I'd like to talk about forking paths.
Although it's starting to fade, forking paths are still very popular in game design. Bioware is the biggest example of this, in that every RPG they've created in the past decade or so has been entirely based around the idea of "choosing between good and bad".
There are some problems with this kind of design, the big one being that when you give your players some choice, it changes how they view that element of the game. It goes from being a simple story to being a part of the gameplay. And bad gameplay, like Dragon's Lair or the quick time events that are killing otherwise interesting games these days.
I've already talked about the fact that these choices are typically only ONE choice repeated over and over and over. This is obviously not terribly freeing, but it does offer some advantages. The first is that it's relatively easy to program, since you're essentially programming two plots and letting the player pretend that it's an infinite number of plots. The second is that it gives the player the illusion of choice - every time he re-selects his chosen path, he feels a bit like he's actually choosing a path. So, psychologically, it has some benefits.
Personally, I feel that choices like these are actually bad. I wouldn't complain if the plot made my avatar good or evil and made him do all those plot choices, but when you give me choices, I always think "all these choices are so... inapplicable. None of them is what I want my avatar to do." Whereas if you never brought it up, I'd basically just say "my avatar's a wuss/a dick. Okay, let's get on with it."
It's obvious that many players don't feel that way, and I don't see any reason why game designers should be avoiding a psychological trick just because I don't personally like it. If that was the case, there would be no MMORPGs at all, because I hate those psychological tricks, too.
But if you're looking to design a game that features some level of actual choice, you have to consider how you're going to do it.
One way, and the way most would-be designers seem to immediately pick, is to simply make a wider variety of choices. Perhaps your first few choices are good/evil, but then they start to turn into things like honor vs life, for example.
There are some problems with this, such as the fact that it's still on rails and players like me will still fail to find a choice that really matches what we want to do. But more importantly, it takes a TON of scripting. Would-be designers who think in this manner are setting themselves up for the let-down of a lifetime when they realize the literally thousands of pages of scripting they'll need to do to support this. That's one of the fundamental problems with these kinds of scripted choices.
If we think about it in terms of first person shooters, we've got an easy way to recognize these things.
Rails shooters such as House of the Dead are quite fun. However, you do not control your motion, you only control the shooting. This is like a linear story RPG. This has some serious advantages: you're not only able to focus only on the parts of the level that the players will see, but you can also insure that the players will move and interact with the scenery in a fun and interesting way. For example, diving down a well.
Some rails shooters allow players to go alternate routes - route A or route B? This is like a Bioware RPG. It doesn't ACTUALLY matter which route you choose, because they're programmed to be roughly equivalent in terms of difficulty and they both lead to the same boss. But it gives the player a sense of control and is a useful psychological trick. Sure, you may think both choices are dumb, but at least you can choose the dumb.
Now, we can imagine such a thing being taken to an extreme. At every door the game pauses and asks whether you want to enter. At every corner, it stops and asks whether to turn right or left.
This doesn't actually give you a better game! It gives you a worse game!
It is much, much better to make the player control his position at an infinitely higher level of granularity. By which I mean letting him walk around and face whatever direction he wants.
He still gets to explore all the cool things you want him to explore, but he also gets to do it fluidly and in complete control at all times. There is no sense of being railroaded into bad choices (assuming a relatively competent designer).
It's true that building a game that allows the player to explore rather than simply putting him on rails is more difficult both in terms of mechanics and level design. However, once you start considering how many more rails you need to lay in order to give the player the "freedom" to go more places, you realize that the price of rails is exponential while the price of the walking mechanic is linear.
It's probably cheaper to lay two or three main rail lines than to create movement mechanics and carefully program out all the nooks and crannies of the level. But when you start talking about branching those rails out to hundreds of possible destinations... the price skyrockets and the railway map becomes hideous.
I hope this explains where I'm coming from.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
T-t-t-touchSCREEN!
Here, something a bit lighter and software-related.
I've just seen Microsofts "year 2019" videos, and they're all about touchscreens.
As someone who actually WORKS with touchscreens and tablets both in my hobbies and in my work, allow me to edjumicatify you.
I llllove touchscreens and I think that the killer app is going to be flexible touchscreens. Once we have a flexible Kindle, we're going supernova. Nothing will ever be the same. Imagine a thin, hardback book, about the size of a Macbook Air. It has a dozen pages in it. Each of the pages can display moving video and is touch sensitive.
The pages are designed to be removed from the book, to operate as independent displays or, if arranged in a lattice, larger displays. They can hook up with other books and pages. You can use "smart inertial dragging" to flick things from one page to another even if they are not attached to each other.
Yay!
But!
And this needs to be stressed.
BUT!
Touchscreens are quite literally an interim technology.
The real next step is going to visual recognition.
Touchscreens are limited by the scope of your hand. The screen I develop for at work is fairly large as such things go, and it's pretty tiring to use. I can't imagine using a wall-sized touchscreen for anything besides collaboration (when it will be important for the other users to clearly see your motions).
Instead, what I expect is for larger screens (and virtual screens) to instead detect your intentions by your eye and hand gestures. You don't reach up and drag something across three feet of wall. You look at it, gesture slightly with your hand, and look at where you want it to go. Vwip, it goes there.
Similarly, interacting with controls is a matter of looking at them and making subtle hand gestures. You don't need to be anywhere near the screen, as long as it can tell where you are looking precisely enough.
Now, you're not always going to want to be looking at what you want to control. For example, an audio guy might be studying the wave forms of whatever he's listening to, but adjusting knobs somewhere else. It's pretty easy to set this up, either using positional recognition (when he looks there, he wants the controls over here) or lock-assignation like sign language speakers sometimes do. That is, looking at what you want, gesturing to "lock it in" to a place (say, your left hand, or just off to the right) and then gesturing relative to that.
THAT is the real future of large screens.
Touchscreens are just a handy-dandy interim technology that we'll use until we get there.
I've just seen Microsofts "year 2019" videos, and they're all about touchscreens.
As someone who actually WORKS with touchscreens and tablets both in my hobbies and in my work, allow me to edjumicatify you.
I llllove touchscreens and I think that the killer app is going to be flexible touchscreens. Once we have a flexible Kindle, we're going supernova. Nothing will ever be the same. Imagine a thin, hardback book, about the size of a Macbook Air. It has a dozen pages in it. Each of the pages can display moving video and is touch sensitive.
