Pattern Challenges, First Thoughts

If I can make the assumption that all gameplay is based on pattern recognition challenges, it's pretty easy to start pulling together the pieces and participate in the pattern recognition challenge of recognizing pattern recognition challenges.

The thing to remember about these challenges is that they're all about the player's PERCEPTION. If you're thinking in the MDA framework, we're talking about aesthetics. The only thing that matters is what the player experiences - what patterns the player sees. If the patterns you're using can't be portrayed, the player will see only noise. That's not necessarily bad - patterns can have noise and randomness (at which point the player's interactions involve minimizing losses from it) - but it needs to be remembered.

The whole of the challenge is from the player PERCEIVING the dynamics, DEDUCING the pattern, and ADJUSTING his actions to TAKE ADVANTAGE of it. These four bits are the whole of gameplay. EVERYTHING (that isn't pointless) in EVERY game can be reduced down to these four components, or this theory is wrong. So, hey, knock it down if you can. I love that sort of thing.

So what's the difference between the MDA framework and this one? Well, in theory, this one is more inclusive and actually has a logical method of utilization. The MDA framework, for all its ivory tower beauty, is only marginally helpful when it comes to designing games. It's pretty darn handy for dissecting them, though.

Even things which at first do NOT appear to be connected to this pattern recognition challenge system ARE. All that eye candy? It's there to assist one of the three things - the perception of the dynamics, the deduction of the pattern, and the methodology of the taking advantage.

For example, in racing games you generally see cars and have a specific style of forward-facing viewpoint. This is to point you directly towards the dynamics. It's going to be a racing game. You know how racing games work. You know most of the dynamics. This means that the player has a head start on deducing the pattern (which is largely how the car and the track interact over time).

You see a game including knights and dragons? It points to the fact that at least one of the game's patterns involves the dynamics of a fantasy society. We immediately think of things like kings and wizards and ancient ruins. Again, this is a direct link into the pattern we can expect.

How about character design? Well, aside from the fact that a design can tell us what to expect from a character, it also often associates a character with a particular emotion. For example, classically princesses, animals, and children were used to build empathy. This is related strongly to the player's methodology of TAKING ADVANTAGE of the pattern - they get the player to try to manipulate the pattern to benefit the characters they have empathy with.

You have to establish what the player WANTS to get from the gameplay. Aesthetics is certainly a way to do this. As is the gameplay itself - the METHOD and HISTORY of interactions with the pattern. That's something for a slightly later time.

As you might be able to tell, it's not just what is classically considered 'gameplay' that this covers. The game itself is a giant system for OFFERING A PATTERN RECOGNITION CHALLENGE. The pattern is important, obviously. But many game designers seem to miss the fact that the RECOGNITION and the CHALLENGE are just as important.

In the upcoming week, I hope to explain specifically how to create pattern recognition challenges from a viewpoint that is actually helpful to a designer. We'll see.

Workers Disunite!

I like this.

I'll be posting on pattern challenges later today.

Bzzt! Does not compute.

I spent the last TWO DAYS trying to figure out why the software I'm writing had gone all cracky. Access times went from less than a quarter second to half a minute.

I was picking through my code - what was it? The code was tight as a drum. It couldn't possibly be the code. Maybe one of the external functions I was using was taking up dramatically more time than I thought? Well, not that one... or that one...

I finally figured out the problem: I was running 'arp' and it never occurred to me that Linux would HANG on arp for thirty seconds. Turns out I had an amorous Windows server frantically trying to back up my Linux box. Since it's the only Linux box on the network, neither knew how to handle the situation. Furthermore, for reasons unknown to me, the Windows box REFUSED to respond to pings while trying to back up the system.

Worse, if I rebooted, it just reconnected. Until IT gets around to fixing the problem, I just cut that segment out completely. I'll live, although it creates a security hole. In a system specifically (and at request) created to be as secure as tissue paper. I'm not worried.

Now the code runs lightning fast again. Ah, code looks real tight after the fourth rewrite.

If you've gotten this far, you really need something more interesting to read. Honestly. Listening to me mutter about work-related projects ranks right up there with playing solitaire.

Rummaging and Foraging

In my wanderings through the webs I have come across several blogs and sites which I feel need to be shared.

This site is an awesome concept.

