Much of the studies of memetics going on today talk about the "propogation of ideas". To some extent, that is even what the word "meme" is thought to mean.
My interest is only marginally in the propagation of an idea. What I want to figure out is the way memes cause other memes.
There's lots of examples of what I'm talking about. One could be that if you comment that "religions are stupid", then religious people will get irritated. Either this or their subsequent defense of their religion will actually make them more dedicated to their religion. (Although it can also undermine their faith while their dedication increases - it's a complex issue related to an attempt to maintain control. It's not specific to religion.) So, an antagonistic idea strengthened its enemy.
More what I'm looking for, however, is how one meme requires or causes another. For example, if you are infected by the ideal of science, you will slowly but surely begin to be infected by related ideals. I don't know for certain whether this stems from culture or a fundamental concept, but either way it is related to or reflected by culture.
Someone who believes is the ideal of science will come to believe that anything - and everything - can be solved by application of this system of thought. If not now, then when enough data has been gathered. Other philosophies are similar: if you extract the core idea, it is often the case that the other bits of the philosophy will arise on their own, with only moderate cultural differences.
Religions usually have very similar cultural bits built into them, whether they are Shinto or Catholicism. Their exact implementation varies, but at their core they all develop the same "respect and hard work" side-effects. This is because they share the same fundamental purpose, and those ideals serve that purpose. They are corollaries, in the same way that scientific thought requires you to believe that science can be applied to anything, if technology has advanced enough to get the data needed.
Of course, not all religious people follow the core ideal of religion, and not all the scientists follow the core idea of science. The culture of these concepts grows very complex, in no small part because the corollaries strike many people as the important ideas, and those are the ideals they follow, rather than the original theme. This results in or from a culture of factionalism within every meme complex.
I wonder what the best way is to nail people to the central idea, rather than the corollaries? That way, you could measure corollaries and see whether they are cultural or fundamental.
Well, I know what my fundamental philosophy is: Olology. Maybe some day I'll post it. :)
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Heroic Memes?
I would say that, if pressed, most people would admit to having a few heroes. Some of those heroes are fictional, some of them are (mostly) factual.
A lot of people idolize Gandhi, for example. Others prefer Captain Kirk. My personal real-world heroes are all scientists or mathematicians, most notably Einstein and Feynman, not necessarily in that order. Oh, and Mr. T. Who is making a comeback!
The funny thing is, no matter who you choose, 99% of the other people in the world, once it is explained who your heroes are, will agree that they are worth respecting. Even if your heroes are bizarre antiheroes. Even if you idolize Coyote or the Marquis de Sade, once you explain why, people will nod and say, "you've got a point. That's worth respecting."
That got me thinking: what is the fundamental thing about these people?
After a bit of thought, it was head-slappingly obvious. In its purest form, you aren't idolizing the person, you're idolizing the idea(l)s that person represents. If you idolize Gandhi, you're probably idolizing the idea of passive resistance, or of standing up to superior forces without stooping to war or murder. If you idealize Captain Kirk, you're probably idolizing the idea of exploration and comraderie.
Other ideas get tied up in these because the hero is who he is. Often, these other ideas are closely related. Gandhi's soft-spoken dialogues, his humble clothes - these are descendents of his cohesive passive resistance. (An interesting subject all on its own, actually... many hypotheses of memetics can be derived from Gandhi.) Kirk's legendary "green-skinned bims" and indomitable willpower also descended from his ideals.
Others become so inextricably linked that you associate them with each other, even when there is little evidence they are connected. Einstein and Feynman's good humors are examples: we no longer think that a scientist has to be dour and somber. Why we thought that in the first place was another set of concepts which were linked without actually being causal.
But all heroes have something in common. A self-propagating meta-meme.
Each hero urges you to "think like I do". Once you start to, those heroes become even more applicable to you. But more than that, their way of thinking offers an advantage (psychological, social, or mathematical) over the "normal" ways of thinking. (This is a balance thing: if everyone was like Feynman, then being a somber scientist would be noteworthy and effective.)
The key isn't that you follow in their footsteps. They key is that they followed in their footsteps. Every hero, fictional or real, is largely the embodiment of an idealized philosophy, tinted with their personal nature. They are professional Gandhis, Feynmans, and Kirks. And the more people appreciate their Gandhism, Feynmanness, and Kirkishness, the more Gandhic, Feynmannish, and Kirky they become.
It's a perpetuating memetic loop. A black hole of heroism!
But, by its very nature, it can't last. Once the person dies, once the stories stop being made anew, they stop exerting their influence. Some quirk of memetics makes it all but impossible for someone emulating their hero to be heroic in the same way. They still benefit from their hero-induced philosophy, but they are not a black hole. They cannot "replace" Gandhi, or Mr. T. (Fortunately, since he's not dead, Mr. T won't need replacing in the near future.)
This might be psychological, or it might be lynchpin-related, but this isn't the place to discuss that.
Also, the stories about those heroes generally grow less and less relevant as culture moves on. That's why it would be bizarre to idolize Coyote. Culturally, he's not in-synch. The number of people idolizing Einstein grows fewer each year, and the number of people idolizing Newton is nearly zero. They don't mesh as well with culture as they did during their life, because they aren't alive to adapt themselves to modern culture.
But the underlying approach they had. Is that an approach which is only valid in their culture? Or is the underlying premise valid in every culture, a kind of basic law of "useful philosophy"? If the latter, these laws could be identified and listed. If the former, you would need to design a method of determining what kinds of approaches would be most likely to be highly successful in a given culture.
A heady task... and a really awesome idea for a science-fiction story.
Anyhow, these self-perpetuating "black holes" of heroism are an interesting topic to study. Who are your heroes? Do you think they had a "black hole" around them, a gravity field which made them ever more them as time passed?
