textuality.org

Games of Skill, Games of Chance ... Games of Labor

2011-12-05T16:46:49Z

There are many ways to categorize games, but one keeps coming up for me lately given the kinds of games I have been playing, and I haven't found a good concise post to link to. So here it is.

There is a classic dichotomy in game analysis between games of skill and games of chance. Winning a game "of skill" requires performing or manipulating the game with greater aptitude than your opponent. Winning a game "of chance" does not depend on the player's ability at all; success is determined by chance events along probabilistic lines. As with any taxonomy, this breaks down if you try to be pure about it. Few games, although many of our best-beloved, are purely one or the other. Darts is a game of skill, and chance can be nearly eliminated with sufficient skill. The card game War is entirely a game of chance, as is Roulette. There may be some skill in betting sensibly in Roulette, but the results of even that are up to chance. The line is almost always fuzzier, though, and when there are stakes, the split can be contentious. A good way to draw a line is whether the outcome is determined by skill or by chance.

A couple of years ago, Eric Zimmerman and Naomi Clark gave a GDC talk that presented a third kind of game that has been seeing increasing relevance in the last half-decade: games of labor. In games "of labor", what matters most is the time or effort that you put in. Skill doesn't matter as much, as you will eventually win or succeed if you just put in enough time. Note that I am not saying "if you practice enough" ... I mean, literally, that if you do something 100 or 1000 times, you will 'win', without regard to how well you did those first 99 efforts. Chance doesn't matter in these games either, as the game is structured around the expectation of success given a certain amount of effort. You know that reward will come on the 100th action, and not if you get lucky on the fifth attempt.

Note, again, that it is rare to see a pure game of labor. In World of Warcraft, as in many RPGs, there are mechanics that work to make the game 'of labor': grind for long enough against enemies that are not meant to pose a threat, and you will accrue enough power in the form of abilities or equipment that once-difficult enemies may be defeated with dead-stupid tactics. Skill in the game can be overcome with sufficient effort - a new but skilled player might be beaten by a less skilled player who has merely put in the time in the game, for instance by having the right equipment for the job. However, skill makes that grinding labor unnecessary, and chance may cut the labor short by giving you what you want more quickly. Regardless of the purity of the mechanic or the game, what is important from a design perspective is the expectation of what leads to success.

A major part of their GDC talk, as with earlier good discussion about skill vs chance, was about the mindset of the player and the expectation of reward. Zimmerman and Clark noted that much of the motivation in games comes out of what the player strives for, what frustrates their effort, and therefore what success will mean to the player. A major part of this ternary distinction is what the fantasy of success is for the player. When a player engages in a game of chance, the obstacle is the odds, and the fantasy for success is being fortunate, being the chosen one. When a player enters a game of skill, the obstacle is the skill of the other players and the fantasy is of being the best at the game.

The fantasy that appeals is really important for why and whether you play the game - players aiming to prove themselves will be frustrated by a win that felt like it was "pure luck." In games of labor, the fantasy is that regardless of your skill, regardless of luck, if you do the work, you will be rewarded. The fantasy is that success is ultimately a matter of effort or time, and NOT your innate or developed talent or who you are or fate.

Farmville and Glitch: Exogenous and Endogenous Game Mechanics

2011-11-14T14:29:06Z

I'm warning you, behind the cut is a bit of an epic post. I've been playing a game called Glitch lately, and I'm really enjoying it ... despite the fact that so many of its core game mechanics felt invasive, insidious, and irritating when I played them in FarmVille and CityVille. I was ready for Glitch to be terrible but with high production values. I named my character after an Italian slang phrase for "that's disgusting/that sucks", gender-bent my character as far as I could, and waded in. What I found was a fairly charming game that takes all the mechanics that Zynga uses to manipulate its players and their friends and turns the mechanics inward, back into the game rather than out into the real world, and in so doing redeems the mechanics themselves. In simpler terms, from a game designer's perspective, Glitch is doing the good (or even Good) version of the new mechanics that we learned from FarmVille.

]]> Zynga's games are notoriously focused on two things - virality and monetization - pushing the player to spend money to finish getting that thing that they started. Zynga games will do anything toward those ends, and in fact will do nothing that does *not* serve either of them. In the process, they introduced us to a few mechanics that hadn't been used much before. Glitch uses many of those same ideas, but keeps them within the game -- the activities are performed by the character, rather than the player, and that makes a world of difference.

One of the most notorious features of FarmVille is the Energy Meter. As you play the game, you have a set number of actions that you can take before running out of energy, and you must wait real time to get more energy ... or pay real money, or beg your friends to send you free energy. It is a hard "gate" to participating in the game, and the solutions reach out of the game - money from you as a person or requests from you as a person to your real-life friends. As in a coin-op arcade, you must pay to keep playing the game, that's not objectionable; the odious particular comes in how the game prompts you to turn your friends' attention into quarters for you. And that energy will run out pretty quickly, so you really are dependent on your friends.

Glitch also uses energy, but not only does it take a pretty long time to run out, there are many in-game items that refill it. As with Zynga's games, waiting for real time (narrativized around in-game time as 'game days') gets you a refill. However with the slower burn and the periodic refill, the effect is that if you spend a portion of your actions working toward getting food or working toward energy production, you can stay in energy indefinitely. Also, though your friends can give you energy (as food items) in Glitch, a) there is no way to beg them for it, especially if they are outside the game, and b) if they give it to you, it comes out of their supply (in FV it is free).

Let me repeat that for the sake of the next point: if your friend isn't playing Glitch right then, there is no way to beg them through the game. There is also no way at present to purchase energy directly with real money. By tying the energy to objects which exist exclusively in-world, are producible in-world, and cannot be created by external activity, food and energy not only contributes to the integrity of the game world rather than kicking you out of it, it becomes part of your activity within the game. You can specialize in different ways of producing energy-bearing items. It becomes a *game* mechanic rather than a social/interpersonal mechanic.

