Some people like MMORPGs. Some people don't. You can say the same of all games, but today, MMORPGs. Why do people vary in their preference?
Here's my hypothesis [read "wild-ass guess"]: it has something to do with how easily your brain can be led to believe that the numbers in the game are real and/or important. Which may have something - maybe - to do with hypnosis.
So. Have you been hypnotized? If, so, chime in and answer:
How easy were you to hypnotize?
How do you like MMORPGs?
Saturday, December 09, 2006
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Swords and Smiles 2: Electric Boogaloo
In Swords and Smiles I talked a little about abstraction. Right now, combat is abstracted out, especially in RPGs. These games have very simple combat mechanics: choose "attack", and you'll hit and do damage based on your character, skills, and/or equipment. As interfaces become more complex (Wii) we're seeing this abstraction reduced, the play more openly simulated and interactive.
The question is, can social games use these kinds of abstraction, and can they ride the same wave of unabstraction?
I say "yes". There are lots of ways to abstract out social play. The problem is that when we abstract it, it ends up being very shallow. Imagine an RPG with no levelling or equipment: you simply walk around the map fighting random fights. Click the button, cross your fingers that you'll do more damage than it will. There's not very much interesting about that.
Abstracted social play is the same way. But it can be solved the same way, too: adding in secondary play loops like equipment, levels, plot, etc. It makes just as much sense. What you wear changes how people react to you, and how long you've been doing this sort of thing affects how well you do it.
I can't see any reason why you couldn't make a compelling social game, save one:
Most games have a plot, and a lot of their pull is from that plot. Because the plot isn't affected by the combat, the writers can write pretty much whatever they please. However, in a social game, you'll have to be careful to keep the social play separated from the plot, or you'll end up with a branching plot of DESTRUCTION, impossible to write. That really limits our play options.
However, I think it's still possible. And I have an idea for a game. It involves team-based high school melodrama (or college melodrama, I suppose). I like the idea, but I don't really have the time or energy to write it up. But I'll give you a sample: everyone has confidence and loyalty, but they are opposing. When one goes up, the other goes down, and visa-versa.
Why?
Think about it...
The question is, can social games use these kinds of abstraction, and can they ride the same wave of unabstraction?
I say "yes". There are lots of ways to abstract out social play. The problem is that when we abstract it, it ends up being very shallow. Imagine an RPG with no levelling or equipment: you simply walk around the map fighting random fights. Click the button, cross your fingers that you'll do more damage than it will. There's not very much interesting about that.
Abstracted social play is the same way. But it can be solved the same way, too: adding in secondary play loops like equipment, levels, plot, etc. It makes just as much sense. What you wear changes how people react to you, and how long you've been doing this sort of thing affects how well you do it.
I can't see any reason why you couldn't make a compelling social game, save one:
Most games have a plot, and a lot of their pull is from that plot. Because the plot isn't affected by the combat, the writers can write pretty much whatever they please. However, in a social game, you'll have to be careful to keep the social play separated from the plot, or you'll end up with a branching plot of DESTRUCTION, impossible to write. That really limits our play options.
However, I think it's still possible. And I have an idea for a game. It involves team-based high school melodrama (or college melodrama, I suppose). I like the idea, but I don't really have the time or energy to write it up. But I'll give you a sample: everyone has confidence and loyalty, but they are opposing. When one goes up, the other goes down, and visa-versa.
Why?
Think about it...
Saturday, December 02, 2006
Laser Tag
I'm going to go back to the Swords and Smiles/Interfaces thing tomorrow, but for today I'd like to talk about something slightly simpler. Something to show everyone that game design analysis isn't just some ivory-tower voodoo that nobody ever uses. This essay may seem a little long, but it's extremely straight forward and easy to read.
Yesterday, I played laser tag. With 35 other friends - we bought the place out for a little while.
The basics of laser tag are simple: shoot the other dude to get more points. Most games of laser tag have additional features to make the play more interesting. All of them have terrain, most of them have teams, many of them have special targets (such as bases), ammo limits, lives...
