So, I wasn't planning on reviewing Dead Space, since it's... not really very interesting. It's basically System Shock II minus Shodan, psychic powers, and hacking. IE, a random repairman against The Many.
I was just gonna let it slide peacefully into oblivion but, but...
Then I met the Asteroid Shooting Minigame. A mandatory minigame where they put you in a seat and make you play Tie Fighter. Not the later ones. The original one. On the Apple II. The one that isn't even listed in Wikipedia, presumably because it was someone's basement hack.
I always hated that game, and I have not improved any with experience. So I've tried to beat this dumb, infuriating, pointless thing several times. Each time I think to myself, "IF I WANTED TO PLAY TIE FIGHTER, I'D TIME TRAVEL BACK TO 1988! SHUT UP AND BE A SHOOTER!"
But every time I die. And every time, I get a little further. Oh, good, maybe I'll eventually beat it!
Except your captain-type-dude is sitting in your ear the whole time. "Almost got it! Just a little more!" "You said that five minutes ago, dipshit, what's the point of lying to me? Just to fool me into thinking maybe I'll win this time, maybe I'll hold out long enough on this idiotic, sub-par minigame designed by brain-damaged, idiot monkey-men and implemented by sadistic, gibbering idiots and playtested, evidently, by savants with astonishingly good control over the MOST IRRITATING MOTIONS ON THE CONTROLLER? We'll call them idiot savants, just to keep with the theme."
Yeah, I'm really enjoying it.
So the game went from being "decent" to being "totally shitty" in one fell swoop.
Reading the walkthroughs, I find that not only does nobody have any useful suggestions aside from "not sucking", but there's ANOTHER ONE OF THEM LATER ON.
See, this kind of shit is just bad game design. The idea here is that they mix it up a bit, you know? Give you a break from the regular gameplay. Maybe the game needs it: the regular gameplay consists almost entirely of walking around slowly, then freezing and dismembering zombies. It's not exactly rapid-fire. The minigame certainly is.
But you know what? Mandatory minigames are a sign that your game design is fundamentally flawed. Doesn't matter what they are - quicktime sequences, turret fighting sequences, PRESS A REALLY QUICK sequences... they're all a sign of shitty basic play being desperately propped up by other shitty play.
You can put minigames in, sure. System Shock II, which Dead Space obviously wanted to be, had a hacking minigame. I'm sure it irritated some people. But you know what?
IT WAS OPTIONAL.
Man, I go on and on about weird, advanced little theories about game design, but then I go play a so-called triple-A game and I find they need BASIC DESIGN LESSONS.
I can't imagine the designers were really this bad. All I can think of is that they had a boss breathing down their neck and two days to do something. Because it's really bad. Ugh.
UGH.
The funny thing is that every other review on the planet seems to have loved the game. Not only did they not even notice this minigame, they thought the game itself was better than I think it is. This is probably the most negative review written about the game, but even before I got into this dumbass minigame, I didn't consider the game to be so great.
Maybe I'm spoiled by the fact that I'm kind of a scifi-survival-horror specialist. All these people comparing Resident Evil to Dead Space. Nooo, you did NOT. No wonder you think it's good. Maybe you should play System Shock II again. Or, hell, Shadowgrounds is scarier than this is.
This artificially crippling the camera crap? It doesn't make the game scarier to me. At all. More responsive - even eagle-eye - cameras work just fine because in survival horror, a big part of sustaining the scare is in maneuvering. And there isn't any in RE4 OR in Dead Space.
It's just someone walking around shooting zombies.
And, you know, playing painfully retarded minigames.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Condition RED Line!
Stolen more or less (more less and less more, I guess) verbatim from the MBTA here in Boston:
"Hi, this is Dan Grabauskas, general manager of the MBTA. Safety is our number one concern on the T.
"As our eyes and ears in the system, it's more important than ever for you to keep alert for suspicious behavior and activities. Even though there has not been a significant terrorist attack on a bus, train, or subway in America in our lifetime, even though Boston has never been the target of a significant terrorist attack, and even though there is no reason to think that we will be targeted any time soon, we're relying on you to report any suspicious activities, such as people with funny hats.
"Remember: in these dark times where literally ones of Americans are being murdered by foreigners every day, occasionally within two thousand miles of our borders, paranoia is a virtue and a welcome distraction. So, see something, say something: it's better to wrongfully arrest ten innocent civilians with dark skin than to let one person remember that they are safer in Boston than virtually anywhere else on the planet.
"Please stay tuned for another, back-to-back announcement on the topic of unfounded paranoia, and remember: watch that dirty rotten foreigner two seats down LIKE A HAWK."
"Hi, this is Dan Grabauskas, general manager of the MBTA. Safety is our number one concern on the T.
"As our eyes and ears in the system, it's more important than ever for you to keep alert for suspicious behavior and activities. Even though there has not been a significant terrorist attack on a bus, train, or subway in America in our lifetime, even though Boston has never been the target of a significant terrorist attack, and even though there is no reason to think that we will be targeted any time soon, we're relying on you to report any suspicious activities, such as people with funny hats.
"Remember: in these dark times where literally ones of Americans are being murdered by foreigners every day, occasionally within two thousand miles of our borders, paranoia is a virtue and a welcome distraction. So, see something, say something: it's better to wrongfully arrest ten innocent civilians with dark skin than to let one person remember that they are safer in Boston than virtually anywhere else on the planet.
"Please stay tuned for another, back-to-back announcement on the topic of unfounded paranoia, and remember: watch that dirty rotten foreigner two seats down LIKE A HAWK."
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Dangerous Fabricators
I happened to watch this today, only a day after writing this, and the two overlap.
I always get irritated at the beginning of these kinds of talks. It's so easy for people to get worked up about the potential horrors that theoretically await us. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bill Joy isn't as blindly reactive as many of these kinds of people, but I thought I'd take the moment to give MY opinion on the matter.
The basic concern is that as individuals gain more capability to create higher-technology devices, someone will do something horrible. For example, once we have home printers for printing life forms (virii and bacteria first), what's to stop someone from printing up some new superdisease, causing an epidemic, and killing a billion people? The home printers for printing life forms are not scifi, they're... ten years away. Twenty at the most. Then we'll all die OMG!
