It's been a while since I felt anything future-shocky. Culture is complicated, and even as science marches forward, culture hangs back and just kind of faffs around. But I did see something future-shocky this week. In a very early stage. Darius built a meme machine.
Meme machines have been around for a while, of course. Most of them are pretty basic, and their output is not what you'd consider "usable". If you use them or iterate them long enough you can get something useful out of it, but the percentage is low and the longevity is poor. A good example of this would be the objection engine, which produces the same kinds of output as Darius' bot, but with a different focus.
Both are "fan meme" engines. But Darius' engine operates 100% automatically. Just plug in a video with some subtitle tracks, and out pops animated gifs tagged properly. The sort of things fans make on their own, all the time. While the individual gifs aren't always good, they are tagged and ready to roll. In fact, you could even largely automate the distribution of them!
People are always considering the line between humans and "robots" - more accurately, humans and automation. They are always worried that robots are going to steal their jobs - or Mexicans are going to steal their jobs, or Polish people are going to steal their jobs, or women are going to steal their jobs, or gay people are going to... well, they worry about their jobs a lot. Out of all of those options, machines are the only one that actually steals jobs - as in, reduces the number of jobs required to perform a task.
That's because, put simply, automation makes it easier for a human to complete a task. Automation very rarely if ever reduces the number of humans involved to zero... but it does steadily divide the number of humans required for any given task.
As to the political/economic side of that argument... well, this isn't the essay for that argument, but let's just make it clear that I'm a bit of a technophile and there are an infinite variety of tasks to be done.
Most people think of physical labor when they think of robots replacing them. But the truth is more interesting: automation is predominately nonphysical. There's more software automation than physical human labor automation. I mean, every single computer on the face of the planet is literally automation. It is automation from the ground up.
We already use that automation for virtually every aspect of our personal lives. Our bus fares are automated. Our mail is automated. Our research is automated. Our entertainment is automated.
We have this weird line drawn in our head where our opinions are not automated. We hold that beliefs are somehow 100% human and cannot be automated.
Well, that's wrong.
As Darius shows, it's actually not that hard to stick an automatic thumb into the human mind.
Like any kind of automation, it's not that the human is written out. It's that the task of believing, of being a fanboy... is being augmented. Fewer humans can accomplish more of the "fanboy" task. The fanboy robot does not replace humans, but it augments them such that vastly more task can be done. Not every gif is worthy of use, but a human can easily go through 100 gifs and choose the best few. It takes no expertise. And, in fact, it actually makes that person MORE of a fan than they probably were before, because they are partaking in an act of creation, no matter how indirect.
So... what I'm trying to say is:
Everyone who creates a TV show should probably pay Darius to do this for them. It won't create fans out of thin air, but it does allow the fans to produce vastly more "fan culture". It allows your fans to be more effective.
We're not at the stage where the "fan culture" task is maxed out. I think we'll see it evolve a few more times before we get to the point where humans are "fired" from being fans because there's too much fan labor and not enough fan tasks that need doing.
But, hey, I look forward to that future. It sounds amazing.
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Monday, August 12, 2013
DarkStarlike
One of the kinds of gameplay I like is base-building - or, more accurately, house-building.
I really liked The Sims, but the focus on it being a time management game always wore on me. I didn't like that mechanic, especially since it punished building large, beautiful houses and rewarded building cramped little zig-zag houses. What's the point of building a house if you're going to be punished for building a nice one?
I've always wanted to do the opposite: a game where time isn't short, but long. I became interested in facilities that are inhabited. Really lived in. The exact opposite of The Sims, it's a game where you build your base specifically to keep your inhabitants happy in the long term, as they live in it for days, weeks, years. Not "how efficient can you make it", but "how long-lasting can you make it", both in terms of mechanical components lasting for a long time and in terms of keeping the inhabitants happy with their daily lives and interactions as time wears on and on.
That's why my most recent prototype is codenamed 'Dark Star'. If you haven't seen it, Dark Star was made before Alien, and then the script was reworked and refilmed and called "Alien". It's about a crew of a deep-space mining vessel, as time wears on them and they are harassed by an unimaginably stupid "terror". Unsurprisingly, since John Carpenter directed both, it also has a lot in common with The Thing. But the focus is less on the alien terror and more on the steadily unraveling humans stuck in isolation for years at a time. And it's also a comedy, rather than a horror movie.
Any way you cut it, the difficulty of this concept as a game is how you model the inhabitants. Their behavior has to be simple enough to be meaty, but also support the steady unraveling and social pressures teams suffer when isolated for long periods of time. This is doubly important for my needs, because the game is intended to allow you to leave ships in various places and use them to either gather scientific data, materials, or hook up with other ships later and serve as supply points. There's going to be multiple ships out in the universe, so the modeling has to be something that the player can grasp relatively quickly. They'll have forgotten the precise details of what's going in ship 1 when they're flying ship 9.
I thought about it a lot, but I couldn't come up with a very good mechanic. They were all really "The Sims"y, based on needs and proximity and so on. It got complicated, because you had to do things like assign rooms and jobs and manage shifts so that people would encounter each other - just a huge headache. I needed something that would run in an obvious manner at high timescales, as well as be easily and deeply modified whenever you wanted.
So, here's the simple idea:
The ship is a grid. Each inhabitant can be "posted" at one particular grid node. However, that's not their physical position: we don't actually care about their physical position for our simulation (although we do care about it for visuals). From their post, they project a "+" pattern - a beam in each orthogonal direction. All the tiles their beam hits are tiles which concern them. Those are the tiles they use or maintain day-to-day. So it should obviously include a place to sleep and a place to eat and a place to relax, whatever you can manage... and it should also hit the facilities they are responsible for repairing or using. The "+" pattern has no end - if your ship is 500 tiles wide, they will be concerned with 500 tiles horizontally (and howevermany a vertical slice is, as well). So larger ships allow characters a wider variety of facilities... and a much heavier maintenance duty, if you aren't careful.
In terms of maintenance, it's best to have enough sailors to cover every single tile. Tiles that aren't covered aren't maintained. For some tiles, that's okay. But most facilities need maintenance. Similarly, a work station means nothing if nobody works at it.
In terms of socializing, when two beams overlap that's a social encounter that the characters will have regularly - maybe not every day, but fairly regularly. The kind of social interaction depends on the kind of facility at the overlap. So if they overlap at a mess hall, they tend to eat lunch together. Characters aligned diagonally will always interact at precisely two points, so you can control what sort of interaction they have and what kind of social sustenance they provide by carefully choosing which points you interact on - if both points are the same kind of interaction, it's much more powerful but also much more limited.
On the other hand, inhabitants can also be aligned on the same beam - either horizontally or vertically. (They can't be on precisely the same space, though.) In this case, there are a massive number of overlaps: every single tile along that axis. This can be a very powerful way to create plenty of social interactions... but overloading is often worse than going without, so care needs to be taken.
The core idea is that the characters have particular social characteristics and needs. Each character is probably marked by obvious appearance characteristics as to what sort of needs they have - otherwise it would be a bit difficult to tell quickly enough for my taste. You could replace that with a series of floating icons or something if you really want to avoid stereotypes, but I was planning on using floating icons for what their actual state is. Requirements/tendencies are different from actual state.
Then it's a simple matter of calculating from their various activities, and moving from your current state towards the calculated state by some amount per day (10%?).
The most basic element is your personal needs. You need a bedroom, a washroom, and a place to eat on your beams. If you don't have them, you'll quickly get annoyed. If you have extra good ones, that might help to blunt your mood swings! However, this is just a very basic baseline. Things get more complex from then:
You can calculate interpersonal interactions by simply looking at all the places your beams collide with other crewfolk's beams. This is a social interaction, and of the type the room specifies. The bad news is that this isn't scaled. On a ship with, say, 100 crew, you'd probably have 198 interactions, assuming none of the other crewmembers have the same X or Y coordinate as you. (There are ways to build a ship where the intersections happen in empty space or on incorrect job rooms, which can lessen that, but in general it stands.)
This is made much worse when someone shares a coordinate with you, because they'll overlap on around half of your rooms in most cases, meaning you can easily rack up the width or height of the ship with interactions with that one person.
Individuals can blunt this automatically, however. Any room they touch with a beam that nobody else touches with a beam is considered personal space, and they can use it to avoid 1 interpersonal interaction. So if I have 8 interpersonal interactions and 4 personal spaces, I can negate 4 of those interactions - and I'll automatically negate the ones that are the most problematic for me. If I'm not overdosing, I don't need to negate any of them. This doesn't mean you don't meet up with the other person, it just means that you also spend some time alone.
Obviously, if someone shares a coordinate with you, then all the rooms on that axis are going to be shared rooms because they have the same beams as you. This means that it's going to really limit your personal space.
The other kind of social input is the rooms you touch - shared or otherwise. This really only matters in small ships, because it's capped. If you touch three rooms, they'll each give you 33% of the social input you would have gotten if someone interacted with you there. But if you touch 100 rooms, you only get 1% each. So, as the ship gets larger, the contributions trend towards a very low baseline.
