Another story – The (Former) General – has been released as part of Penguin/STS’s current ARG, We Tell Stories.
This story, and the website it comes from, is all part of an ARG, from two of the key people (Dan and Adrian Hon) behind Perplex City (PXC). So … expect misinformation, deliberate errors, and stenography. I’m not playing the game (sadly; just too busy with other things at the moment), so I’m interpretting this completely cold.
Using a custom font renderer that lets me position text exactly where I want it, I put together a simple game that teaches you to count from 1 to 10 in Korean characters.
First, you HAVE to manually download the Korean font I’m using (because I don’t think I can legally include it in the executable file :( )
http://www.i18nl10n.com/fonts/UnBatang.ttf
NOTE: you MUST (windows is rubbish) do “Save to” and select C:\Windows\Fonts (this causes windows to automagically “install” the font) – I can’t remember how to install new fonts on Linux or OS-X, but it should work fine with both of those OS’s too.
Then just stick the two attached files in a directory somewhere, and double-click on the one called korean-numbercounter-all.jar
Essential library (download this)
Main file (download this to same directory as the library file, and run this file)
NB: this is mainly just a proof of concept to test my rendering code, I’ve got a couple of other simple “games” like this I’ve knocked up as tests.
…according to Ed Castranova’s snippet that Scott J posted from the MDY vs Blizzard trial notes.
Courtesy of Scott, here’s a hosted copy of the source documents.
Ed writes a nice little explanation of why / how bots damage an in-game economy. I liked that. Good stuff – go read it. So far, so good – a great primer for anyone wanting to understand the situation better.
Unfortunately, the implication throughout the document is that this is all directly damaging to Blizzard’s revenue, and should be prevented *by someone other than Blizzard*.
I think this is a really stupid way of looking at things. My impression from reading the submission was that it’s overall a somewhat twisted description of the situation, coloured by a desire to use the facts (economic analysis) to support a personal desire (stop people using bots rather than go to the effort of fixing the bugs in the game-design). Sure, capitalist companies will pursue the cheapest possible means to achieve their goals, including suing people if they think they’ll succeed, but I deeply object to this kind of good factual analysis being spun to imply it proves stuff that it does not prove, and which consists an attempt to dodge responsibility and use the legal system to make up for mistakes in a company’s product-development strategy. Make better games, don’t blame the players for not playing the way they were “meant” to. Even the ones who are cheating. Ban them for cheating, stop them however you can, but don’t claim it’s not your fault that they’ve managed to cheat in the first place: of course it’s your fault.
Picking the snippet Scott quoted, which is nicely indicative of the whole piece:
Glider bots destroy this design, distorting the economy for the average player in two specific ways. When a Glider bot “farms” an area, it picks up not only experience points for its owner, discussed above, but also the “loot” that is dropped by the mobs killed by the bot. Because Glider can run constantly, it kills far more mobs than anticipated by WoW’s designers, thus creating a large surplus of goods and currency, flooding the economy with gold pieces and loot like the Essence of Water. This surplus distorts the economy in a specific way.
When bots gather key resources, they gather them in abundance. Owners of bots usually sell these resources to other players for gold, which inevitably deflates their price. Blizzard’s design intent is for the resources to command a certain high value, so that average players, who might get one or two of the resources in an average amount of play time, may obtain a decent amount of gold from selling them. But because characters controlled by bots flood the market with those resources, the market value of these resources is far less than Blizzard intended, and the average player realizes only a fraction of the intended value from the resources s/he finds. The deflated value of key resources presents a critical problem for ordinary players trying to enjoy the game. Blizzard’s game systems assume that players will be earning a certain amount of gold per hour, and many systems, such as repairs and travel, force players to make fixed payments of gold into WoW’s systems. Buying a horse, for example, costs a certain amount of gold. That pnce IS set by the game designers based on the assumption that normal players will accumulate gold at a certain rate, and that some of their gold will come from the value of resources that they harvest and sell. When the value of those resources plummets because of Glider, the amount of time it takes to accumulate the gold required for in-game expenditures like the horse skyrockets. This skews the economy, frustrates players, and, as a result of a less-satisfied user base, damages Blizzard.
My interpretation of the above argument:
The analysis is economically accurate, but the conclusions about the impact on design, and whose responsibility it is to contain/prevent/undo this, is just making out game developers to be lazy, stupid, bullies. People should take responsibility for their mistakes, not blame everyone else. Especially not blame the users of a game. Even if they hack your game to pieces and cheat like crazy THAT’S STILL YOUR FAULT AS A GAME DEVELOPER. You may hate them, rightly so, but it’s your responsibility to make better games. At least, that’s how we used to make games. Maybe the industry doesn’t work that way any more. Maybe it’s just me that thinks that way, maybe to everyone else in the industry a “bad game” isn’t your fault as a developer, it’s the players’ fault for not being clever enough to appreciate the coolness of your game.
