The Ephemeral Notebook

I just created http://mycatisretarded.com/

The story of why:

1. My girlfriend said “my cat is f!@#ing retarded”
2. and then I said “DOT COM” (a habit of mine)
3. Which made me curious
4. Not only was that available but plain old mycatisretarded.com was
5. ?????
6. Profit

Or at least something major.  These are all MMOs slated for release in the next year or two that are at least substantial enough to generate some amount of hopeful anxiety within my heart of hearts.  These are my current favorite unreleased MMOs of the ones that have given us anything to show for (as opposed to theoretical MMOs or just-bought-the-license MMOs).  My choices here are fueled by any of:

1. game mechanics beyond the copycat mould (“only we promise we’ll do it better!”)
2. an expansion of a player motiviation or Bartle type currently underserved (builders, explorers, etc)
3. a new gameplay genre or aesthetic genre which could move the MMO classification beyond EQ/WoW cloneage
4. a new target audience and play pattern (e.g. casual or interstitial play – ease of getting involved in a large way without lots of personal/guild planning)
5. a colorful presentation and high quality concept art and tech demos

So without further ado…

1. The Secret World

[Website | Interview | Art | Information]

What it could change:  Storytelling within MMOs, ARG possibilities, Mystery Genre

This is a highly ambitious project and one that may only appeal to a niche audience, but it may teach future MMOs a number of new tricks – and it creates some subgenre firsts (earth-based, mystery-genre) that will hopefully continue to unfurl to become the long tail of our salvation from the fantasy tolkeinesque genre.

2. Blackstar

[Website | Interview | Art | Information]

What it could change:  The space flight and exploration genre, the anime-inspired sci fi niche

Blackstar is the game I foremost wish to have sex with.  It may be a case of style over substance, but in this case the style is a lot more than a coating.  The style imperative drives Blackstar into a niche that is relatively untapped (though growing fast) – the niche filled with games like S4 League – high speed action and anime influences.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my slower more realistic games like EVE as well.

However, I often explain it in terms of mecha.  There are two major ‘forks’ in the spectrum of mecha concept and design.  There is the highly mechanical version used by things like Battletech where the mecha is very ‘vehicular’ and requires constant tuneups, has major heating issues, and is realistic in its movement and damage withstanding capabilities.  Then there is the hyper-anime version where the mecha is a large superhuman extension of the human body – it behaves more like a Demi-god in various mythologies than a machine. Naturally these points came from a middle ground – the first Gundam books put forth the idea that to make the machine more than just a machine, the human would have to be more than just a human.  The modern Gundam franchise however is fully on the immortal-demigod side.

There are a few modern properties to wedge themselves in the middle somewhat:  Armored Core for example seems to steal equally from both sides, even though its roots lie more on the Virtual-On derived robot as shiny demigod side.  However, this gradient can be defined in rather simple terms when it comes to video games.  Much like the original Newtype concept, the question I ask myself is “How much does this experience make me feel like I am performing above my own ability?“.  In reality, it is only at the ‘top’ of my ability, not beyond, but using style and rewarding the occasional random reflex move with the great results, this feeling can be achieved.

Games that evoke this feeling for me are:  Zone of Enders, Wipeout, Descent, and Pop n Music (and many rhythm games).  Zone of Enders is perhaps the best example (and Descent for the same reasons) – requiring an awareness of more than just 2 axis of movement and encounter somehow feels extra-human.  ZoE uses just the right amount of glowy flash and style to make it feel like you’re this incredible 190 Beats-per-minute badass, computing every possible trajectory, even if you’re just mashing buttons frantically.

This is what I’m hoping Blackstar embraces, and seems to be doing with the pacing of its space combat.  The future-anime aesthetic of glowy lines, light streaks left in the air,visible concussion waves, and intersections of reality and user interface with an overuse of reticles and indicators.  If they can make a game with good mechanics, a fair amount of customization, that still makes me feel like a complete badass – I will be completely sold.