Some rooms count differently depending on your skills/job/tendencies. For example, a medical doctor isn't going to get any benefit from a deep space scanning room, and a astrophysicist won't get any benefit from a med bay... even if the two overlap on it and theoretically have a social encounter. It just does nothing. So it's critical to have a very quick and easy "read" of the situation, which is simple enough. Just color and mark the beams, and estimate the social situation for the crewmember a few weeks into the journey.
As the journey wears on, that might change. People's fundamental tendencies slowly drift out of kilter based on their long-term actual states. But it's a good enough estimation to keep a newbie in the game and not terribly confused. We can also implement some kind of actual relationship growth as well, if we like, which would further drive them off kilter - probably mostly driven by someone having lots of the same kind of social interaction with you.
All told, this system should make it very easy to estimate how people will interact socially, while also linking everything to a fun and complex space station/ship game which lets you build, leverage, launch, and reuse ships. It seems like a fun combination of managing social topology, work, and ship maintenance. Rather than being about dealing and repairing damage from space battles, it's all about trying to create a ship that operates well for extremely long periods of time, including when damaged or on the fritz or a crewmember is sick.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and program it some more.
I really liked The Sims, but the focus on it being a time management game always wore on me. I didn't like that mechanic, especially since it punished building large, beautiful houses and rewarded building cramped little zig-zag houses. What's the point of building a house if you're going to be punished for building a nice one?
I've always wanted to do the opposite: a game where time isn't short, but long. I became interested in facilities that are inhabited. Really lived in. The exact opposite of The Sims, it's a game where you build your base specifically to keep your inhabitants happy in the long term, as they live in it for days, weeks, years. Not "how efficient can you make it", but "how long-lasting can you make it", both in terms of mechanical components lasting for a long time and in terms of keeping the inhabitants happy with their daily lives and interactions as time wears on and on.
That's why my most recent prototype is codenamed 'Dark Star'. If you haven't seen it, Dark Star was made before Alien, and then the script was reworked and refilmed and called "Alien". It's about a crew of a deep-space mining vessel, as time wears on them and they are harassed by an unimaginably stupid "terror". Unsurprisingly, since John Carpenter directed both, it also has a lot in common with The Thing. But the focus is less on the alien terror and more on the steadily unraveling humans stuck in isolation for years at a time. And it's also a comedy, rather than a horror movie.
Any way you cut it, the difficulty of this concept as a game is how you model the inhabitants. Their behavior has to be simple enough to be meaty, but also support the steady unraveling and social pressures teams suffer when isolated for long periods of time. This is doubly important for my needs, because the game is intended to allow you to leave ships in various places and use them to either gather scientific data, materials, or hook up with other ships later and serve as supply points. There's going to be multiple ships out in the universe, so the modeling has to be something that the player can grasp relatively quickly. They'll have forgotten the precise details of what's going in ship 1 when they're flying ship 9.
I thought about it a lot, but I couldn't come up with a very good mechanic. They were all really "The Sims"y, based on needs and proximity and so on. It got complicated, because you had to do things like assign rooms and jobs and manage shifts so that people would encounter each other - just a huge headache. I needed something that would run in an obvious manner at high timescales, as well as be easily and deeply modified whenever you wanted.
So, here's the simple idea:
The ship is a grid. Each inhabitant can be "posted" at one particular grid node. However, that's not their physical position: we don't actually care about their physical position for our simulation (although we do care about it for visuals). From their post, they project a "+" pattern - a beam in each orthogonal direction. All the tiles their beam hits are tiles which concern them. Those are the tiles they use or maintain day-to-day. So it should obviously include a place to sleep and a place to eat and a place to relax, whatever you can manage... and it should also hit the facilities they are responsible for repairing or using. The "+" pattern has no end - if your ship is 500 tiles wide, they will be concerned with 500 tiles horizontally (and howevermany a vertical slice is, as well). So larger ships allow characters a wider variety of facilities... and a much heavier maintenance duty, if you aren't careful.
In terms of maintenance, it's best to have enough sailors to cover every single tile. Tiles that aren't covered aren't maintained. For some tiles, that's okay. But most facilities need maintenance. Similarly, a work station means nothing if nobody works at it.
In terms of socializing, when two beams overlap that's a social encounter that the characters will have regularly - maybe not every day, but fairly regularly. The kind of social interaction depends on the kind of facility at the overlap. So if they overlap at a mess hall, they tend to eat lunch together. Characters aligned diagonally will always interact at precisely two points, so you can control what sort of interaction they have and what kind of social sustenance they provide by carefully choosing which points you interact on - if both points are the same kind of interaction, it's much more powerful but also much more limited.
On the other hand, inhabitants can also be aligned on the same beam - either horizontally or vertically. (They can't be on precisely the same space, though.) In this case, there are a massive number of overlaps: every single tile along that axis. This can be a very powerful way to create plenty of social interactions... but overloading is often worse than going without, so care needs to be taken.
The core idea is that the characters have particular social characteristics and needs. Each character is probably marked by obvious appearance characteristics as to what sort of needs they have - otherwise it would be a bit difficult to tell quickly enough for my taste. You could replace that with a series of floating icons or something if you really want to avoid stereotypes, but I was planning on using floating icons for what their actual state is. Requirements/tendencies are different from actual state.
Then it's a simple matter of calculating from their various activities, and moving from your current state towards the calculated state by some amount per day (10%?).
The most basic element is your personal needs. You need a bedroom, a washroom, and a place to eat on your beams. If you don't have them, you'll quickly get annoyed. If you have extra good ones, that might help to blunt your mood swings! However, this is just a very basic baseline. Things get more complex from then:
You can calculate interpersonal interactions by simply looking at all the places your beams collide with other crewfolk's beams. This is a social interaction, and of the type the room specifies. The bad news is that this isn't scaled. On a ship with, say, 100 crew, you'd probably have 198 interactions, assuming none of the other crewmembers have the same X or Y coordinate as you. (There are ways to build a ship where the intersections happen in empty space or on incorrect job rooms, which can lessen that, but in general it stands.)
This is made much worse when someone shares a coordinate with you, because they'll overlap on around half of your rooms in most cases, meaning you can easily rack up the width or height of the ship with interactions with that one person.
Individuals can blunt this automatically, however. Any room they touch with a beam that nobody else touches with a beam is considered personal space, and they can use it to avoid 1 interpersonal interaction. So if I have 8 interpersonal interactions and 4 personal spaces, I can negate 4 of those interactions - and I'll automatically negate the ones that are the most problematic for me. If I'm not overdosing, I don't need to negate any of them. This doesn't mean you don't meet up with the other person, it just means that you also spend some time alone.
Obviously, if someone shares a coordinate with you, then all the rooms on that axis are going to be shared rooms because they have the same beams as you. This means that it's going to really limit your personal space.
The other kind of social input is the rooms you touch - shared or otherwise. This really only matters in small ships, because it's capped. If you touch three rooms, they'll each give you 33% of the social input you would have gotten if someone interacted with you there. But if you touch 100 rooms, you only get 1% each. So, as the ship gets larger, the contributions trend towards a very low baseline.
Some rooms count differently depending on your skills/job/tendencies. For example, a medical doctor isn't going to get any benefit from a deep space scanning room, and a astrophysicist won't get any benefit from a med bay... even if the two overlap on it and theoretically have a social encounter. It just does nothing. So it's critical to have a very quick and easy "read" of the situation, which is simple enough. Just color and mark the beams, and estimate the social situation for the crewmember a few weeks into the journey.
As the journey wears on, that might change. People's fundamental tendencies slowly drift out of kilter based on their long-term actual states. But it's a good enough estimation to keep a newbie in the game and not terribly confused. We can also implement some kind of actual relationship growth as well, if we like, which would further drive them off kilter - probably mostly driven by someone having lots of the same kind of social interaction with you.
All told, this system should make it very easy to estimate how people will interact socially, while also linking everything to a fun and complex space station/ship game which lets you build, leverage, launch, and reuse ships. It seems like a fun combination of managing social topology, work, and ship maintenance. Rather than being about dealing and repairing damage from space battles, it's all about trying to create a ship that operates well for extremely long periods of time, including when damaged or on the fritz or a crewmember is sick.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and program it some more.
Saturday, August 10, 2013
Constructive Implicit Goals
I've been thinking about intrinsic goals, and how to create them.
Most games have goals that are stated. Kill the monster, shoot the alien, save the princess. But these games also have goals that aren't stated.
For example: you have some time, gold, and XP before you get to the monster's castle - how will you spend them? The fundamental rules about how your character interacts with the world determine the kinds of things you'll consider doing.
Grinding a bit to get the super-sword. Learning to use the fire-ice combo to kill hordes. Searching for the hidden nook that might have a treasure in it...
These are unstated goals. The game doesn't simply say "you should grind!" Instead, it simply allows you to fight while traveling from one place to another. The player quickly realizes that he can travel as much as he likes in order to get into those fights. The fundamental construction of the world allows the player to figure this out and do as much or as little as she likes.