Welllllll, the answer isn't easy, mostly because the question presumes things that are false are true. It supposes an incorrect social dynamic. It is in error about the way human minds work. I suppose you could call it a misunderstanding of basic memetics, except that basic memetics doesn't exist. It ALSO misunderstands the nature of science in a fundamental way. These two misunderstandings radically alter the dynamic of this kind of terrorism.
One thing that isn't an answer that I need to address is regulation. Regulation will not work when you're regulating home use. If we can do something in our house, it cannot be regulated without destroying the society you're trying to protect. Once I have a DNA printer, it's impossible to stop me, impossible to catch me, short of omnipresent monitoring from an insanely overpowered government.
Nothing less will accomplish anything, as you can clearly see from the explosion of music, video, and more flat-out illegal things that is saturating modern computers. These things - especially toxic data such as child porn - are controlled by law. Stringently. But they still range somewhere between available and omnipresent, especially if you have access to gray networks (such as Freenet) or can speak multiple languages (to search outside your government's jurisdiction).
Some people are happy to settle for omnipresent monitoring - a total loss of privacy - out of the stark fear that someday some asshole with a DNA printer will kill off half the world's population. Those people, as I mentioned, are operating under at least two false premises: they misunderstand human dynamics and they misunderstand scientific dynamics.
I'll cover the scientific dynamics first.
It's forty years in the future. I'm at home with my printer and, having been spurned by my erobot, I'm planning to destroy the world with a particularly clever little microbe that makes people explode violently. Like in video games.
I release it into the wild. What happens?
Well, if I released it TODAY, man, I'd kill off half the world. It would be aweso... ful. Yeah. Awful.
But I'm not releasing it today, I'm releasing it forty years from now. When the technology has been developed to allow a home user to build this sort of thing.
I can't predict precisely what the defense will be, but I know there will be defenses, because we always develop defenses in line with the technology. Sometimes those are nontechnical (such as the very political defenses against atomic weapons), but the majority of times they evolve as sister technologies or practices and grow to a level where we stop even considering the original technology a threat.
For example, a government worker can easily email billions of dollars of secrets to China and get paid to an anonymous account. Nobody the wiser. But it's not something people run around screaming about.
Because we've evolved defenses against it. Some are technical - email monitoring from secure sites, security clearance requirements, etc - and some are political. I don't really know what those are, but given that I could get around the technical requirements in half an hour, I presume they exist.
I'm going to list a few technical defenses that may evolve simultaneously with home DNA printers, but in honesty I think the biggest defense will be a sister technology allowing for a more... socially advanced?... human. I don't really want to go into it here, but it's pretty clear that this level of technological change fundamentally changes human society.
Anyway, technical. I think these are the most likely:
1) Alarm vaccines. These are intelligent defenses, probably bacteria, that scan against a wide variety of known intruders and actually report on the kinds of microbial intruders you're experiencing. If they find a NEW one, you can see the alarms howl! And, of course, they immediately report the structure and activities of this new form immediately, as well as beginning basic defensive operations. Sort of like a biological Norton, if you want.
2) Airborne scanners. Same idea, but in boxes rather than people. This has the advantage of being easier to update and able to use technology that couldn't exist in people's bodies. However, it would also be less widespread and unable to accurately watch the progress of a new monster against a host. Plus side, they'd catch nonhuman-targeted microbes.
3) DNA Reverse Engineering. Get a sample of the new critter, run it through the reverse engineer, and you've got instant vaccine and cure. Release the hounds within an hour of detecting the thing in the first place.
4) Internal Weather Control. Instead of injecting a drug, we inject a bacteria that can manufacture the drugs we want. Moreover, the bacteria can be recalibrated if it turns out that cocktail isn't working.
Now these all sound hopelessly farfetched and futuristic, but you have to remember that we're talking about fighting off a microbe that I created on my home machine. They're not really more futuristic than that.
The point is that by the time we have home machines for this, we'll have developed defenses and responses to the threats the home machines create.
You can argue this isn't true - that we don't have defenses against nuclear bombs, for example - but those can't be created at home. Computers and the internet were once predicted to have catastrophic consequences for humanity back in the eighties, if you recall. "A hacker brought down wall street! OMG!"
But that passed because we developed safeguards, built them right into the infrastructure of the system. Built them right in because we WERE the system. The home users actually enabled the development of the defenses we use against the many horrors of the internet.
Same idea. Technology doesn't advance on its own. It advances for a large number of people and in tandem with a large number of brother and sister technologies.
...
The OTHER issue here is a fundamental misunderstanding of humans. And this is perhaps a more serious misunderstanding.
HUMANS ARE NOT GOOD AT REMOTE ACTIVITIES.
Nearly every crime ON THE PLANET is perpetrated by someone who spends a great deal of time near the victim. Likely it's a member of their family. Kidnapped children? It's usually a family member. Abuse? It's usually a family member or a trusted friend. Theft? It's often someone you know, the rest of the time it's usually someone who lives relatively nearby. Mugging? Usually muggers stay pretty close to home or their primary hang out, believe it or not.
Believe it or not, humans shit where we eat. Criminals commit most of their crimes within spitting distance of their normal zone of activity.
There are exceptions. For example, a lot of people knock over convenience stores. But it's usually a convenience store they've been in before or at least driven by a bunch. The convenience store makes a particularly appetizing target, so I guess it's understandable.
"But that doesn't hold true for terrorists and serial murderers... does it?"
Yyyyeah, it does. To a large extent.
It seems the majority of terrorist attacks happen in the same city as the terrorist lives. Nearly all of the rest happen in the same nation. You'll notice that most nations that suffer terrorist attacks have a higher percentage of immigrants from so-called "at risk cultures".
Our very own terrorist attack was a black swan. A particularly aggressive gambit using a particularly appetizing method against a particularly appetizing target.
I need to be clear. I'm not arguing against immigration or whatever else your personal concerns are. I'm explaining that terrorists do not simply pop over on a boat and blow you up. They blow themselves up near where they live, in the same way that muggers tend to mug people on the same set of streets, often within walking distance (or bus distance) of their home.
The same is true for our theoretical disease-criminal of the future. He is operating not out of coordinated misanthropy, but out of greed or UNcoordinated misanthropy. He won't cause any more damage that criminals today do. In fact, he'll probably cause less, because we'll be operating under augmented reality, which will make us very community-driven organisms. But let's assume the same level of misanthropy as today. Not a big threat.
"How can you be so sure? Isn't in DANGEROUS?!?!?!"