The pages are designed to be removed from the book, to operate as independent displays or, if arranged in a lattice, larger displays. They can hook up with other books and pages. You can use "smart inertial dragging" to flick things from one page to another even if they are not attached to each other.
Yay!
But!
And this needs to be stressed.
BUT!
Touchscreens are quite literally an interim technology.
The real next step is going to visual recognition.
Touchscreens are limited by the scope of your hand. The screen I develop for at work is fairly large as such things go, and it's pretty tiring to use. I can't imagine using a wall-sized touchscreen for anything besides collaboration (when it will be important for the other users to clearly see your motions).
Instead, what I expect is for larger screens (and virtual screens) to instead detect your intentions by your eye and hand gestures. You don't reach up and drag something across three feet of wall. You look at it, gesture slightly with your hand, and look at where you want it to go. Vwip, it goes there.
Similarly, interacting with controls is a matter of looking at them and making subtle hand gestures. You don't need to be anywhere near the screen, as long as it can tell where you are looking precisely enough.
Now, you're not always going to want to be looking at what you want to control. For example, an audio guy might be studying the wave forms of whatever he's listening to, but adjusting knobs somewhere else. It's pretty easy to set this up, either using positional recognition (when he looks there, he wants the controls over here) or lock-assignation like sign language speakers sometimes do. That is, looking at what you want, gesturing to "lock it in" to a place (say, your left hand, or just off to the right) and then gesturing relative to that.
THAT is the real future of large screens.
Touchscreens are just a handy-dandy interim technology that we'll use until we get there.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Fun with Anticorporatism
Like many people, I have a bit of an anticorporate streak. Like most of us, I feel this way largely because corporations tend towards making money by screwing people over rather than by providing valuable goods or services in the most efficient manner.
I'm not naively anticorporate, though. Instead, I like to study and think about things. And one thing that's worth looking into are the various anticorporate subcultures that have arisen.
My interest is only in the cultures that have arisen organically from technological advances. Centralized anticorporate movements based around "ideals" have no interest to me because they are inherently doomed and transient. On the other hand, the following subcultures can teach us something about the fundamental transitions we're seeing as technology advances.
Of course, my definitions and examples are going to be based on my personal experiences/research, and I'm sure many other people will have other views on the matter. Similarly, cultures are fuzzy and always changing, so in five years none of this will be relevant. But it's a fun thought experiment.
Pirates
The most commonly referenced anticorporate culture in America, this term is extremely fuzzy. Whatever it may have meant in the past, it has now come to mean people who illegally duplicate data for personal enjoyment.
This cultural label grew out of the fact that we would call illegally duplicated stuff "pirate". Today we may still refer to those cheap, illegal knockoffs as pirate goods, but we understand that it isn't what the culture is really about these days: modern software pirates have no interest in physical goods when they can simply get everything off the internet digitally.
While pirates often share media, it's not usually about making money. It's more about not spending money, and pirates often have very strong views about the companies attempting to lock the data away from them. While the majority of pirates simply get songs and videos in this way, many pirates also download software or crack existing software to add illegal functionality. In nearly all cases, the pirate culture is about disabling the restrictions on data (including software).
The companies complaining most about piracy are in industries that were initially about enabling new capabilities for their customers. Initially, you bought an album because it let you listen to your favorite artist. You bought a copy of Excel because it let you do spreadsheet stuff. These were not capabilities that were otherwise easy to come by.
However, as technology advanced, these capabilities became very easy to come by, to the point where it's actually easier to get them for free instead of paying. The corporations, in an attempt to save their business model, began to prosecute anyone who distributed the capabilities they specialized in. This often required rewriting the laws of the nation to make duplicating data illegal.
Both sides have ethical arguments - one side claims it's stealing, the other side claims the first side is oppressive and driving would-be customers away. The truth is that these simplistic justifications are a product of the situation, rather than any kind of actual morality, and are all irrelevant in the long run.
As time goes on, we can probably expect to see pirates win. Data is fundamentally impossible to restrict, after all. This means that the industries that were originally about providing this data will have to change their business strategy or go out of business. The latter is dramatically more likely, as this kind of data is becoming easier and easier to produce as well as distribute.
Shanzhai
Ah, China. Land of the cheap knock-off.
Shanzhai stands for "mountain village", and is a reference to the idea of lawless, bandit villages. It is therefore vaguely similar in tone to our term "pirate".
Classically, shanzhai knockoffs have been pretty depressingly bad, largely about tricking people into buying them. If you get a shanzhai shirt, it's going to be a lot crappier than the name-brand shirt its pretending to be. Actually, it'll often be a lot worse quality than a generic shirt, since it's relying on camouflage, not quality.
However, in modern China "shanzhai" is slowly making the transition to a different meaning. Modern technological devices such as cell phones and MP3 players can be put on the market for half to a third the cost of their name-brand equivalents. Their functionality is typically in the same ballpark if you know what non-brands to buy, and in many cases is flatly superior because the name brand items are full of corporate crippleware or are missing expensive, patented codecs or functions that shanzhai products have no problem putting in.
This is not some shiny never-never land of joy, of course: shanzhai products are still made with bottom-dollar components and are made to make money. If you know what you're looking for, you'll probably get something that works as well as the original, although with a shorter lifespan... but it's pretty easy to get scammed. Worse, the lack of restrictions and keen eye on the bottom dollar leads to many products being actually poisonous or otherwise dangerous.
You can even consider the pseudo-researched medical procedures to be shanzhai in that manner, although I'm sure city teens would dismiss them as being some other subculture.
There are ethical arguments for and against shanzhai culture, and they are fundamentally the same as the arguments for and against piracy. They have the same causes and, ultimately, the same result. However, shanzhai culture is unlikely to start appearing in western nations unless the economy gets REALLY bad.
Makers
Instead, western nations are developing a subculture of makers.
Makers focus on build-it-yourself technologies, and can get some surprisingly high-quality end products: some makers even build bipedal robots. Makers are not about making cheap knock-offs, makers are really about creating customized items, usually using high-tech tools.
Unlike piracy and shanzhai, making things in this way is usually pretty close to legal, depending on how well-paid the prosecution lawyers are. So it doesn't really have any ethical combat going on with the corporations. Yet.
But it shows signs that it will develop these conflicts for the same reason the other examples already have them. Corporations ideally exist to give out capabilities efficiently: a corporation makes cars, cars let you drive around, people buy cars because it's better than walking.
