if (MUD == MMORPG)

I find it depressing that this post from Raph was even made. To me, it is like the following:

Professor Raph walks into the room. He writes on the giant black board, "advanced cellular biology". The students watch, pulling out their notes.

Raph: "Cellular biology explores the foundation of life itself. This is the field which allows us to manage bacteria, virii, cancers, drugs, and even genetic engineering, in addition to simpler things such as proving that grass and trees are in the same kingdom. In this advanced course, we'll be first learning how to monitor retroviral-"

Student: "Wait, grass and trees are in the same kingdom?"

Raph: "Uh... yes. Yes, they are."

Student: "I don't believe you."

:P

So you want some dialogue, do you?

_{This is a post about what I learned from Crowd of Three, and what I'm going to learn from my next game.}

When creating a social intelligence, there are a lot of ways to go about it. There are, however, three core elements that always need to be included:

1) A reason to socially interact.

2) A result of socially interacting.

3) A visible social interaction.

The problem is that in almost any situation anyone can think of, the world needs to be pretty darn complex to provide a variety of reasons to socially interact. If you've just got two empty-headed people sitting around on a vast white golf ball, what are their interactions going to consist of? Not a whole lot!

So you add things that get the blood pumping. Danger. Love. Money. Lust. Histories, futures, presents. You give them a reason to react, then trigger the reaction.

A classic example: shoot a neutral person, they get pissed and try to kill you - or run away. What choice they makes depends on not only being triggered by you, but by the rest of the content. Comparative strength. Bloodthirstyness. Fear. Morality.

If the programmer is really good, this guy will tell his friends that you're a dick. And there's another cause, and another effect.

The second step is effect, of course. Someone who dislikes you has to have some noticeable effect, or you'll never even know. And the opposite is also true: people who like you need to do stuff to show you that.

In the above example, the shooting and running and spreading rumors are all perfectly valid results.

In Crowd of Three, the causes are (A) random vagueries and (B) trade. The random conversations that the people have at the beginning of the game allow them to build small preferences for and against other people. These preferences are weighted somewhat by the personalities of the characters, but are effectively random. This tiny difference determines who they are more likely to have more vagueries with and who they are more likely to trade with (for example, giving dice is an extremely common trade practice).

All this worked okay, but I overlooked many of the strongest causes and was limited from some of the results I would have liked. For example, I wanted the characters to be able to get into fights, or at least shouting contests, that had to be broken up by other players. But this was a sufficiently large task that I decided not to do it. Similarly, I wanted characters to be able to negotiate a game plan among their "team" - "help me win this next round by giving me your dice, and I'll give you two tokens..." But, again, that would have required a pretty sizeable chunk of code.

There were further refinements I could have made. For example, I could have made you dislike anyone who won tokens from you. But by then the other shortcomings had become evident enough to make it pointless.

The biggest shortcomings lay in step three: visible social interactions. With no ability to move and only the very roughest visual emotional displays, the interactions had to be wholly through the game and text. For reasons unknown to me, the author of this game was stupid enough to only make one game interaction, and it was not even visually displayed.

The end result of which is that showing the player what the social interactions were (and giving the characters character) lay wholly on the shoulders of simple text. Putting aside the fact that text is naturally less effective at this than virtually any other medium, each character needed to be able to talk about a wide variety of social interactions. In a voice which supports their characterization.

Too tall a freaking order. Text generation isn't nearly as hard as text parsing, but as you have seen if you've played Crowd of Three, it's not as easy as I might wish. Perhaps with a team of writers... but I don't have such a team. (Although, if I started over now, I would do better. I know more, now. Generating dialogue is a totally different order from the descriptive text I've generated in the past.)

There's other problems with step three (in this game and others). Showing the player a social interaction with crystal clarity allows him to see the seams in the simulation. This damages the empathy the player has built up. He thinks, "not a person..."

So, what's my next try?

Well, as I built Crowd of Three, I thought about other situations which had a high emotional breadth and depth, but were simple enough for a one-man team and a few weeks. I could come up with only one other option:

Dreams. Daydreams, to be precise.

Dreams are, in my opinion, a great idea. Dreams are fuzzy, not particularly logical. Seams can be hidden beneath the fact that it's a dream. Furthermore, I don't have to write a word of dialogue: it fits into the theme perfectly to allow people to talk in meaningless squiggles representing nothing more than an emotion.

Furthermore, dreams offer a wider variety of causes and effects without requiring me to build a whole world. You can't jump off the boat? Of course not. It's a dream. You can't fully control yourself? Of course not. It's a dream.

There's a lot of other issues, of course. Primary among these is:

How the hell do I make a game about a dream without requiring an absurd amount of art content? Remember, I have to clearly show the emotions and actions of the humans involved.