However, that's a baby's toy - the tiniest of potentials, just enough to let the player feel like they aren't bored. An example of taking this to an extreme would be - obviously - Kerbal. Yes, I'm still talking about Kerbal.
Kerbal has no stated goals, and you really don't gain anything like experience points or such. However, there are a lot of goals built right into the world. Or, rather, the world exists to allow the player to create their own goals.
The most obvious things are the planets and moons. Each of them is a target you may want to reach. None of them have any particular reward for reaching them - they're just various sizes and atmospheres of rock. However, they have very unique physical characteristics, so reaching each is a distinct challenge.
The planets and moons are just the quick in, though - the obvious foothold. It takes almost no time to discover that the real power behind Kerbal's longevity is the physics of the universe. The planets do follow those physics, so you could say that the planets are simply specific instances, almost simply samples of how the physics can work. The core draw is the physics.
More specifically, movement.
The movement rules in Kerbal, along with the several kinds of visualizations used to help you plan your movement out, make moving an interesting challenge.
You can talk about splitting it up - launching, achieving orbit, transferring orbit, landing, docking, flying in atmosphere, supersonic flying, and so on. But they all use the same few core mechanics: position, velocity, gravity, drag. The existence of planets, especially your starting planet, provide a fun set of bumps and gradients to use, mixing the mechanics up and also prodding you into filling in your own instances. While you can't launch objects that create gravitic or atmospheric bumps, you can launch objects that have cyclic position and velocity, meaning you can use them as waypoints. Dock with them.
Anyway, this gives a very powerful set of implicit goals. Not simply because there are obvious implicit goals like in an RPG, but because the act of aiming for the obvious implicit goals makes you realize that your actions can create more implicit goals in a constructive manner. It's less like an RPG, and more like if every RPG party you sent out into the world remained there, ready and waiting for you to team up with them using another party you create later, or can be slotted into towns to make the town reshape the landscape...
Thinking about this kind of constructive implicit goals, I've created a variety of theoretical options. One such example is the RPG system briefly mentioned above, but nearly any kind of genre or theme could work. The key is that you need to give up on imposing a structured progression. Instead, you need to provide hooks to get them started, and the ability to work off of the things they build while chasing the hooks.
So if you want to make a fantasy RPG where that's the case, you would create a vast and inhospitable series of planes, each more dangerous than the last and filled with a spotty spattering of cities, ruins, and monster-gods.
Your actions would be to create adventuring parties, then guide them around - fighting monsters or avoiding them or whatever. Moving uses up some adventurer spirit - the more adventurers in your party, the less you move per point of adventurer spirit. You can stop wherever you like, whether you're out of spirit or not... but once you run out of spirit, you can't move any more. There's various kinds of long-term things you can do while stopped, depending on what adventurers are in your party. These generally change the map slightly in your favor in some manner.
Similarly, certain kinds of adventurers are vastly less mobile on certain kinds of terrain. If you're okay with sticking to roads, then horse-mounted knights will be ideal. If you want to move through the jungle, you'd be better off with rangerly elves.
If another party reaches you, then the two parties can exchange whatever members they want, and transfer whatever adventure spirit quantities remain between the two parties as they like. Some adventurers can generate spirit once they settle down permanently, so this is a valuable contribution: stop by and get your spirit recharged.
Anyway, the game would need to be somewhat carefully crafted such that your party mechanics are a bit more complex than "N members walking along". You'd probably construct a party out of social links - this guy is the leader, those three are sworn companions, etc. These links would provide a structure to help respond to challenges in a manner well-suited to your needs. A lot more work needs to be done on the design of it before you can say "okay! That's it!"
Anyway, there's lots of other genres you could start to think about, but since it involves iterative building, every genre would have to be re-cast such that there was some kind of iteration. So a first person shooter - you'd probably have to play a series of different marines or something.
It's a fun thought experiment.
Most games have goals that are stated. Kill the monster, shoot the alien, save the princess. But these games also have goals that aren't stated.
For example: you have some time, gold, and XP before you get to the monster's castle - how will you spend them? The fundamental rules about how your character interacts with the world determine the kinds of things you'll consider doing.
Grinding a bit to get the super-sword. Learning to use the fire-ice combo to kill hordes. Searching for the hidden nook that might have a treasure in it...
These are unstated goals. The game doesn't simply say "you should grind!" Instead, it simply allows you to fight while traveling from one place to another. The player quickly realizes that he can travel as much as he likes in order to get into those fights. The fundamental construction of the world allows the player to figure this out and do as much or as little as she likes.
However, that's a baby's toy - the tiniest of potentials, just enough to let the player feel like they aren't bored. An example of taking this to an extreme would be - obviously - Kerbal. Yes, I'm still talking about Kerbal.
Kerbal has no stated goals, and you really don't gain anything like experience points or such. However, there are a lot of goals built right into the world. Or, rather, the world exists to allow the player to create their own goals.
The most obvious things are the planets and moons. Each of them is a target you may want to reach. None of them have any particular reward for reaching them - they're just various sizes and atmospheres of rock. However, they have very unique physical characteristics, so reaching each is a distinct challenge.
The planets and moons are just the quick in, though - the obvious foothold. It takes almost no time to discover that the real power behind Kerbal's longevity is the physics of the universe. The planets do follow those physics, so you could say that the planets are simply specific instances, almost simply samples of how the physics can work. The core draw is the physics.
More specifically, movement.
The movement rules in Kerbal, along with the several kinds of visualizations used to help you plan your movement out, make moving an interesting challenge.
You can talk about splitting it up - launching, achieving orbit, transferring orbit, landing, docking, flying in atmosphere, supersonic flying, and so on. But they all use the same few core mechanics: position, velocity, gravity, drag. The existence of planets, especially your starting planet, provide a fun set of bumps and gradients to use, mixing the mechanics up and also prodding you into filling in your own instances. While you can't launch objects that create gravitic or atmospheric bumps, you can launch objects that have cyclic position and velocity, meaning you can use them as waypoints. Dock with them.
Anyway, this gives a very powerful set of implicit goals. Not simply because there are obvious implicit goals like in an RPG, but because the act of aiming for the obvious implicit goals makes you realize that your actions can create more implicit goals in a constructive manner. It's less like an RPG, and more like if every RPG party you sent out into the world remained there, ready and waiting for you to team up with them using another party you create later, or can be slotted into towns to make the town reshape the landscape...
Thinking about this kind of constructive implicit goals, I've created a variety of theoretical options. One such example is the RPG system briefly mentioned above, but nearly any kind of genre or theme could work. The key is that you need to give up on imposing a structured progression. Instead, you need to provide hooks to get them started, and the ability to work off of the things they build while chasing the hooks.
So if you want to make a fantasy RPG where that's the case, you would create a vast and inhospitable series of planes, each more dangerous than the last and filled with a spotty spattering of cities, ruins, and monster-gods.
Your actions would be to create adventuring parties, then guide them around - fighting monsters or avoiding them or whatever. Moving uses up some adventurer spirit - the more adventurers in your party, the less you move per point of adventurer spirit. You can stop wherever you like, whether you're out of spirit or not... but once you run out of spirit, you can't move any more. There's various kinds of long-term things you can do while stopped, depending on what adventurers are in your party. These generally change the map slightly in your favor in some manner.
Similarly, certain kinds of adventurers are vastly less mobile on certain kinds of terrain. If you're okay with sticking to roads, then horse-mounted knights will be ideal. If you want to move through the jungle, you'd be better off with rangerly elves.
If another party reaches you, then the two parties can exchange whatever members they want, and transfer whatever adventure spirit quantities remain between the two parties as they like. Some adventurers can generate spirit once they settle down permanently, so this is a valuable contribution: stop by and get your spirit recharged.
Anyway, the game would need to be somewhat carefully crafted such that your party mechanics are a bit more complex than "N members walking along". You'd probably construct a party out of social links - this guy is the leader, those three are sworn companions, etc. These links would provide a structure to help respond to challenges in a manner well-suited to your needs. A lot more work needs to be done on the design of it before you can say "okay! That's it!"
Anyway, there's lots of other genres you could start to think about, but since it involves iterative building, every genre would have to be re-cast such that there was some kind of iteration. So a first person shooter - you'd probably have to play a series of different marines or something.
It's a fun thought experiment.
Friday, August 09, 2013
Alternate Mod Multiplayer
I said this in passing on Twitter, but the more I think about it, the better an idea it seems to be.
Part one: multiplayer Kerbal. A shared universe where you can dock at each other's space stations and so on. I think it'd be a lot more fun to build things if other people could see what you built. The complexity here is in the inherent asynchronous nature of the game, but I think you could use a combination of check-ins and flight reviews to handle that. So if I launch a rocket, then the other players can watch how it is going/how it went at whatever speeds they like, including allowing me to make notes (audio or text) explaining things.
Live multiplayer might also be possible and fun, with each player controlling a piece of the mission. For example, one player launching a rocket and the other player tracking it and beaming power to it.