A lot of people idolize Gandhi, for example. Others prefer Captain Kirk. My personal real-world heroes are all scientists or mathematicians, most notably Einstein and Feynman, not necessarily in that order. Oh, and Mr. T. Who is making a comeback!
The funny thing is, no matter who you choose, 99% of the other people in the world, once it is explained who your heroes are, will agree that they are worth respecting. Even if your heroes are bizarre antiheroes. Even if you idolize Coyote or the Marquis de Sade, once you explain why, people will nod and say, "you've got a point. That's worth respecting."
That got me thinking: what is the fundamental thing about these people?
After a bit of thought, it was head-slappingly obvious. In its purest form, you aren't idolizing the person, you're idolizing the idea(l)s that person represents. If you idolize Gandhi, you're probably idolizing the idea of passive resistance, or of standing up to superior forces without stooping to war or murder. If you idealize Captain Kirk, you're probably idolizing the idea of exploration and comraderie.
Other ideas get tied up in these because the hero is who he is. Often, these other ideas are closely related. Gandhi's soft-spoken dialogues, his humble clothes - these are descendents of his cohesive passive resistance. (An interesting subject all on its own, actually... many hypotheses of memetics can be derived from Gandhi.) Kirk's legendary "green-skinned bims" and indomitable willpower also descended from his ideals.
Others become so inextricably linked that you associate them with each other, even when there is little evidence they are connected. Einstein and Feynman's good humors are examples: we no longer think that a scientist has to be dour and somber. Why we thought that in the first place was another set of concepts which were linked without actually being causal.
But all heroes have something in common. A self-propagating meta-meme.
Each hero urges you to "think like I do". Once you start to, those heroes become even more applicable to you. But more than that, their way of thinking offers an advantage (psychological, social, or mathematical) over the "normal" ways of thinking. (This is a balance thing: if everyone was like Feynman, then being a somber scientist would be noteworthy and effective.)
The key isn't that you follow in their footsteps. They key is that they followed in their footsteps. Every hero, fictional or real, is largely the embodiment of an idealized philosophy, tinted with their personal nature. They are professional Gandhis, Feynmans, and Kirks. And the more people appreciate their Gandhism, Feynmanness, and Kirkishness, the more Gandhic, Feynmannish, and Kirky they become.
It's a perpetuating memetic loop. A black hole of heroism!
But, by its very nature, it can't last. Once the person dies, once the stories stop being made anew, they stop exerting their influence. Some quirk of memetics makes it all but impossible for someone emulating their hero to be heroic in the same way. They still benefit from their hero-induced philosophy, but they are not a black hole. They cannot "replace" Gandhi, or Mr. T. (Fortunately, since he's not dead, Mr. T won't need replacing in the near future.)
This might be psychological, or it might be lynchpin-related, but this isn't the place to discuss that.
Also, the stories about those heroes generally grow less and less relevant as culture moves on. That's why it would be bizarre to idolize Coyote. Culturally, he's not in-synch. The number of people idolizing Einstein grows fewer each year, and the number of people idolizing Newton is nearly zero. They don't mesh as well with culture as they did during their life, because they aren't alive to adapt themselves to modern culture.
But the underlying approach they had. Is that an approach which is only valid in their culture? Or is the underlying premise valid in every culture, a kind of basic law of "useful philosophy"? If the latter, these laws could be identified and listed. If the former, you would need to design a method of determining what kinds of approaches would be most likely to be highly successful in a given culture.
A heady task... and a really awesome idea for a science-fiction story.
Anyhow, these self-perpetuating "black holes" of heroism are an interesting topic to study. Who are your heroes? Do you think they had a "black hole" around them, a gravity field which made them ever more them as time passed?
Expectation and PAC
I wanted to write this essay yesterday, but I decided I had swamped the blog enough. That's good, because some of the commentary has made me refine the concept slightly.
Players get bored with the same challenges. That's pattern adaptation control's (PAC's) purpose; although in truth it is about finding the most efficient method of keeping players intrigued rather than simply "not bored".
The majority of my writings on PAC focus on changing the game level to create variations in the pattern of experience. For example, to keep your players interested, you offer a variety of challenges. Every level has a different architecture and decoration - but within the "overall pattern" of the game.
One of the things which is usually left out is expectation. Not because I don't know about it, but because it's a somewhat more advanced concept.
When a player is feeling eager and pulled forward, he is at his most interested. The most important factor isn't what the player is doing right now so much as what the player will be doing. However, this is also somewhat inaccurate, because what the player is doing now could be what he once will have been being doing. IE, this moment could be the moment he was looking forward to a little while ago. This lends it a kind of apotheietical power, to make up a word in addition to a grammar.
Think of a player's game experience as a squiggly line on a graph. One axis of the graph is time, the other is player interest. The line squiggles it's way across time, going up and down on interest.
Now, if you were to think about the really cool play moments - the moments when the level explodes, the boss fight, the jumping-off-a-building. These moments are only cool for one reason: they've been built up. Or will have been built up, if they are built up after the fact. (In this case, time can be considered to run in either direction.)
So, what you see is these blots on the graph representing these awesome play moments. Usually, the squiggly line spikes at and either just before or just after these moments, steadily tapering down in that direction. Like this:
Depending on whether you build up the event before or after it happens. You can do both, I suppose, but that doesn't make my purpose clear.
Looking back, I see my purpose hasn't been made clear, yet.
The pattern of experience isn't what we're manipulating here. We're not changing the game at all. What we're doing is telling the player about things to come (or building up things that have already happened), such that their interest in our game is peaked. Even if they're playing through part of the game they don't really care for, they'll continue on because they know what lies ahead - or what impressed them earlier.
This is why you'll play through that level you hate in that game you love - to a point. If the level is worse than the memories/foreshadowing is good, you'll ditch the game.
So, when you're designing a game's plot, you'll want to think about how you can inject the future and the past into the present.
