Little Blog Adventure

Beyond the game

2006-04-16T19:32:00.000-08:00

Ah, the final blog exercise for the semester! Looking back, I can say I've quite enjoyed the blog exercises for this module, as well as the module as a whole. :-)

The first question for this last exercise is whether meaningful play can emerge from an Alternative Reality Game such as the The Beast.

Well, I followed the progress of that game quite avidly while it was running and I will say that for me and the good folk who comprised the group called Cloudmakers, it was highly meaningful indeed. As a matter of fact, I've never seen another game bring out the kind of large-scale community interaction and near-obsessive dedication on the part of players that the Beast did. While the game was running, it truly felt like the Cloudmakers group was a kind of cyber-sleuth, drawing on the power of many, many minds in order to solve a deeply puzzling mystery. While I do consider the members of the group who thought that 9/11 could be "solved" to be somewhat deluded, I can understand how they could have come to think that way after having been deeply involved in The Beast. The game is far from traditional and by some definitions of the term may not even be a game, but it was extremely exciting for those who "played" it.

What made the game feel meaningful to the players? Well, if we define meaningful play as occurring when the relationships between actions and outcomes in a game are both discernable and integrated into the larger context of the game, then indeed the Cloudmakers did experience meaningful play- ironic considering how The Beast was never revealed to be a game. Every action players took within the game- gathering clues, solving puzzles online, meeting up in real-life to take part in a game-related event- took the community one step closer towards solving the mystery of the game. As of today, the "mystery" genre seems to be the predominant form of ARG- it will be interesting to see if and how designers can make ARGs that work differently.

As for the second question- yes, I do think that ARGs challenge existing notions of what a game is. An ARG is very interesting in terms of design- designers are no longer dealing with one player or multiple players who are competing with each other- instead, they have a community of players who are all collaborating to achieve the same objective. This is perhaps similar to Massively-Multiplayer Online games, but even those do not involve the same level of collaborative play as ARGs. ARGs also break down the magic boundary between the game space and the "real world." A world where games like that posited in the Michael Douglas movie "The Game" are played by people indeed might not be inconceivable in the near future- except instead of rich individuals, entire communities might be taken along for the ride! At which point, I wonder if we could still call such activities games, or would they be something else entirely?

Game systems

2006-04-16T16:49:00.000-08:00

1. Creating mods (modifications) to existing games is a common practice, not just for computer games, but for any form of games. Does this imply that any game can be considered a game system? Why/why not?

Any game consists of elements which can possibly be re-contextualized into a new game. This is obvious with digital games, but perhaps slightly less obvious for non-digital ones. To illustrate with an example, let us look at football. Considering the game's components to be it's rules, pieces (the football, goal posts) and the playing field, we can see that these elements can be combined in different ways to produce new games. Popular variations like indoor football and beach football are recognisably similar to the original, but it's not impossible to consider a new game using the components of football that's quite different from the original.

However, the real question is: how open a game system does a game make? A game like Snakes and Ladders is possibly too specific to be a system capable of supporting a wide variety of games. Chess, on the other hand, is open enough of a game system to support a wide variety of variants.

So yes, all games can be considered game systems, but not all are open game systems.

2. Consider a game which you feel could be successfully modified. How could this game be generalized into a game system? How much of the unique character/flavour of the game can be retained? How generic can you make the game system? How easy will it be to create new, unique games from the game system?

Half-Life 2 is a good example of a highly modifiable game. The game ships with a full set of editing tools that streamlines and simplifies the process of modifying the game. Because of this, a large community of modders has sprung up around the game.

The tools allow a modder to modify aspects of the game- from levels to characters to weapons and even right down to the core game mechanics. What it provides is Half-Life 2's game engine- consisting of it's graphics, sound, physics engines, scripting capabilities and networking code. Using these as a base, modders are free to create as simple or as complex a game as they wish.

Many mods retain the unique character of Half-Life 2 by re-using the games graphics and sound as well as it's weapons. This makes the mod aesthetically identifiable as a creation built around Half-Life 2. On the other hand, an ambitious modder can drop every single part of Half-Life 2's gameplay and create entirely new art and sound effects to make a game as different from Half-Life 2 as possible. For example, one modding team is developing a Wing Commander-style space combat simulation called Eternal Silence using the Half-Life 2 engine.

Describe one new game designed on top of the game system you proposed in question 2.

A puzzle game in the style of The Incredible Machine, where players put together sets of parts to create an intricate machine to fulfill various objectives. This would leverage Half-Life 2's robust physics engine to showcase a form of gameplay that was only partially explored in the original game.

My D&D Online beta impressions- or, how not to design an RPG combat system

2006-03-30T22:41:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, non-digital games are poorly translated into digital games. I played the beta version of the Dungeons & Dragons Online Massively-Multiplayer RPG and found that though the designers tried their best to simulate the gameplay of the non-digital version of Dungeons & Dragons, I felt that it was a doomed mission. In order to make the game fun, they had to leverage the factors that made conventional MMORPGs (and conventional RPGs, for that matter) fun. That's OK because the game could only work in a digital setting if they took into account what made digital games unique and fun.

However, they made one huge mistake in translating the game from it's board game roots to the digital version- the made the combat real-time, but kept the element of attacks/defence being determined by dice rolls (which was made obvious to the player by the ubiquitous appearance of a dice on the right-hand side of the screen after every attack). Why was this a bad decision? Well, simply put, it completely undermines the illusion of control that the player has over the game. When I attack an enemy and the game shows my sword cutting the enemy in "real-time," I can't and will not accept a dice roll appearing at the right-hand side of the screen and telling me that my attack "missed."

This creates a disconnect between the player's perception of the game and the actual game systems. Similarly, the game lets the player dodge attacks by rolling back, but the success of a dodge move is calculated by the dice. So several times, I would roll backwards before an enemy attacked only to have the attack, executed at empty air a few paces in front of me, hit me! I felt cheated- as if my actions really didn't matter at all in the game. The illusion of control had been broken completely.

Strangely enough, World of Warcraft- which also has a similar stats-based damage system, manages to maintain the illusion of control during combat for me. The combat, while ostensibly "real-time," is slower-paced than D&D Online and players are not given the same freedom of movement as in that game (where you can run and jump in a similar manner to Tomb Raider!). Because of this, the entire experience feels much more fun than in D&D Online.

That being said, it must be understood that the reason that non-digital RPGs implement combat in the way that they do because they are approximating something- combat- using the best tools available in the situation. Early PC RPGs did the same thing because that was the best early computers could do. Today, the situation is quite different- graphics in modern RPGs seem so realistic that their combat systems increasingly seem arbitrary and redundant.

No wonder, then, that D&D Online tried for a real-time combat system. Their failure probably lies in the fact that they did not try hard enough- dice-rolls probably need to be relegated to the past. RPG game designers need to look at why systems exist in games, and if they cease to fulfill the need they were created for, they should scrap them altogether. Some game designers have indeed realised this problem.

The Elder Scrolls series of PC RPGs have long had real-time combat systems, implemented with varying degrees of success. Judging by the reviews of latest game in the series- Oblivion- it looks like developer Bethesda have finally found the right balance between giving players control over combat and making the statistics in the game meaningful. For example, a well-timed attack that isn't blocked by the enemy will result in a hit, but the damage incurred by the enemy will depend on your "strength" rating. Haven't played it yet myself, but it sounds like a good compromise.

Digital Games: Nethack

2006-03-30T22:29:00.000-08:00

Ah, Nethack- godfather of the dungeon hack subgenre of the PC RPG. Ok, that's not entirely true as it was based on the earlier game Hack, itself based on the earlier game Rogue, but seeing as how Nethack has been in development til today and has versions playable on most modern operating systems, I'd rather talk about it than it's predecessors.

So, Nethack then. It's a basic dungeon hack- when you start a new game, you create a character from one of several character classes, and then you're dumped onto the first floor of a dungeon. Your objective is to descend this dungeon, killing progressively tougher enemies while gaining better equipment, nifty spells and gold in the process. Oh, and when you die, it's permanent. There's a save-feature, but it's only meant for cases where you have to turn off the game to go do something else. This is what they call hardcore.

What makes this game, originally released in 1987 and very obviously based on the non-digital game Dungeons & Dragons, a digital game? Well, the first thing would be it's use of procedural content. Every time you start a new game, the entire dungeon you play in is randomly generated anew. You'll (very likely) never encounter the same enemy in the same spot twice. Or the same treasures, for that matter. This makes every playthrough unique and, coupled with the constant danger that permanent death brings, adds to the appeal of the game.

The idea of the computer as a moderator is important here too. Nethack is a single-player game: you, as the adventurer, are battling against the game system which throws various kinds of enemies at you to deter your progress through the game. In a non-digital version of Nethack, a moderator (dungeon-master, in this case) would have to co-ordinate all the enemies while setting the positions of all the treasures. Heck, he or she'd have to make a totally new map every time the player died too. Truly an ordeal that would reduce even the bravest of dungeon-masters to tears.