Well, hell, I can put together a mean chemical cocktail out of the crap under my sink and kill seventy people on a crammed-full red line train. Anyone can. But it hasn't happened, because that's not how humans work. We just don't work like that.
There are some amazing exceptions, most of them American. The unabomber, for example. But to call these uncommon is an understatement. They are so rare that we still remember him, even though he only killed three people. THREE PEOPLE! Similarly, some of you remember the Japanese guy who attempted pretty much what I described in the last paragraph. But more people are harmed in bowling-related accidents than these kind of coordinated criminal misanthropy. Perhaps it's because anyone whose brain is working so poorly as to WANT to do these things can't possibly do them WELL. I'd like to think that if I went off to kill people, I'd do it quite a lot better... but maybe there's something inherent in the act, some kind of mental screw-up? Perhaps there's some other reason. But... these people seem incapable of doing massive harm, even though they already have the tools to do so.
There are exceptions. Black-swan events like 9/11. That's what the technical defenses are for.
Also, there are some memetic factors worth considering. For example, suicide rates go up when there's lots of news coverage of suicides. School shootings went up when the media started going nuts about school shootings. (In fact, they basically didn't exist until the media went nuts.)
These are worth considering, but it's not something that we can stop progress for.
In fact, you can't stop progress at all.
Even if I haven't convinced you, in twenty years you'll find me sipping lemonade as I genetically engineer a green puppy.
I always get irritated at the beginning of these kinds of talks. It's so easy for people to get worked up about the potential horrors that theoretically await us. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bill Joy isn't as blindly reactive as many of these kinds of people, but I thought I'd take the moment to give MY opinion on the matter.
The basic concern is that as individuals gain more capability to create higher-technology devices, someone will do something horrible. For example, once we have home printers for printing life forms (virii and bacteria first), what's to stop someone from printing up some new superdisease, causing an epidemic, and killing a billion people? The home printers for printing life forms are not scifi, they're... ten years away. Twenty at the most. Then we'll all die OMG!
Welllllll, the answer isn't easy, mostly because the question presumes things that are false are true. It supposes an incorrect social dynamic. It is in error about the way human minds work. I suppose you could call it a misunderstanding of basic memetics, except that basic memetics doesn't exist. It ALSO misunderstands the nature of science in a fundamental way. These two misunderstandings radically alter the dynamic of this kind of terrorism.
One thing that isn't an answer that I need to address is regulation. Regulation will not work when you're regulating home use. If we can do something in our house, it cannot be regulated without destroying the society you're trying to protect. Once I have a DNA printer, it's impossible to stop me, impossible to catch me, short of omnipresent monitoring from an insanely overpowered government.
Nothing less will accomplish anything, as you can clearly see from the explosion of music, video, and more flat-out illegal things that is saturating modern computers. These things - especially toxic data such as child porn - are controlled by law. Stringently. But they still range somewhere between available and omnipresent, especially if you have access to gray networks (such as Freenet) or can speak multiple languages (to search outside your government's jurisdiction).
Some people are happy to settle for omnipresent monitoring - a total loss of privacy - out of the stark fear that someday some asshole with a DNA printer will kill off half the world's population. Those people, as I mentioned, are operating under at least two false premises: they misunderstand human dynamics and they misunderstand scientific dynamics.
I'll cover the scientific dynamics first.
It's forty years in the future. I'm at home with my printer and, having been spurned by my erobot, I'm planning to destroy the world with a particularly clever little microbe that makes people explode violently. Like in video games.
I release it into the wild. What happens?
Well, if I released it TODAY, man, I'd kill off half the world. It would be aweso... ful. Yeah. Awful.
But I'm not releasing it today, I'm releasing it forty years from now. When the technology has been developed to allow a home user to build this sort of thing.
I can't predict precisely what the defense will be, but I know there will be defenses, because we always develop defenses in line with the technology. Sometimes those are nontechnical (such as the very political defenses against atomic weapons), but the majority of times they evolve as sister technologies or practices and grow to a level where we stop even considering the original technology a threat.
For example, a government worker can easily email billions of dollars of secrets to China and get paid to an anonymous account. Nobody the wiser. But it's not something people run around screaming about.
Because we've evolved defenses against it. Some are technical - email monitoring from secure sites, security clearance requirements, etc - and some are political. I don't really know what those are, but given that I could get around the technical requirements in half an hour, I presume they exist.
I'm going to list a few technical defenses that may evolve simultaneously with home DNA printers, but in honesty I think the biggest defense will be a sister technology allowing for a more... socially advanced?... human. I don't really want to go into it here, but it's pretty clear that this level of technological change fundamentally changes human society.
Anyway, technical. I think these are the most likely:
1) Alarm vaccines. These are intelligent defenses, probably bacteria, that scan against a wide variety of known intruders and actually report on the kinds of microbial intruders you're experiencing. If they find a NEW one, you can see the alarms howl! And, of course, they immediately report the structure and activities of this new form immediately, as well as beginning basic defensive operations. Sort of like a biological Norton, if you want.
2) Airborne scanners. Same idea, but in boxes rather than people. This has the advantage of being easier to update and able to use technology that couldn't exist in people's bodies. However, it would also be less widespread and unable to accurately watch the progress of a new monster against a host. Plus side, they'd catch nonhuman-targeted microbes.
3) DNA Reverse Engineering. Get a sample of the new critter, run it through the reverse engineer, and you've got instant vaccine and cure. Release the hounds within an hour of detecting the thing in the first place.
4) Internal Weather Control. Instead of injecting a drug, we inject a bacteria that can manufacture the drugs we want. Moreover, the bacteria can be recalibrated if it turns out that cocktail isn't working.
Now these all sound hopelessly farfetched and futuristic, but you have to remember that we're talking about fighting off a microbe that I created on my home machine. They're not really more futuristic than that.
The point is that by the time we have home machines for this, we'll have developed defenses and responses to the threats the home machines create.
You can argue this isn't true - that we don't have defenses against nuclear bombs, for example - but those can't be created at home. Computers and the internet were once predicted to have catastrophic consequences for humanity back in the eighties, if you recall. "A hacker brought down wall street! OMG!"
But that passed because we developed safeguards, built them right into the infrastructure of the system. Built them right in because we WERE the system. The home users actually enabled the development of the defenses we use against the many horrors of the internet.