A simple way to do this would be to put up signs pointing the way your next level and your previous level. For example, walking into an intersection that's labeled with arrows pointing "Science Lab" and "Armory". These are meaningful labels which give the player something to look forward to.
More usefully, clawmarks could be scoured on the side of the corridor saying something dire, like "I can feel it changing!" or simply "Mine. Stay out." This gives a much richer impression of what's ahead - spatially and chronologically - than a simple sign. The player feels a thrill of apprehension.
There are a million ways to do this. Overhearing guards talking. Finding a mutilated corpse. Reading a love letter. Seeing a new color of paint on the walls. It's simply foreshadowing. Building expectation, often only semi-consciously.
Except it runs backwards, too.
Some sudden events are merely to break up the pattern of play. For example, a little ambush to keep the player on his toes. There's nothing "behind" it. Right?
Wrong. Sure, you can have that isolated ambush. But it's much better - and not very hard - to write it into the story. In the simplest version, it can be used as a kind of foreshadowing: run into the zombies, you know there are zombies ahead.
But it can be rigged such that you "build expectation" backwards in time. You have an experience, and then learn why it happened and what its significance was. This is pretty common. In "Castlevania, Symphony of the Night", you start with a lot of powers and - bam - all your items and levels are sucked away. The rest of the game is spent recovering from it and learning why it happened. The first makes the event "ludologically" important, the second "narratively" important. Both are simply building expectation in reverse.
Imagine playing the game backwards. You start off with all this awesome shit and gradually lose it over time. Bosses alude to your past (future) as that time when you were badass. So you know this losing of weapons is only temporary, and sure enough, Death comes along and gives you some of the best equipment available just when you've lost your last, crummiest equipment. Functionally, it's the same as foreshadowing moving forwards, except it goes backwards.
It sounds arbitrary, as if it would be better covered under a different subject. But it's the exact same method, simply reversed in time. To a large extent, psychologically, people operate independently of the flow of real time.
I think it's interesting, and an important point. So, when you think about your design, think: "Where is the player? Where is he going? Where has he been?"
Because you don't leave the first part of your game behind. You build on it. Use it as foreshadowing and "echo" backwards to build it up. Like sloshing in a bathtub, these foreshadowing ripples forward and backwards in the game build on each other. Sploosh!
Players get bored with the same challenges. That's pattern adaptation control's (PAC's) purpose; although in truth it is about finding the most efficient method of keeping players intrigued rather than simply "not bored".
The majority of my writings on PAC focus on changing the game level to create variations in the pattern of experience. For example, to keep your players interested, you offer a variety of challenges. Every level has a different architecture and decoration - but within the "overall pattern" of the game.
One of the things which is usually left out is expectation. Not because I don't know about it, but because it's a somewhat more advanced concept.
When a player is feeling eager and pulled forward, he is at his most interested. The most important factor isn't what the player is doing right now so much as what the player will be doing. However, this is also somewhat inaccurate, because what the player is doing now could be what he once will have been being doing. IE, this moment could be the moment he was looking forward to a little while ago. This lends it a kind of apotheietical power, to make up a word in addition to a grammar.
Think of a player's game experience as a squiggly line on a graph. One axis of the graph is time, the other is player interest. The line squiggles it's way across time, going up and down on interest.
Now, if you were to think about the really cool play moments - the moments when the level explodes, the boss fight, the jumping-off-a-building. These moments are only cool for one reason: they've been built up. Or will have been built up, if they are built up after the fact. (In this case, time can be considered to run in either direction.)
So, what you see is these blots on the graph representing these awesome play moments. Usually, the squiggly line spikes at and either just before or just after these moments, steadily tapering down in that direction. Like this:
Depending on whether you build up the event before or after it happens. You can do both, I suppose, but that doesn't make my purpose clear.
Looking back, I see my purpose hasn't been made clear, yet.
The pattern of experience isn't what we're manipulating here. We're not changing the game at all. What we're doing is telling the player about things to come (or building up things that have already happened), such that their interest in our game is peaked. Even if they're playing through part of the game they don't really care for, they'll continue on because they know what lies ahead - or what impressed them earlier.
This is why you'll play through that level you hate in that game you love - to a point. If the level is worse than the memories/foreshadowing is good, you'll ditch the game.
So, when you're designing a game's plot, you'll want to think about how you can inject the future and the past into the present.
A simple way to do this would be to put up signs pointing the way your next level and your previous level. For example, walking into an intersection that's labeled with arrows pointing "Science Lab" and "Armory". These are meaningful labels which give the player something to look forward to.
More usefully, clawmarks could be scoured on the side of the corridor saying something dire, like "I can feel it changing!" or simply "Mine. Stay out." This gives a much richer impression of what's ahead - spatially and chronologically - than a simple sign. The player feels a thrill of apprehension.
There are a million ways to do this. Overhearing guards talking. Finding a mutilated corpse. Reading a love letter. Seeing a new color of paint on the walls. It's simply foreshadowing. Building expectation, often only semi-consciously.
Except it runs backwards, too.
Some sudden events are merely to break up the pattern of play. For example, a little ambush to keep the player on his toes. There's nothing "behind" it. Right?
Wrong. Sure, you can have that isolated ambush. But it's much better - and not very hard - to write it into the story. In the simplest version, it can be used as a kind of foreshadowing: run into the zombies, you know there are zombies ahead.
But it can be rigged such that you "build expectation" backwards in time. You have an experience, and then learn why it happened and what its significance was. This is pretty common. In "Castlevania, Symphony of the Night", you start with a lot of powers and - bam - all your items and levels are sucked away. The rest of the game is spent recovering from it and learning why it happened. The first makes the event "ludologically" important, the second "narratively" important. Both are simply building expectation in reverse.