Interestingly, there aren’t many (if any) scifi-anime-franchise based MMOs, which could signify a lack of a niche, or (more likely if you look at the growth of anime in the US) a huge niche possibility.  Phantasy star has a bit of this niche right now, but it’s a completely different beast.  My bet is that Blackstar lights the fire of a small niche that will grow slowly over time and then eventually take off through some other means (for example a free-to-play anime-franchise world or similar), never reaping the success it deserves but I’ll definitely be playing it.

3. LEGO Universe

[Website | Interview | Art | Information]

What it could change:  Collaborative building environment that isn’t rife with furry penises

4. All Points Bulletin

[Website | Interview | Art | Information]

What it could change:  The advent of the modern-day crime genre, new levels of character customization

Modern day crime seems to be perfectly at home with the social structures common in MMOs.  The idea of getting together a gang who associate themselves by names and colors such that there is brotherhood even with members you haven’t met, and then engaging in a resource war to stake out territory for your gang – I’d venture to say it’s the thing in real life that most closely resembles MMO PvP.  Life resembles art, etc I suppose.

As it stands, the Grand Theft Auto multiplayer has done fairly well, but lacking the persistence that makes such a world truly thrive, it becomes more like a large game of counterstrike overrun with cheaters and those who are only playing ‘for the lulz’.  Bringing a real sense of property into this seems only natural.

Most of my questions regarding APB have to do with the larger social economics – how is equilibrium maintained (if you can steal cars from npc pedestrians and sell them, this would be an open economy and as such would need considerable drains), what avenues of PvP are available (stealing? territory? police griefing?), and what degree of continuity are they attempting to provide (shards, instances, fragmented economies, etc).

One of the most impressive things about APB so far has been the character customization.  It’s so nice to start seeing current-gen MMOs start to take this seriously.  The flexibility they were showing in the tattoos and face were pretty impressive.  I hope they treat clothing the same way, as that tends to be the part of character customization most often forgotten – the part that isn’t a couple sliders during the sliver of time we call creation.

5. Free Realms

[Website | Interview | Information]

What it could change:  The quality of casual and youth targeted MMOs, achievement structures, minigames in MMO, web cross-media support,  business models

6. The Agency

[Website | Interview | Art | Information]

What it could change:  Interstitial play and true MMO integration for FPS nuts, the spy genre

I love me some Team Fortress 2.  The thought of being able to play something like that and call it an MMO feels almost like cheating.  And yet, the bridge we could architect to cross this gap is looking more and more comical each day until the point where we can instead take a deep stride and cross.  Before you tell me about Planetside however, let me just say that that game was likely ahead of its time.  Not because MMO players weren’t ready to FPS, instead it was because FPS players weren’t yet ready to MMO.

Since then, we’ve seen the Battlefield series, Call of Duty 4, CounterStrike’s experiments with global economics, and even Team Fortress 2 having persistent improvements now through achievements.  It seems that persistence in FPS games is going to, well, persist. The biggest difference to me, however is a mindset.  When I think about logging on to an MMO I think about all the things that need to be done, the time each of them takes to complete, travel time, organization time – I’m generally exasperated before I log on.  However, playing a quick round of TF2 requires no preparation.  Better yet, pickup groups in TF2 are the norm and they are often FUN!  I don’t even need my friends to be online to have a good time.

If The Agency gets these things right, then it will be a blast.  The promise that I could have a slew of missions of known lengths (7 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes) and hop into the action immediately with friends or with people who are insentivised properly for doing their role is a tantalizing one.

Add to all this the spy genre possibilities (please have information warfare /espionage forms of PvP), and some of the more interesting mission mechanics I’ve seen in an MMO, and there is some serious possibility for win here.  Perhaps my single favorite design mechanic of The Agency that I have seen so far is the quality of completion for missions.  It’s a very console mentality idea that seems entirely at home in the genre even if it didn’t have the console release.  Having a gradient of completion means that you can win small and then keep improving, instead of failing to win (as is WoW’s predominant instance methodology).