Part two: multiplayer Kerbal with mods.
Here's the key: each player can have different mods installed. Think of it as each player being a different nationality, and each nation having slightly different technologies. If you want to change out your mods, just switch nationalities - or create a new nationality that has the mods you want.
Part mods tend to work very well with each other - there's not going to be a crash because you installed three different kinds of fuselage parts. But operational mods do tend to conflict and crash, at least in the older versions. I say - okay! Let's make that a part of the gameplay! If you have operational mods installed and they conflict then, guess what? The the technologies aren't compatible. One nation should have one, another nation the other! You can download "nation packs" of parts and mods as well as downloading those separately, allowing for a wider variety of customization. Nation packs could also alter things like texture packs, flags, Kerbin colors...
Multiplayer games could therefore be with each player playing a given nation, giving them unique capabilities. I might have those giant 5-meter launch arrays, but I don't have the enregy-beaming capabilities that my friend does. Maybe I launch one of his payloads on one of my rockets! I can't use his ship - that mod isn't active for me, so I can't take control - but, conversely, he can't take control of the launch stage. Cooperation!
Also, very relaxed asynchronicity as we need it. I could simply hit "pause" on the mission when I separate from his payload, then check in the universe. He would then be able to play that mission out visually, see my commentary, and immediately take control over his payload when he hits the end of the recorded mission.
Of course, you could do all the same things single player, but it wouldn't be as interesting...
Anyway, I like the idea. It's sort of like allowing players to have different tech trees, but with player-constructed mods as the "levels" of the "tree" instead of pre-planning it!
Part one: multiplayer Kerbal. A shared universe where you can dock at each other's space stations and so on. I think it'd be a lot more fun to build things if other people could see what you built. The complexity here is in the inherent asynchronous nature of the game, but I think you could use a combination of check-ins and flight reviews to handle that. So if I launch a rocket, then the other players can watch how it is going/how it went at whatever speeds they like, including allowing me to make notes (audio or text) explaining things.
Live multiplayer might also be possible and fun, with each player controlling a piece of the mission. For example, one player launching a rocket and the other player tracking it and beaming power to it.
Part two: multiplayer Kerbal with mods.
Here's the key: each player can have different mods installed. Think of it as each player being a different nationality, and each nation having slightly different technologies. If you want to change out your mods, just switch nationalities - or create a new nationality that has the mods you want.
Part mods tend to work very well with each other - there's not going to be a crash because you installed three different kinds of fuselage parts. But operational mods do tend to conflict and crash, at least in the older versions. I say - okay! Let's make that a part of the gameplay! If you have operational mods installed and they conflict then, guess what? The the technologies aren't compatible. One nation should have one, another nation the other! You can download "nation packs" of parts and mods as well as downloading those separately, allowing for a wider variety of customization. Nation packs could also alter things like texture packs, flags, Kerbin colors...
Multiplayer games could therefore be with each player playing a given nation, giving them unique capabilities. I might have those giant 5-meter launch arrays, but I don't have the enregy-beaming capabilities that my friend does. Maybe I launch one of his payloads on one of my rockets! I can't use his ship - that mod isn't active for me, so I can't take control - but, conversely, he can't take control of the launch stage. Cooperation!
Also, very relaxed asynchronicity as we need it. I could simply hit "pause" on the mission when I separate from his payload, then check in the universe. He would then be able to play that mission out visually, see my commentary, and immediately take control over his payload when he hits the end of the recorded mission.
Of course, you could do all the same things single player, but it wouldn't be as interesting...
Anyway, I like the idea. It's sort of like allowing players to have different tech trees, but with player-constructed mods as the "levels" of the "tree" instead of pre-planning it!
Thursday, August 08, 2013
Gleeful Gaming
So, I've been thinking about games that make me feel glee.
"Fun" is such an awful term, because it's so vague and wishy-washy. Every game feels different, and most of them are at least somewhat fun. Let's talk about one kind of fun in particular: glee.
Glee is a pretty rare thing to find in games. It's easy to find games that make you smile, or laugh, or shout in triumph... but it's really uncommon to find a game that gives you the kind of lighthearted joy I'm talking about.
Katamari Damacy did it. Playing Katamari Damacy was always such a gleeful experience. At least until they started adding in missions like "pick up all the hot things but not the cold things". At that point, the game lost that gleeful feeling for me, although it continued to be fun in other ways.
On the other hand, Saints Row III started off fun in other ways, but became more and more gleeful as the game went on. I had problems with that game - especially the pacing - but it was one of the rare, treasured gleeful experiences.
Kerbal Space Program is gleeful, too. Building a ridiculous rocket and trying to get to the outer planets with a heavy space station is the same kind of gleeful experience as trying to fly between two bridges in a VTOL while dressed in a pink tuxedo. To me, they feel the same.
But lots of games you might expect to be gleeful, aren't. Angry Birds is fun, but never gleeful. Mass Effect: fun, not gleeful. Racing games: fun, not gleeful.
I think for me to feel glee, there has to be an open constructive element to the game. There can be missions and objectives, there can be constraints, but they have to accept the constructions and choices I've made.
In Katamari's standard missions, exploring the levels is fun because the context is always changing. Even if I come back in a later play-through and explore it again, being bigger or smaller or coming in from a different direction can change the experience so much! By accepting my construction - size, direction - it makes me feel like it's playing with me, rather than against me. On the other hand, in Katamari's challenge missions, it's usually a matter of trying to find the one best path within the time limit. Fun, but highly restrictive and not interested in what I have to say for myself.
SR3 was also gleeful. There were plenty of missions and constraints, but in most cases it let me roll into the mission with whatever character I had built. That includes body, clothes, personality... but also upgrades and weapons. In fact, the irritating missions in SR3 are universally the ones where you have to use the provided weapons to protect the provided NPC health level. These were not simply hard: they were annoying, because they rejected my character choices in favor of providing their own.
Kerbal, of course, almost goes without saying. The whole game is built around letting you provide the construction for the gameplay part.
The three examples I gave are very goofy, but I don't think goofyness is actually a core part of feeling glee. I have felt glee at non-goofy games.
For example, Dragon's Dogma. Not a goofy game, but I felt a lot of glee running around that world. Again, that's probably because the gameplay accepted my constructions, accepted my choices.
As a counter-example to show the fine detail of how this works and fails to work: Sim City games do not make me feel glee. Their simulations are too aggressive, and rather than accept my choices, they punish me for choosing things they don't like. So it's not gleeful at all, although it is fun.
"But Kerbal has that kind of system, too!" you say. Well, that's true: in Kerbal, it is very easy to build a rocket "the way you want" only to have it explode violently. But in Kerbal, the iteration is very short and the punishment is hilariously fun. If you do something Sim City doesn't like, you spend ten hours getting slowly punished for it. If you do something Kerbal doesn't like, you explode five feet off the launch pad and watch all your rockets go spinning off every which way. Moreover, you can then go right back to your rocket design and tweak it, while in Sim City that's not as easy to do due to the difficulty of editing a city and the very long delays before you get a good grasp on whether something is working out.
In all of these games, the times when I lose that gleeful feeling are the times when the game steals my time away because of something I didn't realize would happen. The big annoyance in Dragon's Dogma? Falling off a cliff and having to revert to a save from fifteen minutes ago. In Kerbal? Landing on the Mun only to find that the hatch "is obstructed" by something and won't open. In Saints Row 3? Hm... I don't think I ever felt irritated at that game, except at the low number of clothing options.
As far as I can tell, here are the tenets for making me feel glee:
1) I must be able to construct my avatar. Not necessarily entirely freely, but with very little effort. Whether this is in customizing clothes, building my rocket, gaining skills, or just changing my size and position in a lasting, meaningful way.
2) Challenges, whether implicit or explicit, must accept my constructions.
3) Failure should be fun, and not set me back more than 5 minutes unless I've personally chosen to make the situation last more than that long.
4) Let me choose what I want to try to accomplish, when.
5) Don't distract me.
As a side note, all the games I've spent 80+ hours on have made me feel glee, and nearly all the games that make me feel glee I spent 80+ hours on.
"Fun" is such an awful term, because it's so vague and wishy-washy. Every game feels different, and most of them are at least somewhat fun. Let's talk about one kind of fun in particular: glee.
Glee is a pretty rare thing to find in games. It's easy to find games that make you smile, or laugh, or shout in triumph... but it's really uncommon to find a game that gives you the kind of lighthearted joy I'm talking about.
Katamari Damacy did it. Playing Katamari Damacy was always such a gleeful experience. At least until they started adding in missions like "pick up all the hot things but not the cold things". At that point, the game lost that gleeful feeling for me, although it continued to be fun in other ways.
On the other hand, Saints Row III started off fun in other ways, but became more and more gleeful as the game went on. I had problems with that game - especially the pacing - but it was one of the rare, treasured gleeful experiences.
Kerbal Space Program is gleeful, too. Building a ridiculous rocket and trying to get to the outer planets with a heavy space station is the same kind of gleeful experience as trying to fly between two bridges in a VTOL while dressed in a pink tuxedo. To me, they feel the same.