Another important thing that the computer does is hide the game's systems from the player. Even if the player is aware that combat in the game is decided by a series of calculations, he/she does not have to bother remembering those calculations. All the player has to do is choose to "attack the enemy." By doing this, the player cues the computer to compute all necessary calculations and near-instantaneously inform the player of the result of the attack- did it hit or miss? If it hit, how much damage did it cause? This information is delivered so fast to the player that there might as well be no delay between the physical action of pressing the attack key and receiving the feedback for the action. This clearly cannot be done in a non-digital game.

The last thing the computer does for the player that is, I think, quite important is to limit the player's information about the game. The dungeon map which the player explores is completely hidden from the player except for the areas which he/she has visited already and a few spaces in front of the player (if the player is exploring a new area). This adds an element of suspense to the game- a player can never be sure if a new room will contain a treasure chest, or a terrible enemy. Taking calculated risks becomes the name of the game.

It's interesting to see how Nethack (and it's predecessors and antecendents- such as Diablo) has taken apart a multiplayer, non-digital game- Dungeons & Dragons, and used it's gameplay elements as the framework to build a single-player, digital game. A cursory playthrough of both will reveal that the play experience for both games are markedly different from each other. Both provide meaningful play, but not by the same means.

Dungeons & Dragons is very much a social game, dependant on the interactions between players and the Dungeon Master, who controls the game. At times, the game can become something that's less goal-oriented and more of an interactive story, mediated by the players and the Dungeon Master. A digital RPG, on the other hand, can do no such things. What they can do, and do very well, is internalize all the complex rules of RPGs and present players with (relatively) fast-paced gameplay that is more often that not short on storyline but compelling nontheless.

Nethack is compelling because you never know what kind of adventure you'll go on each time you play the game and also because of the balance between risk and reward that the prospect of permanent death brings to the game- something that few modern games have been willing to emulate. No matter, though- there are more than enough variant of Nethack and other "Rogue-alikes" to satisfy the needs of dungeon hackers around the world. I'm off to slay a slime mold.

Assignment 3: Faith City

2006-03-28T20:30:00.000-08:00

After discarding several versions of this game for being too complicated, here's a version that just might work:

Faith City is a massively-multiplayer online game where 2 religious orders are competing for the faith of the citizens of a city (no prizes for guessing it's name :P). Players will join the priesthood of 1 of these religious orders and attempt to convert as many people as possible; advancing through the ranks of the order and gaining power and responsibility as they do so.

The citizens of this city are AI entities, similar to those found in the Sims in that they have needs and desires that they want to fulfill. Society in this city is divided into 3 strata- the high-income, middle-income and low-income classes. Citizens belonging to each of these 3 classes will have different needs and desires and players must exploit these in order to successfully convert them.

Player characters have certain statistics (wisdom, charisma, reputation, leadership etc) that affect their ability to successfully convert citizens. The number of citizens converted by the player and the number of citizens accidentally driven away by the player are also tracked.

The priesthoods of each religious order are divided into ranks- each new rank a player reaches will afford them new actions, greater responsibility and also greater access to the order's funds and resources. Players ascend to a higher rank by fulfilling certain minimum requirements, both in terms of their characters statistics and the number of people converted by them. In order to reach the highest ranks of each order, though, players will have to be elected to the office.

Each order starts with one temple in that order's home area and a limited amount of funds. Further temples and other structures can be purchased- but only if the order has a player of sufficient rank to do so.

Upon creating a new character, players will have these actions available to them:

1. Preach in temple (Success depends on player's charisma- if successful, will increase faith of citizens who attend temple and also increase player's reputation).
2. Preach on the streets (Similar to 1 but usually requires more charisma to be successful).
3. Community service ((Success depends on player's leadership- if successful, will increase faith of citizens who attend temple and also increase player's reputation).
4. Teaching (Success depends on player's wisdom- if successful, will increase faith of citizens who attend school and also increase player's reputation).
5. Study (Increases wisdom).
6. Speech training (Increases charisma).
7. Leadership exercises (what'cha think? :P)

Further actions would become available as players progress in the game, such as:

1. Starting a marketing campaign.
2. Organising a charity event.
3. Organising a funding drive.
4. Building a temple.
5. Building a school.
6. Building a hospital.

The final 3 actions would only be open to the highest-ranking players and would require a substantial amount of funds. In addition, after gaining a certain level of faith, miracles would become available to each order (perhaps voting could be used to decide which miracle players want to be performed). These miracles would have fairly dramatic effects on the cities citizens as compared to normal actions.

The game is turn-based- each turn takes place over a period of 1 in-game day, which is one real-time hour. Each player's interface to issue commands to their character is in the form of a daily planner- Players may issue commands up to 2 in-game weeks in advance (or 14 real-time hours).

This game would require a high degree of co-ordination between players within religious orders in order for them to successfully spread their religion within the city. Thus a a chat client along with a "newsboard" would be provided within the game in order to facilitate communication between players.

A final note- the design of the game's interface is very important as players should be able to access information about their own character and the levels of faith in the city easily.

Assignment 3 Further Concept Notes

2006-03-27T14:00:00.000-08:00

Just a few brief notes on the other concepts I'll be blogging about. The first is one that Lai Lin suggested- a humourous political game where the first concept's military units are replaced by politicians and the mooted (?) researchers are replaced by "spin doctors." One suggested gameplay mechanic would involve politicians facing off to attempt to convert each other to their own parties- this seems a bit weird for a political game, so an alternate suggestion of an election was made. We discussed the idea as a group but there are certain problems with the idea of an election-based game- Cheryl raised the question of why would players want to vote for each other? Well, we could make it a full-fledged game of governence where the winning party has to run a virtual country and everyone else acts as citizens, but that's way beyond the scope of this assignment!

The idea of an election has led me to another idea- that of a political Alternate Reality Game where the mobile phone and the game's chat network acts as a primary communication tool. Each game would be a one-time event- it would be interesting if players could blur the magic circle by actively pursuing non-players to join in the game and vote for them. The game, then, would be superficially near-identical to a real political campaign. Perhaps a way of examining how campaign politics works in this age of connectivity? Blogs, mobile phones, other portable computing devices along with more traditional means of communication (posters, etc) could constitute the toolset by which players are allowed to campaign. Virtual money, too, could be provided, to facilitate transactions, both legal and illegal (bribery, anyone?).

Ok that sounds like it might be too open- perhaps more constraints are necessary? Actually, this might function well as a totally online-based game with a simulated virtual society made up of AI-controlled entities. This is close to another idea that I'm quite keen on- a massively-multiplayer God Game (which may or may not inherit the "virtual world overlaid on the real world" idea of the 1st concept). I'll blog about that in more detail later.

Assignment 3 Concept 1

2006-03-27T12:04:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about autonomous AI entities (yarr, that's my blog- a little side-project of mine) a lot lately. What I want are game characters that can go about their business with minimum input from players. I want to use these as the basis for a mobile game- my idea is to make a game for busy people, where they can issue commands to their character(s) at a certain time of day and have said commands be carried out during the rest of the day. From this little idea, me and my group have come up with a few massively multi-player mobile game concepts- oh and just for reference, I'm imagining these games would be implemented for 3G networks and fairly high-tech phones with nice big colour screens and all. Here's the first of em.

Idea 1: Veni, Vidi, Vici

This is a multi-player game based on the idea of conquering territory (like the name says :P). Players can choose to be one of two types of characters- A military unit with combat capabilities or a research unit- belonging to a faction (players can select a desired faction but may be allocated another one if there are too many players on the desired faction) ; of which there are 7 (the number has no significance- I've chosen it arbitrarily to illustrate this example). At the beginning of play, each faction has a home territory and all military units are at level 1. This home territory is mapped onto the real world- using Singapore as an example, Tanjong Pagar could be the home of one faction, Woodlands could be another. To conquer other territories- of which there will be 50 contested ones in addition to the 7 home territories of each faction(again, a random number)- players must physically be in a territory and then "drop off" a military character into that territory with instructions to "tag" it with their faction's symbol. However, a player can return his character to his/her home territory at any time without having to be in the physical space corresponding to the home territory.

The objective of the game would be to conquer all the territory in the game- a faction whose home territory is taken over would be "subjucated" into the faction who took over their territory. Meaning that all players of the losing faction would be added to the strength of the winning one- perhaps with the caveat that all military characters would be lowered to level 1.

Gameplay is exceedingly simple- players simply choose to "drop off" their character into an area and the character will act according to the status of the area it was dropped into. A military character in a home territory will defend the territory. A military character in a contested territory will seek to "tag" it- if there are no characters from enemy factions this is done automatically (a successful tag will take one uninterrupted day) but if there are enemies there, the character will engage in combat with said enemies. Players can select one of two behaviours for a military unit- favour tagging or favour combat. A character who favours tagging will try to tag the contested area while other characters will distract the enemy characters in combat. For example, if there are 4 characters of faction A and 5 characters of faction B in an area, the first character in faction B who favours tagging and is not engaged in combat (which is one-to-one) will start the tagging process.

Levels are important for military characters- just like in RPGs, characters with higher levels are more powerful. How do characters gain levels? Well, the original idea was to have the researcher characters be sort of "treasure hunters" who could be dropped into special neutral regions to "hunt" for treasure which could be used to upgrade the military characters. An alternative (which would negate the need for the researcher characters altogether) is to have military characters gain experience in battle- say, a gain of 50% experience for each battle won and 25% percent for a battle lost.