Conclusion

There is no doubt in my mind that the release of these games will inspire improvement in the MMO genre – either through the flames of user exceptance of the subtle kindle of future designer inspiration.  This isn’t to say that other games won’t, but these are the ones that have caught my eye, and I believe deserve yours.

• Human rights & the 'online game provider' –
• Game Design Legends: Meretzky On The Evolution Of The Medium –
• Richard Bartle’s IMGDC keynote –
• Bethesda Trademarks Fallout Name For Film And TV – - I sense some legal fallout in the future
• New Fallout Title Unveiled – - oh reeeeally

Much is often mentioned about the cultural disconnect between the Business, Design, and Programming fields within the game industry.  Different attitudes, different terms and languages, different expectations.  I’ve always felt this has been a self-perpetuating problem (when diagnosing it we canonize it by declaring that this is “just how it is” – further reinforcing the meme), and a rather large problem at that.

As one who considers all three to be a passion I may be speaking from personal bias but I see this as a problem with a relatively easy solution.  To me, Business, Design and Programming are based on the same fundamental principle:

Define the goal clearly, research the available choices, then weigh the pros and cons of each choice to arrive at the optimal solution.

[This should seem familiar if you read my previous entry]

There is little benefit to shrouding a profession in mystery and much to be gained by integrating these goals into a single representation.  The commonly occuring pattern is the separation of these goals into components.  The other parts of the original goalset show up in each component typically as a ‘restriction’, but information is lost in this process.

Let’s take a simple example:

You and a friend are looking to go out for dinner and you want something relatively cheap and relatively good.  You deliberate for a bit and realize that you know a lot of quality places, and your friends knows a lot of cheap places – so you decide to specialize and divide the problem.  You try to find the best restaurant you can under 30$ a person, and your friend meanwhile tries to find the cheapest place with at least 4 stars on Zagat.  The chances that you will arrive at the same solution is slim to none (and reduces as the population of choices increases).

This is how game development often actually works.  The game needs to be relatively fun and impressive, while being relatively stable, maintainable and scalable, while also being done relatively quickly and cheaply.  The meetings are held, restrictions are put in place (typically time via milestones), and then each team optimizes for its pet criteria.  This can occasionally cause conflict  as all of these are mutually exclusive.

This type of problem is an optimization problem, and there are a few common patterns to solving it:

1. Positive Optimize - Pick the one that matters MOST, this reduces one of the variables (e.g. we have exactly 2 years worth of funding to release this – what can we make in 2 years?)
2. Negative Optimize - Pick the one that matters LEAST, this also reduces one of the variables (e.g. it doesn’t matter how stable it is – it’s just a prototype).  In patterns containing three goal variables, this I like to call the ‘Pick Two’ method, based on the saying: “Cheap, Good, Fast – pick two” or other patterns of “X,Y,Z – pick two”.
3. Simultaneous Optimize - this can be difficult to approach but is typically going to be the most accurate.  Programmers (especially AI programmers, Collective Intelligence programmers and Data Miners) will likely recognize this one.  The idea is to assign a fitness function and then try a number of different techniques to get the best possible result (all of which are generally little more than an advanced version of a random shot in the dark).  The ‘king’ of these techniques is more often than not a genetic algorithm.

When faced with a relatively small set of choices, I have a favorite way of tackling the full on simultaneous optimization:  Using a spreadsheet, the goal components of the fitness function become columns and the available choices become rows.  You rate each cell by how well that goal is satisfied by that choice (use the SAME SCALE for all cells, something like 0-5 or 0-10).  Then you apply a weight to each goal as to how important it is to the final fitness.  The sum of each cell in the row multiplied by its corresponding  weights per column is the choice’s final fitness.  It helps to throw in a couple dummy extreme choices to help you balance the goal weights to make sure your balancing is sane.