Then there's recruitment-for-progress. Zynga's games place another hard gate on progress within the game around recruiting friends. In FarmVille, you need a minimum of friends within the game to pass certain levels, to get certain items that are only obtainable from other people, and to make your farm larger. You cannot get very far without recruiting for the game, no matter how kindly your in-game friends are to you. Those 'neighbors' can be drawn from people that you don't know, but you must have them. In Glitch, though, you are never baldly required to have connections. There are optional missions that require you to interact with other players, but you don't have to connect to them in a way that requires approval, it's all in-game interaction. You are rewarded for them with badges, but even those rewards pass most of Hecker's tests by being descriptive rather than prescriptive (not announced ahead of time), by being absolute rather than relative, by staying within the world, and by being optional/small. Personally, I connected soon to friends who were already in the game (and those were the only options given to me, I couldn't reach out to new). I only connected to people I didn't know once I'd done some altruistic actions in-game, whereupon passersby spontaneously added me. Again, recruitment remains within the game, and you're not pushed to reach out. This might just be during the game's beta period, but I like it and hope it continues.

Glitch even pulls messaging other people into the game. Where FarmVille asks you once every 1-3 minutes whether you'd like to let your friends know about something (and lets you give them free items as you do), you have to work to send notes to other players in Glitch. After the first tutorial message, you need to find an object to even send a message to a friend, and then you need to spend an in-game currency as postage ... and you still have to wait time for them to receive the missive. This is the very opposite of Facebook spam; it's enough of a hurdle that it prompts you to go outside the game to another communication system. As you choose what protocol to use to chat, your communication falls under the normal social mores for that communication. It's not the game deciding what you do with your friend, reducing your contact to mercenary demands; you decide in every way how to communicate. The effect of this is again to sharply delineate between activities that you undertake as a player and those your character undertakes within the world, and to thereby let the rules for each context operate cleanly.

Both FarmVille and Glitch have what has come to be called an 'appointment mechanic', but the ways in which they function could hardly be less similar. FarmVille's entire game is wrapped around a variety of appointments, which it asks you to set for yourself, presumably so that you can meet the commitments. Crops take time to grow, and the game uses that to get you to come back later rather than abandoning the game. Furthermore, if you don't meet your commitment by taking too long to return, you'll find your crops dead, your investment in them wasted. In this way, the game colonizes your time as well as your money.

The appointment mechanic in Glitch is in its skill system, and so much less punitive it is barely an appointment. Skills take time to learn, real-world time. When the time has elapsed, your character has the skill, and you need to go in and set a new skill to learn. But you don't have to set a new skill, and if it takes you three days to come back, well, that is potential skill-building time lost but no more. Generally, you will spend some of the wait-time fulfilling quests related to the skill you just learned. The commitment is an optimization strategy, not a requirement for play, and that is underscored by making even the skills be fairly optional. Skills just tighten up your play experience or extend it into new areas, they are not a requirement for existing in the world. You'll be reminded by email when you've finished a skill, but that's it.

Both games have land and an avatar that is yours and which you customize. In both, you can even establish a farm that gives you resources on a schedule, and you can visit others' farms. In FarmVille, there is a heavy emphasis on vanity or cosmetic customization. Many if not most of the items in the game are not functional, they are cosmetic. Many of the items even work against your progress in the game by taking land that could be "productive". I think there are larger points that could be made about blurring the line between purchases for utility and purchases for vanity, but it is enough to note that the game revolves around customization and that extensive customization comes at the cost of functionality, driving players who are engaged enough to care further into real-world money to satisfy their desire to play.

Glitch, on the other hand, separates customization from functionality entirely. Your farm in the game can barely be customized in a personal or vanity-focused way. Choices you make on your plot of land and what appears there are strictly on what you want to have producing for you, what you want to maintain, and it is hard for others to even see it. It's hard to see a real name in the game. And then on the other side of the cost divide, customization of the sort that you can show off is about 80% dependent on real-world money. Outfits for your avatar are divided into subscriber-only and free. What this means is that there is another sharp divide. Everything in the game is functional, and cannot be bought for real-world money; real money contributes almost exclusively to your avatar's non-functional appearance.

It is worth a moment's attention on Glitch's payment options, which are unusually clear in their focus. All gameplay, everything within the game, is free. You can play forever for free, and nothing functional is sealed away from you. Payment gives you a bunch of stuff that applies fairly exclusively to you as a player rather than you as a character within the world. A subscription gets you access to those vanity avatar items, a monthly allowance that can only be spent on them, a monthly allowance of teleports that save you-as-player real-world time walking through the world, and votes in player community referenda. These are all things that help you as a player, and don't make sense in-world to you-as-character.

Finally, everything within Glitch is contextualized. There is a narrative, set in a world, the world has a geography, and everything has an explanation, whimsical though the explanations may be. Tutorials are provided by a pet rock that guides you and gives you quests. Rewards don't come from the game, they're given by that pet rock. Advancement is judged by "giants" that also have personality, a motive, and which give your character a reason to be doing what you're doing. When dialogs come up in discussion with the pet rock, the buttons for going to the next message have dialog "from your character", which gives your character a world-consistent voice and more clearly distinguishes you (and whatever you personally would have said) from the character. Finally, the world is whimsical. You get grain by squeezing chickens (who backtalk you as they seem to resent being squeezed). You may water, pet, and harvest ... bubble trees. There is correspondence to our world --you can expect to get meat from a pig, and you do-- but the manner in which the action happens is distinct to the world of Glitch and even supports the world's story.

FarmVille instead operates within our world and at every point links activity in the game to you as a player. Characters don't have usernames, they have your personal (Facebook) name. You visit farms that your friends run without any regard to geography (since the game couldn't model that well without providing a barrier to participation). Wherever there is an activity to be learned, the game tries to simplify or model a real world equivalent - you shear sheep, harvest your crops with vehicles, which run on gas, etc. I think that it's overreaching to claim that FarmVille colonizesyour personal life, but it certainly works within the world that you live in and blurs the distinction between you as a player and your character within the game at every opportunity. The result is certainly profitable, as it encourages you to tie your performance in the game to your identity as much as you are willing to. Look at how much better your farm is than your friend's! Wouldn't you like to have a farm as impressive, as creative as that other friend's, even if it means chipping in a bit of money to speed the process along?

