STEAMy Affairs

I've written angry posts about STEAM in the past. But much time has passed. So when I started to create a mod for HL2 for work, I figured, "hey, STEAM's a mature technology now, and I probably over-reacted. How bad could it be?" After all, I finally got on board the GameTap express, and it works well enough.

But STEAM still sucks. Sucks like a vacuum. Like a black hole. Like a politician.

Not only does it make it extremely difficult to debug your code, but it also happy-fun crashes at least once every two hours, requiring a reboot to get it to work again. That is, of course, not mentioning the fact that I can't compile HL2 in debug because STEAM doesn't LET you run debug, so you have to compile it in release. Oh, and any time it crashes, it SILENT crashes. No error messages.

And for this joyful experience all I have to do is sit through pop-up ads and incessant, random, pointless dialog boxes.

Thanks, STEAM! I had forgotten what true incompetence felt like.

The Story of FREE Super Saver Shipping

This has been tested and shown to work.

_{Boring story about Amazon's slightly screwy shipping system...}

So, I pre-ordered some stuff on Amazon. I ordered it with FREE Super Saver Shipping, grouped into as few packages as possible. I looked at the delivery date: next month, even though everything is published within the next week.

Unacceptable!

So I switched it over to standard shipping, and it predicted that my delivery date was a full week earlier. Which was, well, acceptable, but not great. Price: +$5.

So I switched to delivering my order in as many packages as possible, as soon as things come in. The slow one is pushed up a week, the fast one is pushed up two weeks. Yay! Price: + another $3.

But, hey, let's change it back to shipping it in as few packages as possible... wait, "minimum shipment is two packages"? That's not any fewer. Is the charge the same? No, in fact, now we're back down $3, to simple standard shipping prices (maybe plus a dollar?). No change in the shipping dates...

Well, let's just see... we'll switch it back to "FREE" and... well, it's free again, but the shipment and arrival dates are still unchanged. A final three weeks earlier on one, two weeks earlier on the other.

But... but... all I did was go in a big circle!

There's a lesson in this... somewhere...

Game Report

On Friday I ran a 17-player LARP. It was a prototype, so it had flaws, but here is a report on it.

The game was built to test the viability of putting social dynamics into rules. The way I approached this was to make it so that each character had a variety of situations - some social, some not - where they gained power. This required me to have to give each character four powers. Unfortunately, a normal LARP does not require players to have that breadth of capability (or, more accurately, use that breadth of capability frequently), so I had to think of a different way to do the LARP. Something other than the standard "run around solving things and occasionally getting in a conflict". Something which requires the players to use large numbers of powers every five minutes. Therefore, I obviously needed to up the tactical complexity without limiting the socialization.

I chose to make the LARP largely a board game (and, in this case, a large board game). It bore a strong similarity to a miniatures dungeon crawl or old time squad war game. It was STRICTLY cooperative - for the first time ever, I did not put in any conflict between players, or even any theoretical reason for them to conflict. I was hoping this would give them a feeling of camaraderie and allow them to focus on forming cooperative relationships. It seemed to work.

Like dungeon crawls and squad games, the big element here was "table talk". The magical ability to plan out your moves with a player three hundred feet away behind ten stone walls. The ability to come up with complex schemes in one five-second block of "board time" and give long speeches as bullets swarm towards you.

I made all the players psychic, and therefore they could all talk to each other regardless of distance. Also, telepathy works faster than the "real world", so they could do a lot of talking and planning even though each turn on the board was only five seconds long.

I decided to do this because I could make the table talk the method of socializing, and give the board-game avatars most of the powers which were fueled by socializing. I also let the avatar's situation provide fuel for some powers, and let some powers affect the table talk.

For example, one player charged up a teleportation power if she remained silent for five minutes. Another player charged up a useful but weak combat power by laughing. Several people charged their powers by convincing other people to do their plan, or getting thanked, etc, etc. On the other hand, some people could charge powers by being in the dark, or killing an enemy, or getting wounded.