The place we went did all of that - no one feature as well as I might hope, but everything somewhat well. (Except the fact that you could still get shot after you died, which was really dumb.)
They also had one feature which was... very interesting.
Every minute or so, people became invulnerable for twenty seconds. The basic idea being that they could waltz into the enemy base and shoot the base for a while, racking up the points.
Now, from my point of view, this was really a dumb idea. I mean, painfully dumb. You can't do anything to stop these people. You don't even get points for shooting them. Worse, the PA says, "green, defend your base!" every time one gets inside. You end up wanting to shoot it: you know there's some asshole in your base, and he's going to be there for precisely eight more seconds before invulnerability fades and he instantly dies. You can't defend your base. It's physically impossible.
So, why did they do it? Why this stupid "invulnerable" shit?
Take a moment to come up with some reasons they might have done so before reading on.
.
.
.
.
The more obvious reasons are ones of play rhythm. You want to keep the game going at a frantic pace, and the best way to keep people running from one side to the other is to make them invulnerable for a little while. However, this is a really bad way to control pacing. In fact, it would be better to do it just the opposite: have the various base targets themselves only vulnerable at pseudorandom times. Invulnerable players don't pull the same vigorous defense, because they can't be defeated.
But it's not a bad design. There's another reason for it. Did you think of it?
Shitty players are the problem.
See, in games of paintball, the real issue is that if you're a bad player, you spend most of the game dead and don't really accomplish anything useful. Laser tag is, at its default, the same: if you can't shoot and have no sense of tactics, you'll suck. You'll end up with a big negative score and feel like you wasted your time.
But if everyone gets to be invulnerable for a while, then no matter how bad you are, you get to kick all the ass for twenty seconds. Assuming you're alert enough to realize that you've just gone invulnerable, of course.
So the invulnerability is really to make the bad players still enjoy themselves. I, being the sort of person who doesn't much like luck as a major factor, hate the rule. But I'm also not a bad player, so I'm a bit biased.
Honestly, I don't think it's really the best way to do it. But it is an effective way to do it.
Can you think of other ways? Let's hear them!
Yesterday, I played laser tag. With 35 other friends - we bought the place out for a little while.
The basics of laser tag are simple: shoot the other dude to get more points. Most games of laser tag have additional features to make the play more interesting. All of them have terrain, most of them have teams, many of them have special targets (such as bases), ammo limits, lives...
The place we went did all of that - no one feature as well as I might hope, but everything somewhat well. (Except the fact that you could still get shot after you died, which was really dumb.)
They also had one feature which was... very interesting.
Every minute or so, people became invulnerable for twenty seconds. The basic idea being that they could waltz into the enemy base and shoot the base for a while, racking up the points.
Now, from my point of view, this was really a dumb idea. I mean, painfully dumb. You can't do anything to stop these people. You don't even get points for shooting them. Worse, the PA says, "green, defend your base!" every time one gets inside. You end up wanting to shoot it: you know there's some asshole in your base, and he's going to be there for precisely eight more seconds before invulnerability fades and he instantly dies. You can't defend your base. It's physically impossible.
So, why did they do it? Why this stupid "invulnerable" shit?
Take a moment to come up with some reasons they might have done so before reading on.
.
.
.
.
The more obvious reasons are ones of play rhythm. You want to keep the game going at a frantic pace, and the best way to keep people running from one side to the other is to make them invulnerable for a little while. However, this is a really bad way to control pacing. In fact, it would be better to do it just the opposite: have the various base targets themselves only vulnerable at pseudorandom times. Invulnerable players don't pull the same vigorous defense, because they can't be defeated.
But it's not a bad design. There's another reason for it. Did you think of it?
Shitty players are the problem.
See, in games of paintball, the real issue is that if you're a bad player, you spend most of the game dead and don't really accomplish anything useful. Laser tag is, at its default, the same: if you can't shoot and have no sense of tactics, you'll suck. You'll end up with a big negative score and feel like you wasted your time.
But if everyone gets to be invulnerable for a while, then no matter how bad you are, you get to kick all the ass for twenty seconds. Assuming you're alert enough to realize that you've just gone invulnerable, of course.