Same idea. Technology doesn't advance on its own. It advances for a large number of people and in tandem with a large number of brother and sister technologies.
...
The OTHER issue here is a fundamental misunderstanding of humans. And this is perhaps a more serious misunderstanding.
HUMANS ARE NOT GOOD AT REMOTE ACTIVITIES.
Nearly every crime ON THE PLANET is perpetrated by someone who spends a great deal of time near the victim. Likely it's a member of their family. Kidnapped children? It's usually a family member. Abuse? It's usually a family member or a trusted friend. Theft? It's often someone you know, the rest of the time it's usually someone who lives relatively nearby. Mugging? Usually muggers stay pretty close to home or their primary hang out, believe it or not.
Believe it or not, humans shit where we eat. Criminals commit most of their crimes within spitting distance of their normal zone of activity.
There are exceptions. For example, a lot of people knock over convenience stores. But it's usually a convenience store they've been in before or at least driven by a bunch. The convenience store makes a particularly appetizing target, so I guess it's understandable.
"But that doesn't hold true for terrorists and serial murderers... does it?"
Yyyyeah, it does. To a large extent.
It seems the majority of terrorist attacks happen in the same city as the terrorist lives. Nearly all of the rest happen in the same nation. You'll notice that most nations that suffer terrorist attacks have a higher percentage of immigrants from so-called "at risk cultures".
Our very own terrorist attack was a black swan. A particularly aggressive gambit using a particularly appetizing method against a particularly appetizing target.
I need to be clear. I'm not arguing against immigration or whatever else your personal concerns are. I'm explaining that terrorists do not simply pop over on a boat and blow you up. They blow themselves up near where they live, in the same way that muggers tend to mug people on the same set of streets, often within walking distance (or bus distance) of their home.
The same is true for our theoretical disease-criminal of the future. He is operating not out of coordinated misanthropy, but out of greed or UNcoordinated misanthropy. He won't cause any more damage that criminals today do. In fact, he'll probably cause less, because we'll be operating under augmented reality, which will make us very community-driven organisms. But let's assume the same level of misanthropy as today. Not a big threat.
"How can you be so sure? Isn't in DANGEROUS?!?!?!"
Well, hell, I can put together a mean chemical cocktail out of the crap under my sink and kill seventy people on a crammed-full red line train. Anyone can. But it hasn't happened, because that's not how humans work. We just don't work like that.
There are some amazing exceptions, most of them American. The unabomber, for example. But to call these uncommon is an understatement. They are so rare that we still remember him, even though he only killed three people. THREE PEOPLE! Similarly, some of you remember the Japanese guy who attempted pretty much what I described in the last paragraph. But more people are harmed in bowling-related accidents than these kind of coordinated criminal misanthropy. Perhaps it's because anyone whose brain is working so poorly as to WANT to do these things can't possibly do them WELL. I'd like to think that if I went off to kill people, I'd do it quite a lot better... but maybe there's something inherent in the act, some kind of mental screw-up? Perhaps there's some other reason. But... these people seem incapable of doing massive harm, even though they already have the tools to do so.
There are exceptions. Black-swan events like 9/11. That's what the technical defenses are for.
Also, there are some memetic factors worth considering. For example, suicide rates go up when there's lots of news coverage of suicides. School shootings went up when the media started going nuts about school shootings. (In fact, they basically didn't exist until the media went nuts.)
These are worth considering, but it's not something that we can stop progress for.
In fact, you can't stop progress at all.
Even if I haven't convinced you, in twenty years you'll find me sipping lemonade as I genetically engineer a green puppy.
Play and Story
I guess this is a rant. I doubt you've heard it before.
As time goes on and I build little demos and tabletop games, I find myself less and less interested in play. But in a really weird way. Lemme sup up.
I have noticed a huge difference in how I design tabletop vs how I design computer games. Here's an example of what I mean. I've designed several pseudo-star-wars games, both as computer game prototypes and as tabletop games (mostly RPGs).
When I design the computer game, I spend eons going over the play dynamics. "Well, how should light saber combat be? Just like so, using time-sensitive balance and yardeyaryaryar?"
When I design the tabletop game, I spend eons going over the, um, "narrative components". "Well, here, I've drawn a picture of the ambassador from Mrrhork, and his stats are on the back. He'll be useful because he's good friends with a rebel naval admiral and..."
Now, it's important to note that I'm not designing tabletops with common RPG mechanics. I'm not popping off to GURPS or d20 and pulling out some tired standard. I'm actually creating very new and strange mechanics for every tabletop game I make. But... but it's so easy. It takes maybe half an hour.
On the computer, it takes ten times that long just to duplicate freakin' pong, man. There's no time left for the story - I've spent all my time on trying to get the game to work in the first place!
The big factor at work here is that the interface for generating and executing rules for tabletop games is significantly simpler than computer games. IE, I write them down, then I remember how to do it. If it's vague or something I didn't expect crops up, I can modify them on the fly.
But! But!
But I hate using standard gameplay.
A big part of my dislike for the new Fallout game (which I thought was merely "quite good") was that they literally used the exact same system as for Oblivion. Even though the system wasn't very well suited to the Fallout theme. (I also disliked the world design, which was also inherited from Oblivion and had the same problem.)
Sure, they applied desperate patches and some varnish. (I'm SPECIAL. How cute.) But underneath it, we're looking at a recycled system. I can't stand that.
Its why I can't stand D&D or d20 or Gurps, either: these are systems that aren't designed specifically for the game the players are playing today. So I can't stand it. It feels like someone's trying to hammer a round peg into a Hulk-Hogan-shaped hole.
I want my gameplay to match the story (narrative elements, whatever). The game is a cohesive experience, and the idea that half of the game can be largely recycled from a completely unrelated experience is repugnant to me. So I quite literally cannot take a piece of gaming middleware such as Game Maker and make a game out of it. I hit a wall where I feel the grind between what dynamics the game needs to have and the dynamics that the middleware allows.
In some cases you can go digging, script up your specific gameplay system... but it takes just as long as making the damn thing from scratch!
It used to be that I'd make my little demos, focus on the gameplay aspects, and then drop them. But I'm having a really hard time doing that now, because I'm starting to really feel the missing half of the experience. It's like I'm arranging furniture in a house that has no roof or walls.