I want to note that I have no idea how this will work out for Glitch. Zynga is brilliant at what it does, and has surprised the industry multiple times by making ridiculous amounts of money with these techniques. They have colonized new markets and pulled in people who would not have identified as gamers before, even if they might have played a game now and then, or everyday. Certainly, the way that each mechanic stays within the game rather than reaching out into the player's life means that players have more freedom to choose not to play the game. They can get turned off by the story or the world. They could find the actions within the game too weird or silly. They could decide that they don't want to pursue the goals that the designers set in the reward and advancement system, and they can't replace those goals with personal investment as easily as they can in FarmVille where they are the character. Glitch asks players to role play to invest, and many adults aren't comfortable role playing. Finally, the "value proposition" in Glitch's business model during this beta period is very much for the people who care about the game, and doesn't aggressively seek conversion or monetization of casual players. Glitch could end up as a very talented starving artist, doing beautiful things that only a few people find a way to pay for.

Overall, I found three things interesting about the differences between the use of similar mechanics between FarmVille, CityVille, etc. and Glitch. Many of the same mechanics, by staying within the magic circle of the game (defined by the game, the site, and correspondence to you as a player), feed back into the game and remain gameplay. They don't cross out into a player's real life, and thereby avoid turning the player's life into part of the game's publishing strategy. I think that is much of why so many game designers feel like FarmVille is so terrible - there are all these neat new things going on in the game, but they are used solely to turn the player into part of the game, rather than to make a space for the player to ... play in. It is shallow game design (though brilliant marketing design) and aggressive commercialization. FarmVille plays the player, while Glitch gives the player a place to play. I hope Glitch succeeds.

Play Log: Minecraft 1.8: Playing with friends

2011-10-10T22:16:18Z

As I told my patient and usually-interested coworkers about my adventures in geography and spelunking, we soon decided to set up a server so that we could play in a shared world. One of them had space on an Amazon server he was using to test an original Facebook game, set it up, and we were off.

We wound up with a really great starting area -- in expansive and safe grasslands, with mountains to the east and west, ocean to the south, and forest to the north. The variety meant that we had clear geography to orient by until we had made maps and learned the terrain; it also meant that we had a balance of resources -- plenty of wood in the forest, ready access to ore and coal in the mountains, and we could go sailing to explore pretty quickly.

We each set out in our own directions. I followed my usual pattern of going to the highest point I can find and carving the top of the peak into a house. Our server-host 'Spach', relatively new to Minecraft, built himself a hobbit-hole on the edge of the forest. Elq, the other experienced player, quickly found a ravine to the east and built a little hold perched in one end of it.

I won't do a play-by-play of the two weeks since we opened the world, as a lot of it was pretty mundane world-establishment. There were some highlights, though:

The ravine-on-the-surface was surprisingly useful, as it gave us a quick route to the depths that was safe in the day. It focused the early exploration.

Our group had a nicely compatible set of interests. Elq and I both love exploration, so he lit the ravine while I went straight for establishing our overland area by making roads and signs between our homes while we all waited to find redstone, a rare component necessary for making compasses, clocks, and maps. Once we had maps, I set out to fully explore one map, taking a week of real-time to do so. Spach, meanwhile, planned and built a well-constructed home over his hobbit-hole as he explored what he could craft and learned the workings of mobs and moats and trapdoors.
The forest to the north turned out to be extensive, and I quickly got a sense of why forests were considered dangerous wastelands before the modern era in the real world. Wandering in what we soon dubbed "Creepy Forest", it was easy to get turned around, to wander well out of your way to navigate around an obstacle, and to get stranded as darkness fell. Spending a night in the forest closely resembles early FPS games in the spookiest ways, as pixelated death can come hissing up behind you from behind the nearest tree.

Every day or two, and especially after the weekend, we have debriefed around the water cooler ... What we found, what we're interested in building next, what area of the play space of the game, not to mention the geographic space, we are each interested in exploring next.

I made a sign and set a bed of flowers for Steve Jobs on the night of his death. Apple's products have been important to me, and it was a Moment for me to make that. A silly, small gesture that only 3-5 people will ever see, but it meant that much more to me as a result.

Inevitably, Spach crafted a near-scale model of our office has been built near the 0,0 point where we each set our initial homes.

Sharing a server is a very very different game from solo work, or even shaping a world and then sharing it for download. Other people cause time to pass - things happen in your absence; and your contributions, if they are to be appreciated, may not take forever to complete. There's also a different sense of meaning than in the solo game. The utility or beauty of what you build isn't decided by just you; the process of design requires an empathy that you can afford not to have on your own. The significance of that operates pretty deeply, and I think now that it's much of why Wilson was so important to the Castaway.

That prompted a final reflection, as I closed up my work late the other night. The game has been increasing in population as I have played it. First I played solo in an early build, and the closest thing to me in the world was a skeleton. Then Endermen came along, with their inscrutable Crafting of their own. NPC villages appeared, though devoid of people, and now I share the world with friends. Eventually I understand that there will be NPCs and many other creatures. It's not a "Lonely Game" anymore. It's not a deserted world that you've crash-landed on, but a populous world that you wake up within and share.

Play Log: Minecraft 1.8: Adventure Time 2

2011-10-06T13:23:04Z

Soon after I picked up Minecraft's latest update, I had an evening play session with two discreet adventures in it. I wrote about the emergence of geography in my last entry; this second is about emergent narrative.

After I had sailed around my continent, I hopped off and finished a land bound corner of my map, and raced home before nightfall. I was low on supplies, so I restocked from the little that I had stored in that home and set off down through a cave system that I'd discovered before but hadn't had time or torches to really colonize.