What'll make the game (hopefully) interesting are the social dynamics that should emerge between players- a large degree of organisation will be required for players to defend their home bases and attack other territories. Players will be given the option of dropping off their character in EITHER the territory that maps to the physical location they are at OR at a territory corresponding to a physical location another player of the same faction is at. This is done by "sending" the first players character to the second player. To facilitate all this social interaction, the game will have a built-in chat client (like MSN Messenger but for phones).

Thinking about mobile games

2006-03-21T16:44:00.000-08:00

Mobile games are interesting precisely because nobody, to the best of my knowledge, has ever created one that takes full advantage of mobile phone technology. Mobile phones allow for peer-to-peer communication, they're portable, most modern ones are outfitted with a decent camera and they can be location-tracked using GPRS systems. So... what kind of game could take advantage of all these things?

I've been mulling over these, trying to think of a suitable game that I could present for the 3rd assignment. I don't think anybody really wants to play a simultaneous multiplayer game over a phone (as evidenced by the Multiplayer on the Run section in this Gamasutra article), but I think not implementing any multiplayer functionality is simply ignoring the key features of mobile phone technology, so perhaps a game that is primarily played single-player, but has a multiplayer component, would work better (I'm thinking something similar to online browser RPG Kingdom of Loathing, or Spore's offline-online gameplay).

I'm also thinking that a lot of people don't really enjoy playing twitch-based games on a phone- after all, a phone's keypad isn't built to play Snake (which was near-impossible to play on certain Nokia models). A gameplay mechanism reminiscent of the Japanese RPG Dragon Quest- which strips down the RPG interface to a beautifully elegant level- is one possible solution. Give players a menu and let them input commands using the different number keys on a phone.

What sort of game emerges from these ideas? An RPG, perhaps, that has players fight through dungeons to get treasure, which they could then sell or trade with other players in a multiplayer marketplace? Extrapolating further, why not combine this with location-specific areas, like dungeons that can only be accessed in specific parts of a city (say, Singapore)? As for cameras, I wonder if it would be possible for a server to overlay data onto a real-life scene as viewed through a phone camera viewfinder? Perhaps a certain building, if seen through a phone camera (or photographed by one), could be displayed as a wizard's tower?

These are just some ideas I'm throwing out and a fantasy RPG setting is by no means a requirement, or even what I'd like to go for. Other technologies I'd be interested in exploring include a game where your phone will alert you to the presence of nearby players and a game involving a heavier use of phone photography- perhaps a database of player faces could be created and taking a photo of another players face would bring up data associated with that player that could then be manipulated? Or a game which allows you to "tag" real-life locations with textual information, which can then be viewed by other players. Of course, such games may be impossible today given the limitations of current phone technology, but since we're not implementing said games, why not ignore those limits?

Soviet-Unterzögersdorf: A Very Serious Game (?)

2006-03-21T16:15:00.000-08:00

Here's a description of the impossible-to-pronounce Soviet-Unterzögersdorf, straight off the game's website:

Soviet Unterzögersdorf (pronounced «oon-taa-tsee-gars-doorf») is the last existing appanage republic of the USSR. The enclave maintains no diplomatic relationship with the surrounding so-called «Republic of Austria» or with the Fortress «European Union». The downfall of her motherland -- the Soviet Union -- in the early 1990s had a particularly bad effect on the country’s economic situation.

It is a great challenge to secure survival for the small but proud confederation. External reactionary forces put the country in danger. It’s a lack of respect due to a morally corrupted and perhaps even non-existing unity of the peoples. The goal of a glorious future is almost unreachable.

But there are a handful of people who don’t give up on a vision for a better tomorrow. Let us tell you the stories of the brave citizens in the beautiful little country of Soviet Unterzögersdorf.

It’s a story that will go into history.

Stirring, no? Except for the fact that the country of Soviet-Unterzögersdorf is completely non-existent. The game, which I'm going to abbreviate as SU because typing the full name is an exercise in (cut-and-paste) frustration, is part of an art project by the international self-described art-technology-philosophy group monochrom. It's a very postmodern production, being a simulation of a history that never existed, designed to comment on and parody Eastern-European Communist countries of yore (and implicitly criticize the current dominant Capitalist system as well). Interestingly enough, they chose the medium of the traditional Lucasarts-style adventure game because they felt that this "almost extinct form of computer game would provide the perfect media platform to communicate the idea of «Soviet-Unterzögersdorf»."

So what's the game about? You play as Vladislav Gomulka, party secretary of the tiny, 2.5 square kilometer large country of SU, the last bastion of Communist ideals (in real-life, situated smack in the middle of Austrian wine country). The game starts as Vladislav wakes up at 7:00am in the morning, to be rudely greeted by the horrendous sight of garbage all over the country's Red Yard, not to mention graffiti! Vladislav's first mission is to clean up all this garbage (and wipe off the graffiti) and then find out whodunnit! No prizes for guessing that it was young punks from the neighbouring village of... bah I can't spell it. Just imagine a jumble of consonants with a few precious vowels thrown in, and possibly an umlaut.

So does the game work? While it's worth as a postmodern examination of the cultural history and the political struggles of Cold War-era Europe will depend on the player's knowledge of the history of that era (though I would assume that this is pretty much general knowledge), it's very compelling as a game. Mostly because it's so darned funny. It's very aware of the something rather-tired tropes of the adventure game genre and it uses them to great comedic effect in furthering the game's story and themes. I particularly enjoyed having Vladislav comment on various in-game objects (he delivers such classics as "Doing this won't destroy capitalism" and "Doing this won't lead to a glorious future!" in droll, dead-pan Russian). The conflict between Communist and Capitalist worldviews is also brought out with some sparkling humour in the game.

So there we have it, a game that aspires to more serious goals than your average videogame and does so in a mostly-successful manner. I can honestly say it's the first pure adventure game I've enjoyed in a long time and I quite appreciated the game's subtext as well. The only problem is, the game ends in a cliffhanger (it's a part 1 of 3, you see). This interview at mutednoise.com is quite revealing- going into the philosophical reasons behind the game's creation and the developers' future plans for the next 2 installments.

Social Games Assignment

2006-03-14T19:03:00.000-08:00

I'm gonna take a look at the game Mafia for this assignment.

1. Describe the social interactions which you observed during play. In what way did these interactions emerge from within the formal elements of the game?

Since the main core mechanic of Mafia is voting to eliminate a player who's suspected of being a Mafia, the game effectively revolved around social persuasion. Basically, at the start of each daylight turn, different players would put forward theories as to who they thought was the Mafia and then attempt to convince all the other players to vote that person out. The accused player would in turn attempt to try and convince everyone of his/her innocence. Social cues became very important. A player who laughed too much might be accused of being a Mafia. In addition, prior experience was brought into the game- one player was voted out because he "looked like a Mafia!" :p

2. Using Sutton-Smith's categorization of social play roles, discuss how the players' roles changed during the course of the game.

I could identify five main social play roles in Mafia- attack, defend, search, mislead, harass and seduce. The players who were Mafia attacked other players during the nighttime turn and all players could, in a democratic fashion, attack each other during the daytime turn. Players have no way to defend against a nighttime attack but they can convince other players of their innocence during the daylight turn to avoid attack. The players who were villagers were attempting to search for the mafia during the daylight turn, while the Mafia would try to mislead them by acting innocent and/or accusing other players of being Mafia, which is a form of seduction since they're tempting the villagers to eliminate one of their own, thus taking them one step closer to defeat.

The accusations certainly contained an element of harassment ("You're the Mafia!" "No way! you're the first person to accuse someone! YOU must be the Mafia!" and so on). In addition, some dead players had a nasty tendancy of voicing out opinions from beyond the grave- though they're actually disallowed from influencing the flow of the game by the rules. Heh.

3. Suggest a modification to the game which will alter the social dynamics that emerge during play.

We actually tried out one such modification during the tutorial class- an addition of an incognito detective who had a chance to find out whether one player was a Mafia or not every turn. Theoritically, this turns the balance in favour of the villagers since one member of their group has some extra knowledge- but in practise it's quite hard for the detective to actually convince players to either spare someone he/she knows ISN'T a Mafia or to execute someone he/she knows IS one, given that the detective can't reveal his/her identity for fear of being elliminated by the Mafia during the next turn.

It's a bit hard to think of another modification for Mafia that wouldn't break the game balance, actually... But I'll take a stab at it anyway. What if there was a player who, instead of being a detective, was a medium? The medium could then ask a "dead" player to point at a player who ISN'T a Mafia. Of course, this means that after a few turns the medium could tell who the Mafia were, but he/she still has the problem of trying to convince all the other players that he/she's telling the truth.

Settler's Cafe Visit

2006-03-07T23:41:00.000-08:00

Here's some notes about the games we played at Settler's Cafe over break. I'd written a skeleton after the trip and meant to expand it into a full post, but events (well, World of Warcrack, to be honest) pushed it into the background til now. Well, here goes.