Corporations have shown that they always, without fail turn to attacking movements that grant people the same basic capabilities they grant. So, once makers become common enough that people are driving maker cars or wearing maker clothes, we'll probably see corporations suddenly coming up with ethical reasons that DYI culture is evil.
And it will go that way, because technology will continue to advance. In fact, with the economy being somewhat dented, I expect to see a rise in DYI culture in general - more people with gardens, for example. While growing a garden is probably not considered part of maker culture, the two are synergistic, and as one rises so will the other.
At least, that's my theory.
What do you think?
I'm not naively anticorporate, though. Instead, I like to study and think about things. And one thing that's worth looking into are the various anticorporate subcultures that have arisen.
My interest is only in the cultures that have arisen organically from technological advances. Centralized anticorporate movements based around "ideals" have no interest to me because they are inherently doomed and transient. On the other hand, the following subcultures can teach us something about the fundamental transitions we're seeing as technology advances.
Of course, my definitions and examples are going to be based on my personal experiences/research, and I'm sure many other people will have other views on the matter. Similarly, cultures are fuzzy and always changing, so in five years none of this will be relevant. But it's a fun thought experiment.
Pirates
The most commonly referenced anticorporate culture in America, this term is extremely fuzzy. Whatever it may have meant in the past, it has now come to mean people who illegally duplicate data for personal enjoyment.
This cultural label grew out of the fact that we would call illegally duplicated stuff "pirate". Today we may still refer to those cheap, illegal knockoffs as pirate goods, but we understand that it isn't what the culture is really about these days: modern software pirates have no interest in physical goods when they can simply get everything off the internet digitally.
While pirates often share media, it's not usually about making money. It's more about not spending money, and pirates often have very strong views about the companies attempting to lock the data away from them. While the majority of pirates simply get songs and videos in this way, many pirates also download software or crack existing software to add illegal functionality. In nearly all cases, the pirate culture is about disabling the restrictions on data (including software).
The companies complaining most about piracy are in industries that were initially about enabling new capabilities for their customers. Initially, you bought an album because it let you listen to your favorite artist. You bought a copy of Excel because it let you do spreadsheet stuff. These were not capabilities that were otherwise easy to come by.
However, as technology advanced, these capabilities became very easy to come by, to the point where it's actually easier to get them for free instead of paying. The corporations, in an attempt to save their business model, began to prosecute anyone who distributed the capabilities they specialized in. This often required rewriting the laws of the nation to make duplicating data illegal.
Both sides have ethical arguments - one side claims it's stealing, the other side claims the first side is oppressive and driving would-be customers away. The truth is that these simplistic justifications are a product of the situation, rather than any kind of actual morality, and are all irrelevant in the long run.
As time goes on, we can probably expect to see pirates win. Data is fundamentally impossible to restrict, after all. This means that the industries that were originally about providing this data will have to change their business strategy or go out of business. The latter is dramatically more likely, as this kind of data is becoming easier and easier to produce as well as distribute.
Shanzhai
Ah, China. Land of the cheap knock-off.
Shanzhai stands for "mountain village", and is a reference to the idea of lawless, bandit villages. It is therefore vaguely similar in tone to our term "pirate".
Classically, shanzhai knockoffs have been pretty depressingly bad, largely about tricking people into buying them. If you get a shanzhai shirt, it's going to be a lot crappier than the name-brand shirt its pretending to be. Actually, it'll often be a lot worse quality than a generic shirt, since it's relying on camouflage, not quality.
However, in modern China "shanzhai" is slowly making the transition to a different meaning. Modern technological devices such as cell phones and MP3 players can be put on the market for half to a third the cost of their name-brand equivalents. Their functionality is typically in the same ballpark if you know what non-brands to buy, and in many cases is flatly superior because the name brand items are full of corporate crippleware or are missing expensive, patented codecs or functions that shanzhai products have no problem putting in.
This is not some shiny never-never land of joy, of course: shanzhai products are still made with bottom-dollar components and are made to make money. If you know what you're looking for, you'll probably get something that works as well as the original, although with a shorter lifespan... but it's pretty easy to get scammed. Worse, the lack of restrictions and keen eye on the bottom dollar leads to many products being actually poisonous or otherwise dangerous.
You can even consider the pseudo-researched medical procedures to be shanzhai in that manner, although I'm sure city teens would dismiss them as being some other subculture.
There are ethical arguments for and against shanzhai culture, and they are fundamentally the same as the arguments for and against piracy. They have the same causes and, ultimately, the same result. However, shanzhai culture is unlikely to start appearing in western nations unless the economy gets REALLY bad.
Makers
Instead, western nations are developing a subculture of makers.
Makers focus on build-it-yourself technologies, and can get some surprisingly high-quality end products: some makers even build bipedal robots. Makers are not about making cheap knock-offs, makers are really about creating customized items, usually using high-tech tools.
Unlike piracy and shanzhai, making things in this way is usually pretty close to legal, depending on how well-paid the prosecution lawyers are. So it doesn't really have any ethical combat going on with the corporations. Yet.
But it shows signs that it will develop these conflicts for the same reason the other examples already have them. Corporations ideally exist to give out capabilities efficiently: a corporation makes cars, cars let you drive around, people buy cars because it's better than walking.
Corporations have shown that they always, without fail turn to attacking movements that grant people the same basic capabilities they grant. So, once makers become common enough that people are driving maker cars or wearing maker clothes, we'll probably see corporations suddenly coming up with ethical reasons that DYI culture is evil.
And it will go that way, because technology will continue to advance. In fact, with the economy being somewhat dented, I expect to see a rise in DYI culture in general - more people with gardens, for example. While growing a garden is probably not considered part of maker culture, the two are synergistic, and as one rises so will the other.
At least, that's my theory.
What do you think?
Monday, February 23, 2009
I Apologize to NASA in Advance
So, NASA's making an MMO. It's gonna suck.
Hey now, I'm not just being a jerk. I'm not just reveling in making asinine and obvious predictions. I want to talk about why, because that's where lessons can be learned.
The problem with these sorts of games are that they are "checklist games". It's not just NASA: most of these sorts of games are built this way, no matter who sponsors them. They're made by making a big list of all the stuff the group considers cool, and then sticking that stuff in the game. In this case, NASA's list will include "doing experiments on the space station", "launching in a rocket", "driving a buggy", and "space walks", along with a few dozen others. Not ALL of these things will make it into the game, probably, but the game is driven by this list.
The problem is that this kind of design doesn't lend itself to having an actual GAME anywhere.