An aside - torches are an interesting resource in Minecraft right now. They're the game's only ready light source, so if you're somewhere dark and you want to see at all, you need to place a torch on a surface. Also, monsters can only spawn in full or near-full darkness, so by placing a cover of torches around an enclosed space like a cave, you can make that space safe. The torches will burn forever, so that terrain is now 'colonized' for you indefinitely. Supposedly the infinite lifespan of torches is going to go away at some point for greater realism and danger, but for now, without any portable light source, you really need torches to burn permanently. Torches are easy to craft, though coal, one of the resources for them, is somewhat uncommon. What this adds up to is that explorations underground and at night are limited in their duration by the number of torches that you can make and carry. That can be a *lot*, but this adventure hinges on torches as a consumable resource.

I stocked up and headed down some small caves and lit their twists and turns until I broke through a narrow spot into a vast chasm. I not only couldn't see the far side, but I was on a cliff-edge and could see neither top nor bottom. To either side, off at a considerable distance, I could see lava-pools and lava flows that showed the chasm to be very large in all directions, with me probably near the top. I had found one of version 1.8's new "ravine" terrain features, and one that was completely underground!

My side of the chasm was rotten with caves -- good for exploring, but bad for getting to the bottom of the chasm, as I couldn't easily dig myself a path without a lot of backtracking as I emerged through the ceiling of a room. I explored and lit a few caves, none of which took me further down. I began to run low on torches, so I decided to stick to the ravine walls and to try to pick my way down. Soon I rounded a corner to find myself face-to-face with a cave spider, which leapt at me and in the battle knocked me off the edge.

At that point, I was sure that I was dead. You can't take much falling in any event, and the bottom of the ravine here was lava. As luck would have it, I fell halfway down and onto a lower ledge. That's when I realized that I had only a dozen torches left. I had to try to climb back to my safely lit area with a very small supply of light. I got an actual frisson of fear.

I hastily ascended, lighting only where I had to and hoping that mobs would not come pouring out of the side-passages I was leaving dark. In about 10 minutes of real-time, I found a chimney cavern that I remembered seeing from the top, and was able to carve a staircase around it and back to relative safety. Which is when I ran out of food.

Another feature in 1.8 which is very well designed is the food and hunger system. In earlier versions, food would raise your health, and health only declined by taking damage. In 1.8, you have a hunger bar. When it's full, you will slowly regenerate health; when it is empty, you will rapidly lose health; it runs empties over time as (I believe) a function of the intensity of your activity. Significantly, the hunger bar is only filled by eating food, and health is only refilled by being full and regenerating over time.

There are a number of interesting consequences of that balanced system, but the one that I was facing was the added simulated system of being deep underground and getting hungry. I started for home, and soon found myself in a cul-de-sac maze of tunnels. They were all well-lit, all familiar, but I couldn't find the cave that led out. Eventually, as hunger became more urgent a need, I found what felt like the highest point, and decided to dig my way straight up as far as my ladders would take me, and then to just dig-and-fill my way to the surface, hoping that my light and food would hold. I checked my map and saw that I should be safe and not emerge underwater.

I dug up, and ... hit water. After a brief glimpse of light, I was swept back down and had to return to the bottom to get air. What could I do? If the water was in an unlit cave, I had no more light to place. If it was on the surface, my map should have shown it. I was now running out of time, though, both real and in-world, so I decided to risk it. This could mean losing everything, including my hard-built map, at the bottom of a lake that I couldn't swim to, but I had to try. I furiously swam and dug up toward the light ... and emerged just before my air ran out ... in an overhanging pool on which I had built my house. I was home!

Just as the map and terrain changes worked together to make significant geography emerge in my previous adventure, resources, terrain, and mobs combined to make a real adventure story emerge. Running short of one resource, being pushed beyond my intended range, and then having to conserve my resources to return to safety created the common thread of events which form a meaningful story.

d

Local ... Game Design ... Conventions?

2011-10-02T18:43:59Z

I went to a playtesters' group recently, and picked up two fliers for upcoming conventions for game design. They seem to be focusing on the indie, hobbyist, artisanal, and semi-professional game design communities as much as on professional designers. With my Game Design Advocate hat on, I think that these are awesome ideas, and I hope that I can attend one or both. If you're interested in game design, or just want to see something new, I'm sure there are going to be some great experiments and original ideas ... not merely on display, but there for you to experience!

Metatopia - "The Game Design Festival", Nov. 4-6 at the Morristown Hyatt & Conference Center. $50 membership for designers, to get your game played; $20 player memberships, and $30 walk-in player memberships. Cool!

Anonycon - "Artisanal Games; Craft, Skill, & Quality", December 2-4 in Stamford, CT.

Play-Log: Minecraft 1.8.1 - Adventure time!

2011-09-28T12:52:55Z

No, Finn and Jake did not appear to me in Minecraft. However, an interesting set of elements combined last night to make two real adventures emerge during my play session. I'll even say that they shared many qualities with tabletop RPG sessions, albeit ones run by a very open-ended and open-minded GM. What amazed me was that emergence from something that had previously been a sandbox game. So where did the GM come from?

]]> At the end of my previous play session, I had eagerly crafted a Map, one of the new features in the 1.8 release. I knew I was on a sizable island, but since it was hilly and heavily forested, I kept getting lost trying to get my bearings. I've previously run into interesting features and even found a pack of wolves that I want to domesticate, but without a map I couldn't find my way back. Thus I initially set out last night to fill in that map.

I spent the first couple of days mapping eastward (toward where I had seen the wolves) until I hit the boundaries of my map. Once I hit the edge of what the map could cover, and at the edge of an ocean, I turned south to establish the borders of my island. That was one point from the new update - a bunch of work was done on biomes, and "deep sea" biomes were created which could cover large areas of a map. This does more than just occupy space, though. Oceans are difficult to cross (swimming is slow) and camping in the middle of one is impossible, you have to wait out the night. They're also devoid of other features, so they force the land into a geography of interest. I had borders to walk along, and could mentally place features that I might want to come back to. With oceans as interest-wastelands, and as borders, and then with a map, my world had a geography.

