if you broke your leg and couldn't work for a few weeks.

Religions serve this purpose as well, although their membership tends to be more diverse so their social support structure is also more diverse. It's no coincidence that both religion and fraternities do better when the economy is faltering: that's when people need stability and support.

There are loads of other structures to help the "in" group. It can be argued that in societies with extensive family structures (such as a stereotypical Italian or Greek family), those family structures serve much of the same role as a fraternity would, in terms of supporting the members that need it and kicking the lazy ones when they need it.

As a secular humanist, I worry about secular support structures. Religion isn't secular. Secret societies are rarely secular, and don't fit into current culture. Familial support structures are fine, but we aren't a familial nation, so they also do not fit into our culture. There are secular groups you can join, but they're more like hobby groups or political activist groups.

What I want is something that can let me help people out when I'm flush, and rely on people like me when I'm not. Charities don't fit the bill for a wide variety of reasons, not least of which is that they aren't a support network, they're a charity. More importantly, I'm talking about helping specific people, not some vague assurance that I'm helping "people", somewhere.

Well, I was funding yet another Kickstarter program when it occurred to me that I was looking at the new support framework.

I do spend a fair amount of money on line, and I spend it on people. Sure, I normally get stuff for my money, but it's more about promoting the growth of these people. As an example, I recently bought a $5 pre-order of a game which will theoretically be $30+ when released. This did not make me happy. I wasn't after a deal: I would have been happier paying $30.

Does this make me unique?

I don't think so. I think it's the fundamental difference between interacting with people and interacting with corporations.

Kickstarter and other similar things are about interacting with people, not companies.

What if something like Kickstarter was crossed with something like Facebook? A place that wasn't simply a social network, but a "this is what I'm working on now, look!" site. I call it "Wickerwork".

Describing Wickerwork won't work if you're not familiar with Kickstarter, or underestimate how much money flows through Kickstarter. Wickerwork is fundamentally Kickstarter, but instead of being project-centric, it's person-centric.

Every few days (or faster), you would update your status. This is the state of the art project we're working on, thanks for funding us. The next project is this one here, get on it if you want us to do it. Etc, etc.

If you break a leg and can't work any more, you can post about that - "oh, no, I broke my leg and can't work the farm! Help!" People will donate, or come down to help, or maybe even create a special offer of their stuff with the proceeds going to you.

The problem with this approach normally is that I don't know you and don't care about you. There's very little interest in helping a random stranger. I have to be aware of you. I don't have to be your buddy, but I have to know you.

Right now we propagate help messages through Twitter or Facebook or whatever, and they're crap at it. I don't know you, your Facebook page is pointless, etc, etc.

Something like Kickstarter is a unique opportunity to know people because you have a historical record of how they work. This lady is a local grower who has had three funded projects, she makes these cute videos about her gardens, she provides local food and seems nice... and she's not just begging for money, she's offering an optional "high-price" version of her normal service, asking for extra hands, has a friend who is selling stuff to help her (as well as accepting donations if you just want to give, of course). In this situation, even if I don't know this lady, I can know her. In just a few minutes, she can establish herself as a person very clearly.

This is a unique advantage of Kickstarter (or, I guess, any project-themed system). Projects are a powerful way to get to know someone. Their favorite music, their profile pic, their thoughts on things like social networking, that's not going to be important to me until they've established themselves as someone who actually exists. And that's easiest done by saying, "I'm the guy who made this documentary" or "I'm the lady with this farm".

It also offers an additional resource in that you can offer further project-related rewards instead of simply begging for money. "Emergency sale of documentary DVDs to pay for my kid's hospital bill!"

Also, because it keeps a record, it will be clear how often you need this kind of help. One problem with simply giving aide is that the incentives are bad, and you can theoretically start to rely on the aide rather than using the aide to get back on your feet. Either way, you could see it quite clearly in their project history.

Now, the problem with Wickerwork is that in order to be involved, you have to be doing Kickstarter-style projects with fair regularity. Saying, "I'm the girl who used to do that local farm thing, but now I work at Dairy Queen full time", that's not going to have the same draw.

This is a huge drawback. Most people don't do Kickstarter-style projects.

Well, the more I think about it, the more I think that maybe they should.

Maybe it would be a much more interesting place if people spent some of their hobby time doing a small escrow-funded project. Think about your hobbies. Could any be adapted to a small, funded project?

Most of them would probably benefit from becoming a small, funded project. The pressure would be just enough to actually finish the things you start.

For example, if you've got a musical hobby, you've probably dreamed of releasing a single, or an album. But chances are you've done neither, or if you have done one, they sank without a blip. Imagine if it had been a "I need $100 to fund recording my single! Maybe it's no good, maybe it's awesome, let's find out!"

Once you released the single, you would have a guaranteed audience, because they spent money on you already. No vanishing without a blip. And you would be driven to finish it, because otherwise you would have to return the $100 plus an extra $10 due to Amazon's fees.

That's what Wickerwork would be about. A continuous boil of small transactions and projects to knit people together quietly and closely.

Some people might be thinking "Nobody would fund that project, this guy's hopelessly optimistic!"

That's the same sort of thought that thinks Wikipedia cannot possibly work. Well, Wikipedia works, and surfing to Kickstarter clearly shows people will fund those sorts of projects.