I could do just lineart. The coloring is really what takes me forever. And I think lineart might do well in a dream.

Anyhow, this is a bit of what I have learned, and what I plan to do next. Comments?

Why Strip Poker?

I released a silly little game called Crowd of Three over on my other blog. It's a game vaguely related to strip poker, but don't go expecting porn: that's not why I built it.

This post will explain why I built it.

I want to build social AIs. The problem is, a social AI needs a world to inhabit, or it has no "hooks" with which to do meaningful socializing. Most simplistic worlds either (A) don't have the depth of emotion I need or (B) don't have the breadth of emotion I need.

For example, a game about an unhappy couple. It doesn't appeal to me. There's not enough complexity to the socializing unless you put that unhappy couple in a world full of content, which quickly takes it from "simple" to "800+ megs of poor line art and dialogue trees". Not to mention any names, of course.

So, a few weeks back, I was thinking:

Me: "I need a really simple world with strong built-in emotional hooks. Preferably a game. What kind of game gives you a strong emotional feeling as you play?"

Me: "Hmmmm... well, any game where you have a big stake... like poker: to the death!"

Me: "No, it needs to have a broader range of emotions. Friendship, rivalry, shyness, anger, gloating... what's a simple situation that has all of those and makes them change over time?"

Me: "Hrm... toughie. I give up. What?"

Me: "I was hoping you'd know! Why do I have to think of everything?"

The first answer I stumbled across was Strip Poker. There's not a whole lot of other games which result in as wide a variety of behaviors, and it's fairly simple.

Of course, strip poker wasn't enough. I took the parts of strip poker that aided social interactions and punched them up a notch. I took the parts of strip poker that reduced interactions and killed them. What I ended up with is a very simple game of die-rolling where you can give chips to other players. In exchange for gratitude or clothing.

Regardless of the fact that strip poker games have always been strictly pornographic, I really couldn't think of any other game which could serve the same purpose. So... strip poker it was!

As it turns out, the social AI I implemented was too simplistic - or too clear, depending on how you look at it. This is partially because the algorithms I used were simplistic, and partially because the game has a very restricted "team play" dynamic, making it hard to express your like and dislike in the play environment: it's strictly social, which isn't good enough.

I think my next game will be about a dream. No dialogue at all. :)

Thinking of Home...

So, the roundtable on home in games has really been nibbling away at the back of my mind. I'm trying to think of how you could make a game which feels like a nostalgic dream.

A lot of movies and series use this idea very powerfully. For example, Macross Plus opens with a scene where two boys and a girl are struggling to get a home-made bicycle-plane off the ground. The song ("Voices" is the name) is also a huge help. The end result is that the scene has the feeling of a nostalgic dream.

I've been trying to think: how could you do a game that feels like a nostalgic dream? The whole way through?

There are a lot of games which touch this idea. Ico and it's successful successor, Shadow of the Colossus are two examples. Even Animal Crossing is an example. But these games don't feel like dreams, they feel like games surrounded by a dream.

I think two things are required, just for a start: an absolute lack of dialogue and a very simple, abstracted game mechanic. Walking around is too concrete, to say nothing of doing battle or collecting carrots. The mechanic can't be too controlling, either: lack of dialogue and lack of concrete control both serve the same purpose.

Remember the last subtitled film you saw? Even if the subtitling was incredibly weird ("the caffiene stings my broken heart") the fact is that you aren't hearing the character say it. In English, the lines of dialogue can only be as good as they are. When they are in another language, they are as good as the reactions of the rest of the characters say they are.

If you have ever watched a good foreign movie without subtitling, you know what I mean. This manifests even more. The story is clear, even without any dialogue. In fact, it might even be better without the dialogue.

This same effect allows The Sims to endear themselves to some players: the Sims are saying exactly what you think they are saying, because all they are actually saying is gibberish.

The lack of concrete controls serves a similar purpose. If your controls are very subtle or organic, then you won't expect precision from the game. You can conceal the idiot logic that drives the game and therefore let the player be pleased with the result he has "caused".

The thing is, you can't use branching states for this. Players are simply too good. They recognize a branching state a million miles away.

So you'd actually need a drama engine. Driven by something totally insubstantial. Ideal in my mind would be the Revolution's controller. Less ideal would be the relative position of a mouse without a pointer reflecting it. Move this way to bring more of this emotion into the game, that way to bleed it out. From dream to nightmare and back, as you twitch your hand. Never controlling the fundamental processes of the game, but guiding them.

Toughie. It would need to be simple, but moderately long. I would prefer something with a tangible storyline that weaves into a romance plot, rather than a straight-up romance plot. Just as a basic example, you could turn the plot to Secret of Mana into a pretty good zero-dialogue nonconcrete-controls game.