Imagine playing the game backwards. You start off with all this awesome shit and gradually lose it over time. Bosses alude to your past (future) as that time when you were badass. So you know this losing of weapons is only temporary, and sure enough, Death comes along and gives you some of the best equipment available just when you've lost your last, crummiest equipment. Functionally, it's the same as foreshadowing moving forwards, except it goes backwards.
It sounds arbitrary, as if it would be better covered under a different subject. But it's the exact same method, simply reversed in time. To a large extent, psychologically, people operate independently of the flow of real time.
I think it's interesting, and an important point. So, when you think about your design, think: "Where is the player? Where is he going? Where has he been?"
Because you don't leave the first part of your game behind. You build on it. Use it as foreshadowing and "echo" backwards to build it up. Like sloshing in a bathtub, these foreshadowing ripples forward and backwards in the game build on each other. Sploosh!
Monday, November 28, 2005
Flow channel and adaptive difficulty
In response to this post.
I've been thinking a lot about the same kinds of things, and I've come up with a few ideas that touch upon this:
First, some game designers want their game to be "hard" or "easy" - and this is a choice I can respect, although I would question its effect on sales.
Second, there's more than one kind of "difficulty", as Corvus pointed out. Adjusting on all these levels independently may very well be possible, but it requires an unusually deft algorithm.
I thought about how to determine the ideal difficulty. My first thought was:
A simple way to do this initially, without alienating them, is to have a tutorial which has several different "paths" they can take. This could be used not only to measure their play preferences (they chose the "exploration" path rather than the "stealth" path) but also their memetic preferences (they really like the rocket launcher, or being a psychic).
However, I decided that wasn't going to be very accurate. There is one sure way to tell that a player is or is not enjoying a game:
How long they play for.
Sure, some players will play in eight hour blocks and others play an hour a week. However, everybody will tend to make time to play a great game and let a weak game slide.
What you do is: over time, you slide the difficulty bar up. And up, and up, and up. After a few hours, they'll reach a point they "can't beat" (or don't care to try to beat) and quit playing.
But most people will come back and try again. I would say nearly all of them. And you are now aware of their limits - the "upper bound" of their "flow channel". After that, your primary goal is to find the optimum flow, which is done by moseying slowly towards that line, and being pushed down each time they quit. Over several sessions, you decrease the difficulty increase and bracket some place where they are having fun.
It's a noisy signal, unfortunately: they may quit to eat dinner, not because it's too hard. But noise just decreases the efficiency of the algorithm - it doesn't invalidate it.
At first glance, this would seem to tend towards "hard". But not really: people who want to explore will be naturally turned off by the rather high-seeming difficulty, and shut off the machine. This will bring the difficulty down, and the rise will be slower this session.
It's got some lumpy parts, but I think it's possible to measure what kind of challenge a player likes by simply measuring when they stop playing, and taking into account that sometimes they'll stop playing for non-game-related reasons.
I've been thinking a lot about the same kinds of things, and I've come up with a few ideas that touch upon this:
First, some game designers want their game to be "hard" or "easy" - and this is a choice I can respect, although I would question its effect on sales.
Second, there's more than one kind of "difficulty", as Corvus pointed out. Adjusting on all these levels independently may very well be possible, but it requires an unusually deft algorithm.
I thought about how to determine the ideal difficulty. My first thought was:
A simple way to do this initially, without alienating them, is to have a tutorial which has several different "paths" they can take. This could be used not only to measure their play preferences (they chose the "exploration" path rather than the "stealth" path) but also their memetic preferences (they really like the rocket launcher, or being a psychic).
However, I decided that wasn't going to be very accurate. There is one sure way to tell that a player is or is not enjoying a game:
How long they play for.
Sure, some players will play in eight hour blocks and others play an hour a week. However, everybody will tend to make time to play a great game and let a weak game slide.
What you do is: over time, you slide the difficulty bar up. And up, and up, and up. After a few hours, they'll reach a point they "can't beat" (or don't care to try to beat) and quit playing.
But most people will come back and try again. I would say nearly all of them. And you are now aware of their limits - the "upper bound" of their "flow channel". After that, your primary goal is to find the optimum flow, which is done by moseying slowly towards that line, and being pushed down each time they quit. Over several sessions, you decrease the difficulty increase and bracket some place where they are having fun.
It's a noisy signal, unfortunately: they may quit to eat dinner, not because it's too hard. But noise just decreases the efficiency of the algorithm - it doesn't invalidate it.
At first glance, this would seem to tend towards "hard". But not really: people who want to explore will be naturally turned off by the rather high-seeming difficulty, and shut off the machine. This will bring the difficulty down, and the rise will be slower this session.
It's got some lumpy parts, but I think it's possible to measure what kind of challenge a player likes by simply measuring when they stop playing, and taking into account that sometimes they'll stop playing for non-game-related reasons.
On Creativity
So, people like to pretend they're creative. What is creativity? Complex question. But one thing is for sure: necessity really is the mother of invention. If you can't pick the obvious first choices, you have to invent new choices.
As a matter of fact, this is largely why theoretical physics has "stars" which advance it so dramatically. The vast majority of the scientists choose the obvious choice of existing methods and try to enhance them. Some scientists stop themselves from choosing the obvious choice and try to figure out another method. A few of these scientists succeed and change the face of their science.
In a dramatically less important example, I am kinda creative. No creative genius, but more creative than your average hairless monkey. And my favorite excersize is figuring out alternative "paths" to the same basic functionality.
For example, in the world of Machine City, there is no electricity. The laws of physics are just a tiny bit different. There is no lightning, no static electricity, no induction.
There are two things to be creative about, here. One is "what happens instead"? It would be fun but meaningless to bluff on this matter. As that is a very complex question which nobody who isn't a cunning quantum theorist could answer, I'll go in the other direction:
"How does society get around this?"