What do you think?

Funny Laws of the New Century

Every few months I try to write a scifi RPG (tabletop) using fairly realistic reactions to theoretical advancements. Basically, I try to write some speculative fiction in game form. I never publish or anything, but the one I created last month has some interesting characteristics, so I thought I'd share a few of the details.

The tabletop game is codenamed "anonymesh", and revolves around the idea of a massive, dense network of interconnected wireless nodes. Extremely low-energy computers combined with cheap solar cells make running a wireless node quite literally free, and so most people use "meshnet" instead of the centralized backbone internet. This leads to a lot of really interesting characteristics, and as you might expect, the players all play hackers.

The interesting bits are endless, but one of the most interesting things that popped out of this universe was the idea of "deanning". Basically, I tried to think of the weirdest, cleverest laws I could, and some of the privacy laws that emerged were very strange.

For example, you can take a picture of main street and post it on line without getting anyone's permission, without blurring faces, without any of that, because the people in the picture are anonymous.

What isn't legal is running face-scanning technology across that image to identify who these people are. This is de-anonymizing the data, or "deanning" it. Technically, while the deanning is illegal, it can't be enforced. Instead, only the propagation of deanned data is illegal. (More specifically, the propagation of any non-anonymous data without permission, regardless of whether it's been deanned or was never anonymized in the first place.) Data is considered non-anonymous if it reveals more of the person's personal information than the person expected to people they didn't intend. This is an objective statement, but a huge and growing number of guidelines exist in the courts to support it.

This has a huge number of implications, especially since propagation includes "feeding into data mining programs for purposes unrelated to the initial data".

So if you buy a bagel, the bagel shop can remember you bought a bagel. But they can't use the fact that you bought a bagel for non-you-buying-bagel purposes. They can't email you ads, they can't use your preferences in analysis of what bagels are best, they certainly can't sell your debit card info to another company. Not unless the data is properly anonymized. So they can say that their Washington Ave store sold a poppy seed bagel at 10:45 AM, but not who bought it.

It's pretty easy for anyone to save up a lot of vaguely related data and then dean it using basic pattern recognition tools. For example, if you record main street 24/7, you can easily start matching up individuals and determining their habits. Combined with a simple web trawl, you may be able to identify a significant number of people and their exact schedules.

This is illegal, but how would you enforce it? Especially since it's so easy to do with the mesh network: ten thousand man-in-the-middle attacks per message. Just save every bit of recognizable traffic. Analyze encryptions: you'll have gigabytes of data from the same source spooling by day after day, cracking it is just a matter of time and effort.

Well, the truth is that things get deanned all the time. You don't even have to run a thieving wifi router to get enough data to dean. You can dean from an internet search.

But using this information generally leaves a pretty clear trail. The same algorithms that can dean anonymous data can detect when a project or statement contains references to less-than-anonymous data. Individuals rarely have to worry about this in the same way pirates rarely worry about it. But companies have to worry, and have to be scrupulous.

This is especially dangerous to them because many of the wifi routers they depend on are run by untrusted sources who would love nothing better than to forward their illegal data to the police for a reward. It's not illegal to copy the information transferred through their router, not illegal to decrypt it, either, due to some anti-terrorism laws passed by the panicky government.

It's also not illegal to hack into devices, although it is illegal to use those hacked devices in an illegal manner (including data theft). This means that if you do dean data, you want to make sure you do it on an offline-only machine that can't be hacked remotely. Otherwise a hacker might forward that data to the police for that reward, get you thrown in jail.

Those are some of the basic rules, which actually make for a surprisingly interesting hacker game dynamic. There are a few things that may not occur to you at first read, though. Here are a few of those things:

Your friends can talk about you. This is called "implicit permission to dean". Where this permission ends is a rough concept and depends on what the individual has released publicly in the past.

Things you publish "publicly" that aren't intended for public use - for example, your mood on LiveJournal - are considered non-public data. The end user is not expected to always know exactly how every piece of software works, and therefore it is not the user that is held accountable, but the software and those that propagate the information for their own purposes.

So-called "shadow puppets" can be made. These are VR/AR avatars built out of real data fed to them. For example, feed your shadow puppet all the president's videos and speeches, and you have a shadow puppet that looks, talks, and acts like the president. This is almost always a dean even if you do it on public and non-anonymous data, because the shadow puppet can be made to act in a manner normally considered to be private and personal. For example, you can make your president puppet strip naked and dance the watusi. You can also release simulations of the president saying things he normally wouldn't say.

The law hasn't caught up to that extent, yet. Sometimes the infringements are allowed as parody, and sometimes the shadow puppet is waved off as not breaching privacy, but people are starting to crack down on the matter ever since a parody site began releasing pixel-perfect variants of Fox News shows.

"Virtual characters" have some very complex rights ever since the supreme court came down on the side of Disney to find that a shadow puppet of Mickey was not only a violation of trademark, but also a violation of "expected privacy on behalf of Mickey Mouse".

Anyway, the actual game is significantly more detailed (it's actually a bit too detailed for a tabletop game), but the laws about anonymizing and deanning were interesting enough I thought I'd talk about them on their own.