So the invulnerability is really to make the bad players still enjoy themselves. I, being the sort of person who doesn't much like luck as a major factor, hate the rule. But I'm also not a bad player, so I'm a bit biased.
Honestly, I don't think it's really the best way to do it. But it is an effective way to do it.
Can you think of other ways? Let's hear them!
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Swords and Smiles
Melee combat is very complex, but you wouldn't guess that from most RPGs. The melee combat has been abstracted into a simpler form where we use high-level commands to control the combat, and the low-level bits aren't even simulated. Of course, once you've abstracted something like that, it's easy to include fantastical elements like magic, and re-weight things so that various approaches are balanced in game when they aren't in real life. The abstraction simplifies a lot, so we add in a lot of stuff to prop up the play - plot, highly varied monsters, an equipment-buy cycle...
Social play is very complex... but is it more complex than melee combat? Is it more complex than torque and positioning and sharpness and how the body reacts to injury? I lean towards "no", but I'm interested to hear your thoughts. I understand that social play isn't a zero-sum game like melee combat, but...
Here are the questions I'd like to figure out how to answer:
1) Can social play be abstracted out into something very similar to the play in some existing genre? Not "can we replace swords with smiles?", but "can we use a turn-based dynamic like an RPG?"
2) With the advent of "deeper" interfaces (such as the Wii), melee combat (and other situational) simulations are likely to get less abstracted. Will this new wave of "realistic" models provide us with a better foundation for abstracting social play?
3) Does anyone care?
Social play is very complex... but is it more complex than melee combat? Is it more complex than torque and positioning and sharpness and how the body reacts to injury? I lean towards "no", but I'm interested to hear your thoughts. I understand that social play isn't a zero-sum game like melee combat, but...
Here are the questions I'd like to figure out how to answer:
1) Can social play be abstracted out into something very similar to the play in some existing genre? Not "can we replace swords with smiles?", but "can we use a turn-based dynamic like an RPG?"
2) With the advent of "deeper" interfaces (such as the Wii), melee combat (and other situational) simulations are likely to get less abstracted. Will this new wave of "realistic" models provide us with a better foundation for abstracting social play?
3) Does anyone care?
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Games you Never Thought of
Here's a few games you Never Thought of.
First: I finally managed to get a group to play Primetime Adventures, which has to be THE hardest game to sell people on. I finally got a group together - five players, two audience members, and me. Fourteen scenes later, we had finished a comedic romp through a steampunk space opera.
It works very well, even if you have no plot planned. Our "pilot episode" plot was made up on the fly, and it still ended up being an enjoyable game. I wonder whether I can get anyone to play a second time, though. It's so hard to sell.
Second: For the past few years, I've been creating games with lower and lower levels of immersion - testing the edges of what the minimum possible immersion is. It's been a very interesting romp, striding the edges where games fail. I don't think it's too egotistical to say that Boogaloo has proven most of my theories in application: a minimum-immersion game that people like to play.
It falters, but that's expected given the fact that the game has not a hint of immersion. I can, should, and almost certainly will write a paper about it.
However, what I'd like to do now is work on games with higher and higher levels of immersion. There are dozens of possibilities, but most of them have some severe drawbacks. So far, all my ideas have had the big drawback that they take at least half a day. I think that's inevitable: you can only immerse so fast.
Here, however, are two interesting ideas me and my roomie came up with. These games would avoid most of the drawbacks, but there are still some.
A game based on road trips. You get four to ten cars (and their drivers) and 2.5 times that number of players. You then set off on a day-long road trip. Each leg of the trip is an hour or so, with all the cars meeting in various locations. The idea of the game is that it's some kind of Cthulu-esque experience where the passengers are slowly being driven mad (ar-har-har): each car ride is functionally an hour of role-play based entirely around conversation and occasional in-game paper passing.
The players would need to figure out where they wanted to go in whose cars to solve whatever their goal was.
I could make this game a lot of fun, but the downside: about $100 in gasoline per car. Yeowch.