Game: Taboo
Description:
Game with 2 teams, who try to score points. During each round, a team member has to take a card from a pack and describe that word to their team, without using gestures or any of the other words written on the card (members of the opposing team will check to see that there's no cheating). If the team can guess the word in 30 seconds (or was it a minute?), they score a point. The process repeats for the other team. Rounds continue until every member on each team has played. Not sure when the game ends because we just stopped playing- I think the rules said something like first team to reach 10 points wins. Or maybe 20.
Notes:
- Social
- Depends on linguistic skill n quick-thinking
- Some words are too culturally-specific to the USA
- Game wasn't too successful. Some players weren't enjoying themselves. Words too hard, perhaps? Or the game is only successful with certain types of players (i.e. those who have the right skills) or in a real party-atmosphere.

Game: Some game about relationships (can't remember the name)
Description:
Everyone gets dealt a hand of cards at the start, and gameplay involves discarding cards in a certain order. Sticks (either blue or red) are added to your pile o'sticks with each card you discard (except for certain special cards) and the winner is the player who has the least difference in blue and red sticks. So if you have 10 red and 10 blue, there's no difference and you win. Unless 2 players have no difference, in which case I guess it's a draw. But that scenario didn't happen.
Notes:
- The game's SUPPOSED to be about relationships, but the gameplay isn't
- It's actually somewhat of a strategy game
- Not very social; didn't bring out enough interaction between players
- Example of how a game and it's theme don't match!

Game: Guillotine
Description:
Each player is an executioner during the French revolution. The objective of the game is to get the highest score. At the start of play, each player is dealt a hand of action cards which have different effects. 12 Noble cards, each of which has a different value, are arranged on the table. Each player takes turns to execute the Noble currently on the "chopping block"- that is, the leftmost Noble on the lower row of cards. Nobles are executed in a counter-clockwise fashion. However, during his/her turn, each player can choose to use an action card- some of which shift the positions of Nobles. Each round ends when all 12 Nobles have been beheaded or when Robespierre is beheaded (in which case all Nobles after him are just put in the discard pile). The game ends after 5 rounds.
Notes:
- Fast-paced
- Strategic
- Sabotaging other players is part of gameplay; players try to "send" low or negative-valued Nobles to the front of the pile so that another player will get it, or use an action card to deflect such a Noble to another card.
- The action cards facilitate much of this "sabotaging" gameplay, some cards can shift the balance of power quite drastically
- Very fun! No one player dominates for very long because whenever other players see him/her starting to rack up a high score, they'll try to sabotage him/her.

Game: Munchkin
Description:
Parody of RPG games, played using cards and one 6-sided die. Each player is an adventurer and starts as a level-one human. The objective of the game is to reach level-10 before everyone else does. Each turn begins with a player "looking for trouble" by taking a dungeon card from the dungeon card deck. If the card is a monster, the player has to fight it (or try to run away). If the player's level plus any bonuses the player has (from treasure cards) is higher than the monster's level (plus any bonuses it has), the player wins the fight, goes up a level and collects loot in the form of treasure cards. Treasure cards can be items (which have one-off effects), weapons (that boost stats), armor (ditto), class or race cards (both class and race cards give a variety of effects, some beneficial, some not so much).
Notes:
- Higher learning curve than the rest
- Great deal of gameplay possibilities
- Impressive simulation/reinvention/parody of a D&D-type game using only cards n 1 die
- Also really fun! The same element of sabotage-type gameplay applies to this game as well. Except there's an additional layer of intrigue in this because players can choose to help each other during battles if they think it'll work towards their own advantage. Alternatively, they can also choose to sabotage players during battles (by using cards that boost a monsters stats).

Game: Easy Come Easy Go
Description:
The first player to obtain 3 special tiles (out of 9 on the table) wins. To get one of these tiles, a player must roll 4 dice and obtain a certain value (either 4 of a kind, 2 pairs, 3 of a kind and all dice odd, 3 of a kind and all dice even, a sum of exactly 7, a sum of exactly 13, 17 or more or 4 consecutive numbers. Players can choose to re-roll 4 times, but each time they must "freeze" a die (meaning on the first try they roll all 4 dice, on the second they roll 3, 2 on the third and finally 1). If they get the combination of one of the tiles, they can take it no matter where it is on the board (i.e. even if its in the possession of another player)
Notes:
- Fast-paced
- Relies heavily on chance
- The name describes the game perfectly- gameplay revolves around
- Fun for short sessions but gets slightly repetitive after a while.

Game: Jungle Speed
Description:
It's pretty much like Snap, except instead with a custom deck of cards (which are harder to match than normal cards)
Notes:
- Really fast-paced
- Relies on spatial/pattern recognition (the cards are geometric shapes).
- Suitable for a younger audience

Conclusion:
Overall, I'd say Guillotine, Munchkin and to an extent Easy Come Easy Go went down the best with the group I played with- their mechanics facilitate social play (and social interaction along with it) rather well. I was particularly impressed with Munchkin (and not just because I'm a Steve Jackson fan!) both because of the hilarious way it lampooned RPG conventions and how emergent the gameplay was. Ditto with Guillotine. Easy Come Easy Go wasn't particularly emergent and it relied heavily on chance, but some interesting interactions did come out of it- like when players would try and grab a tile from a player who'd just obtained two. Nobody really tried to convince a player to make a bad decision with the dice rolls (such a friendly bunch we were ;-) ) but it's a distinct possibility with the game!

Assignment 2 concept: revised edition

2006-03-04T23:47:00.000-08:00

Here's a version of the Ragnarok game that Cheryl blogged about, modified to use a normal deck of cards.

Number of players: 4-8

Required equipment: 1 standard 52-card deck

Game Objective: 2 teams of 2-4 players each try to collect a set of 4 cards (either 4 different-suited cards of the same number OR 4 same-suited cards with adjacent numbers- e.g. 2,3,4,5), one in each player's hand. The team to successfully collect a set and invoke a Ragnarok card wins Round 1. In round 2, the players in the winning team have to each collect a set of 3 cards (either 2 adjacent-numbered same-suit cards to the number card in their possession or 2 different-suited cards of the same number as the card in their possession).

Gameplay: At the start of the game, players divide themselves up into 2 teams and selects one player to be the dealer. The dealer then removes all non-numbered cards from the deck except for the Aces and the Jacks.

The Ace cards will be used as the Ragnarok card- in order to win Round 1 of the game, one member of a team that has collected a set of 4 cards must place the Ragnarok card down on the table. The Jack cards will be used as Exchange cards. A player who has an Exchange card in hand may place it down on the table and then tell any player from the other team to exchange their cards with him/her (the other player has no choice about this).

Once the dealer has shuffled the deck (sans King and Queen cards), he/she will deal out 2 cards to each player and leave the remaining cards on the table. The player to the left of the dealer will start play.

During his/her turn, a player may choose to either do nothing and keep his/her cards, discard one card at the bottom of the deck and take a new card from the top, or use a Ragnarok or Exchange card. Play then continues in a clockwise order until one team declares Ragnarok. Players from the same team may look at each others cards if they wish.

The second round of the game then begins. Each member of the winning team must then take 1 card from the deck (the player who declared Ragnarok must take 2) and continue play in the same way as round 1 until one player completes his set and wins the game. Exchange cards can be used on players of the same team during this round.

An optional gameplay element: During the second round, the losing team keeps their cards and may choose to help or hinder the players from the winning team by offering a player a card from their hand (without showing them what card they're offering) at the start of that player's turn. Players cannot refuse cards from a losing team player.

Remarks: This doesn't feel very social, come to think of it. Might have to re-think the whole gameplay from scratch. Another concept will be coming soon...

Narrative and Time in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

2006-02-22T19:31:00.000-08:00

Choose a game which you feel attempts to incorporate strong narrative elements.

To answer the above discussion question, I've chosen one of my favourite games in recent years- Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The game is an interesting one to look at because of its unusual (for a game, anyway) narrative technique and one of it's main gameplay features- the player's ability to manipulate time (albeit in a limited way).

Discuss the tension between agency and narrative structure within the game. Do you agree that narrative and interactivity can never co-exist? Why/why not?

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is an unusual videogame (at least in my experience) because the entire story is told as a flashback, narrated by the Prince himself, who you take control of in the game. This is interesting because it implies that everything that you're playing through in the game has already happened. If you die, the Prince will exclaim- "That's not how it happened!" and the game will allow you to restart from the last checkpoint. During non-interactive cutscenes (and during some gameplay sequences as well), the Prince will interject a few comments about your current (which of course is his past) situation.

What's interesting is that despite the storyline implying I had no global agency, I never actually felt that way. Two factors lead to this, I believe. One is that the actual gameplay, consisting of a series of what are effectively obstacle courses that must be traversed by skillful application of the Prince's acrobatic talents, was really compelling. The second is that the player, despite playing as the Prince in the game, is actually put in the position of the (invisible til the end of the game) audience to whom the Prince is speaking. At every point in the game, we don't know what's going to happen next- and so we're curious. The game, then, feels like a story that we have to play through to reach the end (kind of like an adventure game in a way).

Oddly enough, I think this partially resolves the conflict between narrative and interactivity inherent in all games of this nature. The player is no longer torn between the idea that he/she is making meaningful changes to the game world and the relentless, linear pull of the narrative. By explicitly taking away the concept of global agency from the player, it frees the player to concentrate on the local agency of each series of puzzles he/she traverses and enjoy the narrative as the linear, designed creation that it is.