The horrible part is that this isn't a problem when designing tabletop games of any sort. Doesn't matter how hideously complex the game is. 200 page GM guide on time-traveling probability mathematicians? No problem, takes me a week. Board game with 500 illustrated cards? No problem, happy to spend the time.
But freakin' Tetris with a story, man? NO CAN DO.
Anyone else feel this way?
As time goes on and I build little demos and tabletop games, I find myself less and less interested in play. But in a really weird way. Lemme sup up.
I have noticed a huge difference in how I design tabletop vs how I design computer games. Here's an example of what I mean. I've designed several pseudo-star-wars games, both as computer game prototypes and as tabletop games (mostly RPGs).
When I design the computer game, I spend eons going over the play dynamics. "Well, how should light saber combat be? Just like so, using time-sensitive balance and yardeyaryaryar?"
When I design the tabletop game, I spend eons going over the, um, "narrative components". "Well, here, I've drawn a picture of the ambassador from Mrrhork, and his stats are on the back. He'll be useful because he's good friends with a rebel naval admiral and..."
Now, it's important to note that I'm not designing tabletops with common RPG mechanics. I'm not popping off to GURPS or d20 and pulling out some tired standard. I'm actually creating very new and strange mechanics for every tabletop game I make. But... but it's so easy. It takes maybe half an hour.
On the computer, it takes ten times that long just to duplicate freakin' pong, man. There's no time left for the story - I've spent all my time on trying to get the game to work in the first place!
The big factor at work here is that the interface for generating and executing rules for tabletop games is significantly simpler than computer games. IE, I write them down, then I remember how to do it. If it's vague or something I didn't expect crops up, I can modify them on the fly.
But! But!
But I hate using standard gameplay.
A big part of my dislike for the new Fallout game (which I thought was merely "quite good") was that they literally used the exact same system as for Oblivion. Even though the system wasn't very well suited to the Fallout theme. (I also disliked the world design, which was also inherited from Oblivion and had the same problem.)
Sure, they applied desperate patches and some varnish. (I'm SPECIAL. How cute.) But underneath it, we're looking at a recycled system. I can't stand that.
Its why I can't stand D&D or d20 or Gurps, either: these are systems that aren't designed specifically for the game the players are playing today. So I can't stand it. It feels like someone's trying to hammer a round peg into a Hulk-Hogan-shaped hole.
I want my gameplay to match the story (narrative elements, whatever). The game is a cohesive experience, and the idea that half of the game can be largely recycled from a completely unrelated experience is repugnant to me. So I quite literally cannot take a piece of gaming middleware such as Game Maker and make a game out of it. I hit a wall where I feel the grind between what dynamics the game needs to have and the dynamics that the middleware allows.
In some cases you can go digging, script up your specific gameplay system... but it takes just as long as making the damn thing from scratch!
It used to be that I'd make my little demos, focus on the gameplay aspects, and then drop them. But I'm having a really hard time doing that now, because I'm starting to really feel the missing half of the experience. It's like I'm arranging furniture in a house that has no roof or walls.
The horrible part is that this isn't a problem when designing tabletop games of any sort. Doesn't matter how hideously complex the game is. 200 page GM guide on time-traveling probability mathematicians? No problem, takes me a week. Board game with 500 illustrated cards? No problem, happy to spend the time.
But freakin' Tetris with a story, man? NO CAN DO.
Anyone else feel this way?
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Information Economy
Futurist crap
I've mentioned this before, but I guess it bears repeating. A lot of the stuff we now consider information wasn't considered information until technology allowed the local user to create the final form from information.
I know it's not terribly clear, so let me give an example: music.
Music wasn't information for most of the history of humans. It might CONTAIN information, but the music itself was created by the use of complicated instruments, and would be considered to be a product of that instrument plus someone who could play it.
Then we got phonographs which, in combination with records, allowed us to play back music that was recorded on any number of instruments with a very simple instrument: the speaker. The physical presence of the instrument and the time of its playing was removed from the equation: you could listen to the symphony or a jug band, all out of your home device.
This continued to improve, of course, with the advent of radio stations, tapes, CDs, and now MP3s. Moreover, some music is created without anyone ever playing an instrument at any point! At each step, the creation of the song and the end user's enjoyment of it is separated more and more. It becomes information.
It may be difficult to imagine a time when music wasn't considered information, back in a time where songs weren't protected by law because it wasn't the schematic of the song that mattered, but the individual rendering it.
As songs became more and more informationesque, laws were pushed to limit the spread of the information component. Whereas before anyone could pretty much play whatever song they wanted, now there are extremely strict limits on which songs musicians are allowed to play and in what situations they are allowed to play them. There are similarly complex laws governing the final rendering of music. This absurdity that most of the world takes as a given only exists to commoditize something that has always existed freely, but has only recently become useful.
I'm not going to argue whether it's good or bad, and I'm not someone who's advocating an information anarchy. I'm simply pointing out that as songs have had their physical requirements lifted and become information, laws have been made about who is allowed to access and replicate that information. Information that, only a few generations ago, would have been happily passed from person to person without anyone even noticing.
Of course, we all break those laws every day. Well, except me, the sterling example of not-a-music-pirate (cough). But that's not because we're evil, that's because it's gotten to the point where music is about a half a millimeter from actually being nothing but information. It has become so insanely easy to transmit and replicate that it is almost impossible for us computer nerds to really imagine it restricted.
Now, the point of this essay is that many things march towards information in the same way as song did. This is not obvious because music is the only one we're really very familiar with in our modern culture. But here are some examples:
Writing! Writing wasn't originally information, although it conveyed information. Instead, writing was in heavy books or scrolls (or cave walls or bark or whatever). It required the physical presence of these displays to exist. Now, of course, we have a billion displays that can render writing on the fly, and writing has turned into information. Just like music: we no longer need to have the physical form that writing originally required. Our ability to manufacture any "blueprint" of writing on a wide variety of personal screens or printers makes those things obsolete. We take the information - the "blueprint" of the book or essay - and we render it on our screen instantly and painlessly. You're doing it right now.
We're seeing slow strides in that direction for many, many, many things. For example, Pepsi keeps their recipes secret because, unlike three hundred years ago, that information would allow their competitors to easily "render" Pepsi. It's not feasible for individuals to do it, but other large companies can easily do it. That means that Pepsi is largely an information product. Sure, you buy a can of Pepsi, but that can's contents could be manufactured by anyone with a soda mixing plant anywhere on the planet. Pepsi's existence as a unique product is only true because of the countless laws that protect their specific mixture from being stolen and duplicated.