The other game is similar, but you simply ship everyone to a nearby big town (Boston, in my case) and instead of road trips, they take trips on the local subways and/or busses. You get some of the local businesses to go along with the game - a used book store, a little restaurant, a pub somewhere, someone to play a crazed homeless person - and you have everyone check back with "central" every hour or two. Some kind of "event" that happens that they don't want to miss.
It's the same basic kind of experience. The immersion should be comparable to the road trip, but would likely be more erratic. On the plus side, day passes for busses and/or subways typically run $5-$10, dramatically cheaper than the $30 players would need to pitch in for the road trip game.
Why these game ideas evade many of the problems with immersive games is an interesting topic, but kind of a long one, and I've taken enough of everyone's time today. Feel free to muse about it in the comments: I'd be interested to see everyone's take on immersion.
First: I finally managed to get a group to play Primetime Adventures, which has to be THE hardest game to sell people on. I finally got a group together - five players, two audience members, and me. Fourteen scenes later, we had finished a comedic romp through a steampunk space opera.
It works very well, even if you have no plot planned. Our "pilot episode" plot was made up on the fly, and it still ended up being an enjoyable game. I wonder whether I can get anyone to play a second time, though. It's so hard to sell.
Second: For the past few years, I've been creating games with lower and lower levels of immersion - testing the edges of what the minimum possible immersion is. It's been a very interesting romp, striding the edges where games fail. I don't think it's too egotistical to say that Boogaloo has proven most of my theories in application: a minimum-immersion game that people like to play.
It falters, but that's expected given the fact that the game has not a hint of immersion. I can, should, and almost certainly will write a paper about it.
However, what I'd like to do now is work on games with higher and higher levels of immersion. There are dozens of possibilities, but most of them have some severe drawbacks. So far, all my ideas have had the big drawback that they take at least half a day. I think that's inevitable: you can only immerse so fast.
Here, however, are two interesting ideas me and my roomie came up with. These games would avoid most of the drawbacks, but there are still some.
A game based on road trips. You get four to ten cars (and their drivers) and 2.5 times that number of players. You then set off on a day-long road trip. Each leg of the trip is an hour or so, with all the cars meeting in various locations. The idea of the game is that it's some kind of Cthulu-esque experience where the passengers are slowly being driven mad (ar-har-har): each car ride is functionally an hour of role-play based entirely around conversation and occasional in-game paper passing.
The players would need to figure out where they wanted to go in whose cars to solve whatever their goal was.
I could make this game a lot of fun, but the downside: about $100 in gasoline per car. Yeowch.
The other game is similar, but you simply ship everyone to a nearby big town (Boston, in my case) and instead of road trips, they take trips on the local subways and/or busses. You get some of the local businesses to go along with the game - a used book store, a little restaurant, a pub somewhere, someone to play a crazed homeless person - and you have everyone check back with "central" every hour or two. Some kind of "event" that happens that they don't want to miss.
It's the same basic kind of experience. The immersion should be comparable to the road trip, but would likely be more erratic. On the plus side, day passes for busses and/or subways typically run $5-$10, dramatically cheaper than the $30 players would need to pitch in for the road trip game.
Why these game ideas evade many of the problems with immersive games is an interesting topic, but kind of a long one, and I've taken enough of everyone's time today. Feel free to muse about it in the comments: I'd be interested to see everyone's take on immersion.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Lucid
Okay, I keep reading "Lucid" as "Ludic". So, I'm taking tonight off. Soon: something shorter, and maybe a re-luciding of that five page thing I did a bit ago.
Tomorrow: Peanut butter sandwiches, far as the eye can see! My eye, at any rate, being severely nearsighted.
Actually, I'm about out of bread. So: peanut butter bagels, as far as the eye can see!
Tomorrow: Peanut butter sandwiches, far as the eye can see! My eye, at any rate, being severely nearsighted.
Actually, I'm about out of bread. So: peanut butter bagels, as far as the eye can see!
Monday, November 20, 2006
Darius Sucks!
I got to play the Wii a little bit, and I'll I can say for certain is that avatars that look like Darius really suck at boxing.
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