So does this mean that narrative and interactivity can never co-exist? No, I don't think so. I do, however, believe that narrative-based games, in their current form, are incapable of doing this (mind you, I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that). No matter how many branching paths a designer adds to a game's storyline, all those branching paths are still those that have been chosen by the designer and not the player himself/herself. The kind of game that can truly bridge the gap between narrative and interactivity will have to be one that lets a storyline emerge dynamically from the interactions between a player and a game-world. "Emergent gameplay," so to speak.

How is time represented in the game? Is there a separation of story and discourse time? How does the game’s use of time allow for interactivity?

In the process of answering the first question, I think I ended up answering the first 2 parts of this question as well. So I'll talk a bit about the player's ability to manipulate time in the game. Basically, after a certain point in the game, the player acquires, shall we say, a "device". This "device" contains a number of charges, each of which can be used to reverse time by about 10 or so seconds. Thus players can save themselves from a painful death (caused, more often than not, by a mistake made during traversal of the game's obstacle courses). Later in the game, you'll also be able to use said device to slow down time (which helps out in battles) and freeze time (ditto). These time manipulation abilities are restricted, though, and the player does not affect the flow of time within the storyline at all. So we could say that the game uses the manipulation of time as an interactive tool, while at the same time giving players no freedom to affect the flow of time within the story of the game.

Rumours of Gaming's Creative Demise= Very Much Exaggerated

2006-02-22T11:31:00.000-08:00

The brilliant PS2 action-adventure game Shadow of the Colossus has debuted at the number 1 position (oh by the way, that's my regular non-school blog) on UK's weekly all-format games sales charts, taking out EA's NFS: Most Wanted in the process. Oh sweet irony! It's heartening to see that Sony pushed the game with a massive marketing campaign, especially given how little attention they gave to it's predecessor, the equally-brilliant ICO. This, I think, proves what I've always suspected- that gamers will play unconventional, artistic games of high quality if they're made aware of it. Oh and if you're reading this, scratching your head and wondering, "Shadow of the who?", then wander along to this meandering but frequently eloquent review of the game by the Hunter S. Thompson of gaming, Tim Rogers.

Playtesting Round 3- FIGHT!

2006-02-12T14:11:00.000-08:00

PROTIP: If your game board is larger than the average restaurant table, don't go to Anchorpoint to test your game.

We ended up playing the game in an empty corner on the 3rd floor of Queensway. Not the best location, perhaps, but we made do.

As for the playtesting itself, we think we've got unit balancing down pat- we made a change to the Dean unit to make him more formidable, as befits his rank. He now attacks using a 4-sided die with a x4 multiplier. So he either hits for 4, 8, 12 or 16 damage. Quite a bit more satisfying than him attacking with a 20-sided die and repeatedly landing 1s and 2s, methinks. He also moves 2 squares per turn, to prevent a situation where he gets hemmed in by opponents and is unable to attack them (since he only attacks in diagonal directions). This is necessary since the death of the Dean (oh dear we need to revise our terminology!) spells defeat for a player. The Alex unit, who's L-shaped knight-like attack is delivered with the 20-sided die, is the most useful unit in the game but also the most vulnerable with his limited health. These changes make the game a bit more strategic and exciting- since your strongest units are also your weakest and most vulnerable.

We've also decided to cut down unit health points by 5 across the board to make gameplay more speedy- especially since we're going to place LTs on the board which will give health bonuses to units which land on them. Also, we've changed the rules which determine defeat: a player can only be defeated if his/her Dean is killed or his/her Dean's office captured- we took out the 3rd option of defeating all units other than the Dean since a Dean faced off against a weakened opponent, say with one Dean and a student, could conceivably still win the day

In addition to LTs, we'll also have squares which bestow upon a unit a damage bonus, card squares and a University Health Centre square which gives health bonuses to all of a players units (we may have to make this a one-time-use square to prevent abuse). We're implementing a rule for the health squares whereby a player who lands there must vacate the square within the next turn. This to prevent camping.

Speaking of camping, that's one of 2 main issues we were left to grapple with after the session. There's a risk that in a 3 or 4 player game, one player may choose to simply sit in his section of the board, watch all the other players annihilate each other and then destroy the survivor, who will no doubt be weakened beyond any possibility of gaining a victory. We discussed several possible solutions- including a penalty for staying in your own section for too long (we mooted this one) and having attacking players get a bonus whenever they defeat another player.

We rather liked this idea and Weiwei came up with this implementation: a player who defeats another player gets to revive a dead unit of his choice. This makes no difference to a player who's at full strength (presumably a player that good needs no extra help!) but is quite a big deal for one who's faculty strength is at it's ebb. It also encourages reckless use of the Alex unit if a player is in a position to sacrifice it to defeat another player. However, this still doesn't fully solve the camping problem!

An example to illustrate- a camper at full-strength versus a player who has a Dean, a Student and Alex (at full strength, just being revived). Unless the camper is very, very stupid, there's really no way the other player can win. We mulled over this problem for quite a while and finally decided on this solution: let the players solve it themselves. :P

OK that sounds like lazy design but there's a (hopefully) sound reason for this! See, we can't think of a reasonable penalty for being a camper. And really, being a camper should be a valid tactic. But with a few judicious hints (or if those don't work, a few OBVIOUS ones) players will soon realise the folly of letting another player camp. So we're going to add a rule to allow adhoc alliances. Players can choose to gang up on other players. A camper will soon find himself overwhelmed if 2 (or even 3!) other players decide to attack him/her simultaneously. The battle, then, gains a psychological element. What about the reverse case- players repeatedly ganging up on 1 lone player?

Well, bullying is certainly possible, but it's up to that player to try making other players a better deal than the one they have at the moment! After all, alliances can't win the game. Only individual players can. So any alliance is doomed to dissolution. No point being loyal to a player(s) game after game.

So that's that, we hope. I mentioned a 2nd main issue we have. We've got to redesign our cards. We need to do that anyway- there's not enough of them at the moment and not enough helpful cards to make taking the risk of landing on a card square worth the while of a player. But we also need to take into account the fact that we've added attack squares and more health squares, which make some of the cards irrelevant.

Here's my idea- there will be a few cards that produce rather drastic effects and a lot more which have movement effects (forcing the unit that landed there skip a turn for bad cases and making other players skip their turns for good cases). We'll have to test out our new game system again to work out further niggles, but I think we've got a fairly fun game on our hands here. :-)

2nd Playtesting Session Thoughts

2006-02-12T12:30:00.000-08:00

2nd playtest was during Wednesday's tutorial. Supposed to let another group play the game to observe their play session, but sadly that didn't work out as the only other unpaired group in class hadn't quite finished their design yet (tho it did look like it'd make for quite a fun, competitive game once they do finish it). So we played it amongst ourselves again. As usual, Weiwei has put a very, very comprehensive review of the playtesting session. Complete with photos. And a diagram. Oh my.

Well, I'll just post some brief thoughts then:

The physical size of the game-board and pieces, oddly enough, affects how fun the game is. Our first board was small enough to be placed on a Starbucks table, with enough space left for drinks too. Our second board was so large we had to spread it out on the floor to play. We had a lot more fun on the 2nd session. Now why was that, then? I think it's because the first, overly-small, board just felt too cramped whereas the larger one FEELS good to play on. You don't feel constrained by it, and the large pieces feel satisfying to move around. I do believe that we could make the board a lot smaller than it currently is and still retain this feeling of spatial freedom- but I surmise that there's a lower limit as to how small we can make the board and still keep it fun.

This is interesting. I used to play chess with my friends on the bus home from secondary school (yes, we were geeks)- we'd use one of those tiny boards with magnetic playing pieces. That was really fun. So a small board size isn't overly constraining for some games. But clearly, our game isn't chess. We don't have as many pieces and we've got a Dungeons & Dragons-style (albeit simplified) combat system. Our pieces have more visual elements on them which don't scale well to small sizes- namely, the fact that units can face different directions. It's hard to put discernable arrows on tiny magnetic pieces. I wonder if there might be psychological factors involved, too? Hmmm...

Thoughts about Chris Crawford on Game Design

2006-02-06T01:45:00.000-08:00

I read game design guru Chris Crawford's latest book on game design over the weekend. The book is eminently readable- the writing is fairly informal and the ideas well-communicated. And what ideas! The first 12 chapters of the book are fairly essential, I think. The 4th chapter on the topic of Challenge in games is particularly edifying. It describes the types of challenges that games can present to players and the final one it describes, social reasoning, is very interesting indeed. Chris Crawford criticizes game designers for being generally clueless about social reasoning. He reckons, and I think he's damn right on this point, that games which challenge social reasoning skills would be attractive to women. Heck, I'd go a step further and say that games which incorporate such challenges would be more appealing to a broader segment of men than those who play games today. This gives me an idea for a new game design, actually. Getting a bit late though so I'll put up something tomorrow.