Here is a blog I signed up for. It and its related pages contain links to the most important scientific breakthroughs known to man. It also contains the poem:

The rain in Spain is bound to contain
Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane

I signed up for a couple of blogs. They cover the memes I like. Because I'm horrifyingly lazy, I won't provide links, but if you look for clef at cephiro dot com on bloglines, they're all public. Some highlights include:

The Thinking Writer and the Badger Blog, as writing blogs. Adaptive Path Essays and Grammar.police as a tiny taste of my information addiction.

On the Psychology Behind Games

There is a Gamasutra article about the psychology behind games. For those of you that read this sort of stuff fairly regularly, you won't find anything astounding here. It does offer some nice insights, but nothing that you can't find elsewhere (and, mostly likely, have already found elsewhere).

It always strikes me when they list their 'types of play' or 'needs' or anything else they feel like enumerating, they're ALWAYS simply listing 'pattern recognition challenges on THIS level' or 'pattern recognition challenges on THAT level'.

For example, this article has four kinds of play: competition (overcoming challenges), chance (minimizing chance and guessing results), vertigo (seeing the world in a new and unusual way), and make-believe (seeing a new and unusual world). All four of those kinds of play are simply pattern recognition challenges.

The other things they talk about - positive and negative rewards or difficulty levels, for example - are just ways of setting up the challenge. You can't succeed if there is nothing to succeed AT, or if it's too hard.

It strikes me that far too few people actually LOOK at what they are saying. Now, I'm a huge geek, so I like unified theories. And the unified theory of play seems to always boil down to OFFERING PATTERN RECOGNITION CHALLENGES. Play is simply an opportunity to INTERACT with a pattern. In what ways the pattern acts makes the different kinds of games - some of these challenges are fast and simple, some are slow and complex. Some are social, some are physical, some are mental, some are rotational. Some are based on real-life patterns, some establish a pattern in-game from scratch, some are a combination.

WHY people INSIST on categorizing this into different 'kinds of play' never made much sense to me. At first I thought that it was for ease of use. You know, "if you're making a game, think about these kinds of pattern challenges". It seemed helpful. But their lists are always incomplete, because there's a trillion kinds of pattern challenges. And once I got past these 'tutorial' methods, I expected to find them saying, "okay, that was just to get you started. What play REALLY is is pattern challenges, and those are just some common kinds. So how you really design these things is..."

But they never do. Not anywhere. Is it just fundamentally understood? Or fundamentally MISunderstood?

It gets mentioned in this article. He mentions how games are all about interacting with patterns. Yaaaaay!

So why doesn't he DO anything with that? He just MENTIONS it and then starts BABBLING this outdated rhetoric about how games are escapism. Yes, he does it very nicely. He brings up a lot of solid commentary. But it's like having the keys to the car and commenting for hours on how they feel in your hand. DRIVE, damn it!

Maybe I'm missing some fundamental key as to why people never take this tack. So I'm gonna take it. In the near future, I'll start posting musings on OFFERING PATTERN RECOGNITION CHALLENGES. Keep your eye on me!

Monkeys!

I didn't sleep very well last night.

You see, I sleep like a freaking baby. I love sleeping. I go to bed, I sleep, I wake up shortly before my alarm goes off, and hey, I'm good. Since early college life, I have never suffered much from insomnia. Hell, I can sleep sprawled halfway off the bed.

It's amazing that the primary thing that keeps me from sleeping - as in, the ONLY thing which has kept me from sleeping over the past five years - is DRUNKEN JOCKS.

So, hey, this is a hearty FUCK YOU to anyone who goes out hooting and howling at midnight because you got a stiffy watching a ball bounce around a big empty arena.

If you are drunken and making noise for any other reason (such as the guy who honks his horn for hours at 3AM), you are not subject to that particular fuck you, so you get your own: fuck you, too.

I'm a bit bitter. It just amazes me that this ONE FACTION is responsible for an entire segment of modern inconvenience. I've known a lot of drinkers, but very few of them are nearly as aggressively irritating as JOCKS. And I've known a lot of jocks, but very few of them are irritating at all unless they're DRUNKEN.

It's like if you mixed chocolate and peanut butter and got urine.

Generic Post

This is a generic post.

Here is a link that is cool, because John Cleese is one of my faves:

http://www.backuptrauma.com/video/default2.aspx

I was walking yesterday when a corner zealot attacked me with a pamphlet:

Him: "DO U B-LEAF IN GOD?"

Me: (Pause) "Well, I believe that an intangible force guides all religious people."

Him: "GOOD ON U, BRUTHUH!"

Mocking people is most satisfying when they don't even realize they're being mocked.