Look at Diablo – it fell to pieces and died because of in-memory live hacking of the game-data. Seriously hardcore stuff (in a way). But that didn’t mean everyone just shrugged and said “those nasty hackers, they ruined a perfect game, it’s not the developers faut”, instead we took it to mean they hadn’t built it well enough, that next time they would have to change their approach, or their priorities, to prevent this from happening again.
To pick one more quote that underlines how silly I think this piece is because of the spin being put on it:
Glider bots occupy resources that Blizzard could otherwise put to other, more constructive uses. Because those resources are required to fight Glider, they are spent in a way that does not improve the game
Well, duh. And the same is true of most of the work being done by the Customer Service depts that all of the MMO companies pay large amounts of money to in salary every day. And it’s also true of the hardware that we use to run the game. Etc, etc. Just because a development cost “does not improve the game” doesn’t mean you have grounds to go and sue someone else for causing you to have to do it.
Where does it stop, if you go down that route? Are we going to start suing players who ask questions of the CS team that are too stupid? Will we bill players with crappy graphics cards for our time that was wasted diagnosing problems with their hardware that were stopping them from playing our games?
Which is not to say that I support botting or bot applications. I don’t support either. And I believe there are many different ways you can fight them, and there are many good reasons for shutting down people and organizations that use them. But I don’t think the reasons given above are included. And I don’t want to sink to the level of making specious arguments just because it’s the path of least effort…
So, what’s the connection between ES and MMO, that I’ve so tantalisingly been dangling in the title of the last three posts? (start here if you haven’t read them yet).
The short answer is: it’s all about data. And data is a lot harder than most people think, whenever you have to deal with an entire system (like an MMO) instead of just one consumer of a system (like the game-client, which is the only part of an MMO that traditional games have).
Obviously, we need to look at it in a lot more detail than that. First, some background…
Web 2.0 strategies often say “we can’t compete with our users, there’s too many hundreds of millions of them, and actually – collectively – they outmatch us in almost everything we do. So we’re going to bring them into our company, we’re going to let them develop the products, we’re going to let them take our technology and decide what other uses it can best be put to. And we’re not going to beat them over the head with copyright laws, because we can make so much money from the vastly increased volume of users that we get from this that it’s a virtuous circle. If we get too hung-up on controlling our data, and limiting access to our systems, and preventing people from accessing stuff “until it’s ready”, we actively prevent our community from helping us”.
Think about that: many of us, on a daily basis, are actively preventing our communities from helping us.
Speakers: Daniel James, Three Rings; Matt Mihaly, Iron Realms Entertainment
Very brief notes…
Speaker: Jeremy Irish, Groundspeak
Entertaining, with a lot of very small anecdotes, but nothing non-obvious in this talk. Everything he gave as advice you’d probably work out for yourself within your first project without losing time from doing so.
Speaker: Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, CCP
I want a full-time economist working for MY company.
And: CCP staff should give more of the GDC talks, they’re good. And entertaining.
In the midst of a week of depressingly dumb comments (on the topic of economy: what possessed Matt Miller to argue against microtransactions because accountants like to see x million players times y dollar per month and find microtransactions unpredictable?), it was a joy to go to an intelligent, extremely well-informed, rational talk with valuable lessons for the future.
EDIT: photos now added inline; better quality images of almost the same graphs can be found in the official Eve Online newsletters (2007Q3 and 2007Q4)
Speaker: Lesley Matthieson, High Impact
I didn’t find this talk at all useful, not because it was badly given (it wasn’t) but because the speaker seemed to be coming from such a rarefied environment that the ideas and suggestions would only work for a narrow set of people/projects that didn’t include me.
Speaker: Michael Smith, MindCandy
Another half-hour-long introductory topic talk from the Worlds In Motion summit. Short but sweet. A nice overview of lots of different things going on in the use (and sales) of real-world goods as part of online games / virtual worlds. Misses out plenty of things, but does a good job of giving a taster of the sheer variety that’s going on right now.
Like Adrian’s talk from yesterday, I would have loved a second follow-on talk – now that everyone’s been brought up to speed – that explored where we could be going with these, and looking at how these have been used in more depth / detail.
In case it’s not obvious enough, I’m tagging all my session-writeups this week with “GDC 2008” (HTML | RSS).
Mostly I’m covering online-related and social-networking related topics, but jumping around between GDC Mobile, Serious Games, Worlds In Motion summit, Independent Games, and the Game Design, Production, and Business tracks.
Speaker: Jeffrey Steefel, Turbine
IMHO, Jeffrey hereby strengthens the weight of evidence that Turbine is genuinely turning the corner from making poorly-guided foolish games to doing cutting-edge stuff and doing it well. Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) has gone some considerable way to burying the failings of Asheron’s Call 2 (AC2) and Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO), but it’s still far from certain that it’s a sustainable direction for them. In that context, Jeffrey speaks very convincingly and with a lot of apparent understanding about what they’ve done well and where they’re going with it in the future. Frankly, all of the incumbent MMO companies need to be doing this, and pushing at least this far and fast ahead, so it’s great to see someone senior at Turbine pushing this so strongly.