Hmmmmmmm.

Thoughts?

Chaos! The New Guy Syndrome

_{Churn, and your game. And a long, rambling bleaaaaarrrrrgh.}

There's a lot of data on how churn works. In a facility, in a company, in a nation. There's not a whole lot about how it works in a game... at least, not carefully printed up. But the data is there.

With a stable group of people, you can get away with incredible efficiencies through rules that have no need for enforcement. You can make tenuous rules that are followed because of the pressure holding the team together.

As you start acquiring churn, the surface tension is broken. The pressure which keeps the team cohesive disintigrates. The higher the churn, the less pressure naturally forms. The less pressure, the less shortcuts you can take. Tenuous rules are annihilated by the waves of new arrivals, whether they be new hires, immigrants, or new players.

Obviously, the situation are complex, and the same effect can be triggered by an "economic quake", shaking the population out of their cohesion and effectively (temporarily) making them into new hires. I can talk about countries, religions, and companies: all suffer from these effects. Tenuous rules that always worked before, but they work worse every day now.

But not all high-churn organizations have this chaotic, uncontrolled environment. Fraternaties and the military, for example. These have some of the highest churn rates possible, but most of the new recruits end up being very loyal to the organization. Sure, they cause trouble both inside and outside the organization - but they are proud to be in the organization.

Cults are even more effective.

How?

The answer is obvious to anyone who's looked into the matter - or been through the matter. When you join a high-churn system that knows what it is doing, it takes over your life and - here's the kicker - bonds you to a team made primarily of other new, confused recruits.

When you join a high-churn system that doesn't know what it's doing, it just lets you waltz in. When you get there, you don't have any particular fondness for the organization, or any particular urge to waltz down the path they have prepared for you.

The high-pressure team-ups of the military don't make people follow tenuous rules. They just make people follow solid rules with vigor. A high-churn system which survives very long learns quickly to enforce all its rules, whether with force or with peer pressure. It drops the unenforceable ones and replaces them with useful variants.

Most countries haven't done this. Some countries, like the USA, started as immigrant countries and therefore did this quite well for several centuries. Of course, we've been putting in unenforceable rules for the past century or so, and it shows as our cohesion suffers. Please note: protestors, at least here in America, aren't showing a lack of cohesion. The lack of cohesion is manifest in the parasites in the system. The people who break and abuse rules without being stopped or punished.

Now, sticky politics aside, your game is a high-churn system. I mean, duh. Even in its stable late life, your game will have a higher level of churn than any company roster.

So... how can you survive?

By learning from the most successful high-churn systems.

I'm not going to talk about the rules. I've talked about them before, and this essay isn't exactly short even without those paragraphs. So, let's talk about the one other option which games don't use:

The "take over your life and bond you with a bunch of other newbs" approach.

The military, high-aggression religions, and cults all do this. And when they do this, it turns out powerfully. The new recruits are bonded not only to the organization directly, but to other people who they only know inside the organization (and, therefore, must stay in the organization to stay with them).

The problem is, of course, that it's the pressure cooker approach. Most players don't like being pressure cooked, and are likely to simply turn off the game. Plus, pressure cooking requires at least four straight hours. What percentage of players have that available?

Is there a low-pressure pressure cooker which can be turned on and off at will? How about just setting every new joiner up with the four people to join immediately before him and the four people to join immediately after him? As primary contacts?

I'm sure there are lots of solutions. Can anyone else think of any?

Evolution of a METEOR!

_{Self-centered post about a game I made.}

METEOR! was the first LARP I wrote. I wrote it specifically to see how LARPs reacted. I took a bunch of eightiesish movie characters and rammed them into one game. People like Miyagi, Indiana Jones, Batman, Mr. T, and so on. Pretty much just wrote down their names, gave them some special abilities, and set up some basic plot things.

I ran it... and people loved it. They demanded I run it again. Then, again. Then, again. Now it has been run six times. It is almost certainly the LARP which has been run most frequently at WPI.

Personally, I hate it. The game is poorly designed and very GM-intensive. But the way it's designed, you can't simply add more GMs. So it's GM-intensive for no more than three GMs, and even that is pushing it. Which means that players spend a lot of time waiting and shouting, "GM! GM!"

More than that, the game is unbalanced and, due to the game mechanics, unbalanceable. It's a hideous mess.

It's popular for three reasons. First, it involves well-known icons. People already have emotional ties to these characters. This makes it very easy to get excited about playing them. Second, it has a lot of direct feedback as the GMs make shit up based on what you do. Lastly, I always run a "dead dog" where I explain what happened and people share stories. These three things contribute to a very emotionally "fun" game, even though the gameplay blows, half the game is waiting for a GM, and nobody has any useful directives or objectives.