But lots of games you might expect to be gleeful, aren't. Angry Birds is fun, but never gleeful. Mass Effect: fun, not gleeful. Racing games: fun, not gleeful.
I think for me to feel glee, there has to be an open constructive element to the game. There can be missions and objectives, there can be constraints, but they have to accept the constructions and choices I've made.
In Katamari's standard missions, exploring the levels is fun because the context is always changing. Even if I come back in a later play-through and explore it again, being bigger or smaller or coming in from a different direction can change the experience so much! By accepting my construction - size, direction - it makes me feel like it's playing with me, rather than against me. On the other hand, in Katamari's challenge missions, it's usually a matter of trying to find the one best path within the time limit. Fun, but highly restrictive and not interested in what I have to say for myself.
SR3 was also gleeful. There were plenty of missions and constraints, but in most cases it let me roll into the mission with whatever character I had built. That includes body, clothes, personality... but also upgrades and weapons. In fact, the irritating missions in SR3 are universally the ones where you have to use the provided weapons to protect the provided NPC health level. These were not simply hard: they were annoying, because they rejected my character choices in favor of providing their own.
Kerbal, of course, almost goes without saying. The whole game is built around letting you provide the construction for the gameplay part.
The three examples I gave are very goofy, but I don't think goofyness is actually a core part of feeling glee. I have felt glee at non-goofy games.
For example, Dragon's Dogma. Not a goofy game, but I felt a lot of glee running around that world. Again, that's probably because the gameplay accepted my constructions, accepted my choices.
As a counter-example to show the fine detail of how this works and fails to work: Sim City games do not make me feel glee. Their simulations are too aggressive, and rather than accept my choices, they punish me for choosing things they don't like. So it's not gleeful at all, although it is fun.
"But Kerbal has that kind of system, too!" you say. Well, that's true: in Kerbal, it is very easy to build a rocket "the way you want" only to have it explode violently. But in Kerbal, the iteration is very short and the punishment is hilariously fun. If you do something Sim City doesn't like, you spend ten hours getting slowly punished for it. If you do something Kerbal doesn't like, you explode five feet off the launch pad and watch all your rockets go spinning off every which way. Moreover, you can then go right back to your rocket design and tweak it, while in Sim City that's not as easy to do due to the difficulty of editing a city and the very long delays before you get a good grasp on whether something is working out.
In all of these games, the times when I lose that gleeful feeling are the times when the game steals my time away because of something I didn't realize would happen. The big annoyance in Dragon's Dogma? Falling off a cliff and having to revert to a save from fifteen minutes ago. In Kerbal? Landing on the Mun only to find that the hatch "is obstructed" by something and won't open. In Saints Row 3? Hm... I don't think I ever felt irritated at that game, except at the low number of clothing options.
As far as I can tell, here are the tenets for making me feel glee:
1) I must be able to construct my avatar. Not necessarily entirely freely, but with very little effort. Whether this is in customizing clothes, building my rocket, gaining skills, or just changing my size and position in a lasting, meaningful way.
2) Challenges, whether implicit or explicit, must accept my constructions.
3) Failure should be fun, and not set me back more than 5 minutes unless I've personally chosen to make the situation last more than that long.
4) Let me choose what I want to try to accomplish, when.
5) Don't distract me.
As a side note, all the games I've spent 80+ hours on have made me feel glee, and nearly all the games that make me feel glee I spent 80+ hours on.
Monday, August 05, 2013
Magic Circle
Some of you may recall a time when all the conversations about game design seemed to be about the "magic circle" and "immersion".
A little while after that, those terms became unpopular.
I think we need to bring them back. Actually, I think they became unpopular because anyone who can read trends knew damn well the games industry was trending against them with the rise of casual games. But trendy or not, I want to bring them back.
See, back in the day, most of the times I disliked a game, it was because either the gameplay got stale or the story had a gaping hole in it. Both are a loss of immersion.
Easy example: FFIX introduced a character so loathsome, so like essence-du-Jarjar, that I got deeply annoyed every time it popped up on screen. I wasn't thinking "what an annoying character". I was thinking "what the hell were the developers thinking?" Shortly thereafter, I stopped playing.
Similarly, in Tales of the Abyss, a major plot point involves blaming a seven year old for something that A) was prophecy and B) he wouldn't have done if anyone had ever bothered to tell him anything or even treated him vaguely nicely. Again, such a worthless story hole that I lost all respect for everyone. Shortly thereafter, I stopped playing.
But, boy, I long for those days. These days, the awkward story and horrible gameplay of top-flight games is still just as awkward, if not more so, but I rarely get too upset at it. Because now there's a new contender: directly breaking the "magic circle" to try and rope the player into some more publisher-advantageous situation. Usually, in-app purchases. Hoo boy, I say "a new contender", but what I mean is that the Tiger Woods of immersion-breaking showed up and is just making every other immersion-breaker look like a child.
For example, remember Sleeping Dogs? As GTA-likes go, that game was best in breed. Interesting setting, excellent level design, fun gameplay, interesting characters, decent dialog... the game only had one flaw for me. On literally every screen aside from the actual gameplay, there was a scrolling marquee: "Log in for the REAL Sleeping Dogs experience (TM)".
Every screen.
And this excellent, super-immersive game... just kind of slipped away from me. I never logged in. Maybe they just wanted to share high scores, and not to sell me pricey DLC. Who knows? It doesn't even matter, because the "magic circle" was broken. My immersion slipped away every time I hit the menu button, every time I hit a loading screen. Even though the game was excellent, I was losing interest and eventually stopped playing about six hours in. It was just too hard to get into the swing of things when the game kept telling me that I wasn't playing the real version of the GAME THIS IS A GAME WE WROTE IT WORSHIP US PLAY IT LIKE WE DEMAND YOU TO THIS IS JUST A GAME STOP GETTING IMMERSED POKE POKE HEY ARE YOU LISTENING.
That's how it felt.
I picked the most extreme sample - the best game with the smallest amount of "magic circle" breakage. It was still enough to destroy the game for me.
Most games are significantly worse, especially AAA games. Obviously, it's all inherited from casual games. And a lot of people will say that casual games kind of changed the culture to make it acceptable, so now it's acceptable. But the thing is, I never bought that excuse. Even in casual games, it's distracting and makes me want to stop playing. I like casual games where I can play the game fully immersed.
As an example, Triple Town. An excellent and immersive casual game... until you run low on moves, at which point it breaks the magic circle and tells you to buy more moves (along with other upgrades). It should be noted that this was when I lost interest in the game.
"Don't you hate paying for stuff? Isn't that the problem?"
Well, no. Trophies are just as bad. When a casual game starts popping up trophies, I'm basically done with it. It's sabotaging its own magic circle. That was the downfall of Farcy 3 to me: three different kinds of popup trophies. So a great game was brought low by magic-circle breaking... even without asking me for any money.
Sure, asking for money tends to be worse... but that's because the implementation tends to be a lot more aggressive. That's because money is involved: the developers or publishers want it to be more aggressive so they can make more money.
With me it backfires, but I don't know whether that's true of a lot of people. Obviously, there are a lot of people who are fine with the "magic circle" being broken. Trophies as standard practice make that obvious, as does the success of in-app purchasing. But I think maybe it's time to consider that people may not know what they need. Many of these practices abuse gambling disorders and addictive mindsets rather than actually providing an interesting game. Maybe there is a way to make money by offering a good game, rather than by making your game crappy but addictive.
I also think maybe it's not as straightforward as it looks. I think there probably are a lot of gamers - the vast "silent majority" - that don't buy into this distracting trophy-and-IAP stuff. However, they might buy into a game that is properly immersive. The question is - how can you make money off that? Off me, to be specific?
First, I guess we should talk briefly about "magic circles" and why I keep putting quotes around the term.
In brief, the "magic circle" is a concept where the rules and scenarios of the game define a reality that is different from the rest of the world. There is a clear line - this is within the game, that is outside the game. It was a concept very much in vogue for a year or two, but then everyone realized that it's far too simplistic to represent the actual situation that games create. Personally, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it. While insufficient, I think it's a good starting point.
I think the heart of our discussion isn't about "how to make money using the magic circle", but instead "how to put money inside the magic circle". This is why secondary currencies are so popular. Buy the secondary currency with real money in one brief moment, and now that currency has been put into the game world and can be spent without breaking the circle. People talk about how those kinds of intermediate currencies "trick" the player into "mis-estimating" the "actual cost" of a transaction... but I think it's simpler than that. They simply lower the barrier. If the money exists in the game, you can spend it in the game.
If the money doesn't exist in the game, then the quality of your game is a barrier to spending money. The better your game is, the less likely a player is going to want to break the magic circle and screw up the game. So, conversely, crappy games may actually have an easier time getting players to spend outside money, because the player is okay with "surfacing" and breaking the crappy "magic circle".
It's certainly possible to put things inside the circle, but it's also possible to put things outside of a weak circle where players are okay with surfacing for it. For example, every multiplayer game has expanded the circle to include many players, lobbies, and so forth.