This can sometimes work out if the things described are part of a complex, interactive system. For example, the military can make a military training sim that's somewhat fun to play because we know how to simulate and interact with the idea of people running around trying to kill other people.
But being an astronaut is not part of a complex, interactive system. Astronauts live remarkably uninteresting lives. The reason it's enticing is because it's on a frontier, not because of the amazingly exciting lifestyle of exercising three hours a day and spending ten more hours tweaking experiments.
There is no easy way to make the life of an astronaut an interesting thing to a gamer. This is why most such games focus on the things around the astronaut, like the space stations or crafts. You can create a fun, interactive system based around piloting a craft or building a station. Not so easy to make a fun, interactive system based entirely around fetch quests.
You can argue that the Sims made an interesting game out of this idea, but I would argue that (A) the gameplay was actually mediocre, (B) it was still more interactive than the life of an astronaut, and (C) you controlled a fair number of Sims simultaneously.
Now, it's possible to have mediocre, shallow gameplay and still have a fun game. The Sims is one example of this, and every MMO on the market is another. However, these games make up for their gameplay with their metagame aspects - they give the player a huge amount of freedom.
Being an astronaut in the realistic world of NASA is absolutely the opposite of freedom. Not only does mission control script out your life by the minute, but it's actually scripted out weeks in advance. Talk about freedom of choice!
Now, it's possible to make a near-future space-themed MMO that is interesting. However, it would require abandoning the NASA theme. NASA won't do that. It would also require some pretty fancy footwork in terms of game design, and NASA is nimble like a brick. Glued to a table.
Unless NASA is making a very new kind of MMO or abandoning their NASA theme entirely, it is simply impossible for their MMO to be any good. It HAS to suck.
Sigh...
Hey now, I'm not just being a jerk. I'm not just reveling in making asinine and obvious predictions. I want to talk about why, because that's where lessons can be learned.
The problem with these sorts of games are that they are "checklist games". It's not just NASA: most of these sorts of games are built this way, no matter who sponsors them. They're made by making a big list of all the stuff the group considers cool, and then sticking that stuff in the game. In this case, NASA's list will include "doing experiments on the space station", "launching in a rocket", "driving a buggy", and "space walks", along with a few dozen others. Not ALL of these things will make it into the game, probably, but the game is driven by this list.
The problem is that this kind of design doesn't lend itself to having an actual GAME anywhere.
This can sometimes work out if the things described are part of a complex, interactive system. For example, the military can make a military training sim that's somewhat fun to play because we know how to simulate and interact with the idea of people running around trying to kill other people.
But being an astronaut is not part of a complex, interactive system. Astronauts live remarkably uninteresting lives. The reason it's enticing is because it's on a frontier, not because of the amazingly exciting lifestyle of exercising three hours a day and spending ten more hours tweaking experiments.
There is no easy way to make the life of an astronaut an interesting thing to a gamer. This is why most such games focus on the things around the astronaut, like the space stations or crafts. You can create a fun, interactive system based around piloting a craft or building a station. Not so easy to make a fun, interactive system based entirely around fetch quests.
You can argue that the Sims made an interesting game out of this idea, but I would argue that (A) the gameplay was actually mediocre, (B) it was still more interactive than the life of an astronaut, and (C) you controlled a fair number of Sims simultaneously.
Now, it's possible to have mediocre, shallow gameplay and still have a fun game. The Sims is one example of this, and every MMO on the market is another. However, these games make up for their gameplay with their metagame aspects - they give the player a huge amount of freedom.
Being an astronaut in the realistic world of NASA is absolutely the opposite of freedom. Not only does mission control script out your life by the minute, but it's actually scripted out weeks in advance. Talk about freedom of choice!
Now, it's possible to make a near-future space-themed MMO that is interesting. However, it would require abandoning the NASA theme. NASA won't do that. It would also require some pretty fancy footwork in terms of game design, and NASA is nimble like a brick. Glued to a table.
Unless NASA is making a very new kind of MMO or abandoning their NASA theme entirely, it is simply impossible for their MMO to be any good. It HAS to suck.
Sigh...
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Durability, Range, and Luck
I've been playing a slew of tactical RPGs recently (I have a commute, so I have DS time for once). I have worked out... A FORMULA! Whee.
Basically, I have thought up a rating of measurement I call hardcoritude. If the hardcoritude is above one, the tactical RPG is hardcore. If it is below one, it is casual. The amount above or below determines how severely hardcore/casual it is.
This does have an effect. It's not just some arbitrary rating: casual games tend to have very specific gameplay choices that hardcore games do not. Let's take a look. We'll compare Rondo of Swords and Final Fantasy Tactics A2.
The formula is simple. Its (average movement speed times 1.5) divided by (average range times average tiles hit).
In Rondo of Swords, your average speed is 7ish. Most characters move at six, but some move a little slower and some move a lot faster. Because Rondo of Swords characters actually CAN move through enemies, we don't have to reduce our average movement speed to take into account "blocked paths".
The average range for ranged attacks in Rondo of Swords is six, trending higher as the game goes on. However, the vast majority of attacks are not ranged attacks - say, two-thirds of the things we do in the game have a range of 1 (or even 0). So, our real average range is a little under three.
The average radius of effect in Rondo of Swords is difficult, because few attacks actually do that "diamond effect" that most games use. Instead, they have all sorts of weird patterns, typically starting at range zero. We'll say, on average, 3 tiles is your average effective area of effect for area-of-effect-effects. But, again, the majority of attacks (especially ranged ones) are a single tile. If 80% of our attacks are single-tile attacks, we end up with 1.4...
The end result for our Rondo of Swords rating is (7 * 1.5) / (2.666 * 1.4), or 2.8. A very high rating.
Now, if we compare to Tactics A2. Tactics has an average movement speed of around 3.8. The effect range is typically 5 for ranged attacks, and a very high percent of attacks ARE ranged attacks because even warriors have them. So, say, 40% of attacks are ranged, which gives us a final value of 2.6. The average area of effect for AOE effects is 7 tiles, taking into account both summonings and normal AOE powers. However, only about a third of effects are AOE, so we'll go with a simple 3 for the average of all attacks.
Our final rating is (3.8 * 1.5) / (3 * 2.6), or 0.7, a pretty low (but not extremely low) value.
What does this tell us?
Well, casual tactical games trend heavily towards much higher levels of chaos. Basically, a hardcore tactical game starts to look more like chess, while a casual tactical game starts to look more like poker.