As soon as there are more variables or interactions between the choices, it becomes clear that you need something more like a genetic algorithm.  Luckily we all have something very much like that already – intuition.  I like to define intuition as “the sum of all knowledge and experience related to the subject”.  Humans are exceedingly good at making good guesses when presented with a problem that they have a wide knowledge and experience base to draw from.  However each large missing piece of knowledge or experience will heavily skew our guesses.

A few examples:

• a game designer wants to make a modification to a feature, thinking that it should be easy to change, sneaks it into the schedule – but it turns out to be very difficult
• a programmer finds after implementation that a design concept is not at all scalable, and codes up a tweak to make it scalable that defeats the original purpose of the feature.  Not wanting to have ‘lost’ the time on the gantt, the decision is made to keep the ‘fix’ in the final version.
• an executive looks at the gantt and examines where the product will be at for magical tradeshow X – a new trade show the company wants to do that’s 3 months before magical tradeshow Y for which there is a demo planned, and requests a demo version to send with the demo team to show X.  The team crunches and gets it done, but has to make enough hacks that the demo for tradeshow Y needs to have some features cut and is now behind on the entire schedule.

What am I arguing for?  Simply this:

Open and continual communication of goals so as to bring the choices people make closer to ‘optimal’ for the company/game as a whole.

and

An attempt by all to increase the cross-departmental intuition of everyone involved.

What I am arguing against is the ’silo’ effect and hyper-compartmentalization of culture and experience that is common of large hierarchies and specialization of labor.

A few things that help towards this end:

• Agile Development or similar methods
• Prototyping
• Small Teams (preferrably multi-disciplinary)
• Task Forces
• A relatively flat heirarchy (which is related to the previous two)
• A shared company calendar or internal blog/rss
• A wiki with an interconnected glossary of terms
• More multi-disciplanary employees (designers who can code, business heads who know design, etc)
• Task transparency (via the workflow management systems)
• Decision transparency (hearing a detailed explanation of a decision works to teach others about that discipline)
• Financial transparency (many companies cannot do this, but for those who can, it often works well)

• 2009 Bent Festival Featuring Chiptune Performances, Installations – - one of these years I must go to this
• Nintendo's Made in Ore, User-Generated Content – - this is going to change the face of lunchbreaks everywhere
• One Step Closer To A Holodeck: Eon’s ICube –
• City of Heroes player created content surpasses dev's in 24 hours – - this is why user generated content matters – see also spore creatures outpacing evolution
• Dungeons And Dragons’ Arneson: The Lost Interview –
• Ludum Dare Kicks Off This Weekend – - If I didn’t already have things planned for this weekend, this would be a worthwhile way to spend a weekend
• Noir Online promises mafia MMOness – - could be interesting – what with all this american mobster interest lately. probably won’t work in america without some HEAVY localization

Today I was catching up on some reading when I came across James Portnow’s opinion piece on the difference between Choices and Problems (The Problem of Choice).  I disagree with the separation entirely and see the presentation of them as separate as a form of False Dilemma that is all too easy to fall into.

Choices are among the fundamental elements of game design, economics, behavioral psychology and computer science.  In all of those fields, the concept of choice is defined roughly the same way:  (from wikipedia) “Choice consists of the mental process of thinking involved with the process of judging the merits of multiple options and selecting one of them for action.”

Making a choice requires a mental formulation – the generation of some model for weighing the merits of each option.  Merits are directly connected to goals, and one can often discern one’s goals through their choices.  It is also said often in economics that “choice defines preference” but preference is a tricky thing to pin down.

What James appears to me to be discussing is the transparency of the game’s own reward model.  When players align some of their goals with the game’s mechanical goals (as is generally the case when you wish to win), their merit models begin to look more like the game’s.

At this point it can be said that their merit model is far more mechanical than personal.  However, this shift is highly personal in nature.  Players are driven by a varying amount of drive for success (the Achiever Bartle type).  Take three extreme examples on the same game:

1. Player A wishes to win the game with the utmost ‘completion’, and so goes out and purchases a hint book which makes fully transparent all of the mechanical merits of each choice.  The player then chooses each in accordance with the walkthrough and obtains the ultimate score or reward sought.
2. Player B wishes to maintain the mystery of the game and avoids spoilers or hints from any source, wishing the game experience to be as personally driven as possible
3. Player C has little to no interest in completing the game and instead explores the mechanical simulation but with different goals in mind than the main ’success’ goal of the game – for example seeing how big of an explosion one can make, or how silly one can die with ragdolls, or if the game story breaks if you try to kill everyone.