If you think of these games as a series of gears rather than a magic circle, you might see how this is done. There is one gear, small and fast. This is the gameplay itself. Very immersive, very deep. Alongside it is a larger, slower gear. This is the lobby and scoring system, where you can show your enthusiasm, set up new matches, alter match parameters (such as what you are wearing) and so on.
The two gears drive each other, serving two different needs. The small gear drives the large gear, yes. In turn, the large gear offers a valuable stop-off. While the large gear isn't very interesting or immersive on its own, it's almost painless to go from the large gear to a real-money store due to the shallowness of the circle. Similarly, switching between the gears is much less painful than jumping directly from the match to the outside world or visa-versa. The power of the core game gear keeps the large gear spinning even though it doesn't have much power itself.
You don't have to take this geared approach, though. Several "massively single player" games have come out - Dragon's Dogma, Dark Souls, and so on. Most of the things that would be in the large, slow gear are made almost entirely automatic, and handled within the game itself. Can you monetize it? Maybe, if you can put monetized currency in that primary game.
The core concept here is that in order to monetize a game without alienating me, you have to monetize it without breaking the "magic circle". There are, in my thinking, three basic ways to do this. Just to recap, they are:
1) Charge before I play. Classic method, yes, but also useful for expansions, renting servers, etc.
2) Create a gentle gradient to the outside world by "gearing" your game. It has to be really gentle. Generally, a store accessible from the slowest, shallowest, most meta part of the game.
3) In-game currency fueled by out-of-game purchases. However, this is excessively easy to screw up. Your core gameplay loop can easily be damaged by it, in addition to the less tangible risks to the "magic circle". It is very easy to use an intermediate currency and still break immersion all the time.
Anyway, as mentioned, it's clear that many people don't have a problem with all this un-immersive stuff. I may be an outlier.
Or I may be more common than you think, and we're a market that everyone is ignoring.
A little while after that, those terms became unpopular.
I think we need to bring them back. Actually, I think they became unpopular because anyone who can read trends knew damn well the games industry was trending against them with the rise of casual games. But trendy or not, I want to bring them back.
See, back in the day, most of the times I disliked a game, it was because either the gameplay got stale or the story had a gaping hole in it. Both are a loss of immersion.
Easy example: FFIX introduced a character so loathsome, so like essence-du-Jarjar, that I got deeply annoyed every time it popped up on screen. I wasn't thinking "what an annoying character". I was thinking "what the hell were the developers thinking?" Shortly thereafter, I stopped playing.
Similarly, in Tales of the Abyss, a major plot point involves blaming a seven year old for something that A) was prophecy and B) he wouldn't have done if anyone had ever bothered to tell him anything or even treated him vaguely nicely. Again, such a worthless story hole that I lost all respect for everyone. Shortly thereafter, I stopped playing.
But, boy, I long for those days. These days, the awkward story and horrible gameplay of top-flight games is still just as awkward, if not more so, but I rarely get too upset at it. Because now there's a new contender: directly breaking the "magic circle" to try and rope the player into some more publisher-advantageous situation. Usually, in-app purchases. Hoo boy, I say "a new contender", but what I mean is that the Tiger Woods of immersion-breaking showed up and is just making every other immersion-breaker look like a child.
For example, remember Sleeping Dogs? As GTA-likes go, that game was best in breed. Interesting setting, excellent level design, fun gameplay, interesting characters, decent dialog... the game only had one flaw for me. On literally every screen aside from the actual gameplay, there was a scrolling marquee: "Log in for the REAL Sleeping Dogs experience (TM)".
Every screen.
And this excellent, super-immersive game... just kind of slipped away from me. I never logged in. Maybe they just wanted to share high scores, and not to sell me pricey DLC. Who knows? It doesn't even matter, because the "magic circle" was broken. My immersion slipped away every time I hit the menu button, every time I hit a loading screen. Even though the game was excellent, I was losing interest and eventually stopped playing about six hours in. It was just too hard to get into the swing of things when the game kept telling me that I wasn't playing the real version of the GAME THIS IS A GAME WE WROTE IT WORSHIP US PLAY IT LIKE WE DEMAND YOU TO THIS IS JUST A GAME STOP GETTING IMMERSED POKE POKE HEY ARE YOU LISTENING.
That's how it felt.
I picked the most extreme sample - the best game with the smallest amount of "magic circle" breakage. It was still enough to destroy the game for me.
Most games are significantly worse, especially AAA games. Obviously, it's all inherited from casual games. And a lot of people will say that casual games kind of changed the culture to make it acceptable, so now it's acceptable. But the thing is, I never bought that excuse. Even in casual games, it's distracting and makes me want to stop playing. I like casual games where I can play the game fully immersed.
As an example, Triple Town. An excellent and immersive casual game... until you run low on moves, at which point it breaks the magic circle and tells you to buy more moves (along with other upgrades). It should be noted that this was when I lost interest in the game.
"Don't you hate paying for stuff? Isn't that the problem?"
Well, no. Trophies are just as bad. When a casual game starts popping up trophies, I'm basically done with it. It's sabotaging its own magic circle. That was the downfall of Farcy 3 to me: three different kinds of popup trophies. So a great game was brought low by magic-circle breaking... even without asking me for any money.
Sure, asking for money tends to be worse... but that's because the implementation tends to be a lot more aggressive. That's because money is involved: the developers or publishers want it to be more aggressive so they can make more money.
With me it backfires, but I don't know whether that's true of a lot of people. Obviously, there are a lot of people who are fine with the "magic circle" being broken. Trophies as standard practice make that obvious, as does the success of in-app purchasing. But I think maybe it's time to consider that people may not know what they need. Many of these practices abuse gambling disorders and addictive mindsets rather than actually providing an interesting game. Maybe there is a way to make money by offering a good game, rather than by making your game crappy but addictive.
I also think maybe it's not as straightforward as it looks. I think there probably are a lot of gamers - the vast "silent majority" - that don't buy into this distracting trophy-and-IAP stuff. However, they might buy into a game that is properly immersive. The question is - how can you make money off that? Off me, to be specific?
First, I guess we should talk briefly about "magic circles" and why I keep putting quotes around the term.
In brief, the "magic circle" is a concept where the rules and scenarios of the game define a reality that is different from the rest of the world. There is a clear line - this is within the game, that is outside the game. It was a concept very much in vogue for a year or two, but then everyone realized that it's far too simplistic to represent the actual situation that games create. Personally, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it. While insufficient, I think it's a good starting point.
I think the heart of our discussion isn't about "how to make money using the magic circle", but instead "how to put money inside the magic circle". This is why secondary currencies are so popular. Buy the secondary currency with real money in one brief moment, and now that currency has been put into the game world and can be spent without breaking the circle. People talk about how those kinds of intermediate currencies "trick" the player into "mis-estimating" the "actual cost" of a transaction... but I think it's simpler than that. They simply lower the barrier. If the money exists in the game, you can spend it in the game.
If the money doesn't exist in the game, then the quality of your game is a barrier to spending money. The better your game is, the less likely a player is going to want to break the magic circle and screw up the game. So, conversely, crappy games may actually have an easier time getting players to spend outside money, because the player is okay with "surfacing" and breaking the crappy "magic circle".
It's certainly possible to put things inside the circle, but it's also possible to put things outside of a weak circle where players are okay with surfacing for it. For example, every multiplayer game has expanded the circle to include many players, lobbies, and so forth.
If you think of these games as a series of gears rather than a magic circle, you might see how this is done. There is one gear, small and fast. This is the gameplay itself. Very immersive, very deep. Alongside it is a larger, slower gear. This is the lobby and scoring system, where you can show your enthusiasm, set up new matches, alter match parameters (such as what you are wearing) and so on.
The two gears drive each other, serving two different needs. The small gear drives the large gear, yes. In turn, the large gear offers a valuable stop-off. While the large gear isn't very interesting or immersive on its own, it's almost painless to go from the large gear to a real-money store due to the shallowness of the circle. Similarly, switching between the gears is much less painful than jumping directly from the match to the outside world or visa-versa. The power of the core game gear keeps the large gear spinning even though it doesn't have much power itself.
You don't have to take this geared approach, though. Several "massively single player" games have come out - Dragon's Dogma, Dark Souls, and so on. Most of the things that would be in the large, slow gear are made almost entirely automatic, and handled within the game itself. Can you monetize it? Maybe, if you can put monetized currency in that primary game.
The core concept here is that in order to monetize a game without alienating me, you have to monetize it without breaking the "magic circle". There are, in my thinking, three basic ways to do this. Just to recap, they are:
1) Charge before I play. Classic method, yes, but also useful for expansions, renting servers, etc.
2) Create a gentle gradient to the outside world by "gearing" your game. It has to be really gentle. Generally, a store accessible from the slowest, shallowest, most meta part of the game.