So a casual game will tend to have more HP because even support and artillery units will get hit by the high-range, high AOE effects, and it's more a matter of minimizing how effective such attacks will be rather than maneuvering to avoid them entirely.
Casual games will tend to have a much higher element of luck, too: in Rondo of Swords, your percentage to hit is always very high, so close to 100% that missing happens only very occasionally and only against units that are specifically fast. However, in A2, your chance to affect someone with something other than basic damage hovers between 50% and 80%. (It also has the annoying tendency to make any number lower than 95% into a 50-50 chance.)
The side effects these chances cause are also much more critical in a casual game such as A2. In Rondo there are side effects, but they are very minor. In A2, side effects can actually turn your characters against you or make them completely worthless for several turns.
This is a trend that seems to be solid for other tactical games as well. For example, Disgaea is slightly hardcore. It's a little hard to estimate because players will tend to get AOE powers that can hit literally dozens of tiles, and it's difficult to work geo tiles into the equation. But, at the edges, it's somewhere between 1.1 and 1.6. You'll notice that percentages and side effects exist in Disgaea, but it's pretty rare for them to change the tide of battle. When "poison" is actually one of the stronger side effects, you know you're dealing with a hardcore tactical game.
However, Disgaea is more casual than Rondo of Swords in terms of combat. Even magicians can typically take a few hits, there are side effects, and so forth. This is reflected in the number: it's more hardcore than A2, but not as hardcore as Rondo.
Yeah? Can you think of any games that break this mold?
Basically, I have thought up a rating of measurement I call hardcoritude. If the hardcoritude is above one, the tactical RPG is hardcore. If it is below one, it is casual. The amount above or below determines how severely hardcore/casual it is.
This does have an effect. It's not just some arbitrary rating: casual games tend to have very specific gameplay choices that hardcore games do not. Let's take a look. We'll compare Rondo of Swords and Final Fantasy Tactics A2.
The formula is simple. Its (average movement speed times 1.5) divided by (average range times average tiles hit).
In Rondo of Swords, your average speed is 7ish. Most characters move at six, but some move a little slower and some move a lot faster. Because Rondo of Swords characters actually CAN move through enemies, we don't have to reduce our average movement speed to take into account "blocked paths".
The average range for ranged attacks in Rondo of Swords is six, trending higher as the game goes on. However, the vast majority of attacks are not ranged attacks - say, two-thirds of the things we do in the game have a range of 1 (or even 0). So, our real average range is a little under three.
The average radius of effect in Rondo of Swords is difficult, because few attacks actually do that "diamond effect" that most games use. Instead, they have all sorts of weird patterns, typically starting at range zero. We'll say, on average, 3 tiles is your average effective area of effect for area-of-effect-effects. But, again, the majority of attacks (especially ranged ones) are a single tile. If 80% of our attacks are single-tile attacks, we end up with 1.4...
The end result for our Rondo of Swords rating is (7 * 1.5) / (2.666 * 1.4), or 2.8. A very high rating.
Now, if we compare to Tactics A2. Tactics has an average movement speed of around 3.8. The effect range is typically 5 for ranged attacks, and a very high percent of attacks ARE ranged attacks because even warriors have them. So, say, 40% of attacks are ranged, which gives us a final value of 2.6. The average area of effect for AOE effects is 7 tiles, taking into account both summonings and normal AOE powers. However, only about a third of effects are AOE, so we'll go with a simple 3 for the average of all attacks.
Our final rating is (3.8 * 1.5) / (3 * 2.6), or 0.7, a pretty low (but not extremely low) value.
What does this tell us?
Well, casual tactical games trend heavily towards much higher levels of chaos. Basically, a hardcore tactical game starts to look more like chess, while a casual tactical game starts to look more like poker.
So a casual game will tend to have more HP because even support and artillery units will get hit by the high-range, high AOE effects, and it's more a matter of minimizing how effective such attacks will be rather than maneuvering to avoid them entirely.
Casual games will tend to have a much higher element of luck, too: in Rondo of Swords, your percentage to hit is always very high, so close to 100% that missing happens only very occasionally and only against units that are specifically fast. However, in A2, your chance to affect someone with something other than basic damage hovers between 50% and 80%. (It also has the annoying tendency to make any number lower than 95% into a 50-50 chance.)
The side effects these chances cause are also much more critical in a casual game such as A2. In Rondo there are side effects, but they are very minor. In A2, side effects can actually turn your characters against you or make them completely worthless for several turns.
This is a trend that seems to be solid for other tactical games as well. For example, Disgaea is slightly hardcore. It's a little hard to estimate because players will tend to get AOE powers that can hit literally dozens of tiles, and it's difficult to work geo tiles into the equation. But, at the edges, it's somewhere between 1.1 and 1.6. You'll notice that percentages and side effects exist in Disgaea, but it's pretty rare for them to change the tide of battle. When "poison" is actually one of the stronger side effects, you know you're dealing with a hardcore tactical game.
However, Disgaea is more casual than Rondo of Swords in terms of combat. Even magicians can typically take a few hits, there are side effects, and so forth. This is reflected in the number: it's more hardcore than A2, but not as hardcore as Rondo.
Yeah? Can you think of any games that break this mold?
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Balanced Choices
In my last post I glossed over an area because it would have taken a whole essay to explain. An anonymous poster immediately noticed.
So here's the essay.
The anonymous poster... ugh, I hate anonymic, so we'll call him "Herbert". Herbert says
Okay, this is the "balanced choices" theory of design. This is the same theory of design that KotOR and friends use. But they are starting to discover its limits, and you can clearly see this in Mass Effect. It's not a very good way to design things, although it is useful for another reason.
As you read this essay, please consider the difference in choices between Mass Effect and a KotOR game. I think you will see that they have followed the same logical path I am outlining here.
Let me explain what I'm talking about. In fantastabulous detail, yes.
First we have to point out that we're not talking about a skill challenge. A choice of this nature should never be about choosing the option with greater utility. These choices don't train up a skill (like jumping, shooting, or placing plumbing) and they don't happen often enough to form a complex "terrain" of choices. Furthermore, they are heavily warped by the player's play style and current situation, so any "balancing" you do between the options is going to be totally ruined by what the player brings to the table.
It is possible to make the choice between a long-term gain and a short-term gain, in which case it could really tax the player's skill at analyzing these sorts of things. But frankly, you'll only choose the short-term option if you're doing badly, and it will always feel like you've failed, like you've had to ask for help. It will make you weaker in the long run, too, so that's a nasty positive feedback loop. No, not a good situation.