In the first in-game week, I explored peninsulas, found rivers, and built several boats to cross different bays. At one point I even found myself shipwrecked on a desert island - I ran aground too hard, my ship broke, and as the small island was all sand and cactus, there was no wood to build a new boat. It was a long swim home!

I found a small island with a tall peak, covered the island in torches and built a house so that I could spend the next few days sailing loops and mapping the edges of my mini-continent. Each night I raced the sunset home and looked over my new map. After four days, I had filled the edge of the map, and found the boundaries of my subcontinent. I even ran out of supplies in one corner of the map, which led to a harrowing night run -- I lacked the materials to build a bed or place torches, and was in a broad expanse of grassland pockmarked with ravines to fall in. As the sun set, I was frantically switching back and forth from map to sword as I tried to get my bearings in the featureless landscape, and I kept getting turned around. When I finally found a river that I knew would lead to a village that was on my *mental* map, my fear turned to urgency. Could I make the village, and my home on the other side, before the monsters spawned to slow me down?

I just made it, racing through the deserted street of the village (which made it look closed up for the night) and on to my well-lit home, and facing only one skeleton along the way. I resolved to build a clock to accompany my map ... but finding the resources for that would take another, very different adventure.

I'll need to make the second adventure another entry. What impressed me about my overland adventure was how the biome changes and the new map feature pushed 'exploration' to a new significance as a core mechanic. Those additional features make exploration a richer activity, and allow mini-goals to join together into a narrative. I could push a little further, I could string activities together and give them meaning, and they could literally be set into a larger landscape of meaning. Granted, "exploration" is a much more significant mechanic for me personally than for many people, so not everyone will be as excited as I am by this particular update. But it's always neat as a player and designer to see emergent complexity round a corner.

Mechanic's Report: Super Meat Boy (XBox)

2011-08-26T02:19:00Z

At first glance, Super Meat Boy is pretty simple: run, jump, and don't hit anything that isn't a wall or floor, because it'll kill you. And, honestly, that's all quite relevant. But after you've played a few of the very short levels, a lot of nuance begins to emerge within those simple mechanics. Peel the onion back:

]]>

Run

It takes you a very little space to get going, and a little space to stop.
When you're touching a wall, it takes you just a little longer to get going.

Jump

You can stick to walls
and slide down them

but you accelerate as you do
If you jump immediately after hitting a wall, you'll jump a bit faster and a bit further
Hit them fast enough, and you can even slide up

You will jump with better control if you leave the ground doing what you want to be doing.
You can change direction in mid-air

and you can switch between 'walking' and 'running' speed

... and you'll need each and every one of those abilities, in exacting sequence, to complete most of the levels of the game.

In other words, those two simple mechanics --running and jumping-- are so finely tuned that the play resulting from them can rise to performance. It doesn't matter whether you jump in the right spot any more than it matters that you played the right string on your violin at the right time. That is, it matters as the basis for the art. The art is in the performance, the way that you switched from run to walk in midair to drop between the blades, or you pushed just a little harder on the horsehair as your bow reached the end of the stroke. Try it again, and you won't do exactly that again, just something like it and hopefully with as much feeling.

As with musical performance, practice makes perfect, and an audience helps. Because of all this complexity, and the nuance that the mechanics enable for me when I play, a play session at my house gets an audience. I'll bring up a new level, and my wife and roommate and I will have a good laugh at the idea that completing it could be a thing that can be done. They'll hold their breaths as my 45th attempt goes horribly awry and they wait to see whether I can hold out long enough to get back on track. When my 3rd attempt on another level inexplicably succeeds, we'll all flop back on the sofa, aware that we've witnessed something of a miracle.

Super Meat Boy could be incredibly frustrating, and I honestly expected it to be. In this game, you will fail a level (die) dozens of times in each level. But the game has another feature that creates a fun mechanic. Each play is recorded, and when you finally complete a level, you get to see a re-play where every try plays simultaneously. A wave of doomed Meat Boys sweep and bounce around the level, until finally just one makes it to the end. Coming into the game, I thought the feature would seem hokey and perhaps taunting or depressing. But in the giddy aftermath of attempt no. 57's success, the replay seems somehow respectful of my effort. When I go into the next level, each brief attempt is clearly building toward something larger, that will eventually succeed. The minor-seeming feature recasts the rest of the play of the game just a little.

I'm aware that I'm being a bit dramatic about Super Meat Boy. I just honestly didn't expect much from the game, and have been amazed at the nuance of game design, and the skillful guidance of play, that hides behind all the blood and Jhonen Vasquez stylings.

On Reading Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun

2011-04-19T00:18:16Z

I just started reading Raph Koster's A Theory Of Fun, and I am having a very heartening deja vu experience. Raph Koster's grandfather asked him, in the wake of the Columbine attacks, whether he was proud of his work making (digital) games. Though I have rarely been put on the spot so directly, I frequently have two similar experiences. First, when I tell certain classes of people that I make digital games, often those who might be politically or demographically grouped with Koster's grandfather, they get a look that raises the question. It's the "oh, that's nice" that you might give an IRS auditor or a hit man if you met them at a party. The other situation is when I am selling or explaining the game that I work on to people. I am lucky enough to be working on a project which I believe is pursuing the best work that I believe the field has to offer, and is doing so consciously. I am lucky enough to get to do the Right Thing with some of the Right People, and I think my work can make a difference in the world.

That second situation makes me sound very confident, but because of the first situation, and my psychological inclinations, I rarely have that confidence. When I am faced with skepticism, I find it easy to be defensive: "oh, not the shooter games," when I enjoy playing shooter games and see merit in their immersion. Or, "... Educational games. For kids. Wholesome non-time-wasting ones," when I think that every game is educational, and that while kids may need guidance toward the richest outlets for their energy and enthusiasm, I think they rarely tolerate real wastes of their time if given an option. It's about context, framing, but that is beside the point when someone thinks that I am asking them to become a dealer of temporal heroin.