3) In-game currency fueled by out-of-game purchases. However, this is excessively easy to screw up. Your core gameplay loop can easily be damaged by it, in addition to the less tangible risks to the "magic circle". It is very easy to use an intermediate currency and still break immersion all the time.
Anyway, as mentioned, it's clear that many people don't have a problem with all this un-immersive stuff. I may be an outlier.
Or I may be more common than you think, and we're a market that everyone is ignoring.
Thursday, August 01, 2013
Fighting Tabletops and Manga
An adventure RPG is interesting not because of the combat, but because of everything else. Combat is very important, and in many cases it is the cornerstone of the game... but the real joy of those games tends to be the adventure, not the individual fights. I'm always interested in getting a different feel out of my games, so I always wondered: can you make a game that focuses almost entirely on the fighting? A game that feels more like pro wrestling, or an old kung-fu movie, or a shonen fighting manga.
The core "problem" with this approach is that the fighting is highlighted to the extent that the adventure part suffers. Unlike an adventure RPG, the noncombat sections aren't really adventurous. It's rare for them to be about discovering what's over the next hill, or finding a hidden treasure, or saving a village. Instead, they use a variety of soap-opera interpersonal tactics combined with high stakes and emotional training sequences.
My question is: can you put that into your tabletop RPG instead of the adventure hooks?
One core piece is the fighting mechanics themselves. You can't use the same mechanistic approach other RPGs use, because the fights serve a much larger role. In a normal RPG, the fights are obstacles, and the character development/role playing usually happens outside of combat, during an adventure sequence. But in a combat game, much of the role playing and representation need to happen during the fight. Inside the fight.
Similarly, in an adventure RPG fighting is an obstacle is to wear the player characters down. Fights serve other purposes, too - pacing, foreshadowing, drama, plenty of other purposes... but the core mechanics are about attrition. It's pretty rare for combat to actually be life or death in an adventure RPG: most encounters are going to go the players' way, it's just a matter of how many resources they burn. And, of course, between combat they will often take actions to reduce the difficulty of the next fight - bar the doors, burn down the fortress, cast a sleep spell, whatever.
Fighting games can't do that. Or, rather, they have to do it DURING combat, somehow.
So the combat needs to be radically expanded.
The fundamental change is that combat needs to have pacing changes similar to the pacing changes you'd get from a dungeon crawl. Clashes followed by short reprieves. Times when you dominate, times when they dominate. Moments when you might be able to steal a few seconds to recover the feeling in your stinging fists - or would it be better to rush in so he doesn't have time to catch his breath?
There are a lot of possible mechanics to allow for that kind of clashing, but because simple is generally best, I think I would use a very basic "clash and away" system. Every clash lasts a certain number of rounds, then you get an "away" period where you recover, tag out, shuffle for position, or even just cut the away time short to try and get an edge in the first round of the clash.
The damage system would need to be adapted to have all the complexity of the normal RPG's full attrition system. That is, things like consumable items, powers, mana points, and health all need to be rolled into the combat system. Of course, they don't have to have the same justification or color - we just need the statistical backbone. So you would use up some resources during the clash, and try to damage the enemy not just in terms of health, but trying to deplete his resources or foil his resource-consuming attacks. It needs to be a battle of attrition, because that's the actual play of an RPG, and we're cramming it all into the fight.
There's lots of rules solutions for that, and it's largely a matter of what your fighting is. If you're doing a boxing game, you might use things like stamina, dizziness, leg-intactness... if you were doing a mystical kung-fu game, you might have things like chi and broken bones and righteousness. Of course, adding in the teamwork capabilities can make it even more complex.
However, all of that work only gets us halfway to our goal, because we still don't give the players any opportunity to role play. It's just a statistical game right now.
That's the secret behind an adventure RPG, and why they work so well. They pretend to give you all these rules, but in reality what they give you is a distraction to drive you to role play. The rules are really just there as an impetus to allow you to exist in the world. Similarly, the role play is often expressed not in theatrical monologues, but in the ordinary decisions you make between fights. To run or stick. To infiltrate or invade. To plan or wing it. To spend or hoard. Much of the role playing happens without the players even realizing they are role playing. Being "in character" is nice, sure, but there's a lot of meat to the actions you take even when you are not talking as your character.
If you look at a fighting manga or anime, you can see that there is a lot of opportunity for role play. The characters are all quite expressive. However, much of the focus is on their internal activities. Their emotions, basically. This is the opposite of an adventure RPG, where the expression is represented via interactions with the world. In the end, a combat manga's fighter character throws a punch. This isn't a different interaction than the thousands of punches he's thrown before. But it is very different because of the expressiveness and dedication that the fighter showed in the panels beforehand.
To reflect this, it's going to be necessary to make a world that the players can express themselves in. The world probably can't be the fight proper. While they can certainly express themselves in how they fight, there's not enough flexibility to match the variety of things players can freely do while on an adventure. We have to create a world where the players can freely do that level of expressive play.
Basically, we need to make the PCs' emotions into a world.
I don't mean literally. I simply mean that the team's emotional environment needs to be something that the players can interact with freely.
My thinking is a relatively simple token-based system is probably the answer. For example, you might have "friendship tokens" or similar which you can give out as you prefer. If an ally is punched by Master Wong the Iron Fist, you gain as much chi as the tokens held by that ally. You can rearrange your tokens, but not instantly - it's a slow process both in and out of combat.
However, that's still a bit too basic. There needs to be more freedom to create "engines" and "judgments", neither of which are really supported by that simple token system.
So another rule I recommend is the "double or nothing" rule. When you give someone a friendship token, it comes with a due date. If they don't do something in-game to validate your friendship by that time, both you and they lose a friendship token, representing a widening distance and feeling of alienation. But if they do validate it, both of you freely gain another token of the other person's, adding to their token total and making everything more potent.
Each token you add comes with this kind of due date, and you can't add another token until the previous one's been resolved (validated or canceled). However, each token you add has stricter and stricter validation requirements. The first token can be validated with a slight smile. But the seventh token requires a truly epic moment. Moreover, as you get into the 3-token range, you have to start to cement the kind of relationship you two have, and if the validations are of the wrong relationship category, there's no growth (but also no penalty). You can only have one of each kind of relationship...
That probably works well enough outside of combat, but it doesn't allow for in-combat shenanigans. For that, I would say that each player can use the friendship tokens on an ally to judge that ally's enemy, creating "enemy" tokens on them which will give them a bonus against that enemy. Like friendship tokens, enemy tokens react to resolution and are of a specific relationship type. Unlike friendship tokens, an enemy's "resolution" will cause continuous growth rather than a one-shot growth. If you hate an enemy's cheating sleaziness and put an enemy token on him, then every time he cheats that enemy token gets added again.
This doesn't generally get out of control, because enemy tokens must be spent (removed from play) in order to do special moves. Friendship tokens are similar for healing/support moves, although the expense is temporary and they recover at the end of combat.
I think this might be enough... but there is one more thing to discuss. Noncombat.
Between combats, combat manga and anime follow a very specific kind of formula. If you can cement this formula into a playable system, you can probably tap the players' internalized responses in the same way that encountering goblins taps their adventure instincts.
1) Hijinks
Intercharacter hijinks are very common in action manga, establishing relationships between the characters and also helping to establish the rules of the world. This is also a great way to allow player characters to have strong personality characteristics and express them freely. The nature of hijinks will vary depending on the setting - a high-school basketball game might have an arc about the school play, while a gritty monster-smashing brawler might have hijinks about the big eater having to rustle up some food. While some hijinks are simple one-offs, many of them are small, relatively unimportant arcs that hold together for long periods, giving the players a lot of stability in developing their characters and relationships.
2) Training
There are a bunch of different kinds of training. Physical/mental training to improve stats, learning a secret move from a new master, suddenly getting insight as to a new technique from a hijink, researching a specific enemy to find a weakness, training the other team members, going on a training vacation, receiving a new secret weapon from engineering, training in secret... training is a good way to regulate how quickly the players can change their character, and also can serve to tie them very closely to the world if you are careful about it.
3) Casual Color
Casual color is often overlooked. This is the routine stuff. In a normal RPG, this would be deciding what inn to stay at, determining how many rations to take, trying to get a good price on the +1 sword you want to sell, mapping out a path to the next destination. You need to provide similar "bread" for this game. There are a lot of different options, but in essence most of them have personal condition at the heart of them. Being a top-flight fighter involves constant maintenance and tradeoffs for your body to keep it operating at peak... and those tradeoffs get even more complex if you want to change your style out.
4) Plot and Inspiration
Plot should be obvious, but it's a bit different in a fighting game. The overarching plot threads could be the same, but their presentation is completely different. In an adventure RPG, the plot is a reason for the players to care. In a fighting RPG, the plot is a reason for the characters to care. Therefore, plot points should be presented as inspiration to fight and train, which is a completely different focus than a standard RPG story.
Some plot elements are strongly interactive. For example, searching for a hidden master, choosing which of the four enemy kings to fight next, aligning yourself with a given faction. Things like following someone around at night could be considered plot, but are actually hijinks - a major difference between a fighting game and an adventure game.