These kinds of choices are not useful as skill challenges. They are, instead, offered mostly as expressive choices. Allowing the player to choose between a gun and a sword is a very effective choice, even if they are the same, utility wise. Hell, even if one is a bit better or worse.
This is because most players have a strong preference on that front: I'll always take the gun. While it's not a "challenging choice" - the answer is obvious - it does allow me to express myself and start on a path I prefer. Of course, if the game continues to offer me the choice between sword and gun over and over for the rest of the game, they don't count. I've already expressed myself on that front, and unless something has significantly changed the utility of one or the other, I'll just go the same way over and over again.
Self expression is the only thing these sorts of "A or B or C" choices are useful for. But, once you've self-expressed a particular sentiment, there is only a little value in expressing it again unless something big has changed.
Now, to get back to Herbert. Herbert says he wants his preferred side (light side, same as me) to be balanced against a tempting equivalent on the other option (guns and money). Let's quickly examine why this is not a good way to think, although the same end result may be reached from other lines of thought from time to time.
Let's remove the flavor for just a moment. Instead of light side, we'll just make it a "power point". Which it is: you get a point or two of light side for choosing the light side path.
Those points are very personal and long-term statistical improvements. They are very valuable and keep their value forever. Choosing a gun or money, on the other hand, is a short-to-medium-term benefit that will go away as you cycle through various equipment over time. (Actually, money is usually completely worthless in KotOR games, but let's skip that fact.)
This means that, without the flavor, we're talking about that old bugaboo we mentioned, long term choice vs short term choice. Unless we have decided that the points are worthless, choosing for short term is going to feel like failure. It's admitting that we need outside help instead of being self-sufficient with our steadily growing point-power.
Now, adding the flavor back in, choosing light side is emphasized even more.
It may make us feel good that we're "sacrificing" for the sake of our light side choice, but the fact is quite the opposite and, as before, it's not usually an actual choice. It's usually asking us to re-express the same thing we've expressed before: yeah, we're STILL light side.
We could, instead, reverse the flavor. This is probably what Herbert was trying to get at. The idea that we choose flavor or reward.
I think that flavor is, essentially, a long-term reward. No matter how long the game goes on, the fact that we saved that child will never be "replaced" by a "better" act of good. They are cumulative, unlike which gun you equip. So flavor is a long-term reward.
Choosing guns over flavor is, therefore, admitting that you need help bad enough that you're willing to give up on the cool shit in the game to get a boost.
This works in both directions, of course - light side and dark side flavors are equally long-term and valuable. So it's not simply that bad guys get more stuff. In order to get the cool "I burned all their faces off" sequence, you have to sacrifice stuff, too.
You could make it long-term reward versus long-term reward. For example, strictly a flavor choice between light side and dark side (perhaps with a small amount of random statistical crap tossed in so that the player feels like they're affecting their game). But these flavor choices have a dominant side, just like offering me a gun or a sword. I'll always choose the gun and, similarly, I'll always choose light side. It's not a choice except for the very first time.
You can choose between, say, light side flavor and light side points - two tangentially related long-term choices. Except that most players will probably choose in favor of one or the other and always choose that way, just like I'll keep choosing light side after I've starting choosing light side. There may be a little bit of waffling, but I think you'll find it trends towards choosing flavor, because flavor keeps it's value even after the game has ended, so it is longer-term than points. I know I would feel like I was failing if I chose points over flavor. Unless, obviously, the flavor was not enticing to me. Players don't feel bad about not choosing something they find has no merit.
...
What I'm saying here is that the idea of a scripted choice that is internally balanced is not very good. A player will generally make his choice the first time he sees such a choice, and then continue going that direction forever. If offered choices between long-term and shorter-term rewards, he'll trend towards the long-term rewards. And flavor is a much longer-term reward than any balanced gameplay reward.
The problem is that these choices are always going to be inherently shallow. Compare them to non-shallow gameplay. Non-shallow gameplay iterates rapidly and involves training up your skills. These kinds of scripted choices do not iterate rapidly - they barely iterate at ALL - and they don't involve any kind of skill. So they are not skill challenges.
As ways of allowing the player to express himself, they are good to some extent, but tend to become very repetitive. Even if I have always chosen light side, the scripted choice is always between light side, neutral, and blatant dark side, rather than being chosen to challenge my sense of light side.
Therefore, it is necessary to create a method of extremely long-term options that never ask the same question twice.
That is what I outlined in my last post.
...
Sigh, I'm trying to figure out how I should have written that first half. It's not very good. Oh, well, does everyone understand what I'm saying? Agree? Disagree?
So here's the essay.
The anonymous poster... ugh, I hate anonymic, so we'll call him "Herbert". Herbert says
"Not enough deeply disturbing dilemmas, I think. I want to choose the light side but it will mean sacrificing something very important. Usually it's sacrificing a tempting weapon or maybe a nice sum of money."
Okay, this is the "balanced choices" theory of design. This is the same theory of design that KotOR and friends use. But they are starting to discover its limits, and you can clearly see this in Mass Effect. It's not a very good way to design things, although it is useful for another reason.
As you read this essay, please consider the difference in choices between Mass Effect and a KotOR game. I think you will see that they have followed the same logical path I am outlining here.
Let me explain what I'm talking about. In fantastabulous detail, yes.
First we have to point out that we're not talking about a skill challenge. A choice of this nature should never be about choosing the option with greater utility. These choices don't train up a skill (like jumping, shooting, or placing plumbing) and they don't happen often enough to form a complex "terrain" of choices. Furthermore, they are heavily warped by the player's play style and current situation, so any "balancing" you do between the options is going to be totally ruined by what the player brings to the table.
It is possible to make the choice between a long-term gain and a short-term gain, in which case it could really tax the player's skill at analyzing these sorts of things. But frankly, you'll only choose the short-term option if you're doing badly, and it will always feel like you've failed, like you've had to ask for help. It will make you weaker in the long run, too, so that's a nasty positive feedback loop. No, not a good situation.
These kinds of choices are not useful as skill challenges. They are, instead, offered mostly as expressive choices. Allowing the player to choose between a gun and a sword is a very effective choice, even if they are the same, utility wise. Hell, even if one is a bit better or worse.