I also added a memory element - they were all amnesiacs, and over the course of the game they recovered not only their own memories, but discovered logs of what had happened in the previous weeks and years. Obviously, the reason they were amnesiacs is because there was a telepath on board looking to grab all the scientists. Them being scientists, they gave themselves amnesia to give themselves time to escape. This meant that the more they learned, the more danger they were in. This wasn't made clear enough because we didn't have enough GM coordination to handle monster attacks. All the monster attacks were desperately half-assed, through no fault of the AGMs.

As you see, it wasn't all light and sunshine. The map was too large, 17 players was about twice too many, and I ran out of prep time so many of the planned features were scrapped. Still, it went pretty well and there is definitely a core of fun in there, and that's what a prototype is intended to discover.

At some point, I'll run a similar game, but I want to make it more social. I'm thinking about making it high fantasy, and reversing the time scales. IE, every fifteen minutes of real time would be a day or week of board time. And maybe giving players control over multiple avatars...

I love designing games. It's too bad they're such a pain to actually RUN.

INFURIATING! games

I've noticed that most of the games I've gotten recently have been INFURIATING. All in caps.

I've still been trying to play through Fire Emblem, but it's infuriating. 90% of your characters die in two or three hits. This is made worse because they almost always kill the enemy that attacks them, making a perfect opening for another enemy to slide right in and attack. Of course, once a character dies, you need to restart the entire chapter, because a dead character is dead forever. It's like fun, except you're driving needles under your fingernails.

I've been playing through Dead Rising. It's a fun game, except that the boss fights are insanely hard. I'm level... 28 now, and I'm still stuck on the first "real" boss - a psychotic clown. He took me from full health to dead in one twenty-second-long air-juggle combo. It's not unusual. I only have a row and a half of health, only enough to survive getting repeatedly run over and shot by the Dead Rising Warthog-equivalent for a minute and a half. Pshaw, chain guns are nothing compared to psychotic clowns.

I did finally beat Gears of War, but I had to play it on easy. Even then, some of the fights were "hey, you did something slightly wrong! You die." I especially like the way they start to kill you for being in the dark about five minutes before they actually tell you that the dark is what's killing you. They also had the irritating habit of restarting you BEFORE the minute-long unskippable cut scene.

Okay, this one's great. I've been playing a bit of the New Super Mario Brothers. Except that it only saves when you BEAT A CASTLE. When's the last time I wanted to play ten levels of Super Mario straight? A decade ago? I'm not going to put it in sleep mode, because I want to use my DS for other games. So I still haven't reached the second castle. ARGH.

There's a deeply flawed thinking in these kinds of situations. It's more common in Japanese games, but western games often make the same mistakes. I don't mind a game that gives me a challenge. In fact, I like a game that gives me a challenge. But I like my challenges to be less discrete. I don't like WIN/LOSE, especially in games where "lose" means having to play large chunks of the game over again.

All I can presume is that these guys decided to "up the difficulty", but didn't know how to do that without making the player have to replay the area eight times.

Know your game mechanics. Know what constitutes a challenge and what constitutes just being an asshole.

One Panel Comics?

I've been thinking a lot about context. You have to establish context before you can twist or highlight things, so every game, movie, book, speech - everything out there starts by establishing a context. Movies even have a specific term for that long, establishing shot where they show bucolic fields or Brooklyn back streets or whatever. You need to show context so you can give meaning to whatever the meat of your presentation is.

There's a bunch of ways to build context. The most common is to let the visual be dominated by the context. If you're going to do a sports-theme, it's not uncommon for the first visuals to be of a game, or a locker room, or cheerleaders, or similar. The same is true of any kind of context. Familiar contexts can be built easily using this method, but unfamiliar contexts (like an American trying to understand a Shogunate-era context) take a lot more time to explain.

But I've been thinking about how to establish a context FAST.

So I turned to one-panel comics. These comics establish a context and put a twist on it so fast it makes your head spin.

The common way to do this is to have a visual context that everyone immediately sees, then a linguistic context that they read as a twist. Unlike a normal approach, this usually works in the reverse fashion you would expect. Instead of the context being normal and the twist being interesting, the context is often bizarre and the twist explains it. Therein lies the humor, usually.

The Far Side is the obvious example, but Family Circus and every political cartoon ever are also examples.

This is really an application of a more basic idea: that the context is established by the element that the audience recognizes first, then twisted by the element(s) the audience recognizes later. People see the visual context before they read the text, so the visual context is the context and the text is the twist.