Thus it is heartwarming, and familiar, to read about the significance of fun from someone who has spent some time doing, considering, and then articulating the idea. How part of our brains' way of deali with the world is to filter things out, clump concepts and perceptions, iconify them. And how art in general, and games and play specifically, encourage us to (re)consider the ways that we iconify our experience. What paintings are to visual stimulus, and symphonies to auditory stimulus, games can be to our understanding of how the world works and how we categorize or process our experience. Put more simply, games are close to the way we work, and as we learn more about the art (in the craft sense) of games, we learn more about how we work and how to make art (in the lofty sense). And we learn about how to use the art to effect positive change in the world, especially for and by people who don't have a lot of other opportunities to learn that lesson.

I am proud to be a part of that effort.

Play/Design Log

2011-03-28T00:08:46Z

I've been doing a lot of playing lately, of things all over the spectrum and often not in good range of an online writing tool. Nevertheless, I'd like to capture some or all of those activities. So!

Played in the last week ...
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Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery: EP - This iPad game has been hotly anticipated for several years now, and I've got to say ... it does live up to the hype. At least the hype I found. Ars Technica has a nice review that says most of what I'd have to say about it. It appeals to me as a "lonely game", a genre that I really enjoy. I haven't seen that term thrown around much, so it might be worth an entry here sometime, but the gist is that "lonely game"s often start with a lone character in a largely empty but beautiful or eerie world, trying to figure out what's going on. Exploration, discovery, puzzling are the mechanics; atmosphere and mystery are the aesthetics. S:S&S:EP is all that on a LucasArts-style point-and-click UI on the iPad.
Agricola - If you're in any board game circles, or go to PAX, or ever visit BoardGameGeek, you might be sick of hearing about this game. I'm really enjoying it, so you could soon get sick of hearing about it here. It's a well-balanced game, which is remarkable considering the 34,000 elements that a regular game keeps moving. It plays smoothly with two players or with five, if you're willing to give it the recommended 30 min/player (and then some). My wife and I tied twice this week, a remarkable achievement.
Tiny Wings - This iPhone game makes me smile, and I think that's part of the point. You guide a little round bird, who has the titular Tiny Wings, which don't let him fly very well. Fortunately, his world is composed of round sine-wave hills, so he can zoom down one slope and ski-jump off the upslope. There's one button - you touch the screen, and the bird dives so that he can zoom. Then up the next slope, you let go, and he does his best to fly in a parabolic arc. Do it just right and you get the most satisfying feeling as you time the jumps and the poor little bird gets to pretend to fly until nightfall. The design of this game is so elegant, so simple, and the art style perfectly suited to it, that it's hard to think of a cleaner, more perfectly realized game. I'm pleased as well that the central experience that the game works to create in the player is a combination of focus, hope, and joy.
Marple - This is a fairly simple logic puzzle for the iPhone/iPad, with play that feels a lot like sudoku. Like many such puzzles, it's just a matter of time before you figure it out, and a lot of the play is just a matter of quickly and adroitly processing the clues. What has gotten me in this one is that each game takes 2-5 minutes, generally, and I enjoy the turning point as I've figured out enough of the puzzle that the rest begins to fall into place.
D&D 3.5e - On Friday I ran, for the first time in several years, an adventure in Dungeons and Dragons. The game isn't new to me, though I was a bit rusty after several years away; but it was new to three of the five players, who'd never played a tabletop RPG at all. It was wild to start from "So I'm going to describe what's going on, and you will each play a character and tell me what you do." The group picked it up quickly, and we had fun. I was a little frustrated, as the story was only just getting going when we ran out of time, but we hit all my instructional goals: the group gathering, a social encounter, a social conflict encounter, a tactical combat encounter, and a chance to wander around collecting information. One thing that hit me was all of the seemingly ancillary experiences that came so quickly and forcefully back when I got behind the DM's screen again. The nervousness and sense of underpreparation. The joy of getting into character with a player, doing the same. Watching players slowly figure out a puzzle I'd put before them. Seeing throw-away comments come back as role-playing hooks for other players. It made me really want to run a regular group again. However, it also surprised me with a fresh look at 3.5e D&D ... my goodness, but that's a lot of setup for characters for new players. And even for experienced players, so many fiddly numbers, all the time, and so many situations and exemptions and rules.

Time in Galcon

2011-03-19T15:49:17Z

When I first worked at Gamelab in 2006, Galcon went around the office. I played it, saw it as Risk In Space, observed that it was oddly compelling, and eventually moved on to another game -- perhaps Puzzle Quest. I didn't figure out what was getting me and the others in the office hooked, and lazily attributed it to being a really good and simple implementation. Then yesterday, I saw Galcon Fusion highlighted in the App Store, and picked it up.

Now, several years later, I think I know what was compelling before: time, working on several levels. Risk is turn-based, which allows the strategy to be contemplative. It will take a while (punctuated in turns) for your armies to move across the board, and you can spend a while thinking and rethinking your moves. You've got plenty of opportunity to consider your overall deployment, as does your opponent.

The draw of Real-Time Strategy games has always been not just having to think about strategy, but to do so on your feet. The game will not wait for you to analyze the exact probabilities of your moves' successes. To win you must really think at two levels: what is the likelihood of winning this conflict, and in the big picture, how does that move change your overall position. Tactics come back in to a limited extent. And yet strategy at the board-level is that much more important: your opponent doesn't have to wait for you to end your turn before sweeping in on a hole in your defenses, so you'd really best be watching them all the time.

Time also introduces a narrative element for me. The quick pace, the sweeping movements, introduces a dramatic element that is too attenuated by turns to really come across in the play. In Galcon, it's often a good idea to let your opponents wear down the neutral territories, and then send a massive fleet to secure the weakened planet for your side. In the time that it takes my ships to swoop in, I'm picturing a drawn-out war between the local independent state and The Other Side, where my "peacekeeping forces" sweep in to bring an end to the conflict. As a backwater planet that I've been ignoring for a while comes to my attention with the massive number of forces that it developed in my 'absence', I picture its populace proudly sending its troops off to The Great Effort for the first time.