Back to Crawford's book- Chapter 11, on Storytelling, was another good read. While I think the man gives less credit to the open-ended game design of Grand Theft Auto than it deserves. He, like many commentators, myopically focuses on the game's ultra-violent aspects while neglecting what really gives it such immense appeal to players, the degree of freedom given to players within the game's world and the flexibility this gives players in completing the tasks the game sets them. Hell, even Will Wright endorses GTA's design; and a recommendation from one of the greatest designers the games industry has ever seen is no small matter, I think. Anyway, I strongly believe a new kind of interactive narrative technique will eventually emerge out of this sort of gameplay, but it's still far too early and too little-understood, especially by rival game developers who take the external trappings of GTA and turn out inferior imitations. But anyway, Crawford does have some really good ideas about storytelling in games and how it could become more interactive. At the end of the chapter, he presents a major hurdle that needs to be jumped before truly interactive storytelling can become possible- verbs.

Interactive storytelling, he says, is about choice and verbs are what he calls "the vehicle of choice." Stories in novels and movies involve thousands of verbs covering a myriad of actions taken by characters. The average action game has 4 verbs: walk, run, jump, shoot. And sometimes talk. On consoles, this paucity of verbs can be traced to the relative lack of buttons on controllers. The PS2 controller features the most buttons- but it's still a paltry 8. Shinji Mikami's Resident Evil 4 gives players a greater variety of verbs within the limitations of a console control scheme by making one button context-sensitive- it does different things depending on where the player is and what he's doing. So that same button will cause the player to jump, dodge attacks, open doors or item boxes, talk to other characters or control vehicles. But that still doesn't extend the number of verbs past even a hundred. At any rate, the game's storyline is absolutely linear.

The kind of game Crawford is imagining would be highly complex and would be quite unlike any game we have on the market today. The closest thing I can think of to it is the experimental interactive story Facade- described by it's creators as a "one-act play" where you play as an old friend of a young couple who are going through marriage problems. Through a text parser, you interact with them by talking to them or making physical gestures. Your actions will either exacerbate their issues and lead to the dissolution of their marriage (though that outcome can happen without your intervention at all- the character AI is far beyond the the mindless automatons who await your replies in most games) or save it (or a variety of outcomes in between). I wouldn't exactly call the game fun in the traditional sense, but it's endlessly fascinating to play.

One thing I don't agree with Chris Crawford about is the possibility of creative design in licensed games. Basically, he disdains licensed games and thinks they're quite rubbish (he uses the example of the apparently painfully-bad E.T. game to illustrate his point). While it's true that most licensed games are rubbish, it doesn't mean they all are. The Nintendo 64 game Goldeneye, based on the James Bond movie of the same name, is cited as one of the best First-Person Shooter games ever created for a console. Last year's King Kong game was not only excellent, but also delivered the game's story in a novel way- using Half-Life's approach of keeping the player in the protagonist's shoes at all times. Star Wars games have traditionally been awesome, from classics like TIE Fighter and Jedi Knight to more recent games like the Knights of the Old Republic series- which actually played around with the idea of player decisions having story-consequences in an interesting way (true, there were only 2 story-paths to take, but it was still a nice touch).

Oh and the Spider-Man 2 game (the console versions, not the PC version which was a completely different game and rubbish to boot) was probably the only game which took the open-ended gameplay pioneered by GTA and did something interesting with it. Contrary to what Crawford thinks, it does seem like the movie industry is finally starting to respect game developers and give them space to make good games based on licenses. Let's face it, these games make money so they're never going to go away. Rather than bitching about it like Crawford does, it's a much better idea for developers who work on such titles to try and make the best games they can. Granted, we may never see serious innovation out of this quarter, but I think THAT'S a little much to expect.

Gosh this is a long piece and completely unrelated to any assignments too. Well, it IS a blog. That last bit sounds a bit harsh against Chris Crawford so don't get me wrong- I've got nothing but respect for the man. He's got some big brains on him and his book has really essential advice for wannabe game designers like me. Before I finish off, I've got to add that I really enjoyed reading the chapter where he describes making his 1985 game Balance of Power- one of the first political simulations ever made and still one of the best (which is both a testament to the solidness of Crawford's game design and how little progress has been made in the field of game design in 20 years!) It's abandonware now so you can get it here.

Abstract Design Concepts of Snake

2006-02-06T00:34:00.000-08:00

OK I've been thinking and I've decided that I'm going to interpret Alex's question as asking us to use Doug Church's Formal Abstract Design Tools approach to try and extract out possible design concepts in the games we're looking at, rather than taking the 3 tools Doug Church mentioned (intention, perceived consequence and story) and looking at how they fit into the game (which I was previously thinking of doing and I've seen a few other NM3216 bloggers do).

So in that spirit, let's look at Snake. What possible formal abstract design tools can we get from this game? Let me run through the gameplay again. The game starts with the player's avatar- a short black line, at the centre of the screen. The line begins moving horizontally towards one of the 4 walls that bound the gamespace. There's a black dot somewhere that the player can consume. Once the player manoeuvres (I can never spell that word right!!) the snake towards the black dot and consumes it, the snake grows longer. A score kept at the top of the screen increases accordingly. This continues until either the player makes a mistake and the snake dies or the snake fills the entire screen and, well, dies.

So what's notable about this? I'd hoped to avoid using Doug Church's FADT's but perceived consequence is the first thing that came to my mind writing the above paragraph. The snake growing longer and the visibility of the increasing score act as very, very clear reactions to the actions of the player. Intention is similarly obvious and there ain't really a story here except the one that the player crafts for himself. "I almost beat my high score! I was just 5 points away, but I had to make that turn too slow and slam into the wall. F@$%!"

Another striking design concept about Snake is this- it's impossible to win. For lack of a better term, I'm going to call this a "no-win-game"- the idea that a game cannot be won so the objective is to play as long as possible to rack up a high score. Strange concept when you think about it, but nobody really cared while playing Pac-man or Space Invaders. I guess the technological constraints were partly behind the decision to design games that way but I can't help but think they might, unconsciously at least, indicate a sort of fatalistic outlook. I mean, these games were made in the 80's, when everyone believed that nuclear holocaust was more than a mere possibility. Or did they really? I don't think people in Singapore were that paranoid back then, anyway.

Ok, off-topic musings aside, "no-win-game"- I'll drop that term as soon as I can think of a better one- isn't a game design concept that's much-used today. Outside of casual puzzle games which crib ideas from old arcade games shamelessly, the last mainstream "no-win-game" I can think of is SEGA's arcade-driving game Crazy Taxi. In that game, players control a taxi and must pick up passengers and drive them to their destinations before a timer runs out. Everytime you drop off a passenger, the timer is refilled by a set amount so it's theoritically possible to play the game forever but the game design constrains players from doing so. Anyway, you don't die when the timer runs out in Crazy Taxi- it actually grades you based on how much you earned so if you get the highest grade, in a sense, you've won. So it's not exactly a "no-win-game," either. A related design concept, the "time-attack" mode, remains fairly popular especially in puzzle games like Tetsuya Mizuguchi's PSP hit Lumines. In a "time-attack" mode, a player has to accumulate as many points as possible within a set time limit.

Playtesting- Round 1

2006-02-05T23:05:00.000-08:00

I'll refrain from describing my group's game design as Weiwei has very nicely done that here. Well, we held our first playtesting session yesterday morning at the Starbucks next to California Fitness Orchard and boy did we learn a lot from it! For one thing. we realised that our design was really unbalanced. We've got one unit- the NUS student (:P)- who's supposed to be the grunt or pawn-type unit, but is really overly-powerful in gameplay! The unit's health will have to be cut down by a bit, that's for sure. Another thing that... oh goodness I just realised that Weiwei's put up a very comprehensive report on our playtesting session on his blog.

Eh, I don't wanna repeat what he's put down there so I'll just make a few observations that go into things he didn't talk about. Firstly- the purpose of the game. Not the aim of the game for players, but the actual question of "why was this game made?" Basically, we want people in our class to play the game and enjoy themselves. But that doesn't say much. To be more specific, we've set the game in a parody-version of NUS because we want people to laugh while playing it. So in it's essence, this is meant to be a humorous game. That aspect of the game didn't show up very well in this iteration of the design. Partly because we hadn't implemented the card-based events that were meant to add some spice to the game and partly because the game itself (mostly due to the overly large size of the board) was just too slow and kinda boring.

So in our next iteration of the game, we're going to make a few alterations to the gameplay- the addition of events (which I think should be chosen from a stack of cards based on an "academic calendar"), a smaller map and tweaks to the units to make gameplay speedier. Along with that, we'll add some wacky backstory to the game too. I hope these changes will make the game somewhat more interesting!

Formal Elements of Snake

2006-02-03T14:01:00.000-08:00

I considered a lot of different games while thinking about this topic before finally settling on the game of Snake, as popularized by it's inclusion on many Nokia handsets (the 3210 and 3310 in particular!). Snake's a bloody simple game- you control it with a mere 4 keys and there really isn't much strategy involved; it's a pure test of skill, really. And yet, it's supremely addictive and somehow oddly appealing to people who would otherwise never play electronic games of any sort. Me and my classmates used to play Snake (actually it was Snake 2) during lectures in JC (anything to avoid actually listening to the lecture, really) and the guy who would consistently score the highest was a macho-macho rugby player who would break you in half if you so much as insinuated that he was a gamer. So yeah, that's Snake for you. A game for people who hate games. The Tetris of the late 90's, in a way. Too bad Nokia took it out of their newer handsets. My 7260 came with a really crap game where you bounce a ball around levels. It actually might've interesting if not for it's general sluggishness.