This is because most players have a strong preference on that front: I'll always take the gun. While it's not a "challenging choice" - the answer is obvious - it does allow me to express myself and start on a path I prefer. Of course, if the game continues to offer me the choice between sword and gun over and over for the rest of the game, they don't count. I've already expressed myself on that front, and unless something has significantly changed the utility of one or the other, I'll just go the same way over and over again.
Self expression is the only thing these sorts of "A or B or C" choices are useful for. But, once you've self-expressed a particular sentiment, there is only a little value in expressing it again unless something big has changed.
Now, to get back to Herbert. Herbert says he wants his preferred side (light side, same as me) to be balanced against a tempting equivalent on the other option (guns and money). Let's quickly examine why this is not a good way to think, although the same end result may be reached from other lines of thought from time to time.
Let's remove the flavor for just a moment. Instead of light side, we'll just make it a "power point". Which it is: you get a point or two of light side for choosing the light side path.
Those points are very personal and long-term statistical improvements. They are very valuable and keep their value forever. Choosing a gun or money, on the other hand, is a short-to-medium-term benefit that will go away as you cycle through various equipment over time. (Actually, money is usually completely worthless in KotOR games, but let's skip that fact.)
This means that, without the flavor, we're talking about that old bugaboo we mentioned, long term choice vs short term choice. Unless we have decided that the points are worthless, choosing for short term is going to feel like failure. It's admitting that we need outside help instead of being self-sufficient with our steadily growing point-power.
Now, adding the flavor back in, choosing light side is emphasized even more.
It may make us feel good that we're "sacrificing" for the sake of our light side choice, but the fact is quite the opposite and, as before, it's not usually an actual choice. It's usually asking us to re-express the same thing we've expressed before: yeah, we're STILL light side.
We could, instead, reverse the flavor. This is probably what Herbert was trying to get at. The idea that we choose flavor or reward.
I think that flavor is, essentially, a long-term reward. No matter how long the game goes on, the fact that we saved that child will never be "replaced" by a "better" act of good. They are cumulative, unlike which gun you equip. So flavor is a long-term reward.
Choosing guns over flavor is, therefore, admitting that you need help bad enough that you're willing to give up on the cool shit in the game to get a boost.
This works in both directions, of course - light side and dark side flavors are equally long-term and valuable. So it's not simply that bad guys get more stuff. In order to get the cool "I burned all their faces off" sequence, you have to sacrifice stuff, too.
You could make it long-term reward versus long-term reward. For example, strictly a flavor choice between light side and dark side (perhaps with a small amount of random statistical crap tossed in so that the player feels like they're affecting their game). But these flavor choices have a dominant side, just like offering me a gun or a sword. I'll always choose the gun and, similarly, I'll always choose light side. It's not a choice except for the very first time.
You can choose between, say, light side flavor and light side points - two tangentially related long-term choices. Except that most players will probably choose in favor of one or the other and always choose that way, just like I'll keep choosing light side after I've starting choosing light side. There may be a little bit of waffling, but I think you'll find it trends towards choosing flavor, because flavor keeps it's value even after the game has ended, so it is longer-term than points. I know I would feel like I was failing if I chose points over flavor. Unless, obviously, the flavor was not enticing to me. Players don't feel bad about not choosing something they find has no merit.
...
What I'm saying here is that the idea of a scripted choice that is internally balanced is not very good. A player will generally make his choice the first time he sees such a choice, and then continue going that direction forever. If offered choices between long-term and shorter-term rewards, he'll trend towards the long-term rewards. And flavor is a much longer-term reward than any balanced gameplay reward.
The problem is that these choices are always going to be inherently shallow. Compare them to non-shallow gameplay. Non-shallow gameplay iterates rapidly and involves training up your skills. These kinds of scripted choices do not iterate rapidly - they barely iterate at ALL - and they don't involve any kind of skill. So they are not skill challenges.
As ways of allowing the player to express himself, they are good to some extent, but tend to become very repetitive. Even if I have always chosen light side, the scripted choice is always between light side, neutral, and blatant dark side, rather than being chosen to challenge my sense of light side.
Therefore, it is necessary to create a method of extremely long-term options that never ask the same question twice.
That is what I outlined in my last post.
...
Sigh, I'm trying to figure out how I should have written that first half. It's not very good. Oh, well, does everyone understand what I'm saying? Agree? Disagree?
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Star Knights: We're Not Jedi, Honest
I should make it clear that, for once, I know exactly of what I speak. I have run the Bastard Jedi game three times, and have become quite familiar with how players play it.
For a long time, I've been thinking about how to turn my Bastard Jedi game from an insane tabletop into an insane computer game. I'm sure the guys who tried to make the first D&D computer game had a similar headache.
The biggest issue with the Bastard Jedi game (on the computer it's called "Star Knights" or, in full, "Star Knights: We're Not Jedi, Honest") is that the player's character(s) are not simply a stack of combat statistics. There needs to be a progression through a more... moral... area. That's the point, even in the very dualistic Star Wars games that exist now.
However, these dualistic games that currently exist do it pretty badly. Better than nothing? Maybe, but not as good as I would like.
The real problem is that these games offer you one choice - light side or dark side. Once you've made that choice, you'll typically choose the same way throughout the whole game, meaning that the hundreds of carefully-scripted "choices" that the game pops up aren't choices at all: one option is very dominant and the rest aren't worth thinking about.
This is made worse by their use of points as a primary reward mechanism. Light side vs dark side. You want to get as many points of your given side as possible, because they give you more power and make you look nifty. There are other rewards involved - cash, items, and flavor - but the points are very long-term and personal. It would take a gamebreaking injection of cash, items, or flavor to make you choose against a moderate number of points, so the points are obviously going to be the dominant reward mechanism. Since a specific pattern of secondary awards are usually associated with one kind of points or the other, players will tend to choose one kind of points and be wholly satisfied with both the primary AND secondary reward mechanisms (people saying "thank you" vs people dying in a fire, for example), which further unbalances the system.
It's possible to rebalance these choices such that the points you like oppose the secondary rewards you like. However, with such limited secondary rewards, it is difficult to do this very often without accidentally making the player swap his points preference. IE, he wants the light side secondary rewards, so he chooses dark side points.
There are other measures that can be taken to take care and make it interesting, but the truth is that it's a very limited mechanism and prone to becoming very muddy and not-fun if you make it too balanced.
What we really need are a whole lot more long-term rewards of a whole lot more types. And this is what my Bastard Jedi games were centered around.