Those stories could be in the turn-based version, but the hustle of the real-time game introduces cracks in my strategy, gaps in my attention, which provide hooks for a story. The Perfect Command that never makes mistakes is not interesting. In the mistakes or risks lie the stories.

There are a couple other major differences between Risk and Galcon, but they're still influenced by time. For one, while in Risk you are often limited by what regions can attack other regions, in Galcon it's all out in space. Any planet can move on any other planet, somewhat minimizing the distribution of the regions. Planets in close proximity are still useful, as they are more responsive and good for quick adjustments to your strategy, but it's not so completely about owning Kamchatka as the land-based Risk is, for instance. The time matters, though. If you have a string of planets in a line, you can make lots of little hops, keeping your forces balanced in response to the long-range attacks of your opponent. If you want to send a massive force off to a juicy planet halfway across the board, your opponent has lots of time to see it coming.

Another difference introduced by time is the raw numbers. Numbers build quickly in Galcon, in a way that would be tedious to keep track of on a board. This difference is more about Galcon being digital than it is about time, but the constantly ticking clock allows the numbers to be finer at one a second rather than 20 every 20 seconds, which allows more nuanced conflict.

Galcon is pretty simple. But that one tweak -- the introduction of time into a turn-based game -- has ripple effects that I didn't think until now could make such a difference.

Mechanic's Report: Super 7 HD (iPad)

2011-02-19T01:24:54Z

Super 7 HD for iPad is a pretty simple path-drawing game with some nice twists. Rounded polygons come on the screen, each with a number and a corresponding color, and bounce around the screen. If they collide, they form a new polygon with the sum of the numbers on it. The player's job is to draw lines between polygons to form sevens. If two shapes collide that add up to more than seven, the game is over.

The game's difficulty scales well and smoothly. At first, pairs come on that match with each other. Later, the pairs that match are staggered across waves. Then there aren't waves, the shapes just enter in rapid sequence. Then they're back to coming in sets, but with negative numbers, and the cycle repeats with the additional complexity. In the parts I've reached, I've seen multipliers, dividers, and sign changers. A final element of the challenge is there throughout the game: the more shapes go into a sum, the larger the sum shape is, which makes it easier to collide with, and more likely to end the game.

A big part of the game's challenge and its replayability comes from it's scoring structure. Pairs that add up to seven score only one point. You score an extra point for every shape that contributes to a sum beyond two -- so if you make a seven out of seven 1s, you score 6 points. A 3 and a 4 together score only 1. The game doesn't explain that well in its tutorial, so it took me a while to figure out why I scored better in some games. Once i got that, though, the game became much deeper. That's a strong incentive to try to keep additional shapes on the board, hoping to make sums of as many shapes as possible; but shapes that linger with lots of contributors get very large. Meanwhile, the game gets more difficult either over time or over basic score, so you really want to score well quickly, before it gets harder to do so.

I really like mechanics like that, which are a simple press-your-luck system, but where almost all of the risk is self-incurred and the luck you're pressing is largely determined by your skill as a player. Many difficulty systems are entirely determined by luck, or the computer, or the computer's luck. Systems which let the player determine the difficulty are elegant; systems which then in cent the player to continually struggle against their own boundaries are even more elegant.

Being a system like that, Super 7 is a game in which achievements work well. I'm not keen on achievement systems that merely lie alongside gameplay, irrelevant or even distracting to the main gameplay. But since the difficulty mechanics of Super 7 are about the challenges that you assign yourself, achievements are a natural fit and can lead you to explore the strategic space in a way that contributes to your gameplay. They are exercises you can assign yourself to get better at what the game is about. In fact, I think that I figured out the scoring system in order to pursue an achievement!

Super 7 HD makes for a good Mechanic's Report because it's central systems are so elegant, and the rest of the game so simple. The main game and interaction is fun; on top of that, there are complex systems that work against each other and are well-balanced. It's a good design!

The iPad Post

2010-09-14T03:48:58Z

I received an iPad for my birthday. The gift came most directly from my wife and my roommate, but I understand that many people chipped in for it. There has been a fair bit of anticipation, and I know I'm beholden to that community that contributed. Everyone wants to know whether the iPad lives up to its hype or down to its detractors' rants. I need to give a shareholder report.

The main concern for people who have seriously investigated the iPad is that it's a tweener-- more expensive than a netbook, but not as fully capable as comparably-priced laptops; bigger than an iPhone but not big/powerful enough to do real work; with a pseudo-keyboard that makes you think you can do more than you can with its form factor. Certainly those were the reasons that I initially decided to stick with my Hackintoshed netbook until hardware rev 2 came along, presumably with a 'retina' display, maybe a camera, iOS 4 and multitasking.

It has more than replaced the netbook, though, and is certainly not a tweener. I can edit nearly all the documents that I could on the netbook, and in fact with the 3GS edition and a data plan, I have more ready access to my documents in the cloud and don't have to plan as far ahead about what I'm going to work on. It's light enough to carry anywhere, and it's battery lasts forever compared to the netbook. It is much faster than the netbook on everything that it does.

It has, hands-down, the best web-browsing experience that I've ever had -- far better than on the netbook with its unusual screen aspect ratio and squirrelly trackpad. I can sit anywhere with it. I can pinch and zoom and rotate at will to fix any little issues with a page's layout or styling ... a feature that is invisible until you've gotten to use it, and which proves useful every few minutes when you have it.

Many, many of the features at make it appear at first glance to be a tweener have proven in my experience to be very savvy decisions about what's necessary in a focused user experience. The keyboard takes half the screen in landscape mode; but you can type at nearly full speed and it's nearly full-size while still leaving you most of the context that you need for typing. When you're not typing, it isn't taking any space on the screen or on your desk. In portrait mode, the keyboard feels small for regular typing ... but with some practice is of a decent size for thumb-typing, if a little large.