Does that seem odd, to consider a soft drink "information"? Well, how about coffee? More and more homes are getting coffee-savvy, with their own coffee machines, espresso makers, and so forth. Obviously, they're still using beans that are physically grown somewhere, but the final drinks they're making are the result of simple recipes - information about coffee.
My uncle makes something almost indistinguishable from Starbuck's Frappuccino. In fact, we call it a Frappuccino. My dad prefers hot drinks, so on his machine he simply makes coffee, but he grinds the beans to a very specific level and lets them seep for a very specific amount of time under a very specific heat, and it often varies from bean to bean. He's producing, from his home, coffee far superior to most public coffeehouses because his recipes - his "coffee information" - is superior and calibrated specifically to his taste.
I can't go so far as to say that coffee is information, but I can say that it is moving in that direction in the same way that the record began making music into information. It sounds insane to say that someday we'll just say "Coffee, Barbados blend from 2024", and out will pop coffee. But two hundred years ago, it would have sounded insane to say that someday we could just say "Bach, concerto #7, Philharmonic symphony orchestra 2001"... but today, that's almost literally what we can do.
"But that's so far in the future it doesn't bear to be considered!"
It's actually amusing to look back at those times and see their predictions for the future. When people were saying things like, "The phonograph of the future will allow the family to listen to up to thirty different concerts in the quiet of their own home!"
Yeah, I've got three hundred concerts on this machine, and that's only classical music. Um, legally, yeah.
The thing about progress is it's not linear. It's exponential. Just when you can see far enough to start realizing what might happen, it explodes into insanity.
So, let me go ahead and explode this "informatization" of products into insanity.
Cars as information. Download a blueprint from OpenSourceCars, print it out on your home machine, and drive a Ferrarenti to work today. I'm officially coining that pun.
Genetics as information. Plan out a garden consisting entirely of plants to grow in exactly your soil, in exactly your weather conditions, and form a stable biome. Print them out. AS PLANTS, not seeds.
Neighborhoods as information. Get together with your community and pound out the specifics of your community power generation, water filtering, shared spaces, optimal parking... then grow it using a pseudo-life form that excretes complex structures like a clam forms a shell.
Insanely over-futuristic?
Well, it's certainly not going to happen tomorrow!
But all it needs is something that lets you render a product locally. Just a machine that lets you print out the things you want.
I've mentioned this before, but I guess it bears repeating. A lot of the stuff we now consider information wasn't considered information until technology allowed the local user to create the final form from information.
I know it's not terribly clear, so let me give an example: music.
Music wasn't information for most of the history of humans. It might CONTAIN information, but the music itself was created by the use of complicated instruments, and would be considered to be a product of that instrument plus someone who could play it.
Then we got phonographs which, in combination with records, allowed us to play back music that was recorded on any number of instruments with a very simple instrument: the speaker. The physical presence of the instrument and the time of its playing was removed from the equation: you could listen to the symphony or a jug band, all out of your home device.
This continued to improve, of course, with the advent of radio stations, tapes, CDs, and now MP3s. Moreover, some music is created without anyone ever playing an instrument at any point! At each step, the creation of the song and the end user's enjoyment of it is separated more and more. It becomes information.
It may be difficult to imagine a time when music wasn't considered information, back in a time where songs weren't protected by law because it wasn't the schematic of the song that mattered, but the individual rendering it.
As songs became more and more informationesque, laws were pushed to limit the spread of the information component. Whereas before anyone could pretty much play whatever song they wanted, now there are extremely strict limits on which songs musicians are allowed to play and in what situations they are allowed to play them. There are similarly complex laws governing the final rendering of music. This absurdity that most of the world takes as a given only exists to commoditize something that has always existed freely, but has only recently become useful.
I'm not going to argue whether it's good or bad, and I'm not someone who's advocating an information anarchy. I'm simply pointing out that as songs have had their physical requirements lifted and become information, laws have been made about who is allowed to access and replicate that information. Information that, only a few generations ago, would have been happily passed from person to person without anyone even noticing.
Of course, we all break those laws every day. Well, except me, the sterling example of not-a-music-pirate (cough). But that's not because we're evil, that's because it's gotten to the point where music is about a half a millimeter from actually being nothing but information. It has become so insanely easy to transmit and replicate that it is almost impossible for us computer nerds to really imagine it restricted.
Now, the point of this essay is that many things march towards information in the same way as song did. This is not obvious because music is the only one we're really very familiar with in our modern culture. But here are some examples:
Writing! Writing wasn't originally information, although it conveyed information. Instead, writing was in heavy books or scrolls (or cave walls or bark or whatever). It required the physical presence of these displays to exist. Now, of course, we have a billion displays that can render writing on the fly, and writing has turned into information. Just like music: we no longer need to have the physical form that writing originally required. Our ability to manufacture any "blueprint" of writing on a wide variety of personal screens or printers makes those things obsolete. We take the information - the "blueprint" of the book or essay - and we render it on our screen instantly and painlessly. You're doing it right now.
We're seeing slow strides in that direction for many, many, many things. For example, Pepsi keeps their recipes secret because, unlike three hundred years ago, that information would allow their competitors to easily "render" Pepsi. It's not feasible for individuals to do it, but other large companies can easily do it. That means that Pepsi is largely an information product. Sure, you buy a can of Pepsi, but that can's contents could be manufactured by anyone with a soda mixing plant anywhere on the planet. Pepsi's existence as a unique product is only true because of the countless laws that protect their specific mixture from being stolen and duplicated.
Does that seem odd, to consider a soft drink "information"? Well, how about coffee? More and more homes are getting coffee-savvy, with their own coffee machines, espresso makers, and so forth. Obviously, they're still using beans that are physically grown somewhere, but the final drinks they're making are the result of simple recipes - information about coffee.
My uncle makes something almost indistinguishable from Starbuck's Frappuccino. In fact, we call it a Frappuccino. My dad prefers hot drinks, so on his machine he simply makes coffee, but he grinds the beans to a very specific level and lets them seep for a very specific amount of time under a very specific heat, and it often varies from bean to bean. He's producing, from his home, coffee far superior to most public coffeehouses because his recipes - his "coffee information" - is superior and calibrated specifically to his taste.