Electricity is excessively useful. It's probably the most useful of science's many discoveries and implementations. Something which can be generated a hundred miles away and piped to every room in every house in every city? Then it can run lights, air conditioners, security systems, televisions... moreover, even the basic idea of the telegraph operates on electricity! What kind of communication will you have?
Take electricity away. No electric lights. No television. No phones. It's like living in the midieval ages. Except that the first-world countries of the Machine City world need to function like something between the 1890s and 1930s.
For lights, I chicken out. There is a set of chemical compounds which, when mixed, glow brightly and at low heat for many hours. In addition, there's a "spinnable", which is a long tube filled with a substance which glows when agitated. Spinnables are spun to get them to glow, or shaken when used in flashlights. They are noisier, but require vastly less maintenance. The most modern spinnables are called "whisper lights" because they produce almost no noise save the gentle "shush" of the particulate matter circulating inside them.
But for everything else...
I want everything. Computers. Quick communication. Security systems.
And I have to use mechanical power to get it.
Where would you start? Think about it for a second, before I tell you what I did.
...
Here's what I did.
One of the things which enables the modern world is centralized provision of water and electricity. When indoor plumbing is simply a matter of tapping a watermain, you're more likely to have indoor plumbing than if you'll need to build a pump yourself.
So, I needed centralized mechanical power.
Unfortunately, mechanical power doesn't transmit quite as losslessly as electricity. There are, however, more and less lossy ways of transmitting it. The least lossy and least maintenance-heavy way is using water pressure, then having a mechanical converter for the building which pulls belts that distribute power over the rest of the building. Or even one converter for each floor. These are usually provided free by the water company so they can charge hefty monthly fees for water pressure usage.
Now, most of you have played video games in which you've moved through air ducts. Good stuff, right? Some of you have probably played video games where you move through empty water pipes. Sewers, for example.
With the amount of water inertia required to generate enough power to run machines and pneumatic message tubes, buildings aren't going to have those tiny water pipes you're familiar with. A measly six inch pipe? No way. They're going to have big honking pipes. Large enough to enter, should you figure out a way not to get turned into puree by the turbine.
In addition, the belts which distribute the power locally will need to run through a crawlspace that can be accessed to repair the ever-wearing belts and wheels. The noise in these crawlspaces would be tremendous, and often these crawlspaces would have exposed rapidly-whooshing belts. And we're not talking little car-engine belts, nuh-uh. We're talking two foot wide steel mesh belts, and wheels with hooks all over them.
As you can see, I've created a building with a whole new feel to its innards. In addition to the normal hallways and air ducts, I've created belt-fan crawlspaces and big honking water pipes (which may have their own sizeable crawlspaces). Also, the huge machines will be paths in and of themselves, with walkways and catwalks to access any part that needs repairing or tweaking.
Managing this power is a bit wonky, if we look deep. For example, what do they have instead of wall plugs? They still have wall-plugs (actually, floor-and-roof plugs), but plugs that are half a foot across and have teeth. You plug something in, pull a switch, and the assembly rotates, driving your machine. Very noisy.
There's a mechanical contrivance which limits how much power your converter takes, essentially a gear shifter. Similarly, your turbines can tell how much torque they need to generate and can automatically pull that much energy from the city's water pipes.
In turn, measuring the pressure of the water in the tubes can show you how much energy is being taken from the water, and how hard your pumping station pumps can be altered to fit how much energy is currently being used. This isn't an instantaneous reaction, so it isn't uncommon for buildings with large power requirements to have an hour of "brownout" where everything is spun too slowly, until the pumping station picks up the slack.
Similarly, you can't instantly accelerate a belt or shaft to full spin, and the larger the power requirements, the longer it takes to spin up. This means that those big machines may take many seconds or even minutes to spin up to speed.
What we end up with is a bizarrely flavored world. Flipping on a light causes the lights to slowly spin up, dim at first and growing brighter. Or it causes a mechanical device to intermix two chemicals in a spray of wobbly light until the reaction stabalizes.
Turning on a computer is a process involves minutes in which it runs at partial speed. Unlike an electrical computer, mechanical computers run as fast as their spinning belts let them (until their little cogs snap under the pressure, of course). More power, more computation. A very "she cannae' take much more, Cap'n" situation.
Security doors can slam down quite fast, but raising them takes time. Security locks which read punchcards don't require much energy, so they'll go nice and fast - but since it's kind of expensive to hook them into the power supply, they may very well be hand-crank powered!
Unique noises, lights, and architecture are an obvious result. Unique dangers, too. With this many moving parts, moving so quickly and so heavily, damage to buildings is fairly common. Fun!
And through it all, a variety of alternate pathways to navigate the building by.
The computers I've designed are an essay all their own. Fun!
Of course, Machine City will see little of this. It's a shmup. But the detail work will show in the backgrounds. :)
As a matter of fact, this is largely why theoretical physics has "stars" which advance it so dramatically. The vast majority of the scientists choose the obvious choice of existing methods and try to enhance them. Some scientists stop themselves from choosing the obvious choice and try to figure out another method. A few of these scientists succeed and change the face of their science.
In a dramatically less important example, I am kinda creative. No creative genius, but more creative than your average hairless monkey. And my favorite excersize is figuring out alternative "paths" to the same basic functionality.
For example, in the world of Machine City, there is no electricity. The laws of physics are just a tiny bit different. There is no lightning, no static electricity, no induction.
There are two things to be creative about, here. One is "what happens instead"? It would be fun but meaningless to bluff on this matter. As that is a very complex question which nobody who isn't a cunning quantum theorist could answer, I'll go in the other direction:
"How does society get around this?"
Electricity is excessively useful. It's probably the most useful of science's many discoveries and implementations. Something which can be generated a hundred miles away and piped to every room in every house in every city? Then it can run lights, air conditioners, security systems, televisions... moreover, even the basic idea of the telegraph operates on electricity! What kind of communication will you have?