As is obvious, choices with merits that apply to more than one possible goal are evaluated differently by different people.  My disagreement stems from the attempt to separate choices which are mechanical in nature to those which are personal in nature into two separate concepts.  I think this is highly dangerous as it generally assumes a singular goal system.  Where are goal systems most singular?  In traditional story-driven single player games.

Goals and Endings

Let’s take a game like Bioshock.  Instead of having a singular goal, there are multiple endings.  Each ending is now an available goal.  The problem with this is that while situations may change during the course of gameplay, long term goals and gameplay decisions of players rarely do.  This means that each player selects the ending goal that they wish to achieve early in play and now all choices become False Choices.

This is especially true of the hintbook-user who starts by reading up on all the possible branches and endings and makes their selection at the beginning (see also Mass Effect sex scene).  However even someone who is only cognizant of the fact that a game has multiple endings (read it on the back of the box – multiple endings is a feature list slick item), they will pre-construct likely ending goals in their mind, select one and then act accordingly.

This is the basis of role-playing.  If you decide you want to play an evil character with a soft spot for cuddly looking things, then you will make your choices accordingly and you hope that the ending or rewards that you get respect some element of this decision (for example at least that you decided to be evil).  The problem here is the ending – the concentration of goals on the game ending.  Pen and paper roleplay works because it is often open-ended (if you’re not playing strictly from an adventure with an unimaginative GM, you don’t know that the game will contain roughly 40 hours of play time before you start playing it).  The solutions here are to spread the goals out – achievements, chapter-based games, social systems, and economic systems.

The Myth of Purely Aesthetic Choices

So what about choices that aren’t attached to a goal mechanism?  It turns out a rare few of these are purely choices without goals.   Examples in the real world are common in non-essential purchases – what flavor of chips do you buy for yourself?  what color of a particular shirt do you choose when one is offered in multiple colors?  However they can quickly be turned into goal-based variations:  what flavor of chips do you buy when you’re having guests over (maximize for utilitarian benefit), what does this shirt say about me? (does it further the goal of presenting myself to others the way that I wish to?).

In online games, even aesthetic choices become intertwined with social or economic goals.  Let’s take a look at some examples:

• Choice of Color:  This can be an economic merit judgment (based on rarity), and a social persona merit judgment.  Example – a hardcore PvPer picking a pink colorset for its memorability and humor value.  If one is in a guild, color coordination may be desired, limiting choice.
• Choice of Name: Economic factors are huge here (is the name already taken? am I willing to live with Legolasx345 or do I want something truly unique?), as well as roleplay and persona considerations (one trying to play an elf might want an elf-like name).

The name selection example is perhaps the best.  Trademark and domain name selection for a company or product is based on a huge ‘problem’ equation of relative merits – Pronounce-ability, Length, International Meanings and Pronunciation, Logo/Glyph possibilities, Linguistic distance from similar trademarks, Search loading (what is currently found by that name through searches), Legal Availability (and cost to acquire), DNS Availability (and cost to acquire), Social network Availability, and Linguistic connection to the desired evoked emotions or symbols are just a few of the criteria.  This creates a giant ‘problem’ equation, where the stakeholders balance the merits of each to be able to mechanically rate the possibilities – if the company is hiring a marketing firm or is a min/maxer in the player terms.  A company who is like player B in the above example might just pick a name and hope for the best.