I can't go so far as to say that coffee is information, but I can say that it is moving in that direction in the same way that the record began making music into information. It sounds insane to say that someday we'll just say "Coffee, Barbados blend from 2024", and out will pop coffee. But two hundred years ago, it would have sounded insane to say that someday we could just say "Bach, concerto #7, Philharmonic symphony orchestra 2001"... but today, that's almost literally what we can do.
"But that's so far in the future it doesn't bear to be considered!"
It's actually amusing to look back at those times and see their predictions for the future. When people were saying things like, "The phonograph of the future will allow the family to listen to up to thirty different concerts in the quiet of their own home!"
Yeah, I've got three hundred concerts on this machine, and that's only classical music. Um, legally, yeah.
The thing about progress is it's not linear. It's exponential. Just when you can see far enough to start realizing what might happen, it explodes into insanity.
So, let me go ahead and explode this "informatization" of products into insanity.
Cars as information. Download a blueprint from OpenSourceCars, print it out on your home machine, and drive a Ferrarenti to work today. I'm officially coining that pun.
Genetics as information. Plan out a garden consisting entirely of plants to grow in exactly your soil, in exactly your weather conditions, and form a stable biome. Print them out. AS PLANTS, not seeds.
Neighborhoods as information. Get together with your community and pound out the specifics of your community power generation, water filtering, shared spaces, optimal parking... then grow it using a pseudo-life form that excretes complex structures like a clam forms a shell.
Insanely over-futuristic?
Well, it's certainly not going to happen tomorrow!
But all it needs is something that lets you render a product locally. Just a machine that lets you print out the things you want.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Characters that feel like Characters
I'm trying to trim this down to readability...
There are more and more games that try for an open world with some level of social play. Fable II, for example, lets you do any pose to anyone. But though the world has many NPCs in it, none of them feel like a character. They all feel like cardboard cut-outs.
There's something to be said for better play involving characters. In fact, I've said tons on the subject myself. So I'll skip that stuff.
I've come to believe that's only half the issue. I think the other half lies in how you interact with the character.
Most games of this sort give you generic interaction options that can be pointed at any character. For example, in Fable II you can "dance" at anyone, you can "yell" at anyone, etc. Other games featuring open-world (or character-gen) social systems use the same idea, although they often use a different set of generics. Even I have, in the past, done this for nearly all of my prototypes.
But I think that's the flaw. I think that's the big flaw.
The idea behind it is that the characters will react to your generic action in a specific way, showing off their personality. But that's a crippled framework because it depends on the generic message. It's a reply to a generic comment. It's like this: you want to get a feel for how interesting a photograph is. But you're only allowed to ask a few specific questions: how big is it? How red is it? Is there a person in it?
Even if the photo is very interesting, you'll be hard-pressed to tell because your questions are so shaky. And if you have enough generic, pre-defined questions to tell you, then you have thousands of generic questions, 99.9% of which are useless in any given situation.
Social gameplay is the same way. Even if the character is interesting, you won't see that in how they respond to your thumbs-up or your yell. You can't really get to know a character because your AVATAR can't get to know the character. Your avatar's behavior doesn't change to be more specific to the character.
What if it did?
Let's pretend that instead of generic responses like thumbs-up and laugh and so forth, we have four "social action slots". The slots are filled by the places where your character's personality, the other character's personality, and your relationship collide.
The idea is that there could be hundreds, thousands, even billions of potential interactions that could be loaded up. They could be built out of sub-interactions, for example, or even made with a numeric scale involved.
A simple example is a hug. If you can hug someone in a game, they use the same animation no matter who you're hugging. But you hug people very, very differently depending on your relationship, your current mood, etc. And they hug you back (or punch you in the nose) very, very differently. Not just big differences like bum-grabbing or carefully maintaining inches of air between you, but small differences like how long they hesitate before returning your hug, exactly where on your back their hands fall, etc.
Calling it a "hug" is a crime caused by the limitations of our language. There are a billion different kinds of hugs. Instead of trying to make a big list of them, it would be much better to create a hug generating system.
...
I should stress that this is not an always-on thing. You cannot simply walk up to anyone and hug them. You only get the option to when your avatar thinks a hug would be appropriate (or, well, whenever he wants to).
This is a breach of common game design philosophy. We've grown very used to the idea that the player should be permitted to do any legal action at any time. If you take away a player's ability to jump "because his character doesn't feel like it", the players will probably crucify you.
This is really no different, and I expect the players would be irritated that they can't simply choose to try to hug (or whatever) their favorite character whenever they like. However, if it's built fairly transparently, getting that option would be one of the fun gameplay challenges.
But, as with all this week, this relies heavily on the player's avatar having a personality.
What do you think?
There are more and more games that try for an open world with some level of social play. Fable II, for example, lets you do any pose to anyone. But though the world has many NPCs in it, none of them feel like a character. They all feel like cardboard cut-outs.
There's something to be said for better play involving characters. In fact, I've said tons on the subject myself. So I'll skip that stuff.
I've come to believe that's only half the issue. I think the other half lies in how you interact with the character.
Most games of this sort give you generic interaction options that can be pointed at any character. For example, in Fable II you can "dance" at anyone, you can "yell" at anyone, etc. Other games featuring open-world (or character-gen) social systems use the same idea, although they often use a different set of generics. Even I have, in the past, done this for nearly all of my prototypes.
But I think that's the flaw. I think that's the big flaw.
The idea behind it is that the characters will react to your generic action in a specific way, showing off their personality. But that's a crippled framework because it depends on the generic message. It's a reply to a generic comment. It's like this: you want to get a feel for how interesting a photograph is. But you're only allowed to ask a few specific questions: how big is it? How red is it? Is there a person in it?
Even if the photo is very interesting, you'll be hard-pressed to tell because your questions are so shaky. And if you have enough generic, pre-defined questions to tell you, then you have thousands of generic questions, 99.9% of which are useless in any given situation.
Social gameplay is the same way. Even if the character is interesting, you won't see that in how they respond to your thumbs-up or your yell. You can't really get to know a character because your AVATAR can't get to know the character. Your avatar's behavior doesn't change to be more specific to the character.
What if it did?
Let's pretend that instead of generic responses like thumbs-up and laugh and so forth, we have four "social action slots". The slots are filled by the places where your character's personality, the other character's personality, and your relationship collide.