Take electricity away. No electric lights. No television. No phones. It's like living in the midieval ages. Except that the first-world countries of the Machine City world need to function like something between the 1890s and 1930s.
For lights, I chicken out. There is a set of chemical compounds which, when mixed, glow brightly and at low heat for many hours. In addition, there's a "spinnable", which is a long tube filled with a substance which glows when agitated. Spinnables are spun to get them to glow, or shaken when used in flashlights. They are noisier, but require vastly less maintenance. The most modern spinnables are called "whisper lights" because they produce almost no noise save the gentle "shush" of the particulate matter circulating inside them.
But for everything else...
I want everything. Computers. Quick communication. Security systems.
And I have to use mechanical power to get it.
Where would you start? Think about it for a second, before I tell you what I did.
...
Here's what I did.
One of the things which enables the modern world is centralized provision of water and electricity. When indoor plumbing is simply a matter of tapping a watermain, you're more likely to have indoor plumbing than if you'll need to build a pump yourself.
So, I needed centralized mechanical power.
Unfortunately, mechanical power doesn't transmit quite as losslessly as electricity. There are, however, more and less lossy ways of transmitting it. The least lossy and least maintenance-heavy way is using water pressure, then having a mechanical converter for the building which pulls belts that distribute power over the rest of the building. Or even one converter for each floor. These are usually provided free by the water company so they can charge hefty monthly fees for water pressure usage.
Now, most of you have played video games in which you've moved through air ducts. Good stuff, right? Some of you have probably played video games where you move through empty water pipes. Sewers, for example.
With the amount of water inertia required to generate enough power to run machines and pneumatic message tubes, buildings aren't going to have those tiny water pipes you're familiar with. A measly six inch pipe? No way. They're going to have big honking pipes. Large enough to enter, should you figure out a way not to get turned into puree by the turbine.
In addition, the belts which distribute the power locally will need to run through a crawlspace that can be accessed to repair the ever-wearing belts and wheels. The noise in these crawlspaces would be tremendous, and often these crawlspaces would have exposed rapidly-whooshing belts. And we're not talking little car-engine belts, nuh-uh. We're talking two foot wide steel mesh belts, and wheels with hooks all over them.
As you can see, I've created a building with a whole new feel to its innards. In addition to the normal hallways and air ducts, I've created belt-fan crawlspaces and big honking water pipes (which may have their own sizeable crawlspaces). Also, the huge machines will be paths in and of themselves, with walkways and catwalks to access any part that needs repairing or tweaking.
Managing this power is a bit wonky, if we look deep. For example, what do they have instead of wall plugs? They still have wall-plugs (actually, floor-and-roof plugs), but plugs that are half a foot across and have teeth. You plug something in, pull a switch, and the assembly rotates, driving your machine. Very noisy.
There's a mechanical contrivance which limits how much power your converter takes, essentially a gear shifter. Similarly, your turbines can tell how much torque they need to generate and can automatically pull that much energy from the city's water pipes.
In turn, measuring the pressure of the water in the tubes can show you how much energy is being taken from the water, and how hard your pumping station pumps can be altered to fit how much energy is currently being used. This isn't an instantaneous reaction, so it isn't uncommon for buildings with large power requirements to have an hour of "brownout" where everything is spun too slowly, until the pumping station picks up the slack.
Similarly, you can't instantly accelerate a belt or shaft to full spin, and the larger the power requirements, the longer it takes to spin up. This means that those big machines may take many seconds or even minutes to spin up to speed.
What we end up with is a bizarrely flavored world. Flipping on a light causes the lights to slowly spin up, dim at first and growing brighter. Or it causes a mechanical device to intermix two chemicals in a spray of wobbly light until the reaction stabalizes.
Turning on a computer is a process involves minutes in which it runs at partial speed. Unlike an electrical computer, mechanical computers run as fast as their spinning belts let them (until their little cogs snap under the pressure, of course). More power, more computation. A very "she cannae' take much more, Cap'n" situation.
Security doors can slam down quite fast, but raising them takes time. Security locks which read punchcards don't require much energy, so they'll go nice and fast - but since it's kind of expensive to hook them into the power supply, they may very well be hand-crank powered!
Unique noises, lights, and architecture are an obvious result. Unique dangers, too. With this many moving parts, moving so quickly and so heavily, damage to buildings is fairly common. Fun!
And through it all, a variety of alternate pathways to navigate the building by.
The computers I've designed are an essay all their own. Fun!
Of course, Machine City will see little of this. It's a shmup. But the detail work will show in the backgrounds. :)
Spread your play types
Game design theory essay...
I did a lot of thinking about level design over the weekend. For most of it, I stuck to shmup levels - my thoughts centered around Machine City - but I kept coming back to level design "in general", which to me means applying the same principals to a variety of genres.
That's the problem with being a theorist. You always want to generalize.
Anyhow, one of the things that I wanted to clarify is play types. I'll also clarify player vision some more at some point, in another essay.
Most games play either fast or slow. Most of the time, a fast game will eat levels for breakfast, pound through acres of map. Most of the time, a slow game will use the same map and criss-cross over it a half-dozen times. There are exceptions, and this simplified level design philosophy is really only true of one-player and co-op games.
Either way, one of the things you need to do is to keep the player from getting bored of the pattern of gameplay. Some games do this well, some games bore the player to tears. This is more than just offering them play they don't much like: it's offering them too much of a given kind of play.
An example of each can be found in the game No One Lives Forever 2. If you haven't played this game, go buy it. It is my second favorite first-person game, period, and I haven't seen any game which matches it for flawless quality on every level. Save level design, which was occasionally quite good and occasionally quite bad.
Much of this game is slow play. You're playing a spy, after all. A good example of slow play being used well is the undersea base. You play through the whole base. It gives a sense of large size and scale, despite the fact that it is a rather small level. It goes on a little long, actually, but not too badly thanks to the ever-increasing variety of encounters.