But they also see the big visual elements before the little visual elements. A picture of giraffes with chicken heads will be context: giraffes, twist: chicken heads. It'll take people a split second to see the chicken heads. Then you can twist it even further with a bit of text, which is recognized later still.

Of course, this happens most easily by simply placing contexts and twists in chronological order and revealing them - we call that a "story". But it's always best to know the basis you're working from.

It's important to remember that some images are recognized faster than others - it's not merely size. In addition to fun visual tricks, some topics are simply more instantly recognizable. Darth Vader, for example. He's recognized faster than just a generic human. Nudity is also recognized faster, as is clear violence. (I've seen some comics where the violence was so muddy I couldn't recognize it AT ALL...)

I don't know if this is useful in any way, but I thought it was interesting.

The Idea of Rule Shifting

Most of the fun in a game comes from exploring the ways the rules and context interact.

In a platform game such as Megaman or Prince of Persia, the player explores how rules and context interact using simple rules and complex contexts. Ammo and health are unlikely to matter in ten minutes - you'll probably get boosted back to max between encounters.

Once the player starts getting used to the ways the rules interact with the contexts, these kinds of games will usually give the player an upgrade. Double-jump is a common example, as are immunity to spikes or a new special weapon. This changes the rules and lets the designer present all the contexts again, from a new perspective.

This is a tried and true method of making fun games.

Many games (such as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and most Final Fantasies) add a "stepped rule change" as well. These games continually change the rules of the game in small doses by allowing you to change your statistics - upgrade your attack, your defense. This slightly changes the rules of how you interact with the context. Because of this, these games do the "big shifts" less often.

In a classic platformer, you're likely to get an upgrade that somewhat changes the nature of the game every 2-3 levels, usually after each boss fight. In games with a more statistical approach, you'll generally get these kinds of upgrades only two or three times over the course of the whole game. In Final Fantasy, you generally get a chocobo, then an airship, for example. Often you start with no magic, then get magic. These are changes that alter the nature of the game, but they happen very rarely compared to Megaman getting a new gun. This is because the small rule changes tide the player over.

But those stepped rule changes - usually just statistical changes - aren't enough to run the whole game, as many really boring RPGs attest. Similarly, if you hand out too many rule changes of the same basic type, they essentially become stepped rule changes. It's great to go from a wrench to a pistol, and fun to go from a pistol to a shotgun, but going from a machine gun to a fletchette machine gun to a plasma machine gun to an autocannon is not nearly so entrancing. It's basically just a statistical upgrade with a new mesh slapped in. As many boring FPS games can attest.

A good rule of thumb is this: if it changes the way the game is played, it's a real rule change. If it simply changes how easily the player deals with a specific kind of content, it's a statistical change.

But statistical changes shouldn't get the short shaft, because they are often linked to a second game! For example, getting better statistics in an RPG usually involves killing monsters for XP and gold. This puts the focus of the game on killing monsters, unlike a game with no such curve - in Megaman it is common to simply get past the monsters without bothering to engage them.

Similarly, having a long-term ammo supply means that there is a second game of preserving and hunting for ammo. Done correctly, this will even make a player choose a sub-optimal weapon simply to preserve ammo for his more optimal weapons. Guns such as the BFG can exist because they have very little ammo - if ammo for these weapons is easy to come across, the game breaks.

These secondary games follow the same basic idea: they are fun because their context and rules interact in interesting ways. The context of the primary game is basically the level, but the context of the secondary game is, to a large extent, the primary game!

In some ways this means it is difficult to "plan" the contexts. However, you can simply look at the salient elements of the level and the gross rules: if the level is big on sniping, obviously the secondary game is going to be cast in the context of a sniping level. If the level is about jumping, the secondary game's context is jumping.

This gets more complex if the context is largely player-generated. For example, in most Final Fantasy games you get to develop your characters in any way you want. This means that the secondary game (gaining new powers and statistics) is largely affected by the context of how the secondary game has been played so far! It stopped being a linear system and turned into a multi-dimensional glowing purple frog.

Anyway, that's definitely enough writing on this subject. :P

Comments? Questions? Monkeys?