The Single Player Game

Ok, so digging further – let’s come up with the most pristinely pure-choice example we can come up with.  The choice of aesthetics or actions within a purely single-player game that has no predictable affect on the outcome.  I say purely single-player because these are a rarity today.  Any game that is connected with online achievements, gamer scores, or leaderboards is no longer ‘purely’ single player in that the motivations for winning change.  Increasingly with fraps, machinima, youtube, and other forms of shared media, even the most single player experience can become a social one, much like when a friend watches you while you play.

One obvious problem with these kinds of purely surface choices is that they are bad design!  Presenting choices that have no measurable effect can easily disenfranchise the player.

On the opposite side, easily transparent mechanical goals also removes much of the fun of choosing.  If every text option in a game like Fallout had next to it in parenthesis how many XP points you gain by selecting that option, much of the fun would be immediately drained from the game.

The Multi-player Game

When choices can be boiled down to merit equations based on a preset list of goals, they become less interesting.  However, one simple way to stop this is to obscure the mechanics by introducing an external (unpredictable) factor.  The classic examples of this are found in the birthing of games themselves:  Go, Chess, etc.  When one cannot easily predict what situation a choice will wind one up in, the choice becomes more difficult but also more meaningful.   Life is mostly comprised of these choices.

Traditional games don’t have the issue of transparent choice mechanics or purely aesthetic choices, nor do connected games – only single player ‘movie’ games do – a problem we have invented for ourselves as game designers.  Sometimes choice doesn’t matter in these games (when the game is purely linear and driven by twitch skill) – but this to me is a somewhat sad shallow concept of interactivity that doesn’t take full advantage of the medium.

Solutions

While I may disagree with the conclusion in Mr. Portnow’s piece – I agree with the prescription – we should be more cognizant of what we call choice in video games.  And since I never like to just rant without providing some solutions (ok that’s not entirely true… a good rant is fun, too), here are ways I think we can improve the ‘choicyness’ of the single player game experience:

• More achievements and mini-goals, especially ones off the beaten path
• Shareable media awareness (best examples of this are shareable replays in racing games or the snapshot camera in Little Big Planet)
• Episodic game play (smaller, sooner goals)
• Condition-driven systems (instead of using a hidden character ‘alignment’ number, test for conditions present in the world that could indicate alignment)
• Better, more unpredictable AI (the more human ones’ opponents are, the harder the equations are)
• Adapting mechanics (less of Oblivion’s level adaption with reduces impact, more things like enemies having an increased chance of resistance to the tactic/ability you use more often)
• Random scenario changes (this works best in repeatable content, but things like Left 4 Dead’s slight changes in the level layout keep it from being just an equation)
• External stimuli changes (massively single player games, rendering of ghost player data into the game, using external factors to drive economies)
• Generally be more graceful with player ‘mistakes’, build in teaching mechanism to choice systems, allowing a player to get better

And finally, some things we need to do less of:

• Stop thinking of choice being between GOOD and EVIL
• Early-branch trees (e.g. good/evil, character class choices in System Shock 2 – each problem has multiple solutions, but only one generally valid based on your class)
• Using optimal-path scoring (i.e. leaderboards with only total points, time to completion, etc), instead score sections, allow mistakes
• Not planning for the meta-game goals and looking only at our own mechanics

• GDC09: Interview with The Secret World's creator, Ragnar Tørnquist – - I really want this game to amaze me, and while I have a feeling it will take a while after release before it does – for now I have hope shrouded in mystery
• LEGO Universe character creation a soulful experience – - this is one of the MMOs I really care about seeing come to fruition right now
• 'Beware, Max Lives!' – - this is why I <3 Steve Purcell

Sorry Zug but I have to repost this one…  This is like my childhood colliding headfirst with modern marketing while 4chan stands by and comments.  Other than the obvious memes the first thing I thought when I saw this is… “this is someone’s fetish”

Whut.

http://news.livedoor.com/article/detail/4097330/

Episode 1 of the Valkyria Chronicles anime is out – haven’t watched it yet but from a quick glance it seems to have a lot more time to go in depth with the character development which is good, even if the story isn’t exactly the same.  Also the ending is cute.  I really hope this spreads awareness of this amazing game.