So, the formal elements of Snake.

Players:
The game can either be played solo or as a 2-player game- but only if you connect two phones via infra-red. I tried this once, but it lost it's novelty pretty fast. As far as roles go, there's only 1- each player controls a snake. As a one-player game, the interaction-patterns clearly single-player versus game. The two-player version operates on two levels: firstly, both players are playing against the game (to keep from dying) but at the same time they're engaged in player versus player competition as they fight over in-game resources and attempt to trick the other player into killing him/herself.

Objectives:
Snake has 2 inter-related objectives: survival and scoring. You want to keep your snake alive for as long as possible in order to achieve a high score. In the 2-player version, there's a 3rd objective- outwitting your opponent.

Procedures:
The starting action consists of going through the handphone's (assuming, as I do, that you're playing the game on a handphone) menus to open up the game application and selecting the New Game option from the game's start menu. Alternately, if you're starting a multiplayer game, select the 2-player mode option, make sure both players phones' IR ports are aligned and wait for them to connect.

The progression of action? If your snake is moving horizontally, you can turn it up or down. If your snake is moving vertically, you can turn it left or right. That's about it, from start to end of the game. There aren't any special actions, and the only resolving action to end the game is to die. How do you die? That's defined by the...

Rules:
The rules of the game serve to define the moveset of the player (as defined above) and also the conditions for losing- since there isn't a "win" condition, so to speak. You die if your snake's head a) touches part of it's own body, b) touches a wall or c) touches part of an opponent's body.
The other important rule defines how you progress in the game: when your snake's head touches the little dot that's randomly placed on the game screen, your snake grows longer and your score is incremented by x points (I can't remember exactly what it was!). I think that's about it. The rules are so simple a player should be able to pick them up if not by the first game, then at least by a 2nd or 3rd.

Resources:
The little dots that you consume to grow bigger and increase your score.

Conflict:
The conflict in this game comes from obstacles and, in the 2 player game, opponents. The obstacles in the game are the walls that you need to avoid and also your own body, which grows larger and larger the higher your score gets. The sequel, Snake 2, would add a new element of conflict- the dilemma. That game included special animal-shaped icons to consume that would add more points to your score than the normal dots- but these ones would only stay on the screen for a short duration of time. So the dilemma would be whether or not to risk turning quickly (assuming you weren't heading directly for the animal-shaped icon) towards the icon to consume it, even if it results in your snake careening towards itself dangerously.

Boundaries:
If you're doing something else on your phone (talking, sms-ing, whatever) you're not playing the game. You're only playin it once you open the game app and run it. Simple enough, I think. The conceptual boundaries for the 2-player game are well, that you agree to play, I guess!

Outcome:
You die. Like many old arcade games, there's no way to "win" the game. You just try and get as high a score as you can. In the original Snake (and in the sequel too, actually) there's a set limit as to how high a score you can get, determined by the maximum size of the snake's body. So maybe if you actually manage to fill the entire screen with your snake and THEN you die, you can be considered to have won. Cos there's no way to get a higher score than that.

So, does this description fully describe the requirements for playing the game? Not really. I had a friend in JC who couldn't play the game- not cos she didn't understand the rules- she just didn't have the reflexes to play the game (which I thought curious because she was an accomplished violinist- but that's off-topic :P). So yeah, additional requirement to play Snake- fast reflexes. And of course, the requisite hardware/software.

I'm gonna take a breather and look at the game from Doug Church's Formal Abstract Design Tools perspective in another entry.

Throwing stuff on the wall to see what sticks: Pt 2

2006-01-30T01:30:00.000-08:00

Goodness that post was massive. Suffering from brain-drain. I'm gonna try and cycle through my other ideas fast.

Idea 2: The Great Pretenders.

This one begins with a plot: London, 1875. George B. Jensens's rich old uncle has just passed away, leaving him with a fortune of millions. It's just too bad nobody knows what old George looks like- he ran away from home to join the circus when he was just a wee lad. But never mind that- you're a civic-minded individual who won't stand to see such a vast fortune go to waste! For such an accomplished... actor as yourself, it's easy to pretend to be George and grab that money. It's just too bad that a number of other individuals have the very same idea!

Objective: You're George B. Jensen. The other players are also George B. Jensen. But only one George B. Jensen can get inherit the fortune! All of you have assembled at your old uncle's estate- your goal is to convince your uncle's lawyers that you're the REAL George and that all the others are imposters.

Gameplay: Perhaps every player (I'm thinking 2-8) can start with a number of points. Say 30. That represents the lawyers impression of each player- innocent til proven guilty, you see. Each players goal is to bump the other players points down to 0. The key question here is- how?

Perhaps play can involve 2 stages- one where players attempt to gather background information about George and his uncle and another where the players use this information to try and prove their claim. Lying, of course, is encouraged. There needs to be a somwhat rigid set of rules, though, for this idea to work. Also, there's the question of whether or not the "lawyers" are represented by another player or not. I'm leaning towards not, myself. Point allocation being a consequence of the game's systems...

Throwing stuff on the wall to see what sticks: Pt 1

2006-01-30T01:02:00.000-08:00

Right-o. I've got a few ideas for this assignment 1. So I'm gonna just put em all down here and see whether any of em are worth developing further.

Idea 1: Card Fu!

This idea came to me after playing the FPS board during the first tutorial. I love fighting games, maybe there's a way to implement something like a fighting game in a traditional format? A card game is the obvious solution- it's eminently possible to make a fast-paced, back-and-forth using the format. Just to make things more interesting, I'm going to try and design this game using a standard deck of cards rather than a customised one.

Standard deck's got 4 suits, so we could assign 4 unique functions to each of them. Well let's work things out this way: diamonds beat spades, which beat hearts, which beat clubs, which in turn beat diamonds. So that's a loop, with each suit able to threaten another suit while being vulnerable to yet another suit in turn.

So how would gameplay work? There's only gonna be 2 players, that's for sure. Each player should draw a set number of cards from a shuffled deck- let's say, 10 for this game. Then, at the beginning of a round, players have to decide who goes first (that player becomes the attacker for that round). One way to solve this dilemma would be for each player to draw a card from the deck and compare- whoever gets the higher-valued card goes first. Once that's decided, the attacking player has to decide on a card to put down- that card would represent his first attack.

Let's assume that the defender has to put down an equal or higher-valued card of the suit that's NOT vulnerable to the attackers card in order not to lose the round. The round continues in this way until one player is unable to defend against the others attack. Now I'm going to run through a hypothetical scenario just to see what might happen: Attacker puts down a 2 of Hearts. The defender puts down a 4 of spades. The attacker puts down a 5 of diamonds. The defender doesn't have a higher card and the attacker wins the round. Now I wonder if there's a situation where a draw is possible? Perhaps not in a single round. Perhaps best to toss aside the idea of a draw for now.

The big problem right now is that the game's not very interesting. Seems like everything's basically dependant on the attacker's choice of first card. And of course, the tendancy would be for attackers who have very high cards to put them down first for an instant-win. One possible solution is to place an upper limit on the value of the first card that can be put down. But perhaps adding in one more game mechanic would make things more interesting: if a player doesn't have a high enough card to defend against an attack, he/she can sacrifice any 3 of his cards to negate the attack. This, I think, makes the game slightly more strategic.

Damn, I'll have to playtest this to see how this works. I'm pretty sure the mechanics need a lot more polishing before the game'll be fun for players, if at all.

Designing a traditional game: Initial Thoughts

2006-01-24T22:25:00.000-08:00

Hmmm... a traditional format game, eh? Interesting. There's certainly a lot of scope for interesting games in those formats, as one of my favourite non-electronic game studios, Cheapass Games, has shown time and time again. Some of em are even free. What I especially love about their games are the hilarious concepts they're based on- like that of their game "U.S. Patent Number 1," where everyone plays a scientist who's invented a time-travelling machine and are travelling back in time to the opening day of the US Patent Office to secure themselves the very 1st patent ever given out for their time machine!

Anyway, I guess I just love a bit of comedy with my games. So naturally I'm going to try to put that into the game I design. I'm also thinking of how to design a game where cheating is part of the game. Which presents quite a conundrum because how do you make cheating part of the rules? If it's in the rules, it's not cheating anymore! Unless I design a game with a set of rules which makes opportunities for cheating rife, though not within the rule-set of the game. The actual game being played, then, would be sort of a meta-game constructed around the game I design, where players would think of creative ways to cheat without being found out by other players. Sort of like bluffing in Poker...

Calvinball: Game or Not?

2006-01-24T22:02:00.000-08:00

I really don't recall Calvinball having this many rules! From what I remember of the comic strip, there was only one real rule: you can't play the game the same way twice. Heh. But even if we define the "game" by the rules on the link above, can it be considered an actual game? Well, there is a very clear creation of game-space by the very first rule of the game. You wear a mask to play the game. Anyone who isn't wearing a mask, isn't part of the game. That's a magic circle right there!