Then, after a boss fight, you get to revisit the station, seeing it from a radically different viewpoint trying to escape it as it floods.
This is something similar to what Doom III tried to do: show you the base "before" and "after". "After" is inherently more interesting for various reasons, so it is natural to try to stretch it out a bit. The undersea base doesn't, but I wouldn't have minded a bit more level on the escape.
Anyhow, on the other side of the spectrum is India, the city. A large, open level in which you can't kill anyone. All you do is run back and forth on errands, dodging cops. On the third playthrough, you can blitz all the India city levels, but it's a protracted and rather painful experience the first time through.
Later on, you revisit India city. To do what? Run errands and not kill anyone. Wow, and this time the errands are even more inane, featuring running back and forth for water while being shot at. Across the same paths. Over and over. To save people who are too stupid to climb through the giant, open window two feet from them. There are a few moments in which HARM's doomed Indian soldiers attack you, but these are bizarre episodes which aren't really explained: why are they attacking you instead of trying to escape their demise? Although a nice attempt to keep the level from being "turn off the computer" bad, they break suspension.
On the surface, these two levels appear very similar. You run through a lot of corridors in each, can approach them both by stealth, have an intermission (boss fight in one, several levels in another), then work through the "ruined" version.
But a play type analysis shows a very different set of levels. Both levels initially play "slowly", although one is a "conquest"-style play and the other is a "foxhunt"-style play. One is voluntary slow play, the other is involuntary. As you go through the undersea base, you choose to go slowly, killing the threats and making that part of the base safe for you. In India, you are forced to go slow because you need to time your movements to keep you alive. I believe this kind of "foxhunt" play to be distinctly inferior, since it is nonadaptive and submits the player to the same challenges repeatedly.
On the last visit to these levels, things are distinctly different. The undersea base speeds up to a moderately fast game where India slows down even further. India remains "foxhunt" play, but the undersea base becomes "shockwave" play: you blast through each part of the level and leave nothing you ever bother to revisit.
My dislike of "hunted" play aside, using the same gameplay every time you hit a level, you might as well be playing the same level. Shake it up!
As a basic rule, the human brain only stays interested in something for about 20 minutes. Some people can go for vastly longer, but few go for shorter. This means that you need to change modes of play ("patterns") no less often than once every twenty minutes. You don't have to change it for long, but you need to change it. And in order to get maximum use out of a level design, you can get an entirely new experience out of a map by hitting it with a different style of play.
"Twenty minutes?" you say, "that's a long time to be sneaking around without a gunfight. It seems to me that most games interrupt with a new style of play every two minutes!" Yes, for two reasons:
1) Resetting the clock insures maximum attention.
2) Many players have an exceedingly slow first play-through. You can beat XIII in 130 minutes? Sure, but the first time it took you thirteen hours.
So level designers do - and should - err on the side of short attention spans.
To give you an idea of some of the basic kinds of play, here is an incomplete list. Feel free to suggest things I've missed:
Foxhunt: moderate to slow play speed
Explanation: Level is littered with invulnerable threats that have few successful approach vectors; player speed is therefore slowed to allow for higher relative vision.
In English: Effectively a puzzle level, foxhunt emphasizes careful watching and considered movements on pain of death. The slower the play style, the more careful you have to be not to exceed your 20-minute maximum play length.
Conquest: slow play speed
Explanation: Player earns ownership of level.
In English: The player destroys enemy presence in a level so that he owns it. Although this is, in itself, probably medium-speed play, the ownership of the level then encourages the player to carefully search every room. Depending on the player's level-affecting capabilities, they may slow the game even further by destroying parts of the level or by building new structures.
As with foxhunt, care must be used to insure that a player doesn't go more than 20 minutes without a play style change.
Hunted: fast play speed
Explanation: Player vision limits are enforced by forcing player movement. Play speed is therefore accelerated.
In English: Effectively a timed level. Rising water, a rampaging demon, and other active forces push the player to keep moving or lose the game. This play style can also result from moving levels. For example, conveyor belts.
Please note, "hunted" and "hunter" levels are functionally the same. Whether the player is forced to move along by a wall of fire or whether he has to constantly chase a monkey, the core idea is that there is a time-sensitive thing pushing the player to constantly move forward.
Shockwave: moderate to fast play speed
Explanation: Player's only goal is to get through the level
In English: This can be very similar to conquest, but the design is such that there is no way to slow down and appreciate your hard-earned territory. Perhaps there is a constant stream of soldiers, or perhaps there is simply nothing worth appreciating.
Often, "shockwave" is almost indistinguishable from "hunted". The difference is that when you are hunted, something is actively pushing you. Shockwave may send streams of soldiers, but your skill could be enough to hold them off forever. Shockwave may slam doors shut, but only after you use them - not as a possible loss condition.
---
These four types arise from basic elements of play, which I imagine I'll cover sometime. I don't think it's a full list, but each of those has a very different approach, both for play and design.
I did a lot of thinking about level design over the weekend. For most of it, I stuck to shmup levels - my thoughts centered around Machine City - but I kept coming back to level design "in general", which to me means applying the same principals to a variety of genres.
That's the problem with being a theorist. You always want to generalize.
Anyhow, one of the things that I wanted to clarify is play types. I'll also clarify player vision some more at some point, in another essay.
Most games play either fast or slow. Most of the time, a fast game will eat levels for breakfast, pound through acres of map. Most of the time, a slow game will use the same map and criss-cross over it a half-dozen times. There are exceptions, and this simplified level design philosophy is really only true of one-player and co-op games.
Either way, one of the things you need to do is to keep the player from getting bored of the pattern of gameplay. Some games do this well, some games bore the player to tears. This is more than just offering them play they don't much like: it's offering them too much of a given kind of play.