However, many plot elements aren't very interactive, and serve solely to get the character to want to fight. Seeing your next enemy dominate someone you looked up to. Finding that monsters burned out the town. Someone getting sick and needing to earn money to pay for hospital care. A friend going rogue and turning to forbidden techniques... these are things you can't directly interact with. Instead, you train up such that when the moment for resolution comes, you're ready.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on fighting RPGs.
The core "problem" with this approach is that the fighting is highlighted to the extent that the adventure part suffers. Unlike an adventure RPG, the noncombat sections aren't really adventurous. It's rare for them to be about discovering what's over the next hill, or finding a hidden treasure, or saving a village. Instead, they use a variety of soap-opera interpersonal tactics combined with high stakes and emotional training sequences.
My question is: can you put that into your tabletop RPG instead of the adventure hooks?
One core piece is the fighting mechanics themselves. You can't use the same mechanistic approach other RPGs use, because the fights serve a much larger role. In a normal RPG, the fights are obstacles, and the character development/role playing usually happens outside of combat, during an adventure sequence. But in a combat game, much of the role playing and representation need to happen during the fight. Inside the fight.
Similarly, in an adventure RPG fighting is an obstacle is to wear the player characters down. Fights serve other purposes, too - pacing, foreshadowing, drama, plenty of other purposes... but the core mechanics are about attrition. It's pretty rare for combat to actually be life or death in an adventure RPG: most encounters are going to go the players' way, it's just a matter of how many resources they burn. And, of course, between combat they will often take actions to reduce the difficulty of the next fight - bar the doors, burn down the fortress, cast a sleep spell, whatever.
Fighting games can't do that. Or, rather, they have to do it DURING combat, somehow.
So the combat needs to be radically expanded.
The fundamental change is that combat needs to have pacing changes similar to the pacing changes you'd get from a dungeon crawl. Clashes followed by short reprieves. Times when you dominate, times when they dominate. Moments when you might be able to steal a few seconds to recover the feeling in your stinging fists - or would it be better to rush in so he doesn't have time to catch his breath?
There are a lot of possible mechanics to allow for that kind of clashing, but because simple is generally best, I think I would use a very basic "clash and away" system. Every clash lasts a certain number of rounds, then you get an "away" period where you recover, tag out, shuffle for position, or even just cut the away time short to try and get an edge in the first round of the clash.
The damage system would need to be adapted to have all the complexity of the normal RPG's full attrition system. That is, things like consumable items, powers, mana points, and health all need to be rolled into the combat system. Of course, they don't have to have the same justification or color - we just need the statistical backbone. So you would use up some resources during the clash, and try to damage the enemy not just in terms of health, but trying to deplete his resources or foil his resource-consuming attacks. It needs to be a battle of attrition, because that's the actual play of an RPG, and we're cramming it all into the fight.
There's lots of rules solutions for that, and it's largely a matter of what your fighting is. If you're doing a boxing game, you might use things like stamina, dizziness, leg-intactness... if you were doing a mystical kung-fu game, you might have things like chi and broken bones and righteousness. Of course, adding in the teamwork capabilities can make it even more complex.
However, all of that work only gets us halfway to our goal, because we still don't give the players any opportunity to role play. It's just a statistical game right now.
That's the secret behind an adventure RPG, and why they work so well. They pretend to give you all these rules, but in reality what they give you is a distraction to drive you to role play. The rules are really just there as an impetus to allow you to exist in the world. Similarly, the role play is often expressed not in theatrical monologues, but in the ordinary decisions you make between fights. To run or stick. To infiltrate or invade. To plan or wing it. To spend or hoard. Much of the role playing happens without the players even realizing they are role playing. Being "in character" is nice, sure, but there's a lot of meat to the actions you take even when you are not talking as your character.
If you look at a fighting manga or anime, you can see that there is a lot of opportunity for role play. The characters are all quite expressive. However, much of the focus is on their internal activities. Their emotions, basically. This is the opposite of an adventure RPG, where the expression is represented via interactions with the world. In the end, a combat manga's fighter character throws a punch. This isn't a different interaction than the thousands of punches he's thrown before. But it is very different because of the expressiveness and dedication that the fighter showed in the panels beforehand.
To reflect this, it's going to be necessary to make a world that the players can express themselves in. The world probably can't be the fight proper. While they can certainly express themselves in how they fight, there's not enough flexibility to match the variety of things players can freely do while on an adventure. We have to create a world where the players can freely do that level of expressive play.
Basically, we need to make the PCs' emotions into a world.
I don't mean literally. I simply mean that the team's emotional environment needs to be something that the players can interact with freely.
My thinking is a relatively simple token-based system is probably the answer. For example, you might have "friendship tokens" or similar which you can give out as you prefer. If an ally is punched by Master Wong the Iron Fist, you gain as much chi as the tokens held by that ally. You can rearrange your tokens, but not instantly - it's a slow process both in and out of combat.
However, that's still a bit too basic. There needs to be more freedom to create "engines" and "judgments", neither of which are really supported by that simple token system.
So another rule I recommend is the "double or nothing" rule. When you give someone a friendship token, it comes with a due date. If they don't do something in-game to validate your friendship by that time, both you and they lose a friendship token, representing a widening distance and feeling of alienation. But if they do validate it, both of you freely gain another token of the other person's, adding to their token total and making everything more potent.
Each token you add comes with this kind of due date, and you can't add another token until the previous one's been resolved (validated or canceled). However, each token you add has stricter and stricter validation requirements. The first token can be validated with a slight smile. But the seventh token requires a truly epic moment. Moreover, as you get into the 3-token range, you have to start to cement the kind of relationship you two have, and if the validations are of the wrong relationship category, there's no growth (but also no penalty). You can only have one of each kind of relationship...
That probably works well enough outside of combat, but it doesn't allow for in-combat shenanigans. For that, I would say that each player can use the friendship tokens on an ally to judge that ally's enemy, creating "enemy" tokens on them which will give them a bonus against that enemy. Like friendship tokens, enemy tokens react to resolution and are of a specific relationship type. Unlike friendship tokens, an enemy's "resolution" will cause continuous growth rather than a one-shot growth. If you hate an enemy's cheating sleaziness and put an enemy token on him, then every time he cheats that enemy token gets added again.
This doesn't generally get out of control, because enemy tokens must be spent (removed from play) in order to do special moves. Friendship tokens are similar for healing/support moves, although the expense is temporary and they recover at the end of combat.
I think this might be enough... but there is one more thing to discuss. Noncombat.
Between combats, combat manga and anime follow a very specific kind of formula. If you can cement this formula into a playable system, you can probably tap the players' internalized responses in the same way that encountering goblins taps their adventure instincts.
1) Hijinks
Intercharacter hijinks are very common in action manga, establishing relationships between the characters and also helping to establish the rules of the world. This is also a great way to allow player characters to have strong personality characteristics and express them freely. The nature of hijinks will vary depending on the setting - a high-school basketball game might have an arc about the school play, while a gritty monster-smashing brawler might have hijinks about the big eater having to rustle up some food. While some hijinks are simple one-offs, many of them are small, relatively unimportant arcs that hold together for long periods, giving the players a lot of stability in developing their characters and relationships.
2) Training
There are a bunch of different kinds of training. Physical/mental training to improve stats, learning a secret move from a new master, suddenly getting insight as to a new technique from a hijink, researching a specific enemy to find a weakness, training the other team members, going on a training vacation, receiving a new secret weapon from engineering, training in secret... training is a good way to regulate how quickly the players can change their character, and also can serve to tie them very closely to the world if you are careful about it.
3) Casual Color
Casual color is often overlooked. This is the routine stuff. In a normal RPG, this would be deciding what inn to stay at, determining how many rations to take, trying to get a good price on the +1 sword you want to sell, mapping out a path to the next destination. You need to provide similar "bread" for this game. There are a lot of different options, but in essence most of them have personal condition at the heart of them. Being a top-flight fighter involves constant maintenance and tradeoffs for your body to keep it operating at peak... and those tradeoffs get even more complex if you want to change your style out.
4) Plot and Inspiration
Plot should be obvious, but it's a bit different in a fighting game. The overarching plot threads could be the same, but their presentation is completely different. In an adventure RPG, the plot is a reason for the players to care. In a fighting RPG, the plot is a reason for the characters to care. Therefore, plot points should be presented as inspiration to fight and train, which is a completely different focus than a standard RPG story.
Some plot elements are strongly interactive. For example, searching for a hidden master, choosing which of the four enemy kings to fight next, aligning yourself with a given faction. Things like following someone around at night could be considered plot, but are actually hijinks - a major difference between a fighting game and an adventure game.
However, many plot elements aren't very interactive, and serve solely to get the character to want to fight. Seeing your next enemy dominate someone you looked up to. Finding that monsters burned out the town. Someone getting sick and needing to earn money to pay for hospital care. A friend going rogue and turning to forbidden techniques... these are things you can't directly interact with. Instead, you train up such that when the moment for resolution comes, you're ready.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on fighting RPGs.
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