I'm going to ignore the rest of the rules(since the page says that's allowed :P) except for 1.2 , which seems essential to the concept of Calvinball in my mind. Rule 1.2 states that any player may declare a new rule at any point of the game. Why, that makes Calvinball sort of a nomic (a nomic being a game where changing the rules is considered a move in the game)! Or a very chaotic variant of a nomic (where player's usually vote on whether to accept a new rule or not), anyway. What's intiguing about Calvinball (and Nomic) is that the players design the game as they play it.

Whether Calvinball can be played as a game, or whether it's pure play, really depends on the players. It's very easy to "wreck" the game. Say, if Calvin were to yell out, "New Rule: everyone not named Calvin loses!" But there's an interesting point to be made here. While it would be all-too-easy for players to make up such arbitrary rules to ensure they win immediately, the fun of Calvinball is really in keeping the game going for as long as possible, making up increasingly more bizzare rules along the way.

Looking at Calvinball from a design perspective, it's simply too chaotic to be a game. But to a kid who doesn't think that way, maybe it is. A lot of the games I played as a kid were pretty similarly pointless and devoid of any form of scoring system or a way for players to actually win or lose (nobody really loses a game of catch, it just ends when the bell rings to signal the end of recess). But somehow, the kids playing the games were different from the other kids who were just mucking about the playground or eating or whatever else. There was a sense of game there somehow. Perhaps Calvinball has this sense of being a game, even if it isn't actually one?

It would be an interesting exercise to actually try and construct a workable game around the premise.

What makes a "good" game?

2006-01-20T11:18:00.000-08:00

Now for the big whopper of a question. What makes a "good" game? That is a question worthy of a 10-page essay. A thesis, even. But I'm gonna try and keep it short, or as short as my rambly writing style will allow. To answer this question, I'm going to look at games from another angle. Not as systems, but as cultural artifacts. Games, like other forms of entertainment, are products of the societies that have created them. A word that comes up pretty often when discussing the merits of games is "fun." Many argue that a good game is one that is fun. Well, there lies a problem. Fun is subjective. What is fun to me may not be fun to you. What was fun for 19th Century Victorian British folk may not be fun to any of us at all. And so, I would argue that the value of a game can only be argued within the context of the culture that it was created in or that it is played in. And so the value of a game, the measure of it's goodness or badness, can be considered to be a measurement of it's cultural value.

Consider the Medieval sport of jousting. It wasn't just an idle way to pass time. Jousting was a simulation of a battle- it's value could be said to have been as a training tool just as much as a spectator sport (which it also was). Like modern sports, there was glory and fortune to be made for those who took part in it. Jousting was considered a noble sport and there is even an account of a battle during the Hundred Years War that was put on hold in order that a joust could be held!

Within the context of Medieval times, what made jousting so appealing? As mentioned before, honor and glory (cultural value) and it's value as a training tool (the value of simulation) were factors. But the fact that there are still jousting tournaments held today shows another appeal of the sport- that is, competition. Any game that has a competitive element that allows players to show off their talent, skill and mastery of the game invariably becomes popular.

Effectiveness as a competitive tool is, perhaps, is one way to judge a game out of it's cultural context. That certainly goes far to explain the continuing popularity of such games as Chess and Go. The value of such competitive games as simulations must not be understated either. Both Chess and Go can be considered simulations of war. Joust was a simulation of a one-on-one battle. Many, if not all, competitive sports can be considered analogies of war. War is not the only thing that games simulate, but it is a predominant theme- even in videogames (a cursory look at store shelves will reveal a surplus of World War II-themed games).

While competitive and simulative value may suffice as meters for judging the value of non-electronic games, videogames defy such an easy judgement. For videogames (along with the related and also comparatively-recent class of game known as Role-Playing Games) can also be narratives and thus, must be judged in terms of their effectiveness as narratives. Here we reach shaky ground. There is a tendancy to judge videogames in terms of familiar, non-interactive narrative forms: novels, movies, televised dramas. But it is dangerous to try and compare a videogame, an interactive form of narrative, to a movie or a novel, both non-interactive forms of narrative. As videogames are a new medium, there isn't a set terminology or even a well-established method of criticism of games as a medium of narrative expression. Lacking these things, perhaps the best available way to judge the narrative effectiveness of a game is to consider how well it engages a player.

This of course, is a subjective thing, dependant on the personality of the player. But there are elements that serve to increase the likeliness that a player will be engaged in a game. Of great importance is a well-written, well paced story that supports and is supported by the gameplay of the videogame. Now, a well-written videogame story need not be one that can be transplanted to another genre and be as effective there. That's one of the reasons why nobody has been able to make a good film adaptation of a videogame. Half-Life 2 is one of the most acclaimed games of recent years. It's story captivates players and motivates them to play through the game from beginning to end without stopping (I took only 2 breaks during my first playthrough of the game- both for meals). If made into a novel, it would hardly be Booker Prize material. Being a massive book snob myself, I wouldn't even look at it (just as I assiduously avoid Halo novels). But that hardly matters. What does matter is that the narrative supports and drives the gameplay of the game. One could say the gameplay and narrative of the game are fundamentally inextricable (a statement would no doubt cause hardcore Ludologists and Narratologists everywhere to have spasms :P).

OK, I'd better try and summarize my argument as to what makes a good videogame now. So... A videogame can have three purposes. Either competitive (like Counter-Strike), simulative (Falcon 4.0, Gran Turismo) or narrative (like Half-Life 2). Of course, games can combine two of those or even all three, but ah, I'm just going to close one eye and ignore those games before this post collapses under it's own weight. A competitive game can be judged by it's effectiveness as a competition. A simulative game is judged by it's effectiveness as a simulation- how close is it to a real experience and how well does it translate that experience into gameplay?

A narrative game is judged by it's effectiveness as an interactive narrative. The factors that creates effective competition and simulation are somewhat intuitive and well-documented. The factors that create an effective interactive narrative are less intuitive and not so well-documented. I feel that it is our duty as 'gamers' to document this changing medium and come up with a body of knowledge regarding. I, for one, am going to have great fun doing so. ;-)

What is a game?

2006-01-20T11:17:00.000-08:00

So, what is a game? It's a hard question to answer, for any definition of "game" would have to be applicable to all things that are called "games." Hmmm... I'll take a stab at this. A game, in it's essence, is a system. The elements of this system are the player(s), the rules that govern the system, the tools used by the players and the 'field' on which the game is played. This system's rules must define a winning condition. Without the possibility of winning and losing, there is no game- there is just aimless play (not that there's anything wrong with that!).

To illustrate this definition, I'll use an example of a game- the simplest that I can think of. A coin-toss game. Now, a coin-toss, in and of itself, is not a game. It's just a probability event. Now, if we consider the person tossing the coin the player and add a rule: the player wins if the coin lands heads-up, then we've got a game (the coin being the player's tool and the field of play being the area in which the toin coss takes place- the ground, perhaps?). It's not a very interesting game, but it's a game.

Now, let's test this definition with a videogame. Say, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (my personal favourite of the lot- excepting the original). You've got a player- the guy with the controller in front of the TV. The tools are the controller and well, the PS2 (or XBox or PC) that the player's playing the game on. The gameworld where the player runs and drives around in is the playing field. What about a winning condition? Now here's where it gets tricky. The open-ended nature of the game allows a player to muck around in the gameworld without ever needing to actually play through the game's storyline, which comprises of missions with goals that can be achieved or failed and leads to an ending (arguably the final winning condition of the game). But many players do indeed just muck around, exploring the gameworld in pointless yet enjoyable reverie. So what to make of this, then?

Here's my hypothesis- though Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is a videogame, players only play it as a game when they're goal-driven- either completing the core story missions of the game or engaging in the many side-goals that the game provides. When players engage in goal-less play, they're using the game as a "sandbox"- as the game has been called.

Whew! I think that's all I have to say on that topic.

Introduction

2006-01-19T23:19:00.000-08:00

Hello! This cheery little blog exists to act as a sketchbook (or sketchblog, as I've bastardized the term) for the module NM3216- Gaming Culture I. Before I get on with the topic of the week, let me indulge myself in a little introduction. After all, what's a blog without some rambling, semi-coherent material?

I belong to a generation that's grown up playing videogames. Videogames have become so pervasive that the very word 'games,' normally a broad term that encompasses a wide range of activities- be they physical or intellectual- is now commonly understood by my generation to refer to videogames. Or computer games. Or "interactive entertainment." Whatever you like to call them. Videogames inform the lives of us 'gamers' much in the same way as music and movies informed the lives of previous generations. They've certainly done a number on me. I couldn't imagine living in a world without 'em. Somewhere along the way I decided I wanted to create 'em. Which brings me here, to this module and to this blog. I do hope my postings here will be of some interest.

A brief note about the title of this blog. It's a rather horrible pun that refers to one of my very favourite videogames- a sadly little-known 1995 French classic called Little Big Adventure (published in America under the more rugged title of Relentless: Twinsen's Adventure). The brainchild of designer Frederick Raynal (who's most famous work is Alone in the Dark), Little Big Adventure is arguably a masterpiece of game design. The game was driven by it's compelling and well-paced narrative, featured a novel and innovative control system and was set in one of the most unique and intriguing game-worlds ever created. But the real reason I love this game is because of it's ability to draw real emotion from me and make me FEEL for the characters- something that few games have done.

Well then! That's enough introductory material for one post.