The idea is that there could be hundreds, thousands, even billions of potential interactions that could be loaded up. They could be built out of sub-interactions, for example, or even made with a numeric scale involved.
A simple example is a hug. If you can hug someone in a game, they use the same animation no matter who you're hugging. But you hug people very, very differently depending on your relationship, your current mood, etc. And they hug you back (or punch you in the nose) very, very differently. Not just big differences like bum-grabbing or carefully maintaining inches of air between you, but small differences like how long they hesitate before returning your hug, exactly where on your back their hands fall, etc.
Calling it a "hug" is a crime caused by the limitations of our language. There are a billion different kinds of hugs. Instead of trying to make a big list of them, it would be much better to create a hug generating system.
...
I should stress that this is not an always-on thing. You cannot simply walk up to anyone and hug them. You only get the option to when your avatar thinks a hug would be appropriate (or, well, whenever he wants to).
This is a breach of common game design philosophy. We've grown very used to the idea that the player should be permitted to do any legal action at any time. If you take away a player's ability to jump "because his character doesn't feel like it", the players will probably crucify you.
This is really no different, and I expect the players would be irritated that they can't simply choose to try to hug (or whatever) their favorite character whenever they like. However, if it's built fairly transparently, getting that option would be one of the fun gameplay challenges.
But, as with all this week, this relies heavily on the player's avatar having a personality.
What do you think?
Monday, December 01, 2008
Filling in the Blanks
To continue this theme of hollow characters, I'd like to do a little thought exercise. I think you should try it too, because it's fun.
Picture one of the games you've played recently that had a hollow or window main character. Now replace them with a very strongly NON-hollow character. Imagine how the game would feel differently and then imagine how, if the game was designed with that character in mind from the start, how it might be fundamentally different.
For example, replace Mass Effect's "Shepard" with, say, Captain Kirk. This one's easy.
In most regards, Kirk is easy to picture in Shepard's shoes. It's not much of a stretch to see Kirk going to war like that, although it's not exactly what he would do in Trek. I can't see Kirk driving around on barren planets looking for mineral deposits and loot, but I couldn't see Shepard doing that, either.
From a plot perspective, Kirk fits fine into the role of the young renegade captain sent on a special mission with a special ship. However, all the interpersonal aspects of the plot will screw up a bit because Kirk's character doesn't really have those dynamics. His romances are always held at arm's length, for example.
The whole idea of "choosing noble or asshole" is still viable, but it would be done in true Kirkian style instead of mushy, wishy-washy hollow character. "Garrus... you can't... go around killing people!" "It's Wrex - he's gone out of... control!"
The fact that Kirk actually has a personality lets the writing justify letting Kirk take the lead more often, whereas Shepard is ENTIRELY a reactive character. This is because writing an active role for a hollow character results in the players feeling like they've been gypped out of the options they would really like... but that problem is much reduced if the main character has such a strong personality that the player can't deny that the options are all that make sense for him.
If the game was designed with Kirk in mind from the start, I think it would feature the ship more centrally, because Kirk is a captain above all. Sure, he gets in fist fights and fires lasers and boffs a space elf, but the whole purpose of his character is to be the beating heart of his ship.
This sort of character replacement is kind of a fun exercise. That example was pretty straight - a substitution of a bland character with a very similar non-bland character. But it's often fun to imagine really zany mixups, and we can still claim it's educational so long as we think about how it would actually change the game.
For example, imagine Mirror's Edge with Raz from Psychonauts as the main character.
Or imagine Ash from Evil Dead as the main character in Crackdown. (Or Ash from Pokemon, I suppose.)
Or imagine Shodan as the "main character" in SimCity. Go nuts.
The point isn't "How would these characters fit into the game?" The point is "How would the game change to fit in these characters?"
...
I especially like that SimCity one. Imagine a city-building game where you play an evil artificial intelligence. Ha! "The only thinggggs of beauty in the dirt you call a citttyyyy... are the thiinnnnggggss IIIiiii builllllt therrrrrre."
Picture one of the games you've played recently that had a hollow or window main character. Now replace them with a very strongly NON-hollow character. Imagine how the game would feel differently and then imagine how, if the game was designed with that character in mind from the start, how it might be fundamentally different.
For example, replace Mass Effect's "Shepard" with, say, Captain Kirk. This one's easy.
In most regards, Kirk is easy to picture in Shepard's shoes. It's not much of a stretch to see Kirk going to war like that, although it's not exactly what he would do in Trek. I can't see Kirk driving around on barren planets looking for mineral deposits and loot, but I couldn't see Shepard doing that, either.
From a plot perspective, Kirk fits fine into the role of the young renegade captain sent on a special mission with a special ship. However, all the interpersonal aspects of the plot will screw up a bit because Kirk's character doesn't really have those dynamics. His romances are always held at arm's length, for example.
The whole idea of "choosing noble or asshole" is still viable, but it would be done in true Kirkian style instead of mushy, wishy-washy hollow character. "Garrus... you can't... go around killing people!" "It's Wrex - he's gone out of... control!"
The fact that Kirk actually has a personality lets the writing justify letting Kirk take the lead more often, whereas Shepard is ENTIRELY a reactive character. This is because writing an active role for a hollow character results in the players feeling like they've been gypped out of the options they would really like... but that problem is much reduced if the main character has such a strong personality that the player can't deny that the options are all that make sense for him.
If the game was designed with Kirk in mind from the start, I think it would feature the ship more centrally, because Kirk is a captain above all. Sure, he gets in fist fights and fires lasers and boffs a space elf, but the whole purpose of his character is to be the beating heart of his ship.
This sort of character replacement is kind of a fun exercise. That example was pretty straight - a substitution of a bland character with a very similar non-bland character. But it's often fun to imagine really zany mixups, and we can still claim it's educational so long as we think about how it would actually change the game.
For example, imagine Mirror's Edge with Raz from Psychonauts as the main character.
Or imagine Ash from Evil Dead as the main character in Crackdown. (Or Ash from Pokemon, I suppose.)
Or imagine Shodan as the "main character" in SimCity. Go nuts.
The point isn't "How would these characters fit into the game?" The point is "How would the game change to fit in these characters?"
...
I especially like that SimCity one. Imagine a city-building game where you play an evil artificial intelligence. Ha! "The only thinggggs of beauty in the dirt you call a citttyyyy... are the thiinnnnggggss IIIiiii builllllt therrrrrre."
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