An example of each can be found in the game No One Lives Forever 2. If you haven't played this game, go buy it. It is my second favorite first-person game, period, and I haven't seen any game which matches it for flawless quality on every level. Save level design, which was occasionally quite good and occasionally quite bad.
Much of this game is slow play. You're playing a spy, after all. A good example of slow play being used well is the undersea base. You play through the whole base. It gives a sense of large size and scale, despite the fact that it is a rather small level. It goes on a little long, actually, but not too badly thanks to the ever-increasing variety of encounters.
Then, after a boss fight, you get to revisit the station, seeing it from a radically different viewpoint trying to escape it as it floods.
This is something similar to what Doom III tried to do: show you the base "before" and "after". "After" is inherently more interesting for various reasons, so it is natural to try to stretch it out a bit. The undersea base doesn't, but I wouldn't have minded a bit more level on the escape.
Anyhow, on the other side of the spectrum is India, the city. A large, open level in which you can't kill anyone. All you do is run back and forth on errands, dodging cops. On the third playthrough, you can blitz all the India city levels, but it's a protracted and rather painful experience the first time through.
Later on, you revisit India city. To do what? Run errands and not kill anyone. Wow, and this time the errands are even more inane, featuring running back and forth for water while being shot at. Across the same paths. Over and over. To save people who are too stupid to climb through the giant, open window two feet from them. There are a few moments in which HARM's doomed Indian soldiers attack you, but these are bizarre episodes which aren't really explained: why are they attacking you instead of trying to escape their demise? Although a nice attempt to keep the level from being "turn off the computer" bad, they break suspension.
On the surface, these two levels appear very similar. You run through a lot of corridors in each, can approach them both by stealth, have an intermission (boss fight in one, several levels in another), then work through the "ruined" version.
But a play type analysis shows a very different set of levels. Both levels initially play "slowly", although one is a "conquest"-style play and the other is a "foxhunt"-style play. One is voluntary slow play, the other is involuntary. As you go through the undersea base, you choose to go slowly, killing the threats and making that part of the base safe for you. In India, you are forced to go slow because you need to time your movements to keep you alive. I believe this kind of "foxhunt" play to be distinctly inferior, since it is nonadaptive and submits the player to the same challenges repeatedly.
On the last visit to these levels, things are distinctly different. The undersea base speeds up to a moderately fast game where India slows down even further. India remains "foxhunt" play, but the undersea base becomes "shockwave" play: you blast through each part of the level and leave nothing you ever bother to revisit.
My dislike of "hunted" play aside, using the same gameplay every time you hit a level, you might as well be playing the same level. Shake it up!
As a basic rule, the human brain only stays interested in something for about 20 minutes. Some people can go for vastly longer, but few go for shorter. This means that you need to change modes of play ("patterns") no less often than once every twenty minutes. You don't have to change it for long, but you need to change it. And in order to get maximum use out of a level design, you can get an entirely new experience out of a map by hitting it with a different style of play.
"Twenty minutes?" you say, "that's a long time to be sneaking around without a gunfight. It seems to me that most games interrupt with a new style of play every two minutes!" Yes, for two reasons:
1) Resetting the clock insures maximum attention.
2) Many players have an exceedingly slow first play-through. You can beat XIII in 130 minutes? Sure, but the first time it took you thirteen hours.
So level designers do - and should - err on the side of short attention spans.
To give you an idea of some of the basic kinds of play, here is an incomplete list. Feel free to suggest things I've missed:
Foxhunt: moderate to slow play speed
Explanation: Level is littered with invulnerable threats that have few successful approach vectors; player speed is therefore slowed to allow for higher relative vision.
In English: Effectively a puzzle level, foxhunt emphasizes careful watching and considered movements on pain of death. The slower the play style, the more careful you have to be not to exceed your 20-minute maximum play length.
Conquest: slow play speed
Explanation: Player earns ownership of level.
In English: The player destroys enemy presence in a level so that he owns it. Although this is, in itself, probably medium-speed play, the ownership of the level then encourages the player to carefully search every room. Depending on the player's level-affecting capabilities, they may slow the game even further by destroying parts of the level or by building new structures.
As with foxhunt, care must be used to insure that a player doesn't go more than 20 minutes without a play style change.
Hunted: fast play speed
Explanation: Player vision limits are enforced by forcing player movement. Play speed is therefore accelerated.
In English: Effectively a timed level. Rising water, a rampaging demon, and other active forces push the player to keep moving or lose the game. This play style can also result from moving levels. For example, conveyor belts.
Please note, "hunted" and "hunter" levels are functionally the same. Whether the player is forced to move along by a wall of fire or whether he has to constantly chase a monkey, the core idea is that there is a time-sensitive thing pushing the player to constantly move forward.
Shockwave: moderate to fast play speed
Explanation: Player's only goal is to get through the level
In English: This can be very similar to conquest, but the design is such that there is no way to slow down and appreciate your hard-earned territory. Perhaps there is a constant stream of soldiers, or perhaps there is simply nothing worth appreciating.
Often, "shockwave" is almost indistinguishable from "hunted". The difference is that when you are hunted, something is actively pushing you. Shockwave may send streams of soldiers, but your skill could be enough to hold them off forever. Shockwave may slam doors shut, but only after you use them - not as a possible loss condition.
---
These four types arise from basic elements of play, which I imagine I'll cover sometime. I don't think it's a full list, but each of those has a very different approach, both for play and design.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
A Weekend Most Fowl
I'm having a Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow!
This is rather unusual for me. My usual Thanksgiving dinner consists of trying to find some place that's open, failing, and wishing I had remembered to shop for groceries.
Just thought I'd break the parade of pent-up pedagogy with a post proffering paltry poultry.
This is rather unusual for me. My usual Thanksgiving dinner consists of trying to find some place that's open, failing, and wishing I had remembered to shop for groceries.
Just thought I'd break the parade of pent-up pedagogy with a post proffering paltry poultry.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)