Another 'tweener' feature is its single-app focus. Like the iPhone, there's only one app visible at a time, regardless of what is active or processing in the background. To switch apps, you need to back out to the main menu, then focus in on the other app. Having migrated from a netbook, though, I've been grateful for the dedication of the screen's real estate to the current app. The alternative is to put in some persistent interface for active apps, and ... I just don't need it that often.

I'll admit that i don't see what the fuss is about multitasking, honestly. The apps that I want working while I'm focused on something else all have notifications and even push turned on, so they feel like they're still running. The only thing that I have missed multitasking for is letting downloads or loading webpages do their thing while i hop over to another app to take a note. Otherwise, the quick switching between recently used apps with push notification is 95% of what I need multitasking for in the work that I would do in the situations where i would be using an iPad.

There's a larger issue here, and an important one. Getting one as a gift let me step back from it and play a little more easily, and I think that's key with this device. Because I didn't have to justify the expenditure to myself, because I could fall back to the netbook if I needed to, I simply didn't have to use it and I had room to consider what it could really do free of any expectations borne of my existing needs. After a few days of trying to use it as my primary internet device in that context, I could see all kinds of new ways of working that it facilitates, and a lot of "habits" (call them workflow optimizations) from other devices that I actually don't need in the places where i would use an iPad.

It is not a laptop. It's not an oversized iPhone, though that is the easier comparison to make. If you approach it as either of those, if you demand that it be one of those things, you will be frustrated. If you can give it a few days' use as it is, work the way that it works, then it becomes a new kind of device. When I'm browsing the web, I rarely need five other apps running. When I am typing a document, I need files on hand, but I rarely need them all up in front of me simultaneously. Meanwhile, I often want to spin the screen around and hand it to someone else in the room. I want to stretch and resize what I'm working on quickly and intuitively, rather than having to search for five handles in tiny corners, move three palettes, and rearrange other windows. I rarely need access to a hierarchical filesystem, and I often enjoy having just the files that I need right there, and having the system be savvy to what I can do with a document. With the battery life, I rarely need to turn it off, which means that it is often just there and ready with 0 seconds to 'wake up', and it is almost always on my person or within arm's reach. I can take notes in it almost as easily as i can in a paper notepad, except that the notes are then available immediately to the rest of my digital life.

It's by no means perfect. I often would like to browse sites that use Flash, though that should not be confused with a desire to use Flash itself. There are also some places where the interface has underestimated what I would like to do -- most notably, there's no ready way to print, or to take any old web page and save it for offline browsing.

So I think that I was lucky to get it as a gift, because I had that distance. I didn't end up demanding that I get my money's worth of my expectations, and as a result, it's pretty amazing, and I think I'm more likely to actually get ... well, my friends' money worth.

I am still advising many friends, especially those with iPhones or Android phones, to wait for (the unannounced) rev 2. I think that there are many little kinks to be worked out, and a year of seeing how people actually use the devices, and what apps people make, will make for a much better version. But I'm really happy with the version that i have!

Recent podcast appearances

2010-07-04T03:17:41Z

In the last few weeks, I have made guest appearances on a couple of podcasts. Between the recent conference appearances and these podcasts, I spent May and June talking a lot about what I do ... it felt good to get back to being a Doer and not just a Talker, especially as the microphone end of podcasting is pretty new to me. The skills for giving a good presentation at a conference and for being a good podcast guest are really different. Presentations are planned, focused on a single topic, can be visual. Podcasts are spontaneous, more like interviews, may cover a variety of topics, are aural, and (more) interactive. I suppose that panels or other conference formats with 'respondent's are somewhere in between. In either format, I need to be careful to speak less about myself; and to confidently say something once and then to move on. I have a bit of a tendency to explain things three or four ways in the hopes of covering the bases when once is enough. Without further ado, then, 'my' podcasts:

On Teachers Teaching Teachers, talking about Gamestar Mechanic with teachers who have used it
On Dice, Food, Lodging, talking about all sorts of things - Part 1 and Part 2
On Dice, Food, Lodging again, trying to apply game dev software management wisdom to small teams developing tabletop RPG modules in a week

What to do with some Mac Minis?

2010-07-03T21:07:11Z

I have a couple of Mac Minis that we haven't used in a while. I doubt with our current setup that we'll use them again. Besides taking them in to Tekserve on Electronics Recycling Day, what could we do with them? They're Mac Mini (Original)s, specs here at Apple. The quick version of that is that they've got minimal specs to be useful these days-- they're 1.25 GHz G4s, with 512 MB of RAM, IIRC. They're in good shape, they're just ... old. Thoughts?

G4C Talk: "Top 10 Mistakes People make in ... Production"

2010-06-15T23:21:39Z

I recently spoke at the Games For Change Festival's "Games for Change 101.5: A Workshop for Making Social Issue Games" day.

The talk went ... well, I had a catastrophe, but it was one that I planned for. I went into the presentation worried that I'd sent off a draft of my PowerPoint rather than the final version, and that the last slide would be empty. So I crafted a joke to laugh it off, and went in. As I opened the presentation, I established that the final slide was okay. Then, partway through and running late, I came across ... slide #5 duplicated instead of slide #6. I made the prepared joke --"Like I said, you need to test, because you will be wrong the first time. And now I'm back on schedule." Super classy!

Besides that, the talk went well. For my first-ever talk at a professional conference/convention, it was great! I was talking well within my domain, spoke well and was relatively at ease. I've got some high standards for what makes a good presentation, and while I have a long way to go yet to live up to them, I hit a few key points in this talk: I like slides that don't duplicate what the speaker is saying. I prefer slides to summarize and provide a counterpoint or commentary to the spoken presentation. (Did that.) I like slides that provide visual jokes. (Didn't get that.) I like presentations that are grounded in what I know but make me see things in a new way (Didn't). I like presentations that are chock full of 1500 ideas so that a few of them resonate or say something in a lovely concise manner (Did).

The proper final version of my talk is here in several formats:

* sprice_Top10MistakesInProduction.ppt (ppt, 332 KB)

* sprice_Top10MistakesInProduction.pdf (pdf, 1.3 MB)