The Importance of Attrition

So, like a few other people, I've been complaining about the gameplay of Bioshock. I compare it to System Shock 2 and wonder whether they did any playtesting at all.

But, on the surface, it's almost identical to SS2. Vita chambers and quantum entanglement units are basically the same thing - they resurrect you when you die. Similarly, both games are about door-to-door mayhem with guns and hacking and psychic powers. Actually, if anything, Bioshock should be better because the psychic powers don't suck.

I won't claim that SS2 got the gameplay right on purpose. After all, they didn't get anything else right on purpose. But they got a whole lot right on accident - from level design to storytelling and over to enemy design. Presumably, they accidentally made the gameplay fun, too. Amusingly, these are all the things that Bioshock did not achieve. Even working from SS2's blueprints, they were unable to duplicate SS2's high points, although they did have high points of their own that System Shock did not achieve.

The two games can't be directly compared without taking into account the fact that SS2 is a butt-ugly game with a UI that shows its age. It is almost ten years old, after all. BUT, if we were to imagine SS2 bumped up to Bioshock level graphics, I would not have a hard time choosing a favorite.

The reason the SS2 is so much more fun for me is simple: it's scary. Really scary.

But Bioshock is about as scary as peeling paint.

They have the same gameplay! Why is one scary, the other not?

As you might have guessed, I'm claiming it's because of attrition.

There is an issue commonly called "the Quicksave Dilemma". Basically, PC games are expected to have a quicksave-quickload functionality. But this puts a hell of a lot of pressure on the game designers, because whenever the player does poorly, they simply load the game and go through the same situation with foreknowledge of everything. Rinse and repeat, and you have a player that basically goes through the game "cheating" past your challenges. This reduces the depth of the gameplay by "short circuiting" the parts of the gameplay that are about resource management. Who needs resources when you can re-load until you get through without losing any health?

This is a huge problem in surprise-based games. If a big part of the gameplay is stumbling into an unknown situation and then having to fight your way out, quicksave will destroy the game entirely. These days, surprise-based games largely leave the resource management section of the gameplay to atrophy, boosting the moment-to-moment adrenaline-inducing play to compensate. You see this in Doom III, for example, and in Bioshock.

The vita chambers - and the quantum entanglement units - are basically an automatic quicksave-quickload, with the added bonus that all your enemies stay injured. So it induces all the problems that quicksaving induces.

There are a couple of ways of reducing this quicksave problem, but my favorite (and the best for horror games) is by using attrition.

No given situation will kill you, unless you do something completely silly. No given enemy is likely to even hurt you much, unless they're a big nasty. And not only that, the enemies give themselves away: you know precisely where they are and what they are, because they jabber to themselves. "Babies need ressssst... babies need sleep!"

But as you go from room to room, you'll continually be hurt a little, and that really starts to add up. The same principle applies for ammo or any other resources: they slowly get used up.

This isn't really something you quicksave to beat. It's not a lot of damage, and you can't usually do all that much better by quickloading.

Instead, the game drags your resources down despite the fact that you can quicksave and quickload. This isn't perfect: some people are so addicted that they will quickload every time they are hit. Especially in this day and age, where quicksaving and quickloading are really quick - when I originally played SS2, the "quick"save took about seven seconds. But it is a fairly good solution, especially if your quicksaving has other restrictions.

It is what System Shock did. Virtually every enemy save the wrench zombies was likely to hit you in the amount of time it took you to kill them, and they would all use up precious precious bullets. It was why you always got nervous when you heard the monkeys... the damn monkeys!

Bioshock did the Doom III method. Instead of dragging on your resources, they give you a huge amount of resources and cap your maximum carry. After any given fight, you could go back and scrounge your way to full capacity pretty easily, especially in late game. This means that any given fight has to be a significant threat. Every enemy needs to at least have the capacity to kill you.

This means that every fight is worth quicksaving through. It means that you're going to die a lot, and it's not going to matter. In Bioshock, dying is quickloading.

In Bioshock, there is no attrition. In System Shock, there is.

System Shock is scary. Bioshock isn't.

...

Also, System Shock 2 didn't resort to numbering their spells. "Immolate 2"? "Immolate 3"? "Immolate-aga"? :(