Screw light side vs dark side, my Bastard Jedi had six or seven emotional axes, each of which could be considered to be light side or dark side. For example, humility vs arrogance. Having points in either direction gave you advantages if you used that axis and, in turn, using that axis made you more likely to gain another point in it. So your 2 points of humility will give you a +2 if you are humble in combat (or whenever), but it may increase to 3 points of humility.
There is no "OH YOU FELL" moment. No "oh, now you're dark side" moment, nor any "oh, you're redeemed now" moment. Not built into the rules, at any rate.
What there is is a powerful addiction that forms. The pressure of the game is enough that you really want those bonuses, and it's an easy habit to use your traits to get that edge.
Until you start to realize that you're using it all the time, and at more and more severe levels. You can't use two points of humility if your humility is at five, even if you only need two points of bonus.
At two points of humility, you're humble. That's okay. It's a Jedi trait, right? But at five points of humility, you're not humble: you've developed a serious self-worth issue and self-destructive tendencies. This is not because of the rules. This grows organically out of having to role play your use of ever higher levels of humility.
There's the catch, see? You fell without really noticing. You fell to the "light half" of the axis.
As a side note, this also tends to create unstable equilibriums, where players will start to use their less severe emotions to get smaller bonuses and attempt to keep their severe emotions under control. But that increases their less severe emotions and, before too long, you're a wreck.
And it's all done by the player, to the player. There are no rules that say, "oh, you have four emotions above (absolute value 4), you're now an emotional wreck." The rules don't have to say that. It becomes painfully clear to the player.
Quite aside from any other long-term results such as plot events, new saber crystals, and changing relationships with other player characters, these six or seven emotional axes are enough to power the whole engine on their own.
BUT...
They can't be easily translated to a computer game.
They can be, mechanically speaking. But without the social pressure to make you RP your emotion, there's no real connection between choosing one emotional axis or another. You can program in RP - make the character(s) act appropriately - but now you're taking it away from the player and making it character development by partial fiat. Furthermore, it's very, very difficult to script all the different ways that characters should express their various emotions in various situations!
Sigh...
To be honest, I think the scripting involved would probably be manageable in a AAA title, because I don't see how it could possibly be larger than the scripts for Mass Effect or Fable II. But for one hobbyist, that's a retarded level of scripting to aim for.
Comments?
For a long time, I've been thinking about how to turn my Bastard Jedi game from an insane tabletop into an insane computer game. I'm sure the guys who tried to make the first D&D computer game had a similar headache.
The biggest issue with the Bastard Jedi game (on the computer it's called "Star Knights" or, in full, "Star Knights: We're Not Jedi, Honest") is that the player's character(s) are not simply a stack of combat statistics. There needs to be a progression through a more... moral... area. That's the point, even in the very dualistic Star Wars games that exist now.
However, these dualistic games that currently exist do it pretty badly. Better than nothing? Maybe, but not as good as I would like.
The real problem is that these games offer you one choice - light side or dark side. Once you've made that choice, you'll typically choose the same way throughout the whole game, meaning that the hundreds of carefully-scripted "choices" that the game pops up aren't choices at all: one option is very dominant and the rest aren't worth thinking about.
This is made worse by their use of points as a primary reward mechanism. Light side vs dark side. You want to get as many points of your given side as possible, because they give you more power and make you look nifty. There are other rewards involved - cash, items, and flavor - but the points are very long-term and personal. It would take a gamebreaking injection of cash, items, or flavor to make you choose against a moderate number of points, so the points are obviously going to be the dominant reward mechanism. Since a specific pattern of secondary awards are usually associated with one kind of points or the other, players will tend to choose one kind of points and be wholly satisfied with both the primary AND secondary reward mechanisms (people saying "thank you" vs people dying in a fire, for example), which further unbalances the system.
It's possible to rebalance these choices such that the points you like oppose the secondary rewards you like. However, with such limited secondary rewards, it is difficult to do this very often without accidentally making the player swap his points preference. IE, he wants the light side secondary rewards, so he chooses dark side points.
There are other measures that can be taken to take care and make it interesting, but the truth is that it's a very limited mechanism and prone to becoming very muddy and not-fun if you make it too balanced.
What we really need are a whole lot more long-term rewards of a whole lot more types. And this is what my Bastard Jedi games were centered around.
Screw light side vs dark side, my Bastard Jedi had six or seven emotional axes, each of which could be considered to be light side or dark side. For example, humility vs arrogance. Having points in either direction gave you advantages if you used that axis and, in turn, using that axis made you more likely to gain another point in it. So your 2 points of humility will give you a +2 if you are humble in combat (or whenever), but it may increase to 3 points of humility.
There is no "OH YOU FELL" moment. No "oh, now you're dark side" moment, nor any "oh, you're redeemed now" moment. Not built into the rules, at any rate.
What there is is a powerful addiction that forms. The pressure of the game is enough that you really want those bonuses, and it's an easy habit to use your traits to get that edge.
Until you start to realize that you're using it all the time, and at more and more severe levels. You can't use two points of humility if your humility is at five, even if you only need two points of bonus.
At two points of humility, you're humble. That's okay. It's a Jedi trait, right? But at five points of humility, you're not humble: you've developed a serious self-worth issue and self-destructive tendencies. This is not because of the rules. This grows organically out of having to role play your use of ever higher levels of humility.
There's the catch, see? You fell without really noticing. You fell to the "light half" of the axis.
As a side note, this also tends to create unstable equilibriums, where players will start to use their less severe emotions to get smaller bonuses and attempt to keep their severe emotions under control. But that increases their less severe emotions and, before too long, you're a wreck.
And it's all done by the player, to the player. There are no rules that say, "oh, you have four emotions above (absolute value 4), you're now an emotional wreck." The rules don't have to say that. It becomes painfully clear to the player.
Quite aside from any other long-term results such as plot events, new saber crystals, and changing relationships with other player characters, these six or seven emotional axes are enough to power the whole engine on their own.
BUT...
They can't be easily translated to a computer game.
They can be, mechanically speaking. But without the social pressure to make you RP your emotion, there's no real connection between choosing one emotional axis or another. You can program in RP - make the character(s) act appropriately - but now you're taking it away from the player and making it character development by partial fiat. Furthermore, it's very, very difficult to script all the different ways that characters should express their various emotions in various situations!
Sigh...
To be honest, I think the scripting involved would probably be manageable in a AAA title, because I don't see how it could possibly be larger than the scripts for Mass Effect or Fable II. But for one hobbyist, that's a retarded level of scripting to aim for.
Comments?
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