In the first runs, there were only about five villains. This led to a rapid "shaking out" into good guys and bad guys. Both groups had some internal strife, but not much, because they were focused on defeating the other team. The nature of the game usually led to the realization that whoever gets a cool doodad first wins, so both teams go about exploring the "cool doodad" part of the game. Which is exceedingly GM intensive.

Because the villains almost always grouped into one giant team (occasionally with an outlier), this always led to one titanic battle at the end of the game. The villains, I found, rarely had nearly as much fun as the protagonists. They spent the whole game running and lurking.

For the most recent rewrite, I increased the number of villains from five to seven, and added five "gray" characters. Sure enough, the villains and non-villains mingled better. The villains were not forced to lurk nearly as much, and I think they had a better time.

However, because they did not team up into the monolithic "team evil", there was no single confrontation. Instead, the various plots went off every half-hour or so for the duration of the last two hours. While this pleased the villains, the heroes were left flat. There was a continuous rain of evil, and putting out fire after fire isn't made much fun by the rules. Also, when to end the game was difficult to decide, because there was no final confrontation. This fact was exacerbated by the high player count, which meant there were more teams and confusion.

(I think the other two GMs might think that the lack of a big confrontation is due to the "no GM communication" system I instituted, but I think that was relatively minor: it was the fact that there were functionally five different "team evils" that was the real problem.)

This isn't to say the game wasn't fun. The moon got blown up twice. William Shatner became Lord of Hell, and got summoned by the vampire trying to summon the Lord of Hell. David Bowie continually backstabbed the other villains to gain power, and there were montages all around. Batman and the Penguin had a combat scene unrivalled in Bat-fiction. Oh, and Chuck Norris was actually the guy from quantum leap in Chuck Norris' body. Fun times.

But I hate the design of this game, and I don't think I'll ever run it again. There are a lot of things to learn:

Team size is important. Monolithic sides tend to focus the game into a single cinematic encounter, but have to be carefully managed to keep them from (A) tipping the game balance too early or (B) being irritated or bored by the numerical dis/advantage. Diverse teams tend to be balanced (if you set them up right), but have a really shitty sense of pacing. (I plan to solve this with game mechanics in ASTEROID!)

Using readily recognizable icons is great, if you're a total biter like me. Not only does it provide you the writer with a powerful focus, but it gets players excited and provides them with a clear idea of what to play and how to play it. It's kind of unfortunate that it's borderline illegal, and certainly not publishable for profit.

The game physics allow for a number of absurd combos which win the game. :P

Lastly, METEOR! is a brutally fast-paced game. Any players who have a hard time keeping up the energy level and social aggression this kind of game calls for will tend to fall behind. Then they get dropped. I generally lose 3-4 players every game. They fall behind, stop having fun, and drop. Their situation is almost never really that bad: the rules don't allow for your situation to get that bad.

Hey, I said it was poorly designed. I wasn't freaking kidding.

ASTEROID! is going to be the video game version, if I ever design it. The plot is simple: SINISTAR has eaten most of the video-game worlds. You play a video game character - either a protagonist or a villain - to try to stop SINISTAR. And, of course, accomplish your goals.

Unlike METEOR!, ASTEROID! is (will be) about half LARP, half board game. Protagonists have three lives, antagonists have the ability to build lairs. Controlling who can enter what lairs, when, will allow me to manage the pacing of the game. A rigid rule set will radically reduce the need for a GM to handle common things like combat or leveling.

Of course, protagonist doesn't mean "good", it means "three lives". And antagonist doesn't mean "evil", it means "builds lairs".

I think it's going to be a bit like Lord of the Rings the Board Game combined with METEOR!. I think it's going to be fun. But, as I mentioned, I've barely touched it.

Anyhow, I'm exhausted. Definitely time for bed.

Escapist

This week's escapist was a very welcome change from their normal fare.

An article on Rubacava brought us right back around to the round table on what "home" is. I jump up and down to note that his experience is just one more which seems to agree with the "orbit" theory of home. Right on, N. Evan van Zelfden! (And, as I'm sure you're heard, awesome name.)

An article on difficulty brings a long-ago post on how narrative games cause a decline in challenging gameplay into sharp effect. I could dig that post up, if anyone's interested.

Magic Words is a good essay on creating emotion and investment using illusion. In my opinion, we're to the stage where we can have actual results instead of illusionary ones, especially if we include a "home" for the players. Still, a good essay.

Honestly, I didn't find Warren Spector's "celebrity spotlight" to be very interesting. But, I bet a lot of people did, so I'm still going to count it as a solid essay. :)

So, hey, good issue, Escapist. Now, if only you could keep this level of content up...