Speaker: Peter Marx, Analog Protocol/MTV
Good to hear about virtual worlds and MMOs from the perspective of a mega content / media company. Several interesting ideas and explanations that are well worth reading if you haven’t already been tracking the way that Viacom et al have been approaching the online socializing space.
Nothing fundamentally new, but the ideas presented were clear and consistent – and I’m kicking myself for not having tried VLES sooner, it sounds fun.
A very broad range of ideas on what should shape game design at a fundamental level. I greatly enjoyed this for the way it jumped to a bunch of related but competing ideals and perspectives.
Also very interesting for including a 20-minute section on How to Design for Alternate Reality Games (not billed as such, but that’s what it was: a theory on how to think when designing ARGs).
Section 1: Flow, and how to evaluate games
Section 2: Games break down into inputs and outputs
Section 3: Theories of design for Alternate Reality Games
[1] Kellee Santiago
[2] John Mak
[3] Pekko Koskinen
My own occasional commentary is in [ square brackets ]
This presentation is a personal design path, because the topic is in daner of leading to too abstract things, so personalising will make it more concrete, and secondly using concrete example will probably help explain.
I was working in university game research lab in finland, then tried to get projects going between old traditional forms of art and games.
One project from last fall was a reality game that will take place in finland next fall (2008???).
Background of game mechanics, but also a choreographer, a few dances, some actors, a video artist, and theatre director. These are all controlled by background game structure.
Basic premise is that everything you see around you is actually fictional. We’re pretending you’re living in a virtual disney land, your life is part of a museum exhibition, you’re a token citizen in this piece.
We insert fictional elements into the streetlife, give roles to players and use this to nudge people out of their normal daily routines.
I had to recalibrate my game design principles, because this needs some big changes to things I’d normally done. We’d made mainly experimental computer games before, and although I had a background in roleplaying this was still pretty new different design requirements.
Games can be designed for any medium, you can make games that are sound-only, text-only. Any medium at all you can come up with a game for. Why is that?
I think that’s peculiar because other forms of expression are rooted in the medium, e.g. painting is defined by it’s being a visual medium, music is an audio onee, yet that games are simply independent and can apply any medium that they choose.
This leads to the question: where do games reside, where do they stem from?
[this is part of their uniqueness: they’re part of what we are as humans]
I have a couple of ideas…
1. Games are essentially systesm: structures and operations. The structures, and the operations that are based on those strucutres. The medium’s features are there to make the structures apparent, and make the operations sensible / understandable.
e.g. learnign chess: you can learn it many ways, physically: in your head, on paper. but what’s important is that you’re devleoping a mental-model in your head, and then you can play it in any medium.
This is true of all games, I think: the game is not part of the medium, it just uses a given medium to show the structure that the game is comprised of.
If this is the case … doesn’t that mean that the whole game ultimately resides and plays out within the player’s own mind?
The starting point for any move in the game is in my head; first I play the move in my head, to decide what to do in reality, what action to actually take in the game outside my head.
2. If these reside in the player, aren’t games ultimately “systems of behaviour”?
If I play something, I’m behaving differently from my normal self [because I’m using that custom proprietary mental model to shape my thinking and actions].
Can’t we think of game design as you coming up with a pattern of behaviour “that would be an interesting way to behave, to live, to act” and then turning it into a representation of structures and operations that forces that way to behave.
3. If we adopt this design premise, then can we design a player the same way we design a game?
[on a basic level, you would expect a definite resounding yes: this is mathematical matching at play]
I think we can.
Sturucturally the approach I used was to think that games are environments in which we play. But…we could also design games as lenses, not as environments, but as esomething placed between you and your environment, that shape how you view your environment.
This gave me the approach I needed to do the reality-game design.
I could get someone doing something that looked game-like. Then I could get some other people to walk into the room and tell them that this was an artist doing an art piece.
I could then get more people to come in, and tell them that it was a religious event.
These are three different lenses of the same activity that is occurring.
Looking to the future…
This model of lenses cuts out some thing that games can do much better than just be lenses, so it’s not perfect as a model.
Are games as we see them now the last stop in development of understanding of what a game is, and of examples of genres, or just the beginning of a fundamentally different way of looking at them.
If you look at games pre-computers, they haven’t changed for thousands of years. But it’s changed so much in 20-30 years that this suggests its still a long way away from slowing down, if you look at historical cultural changes.
I think games are the best way to take control of life: we can design our lives, we can design the reality we want, how we live our lives.
People talk about how mmorpg players are losing their personalities to another online personlity. I think this is a reflection of the fact that games have a baheriovurla background, so they ALWAYS tie up with identity they ALWAYS cause you to adopt a new identity in order to play them.
That’s one development that’s only just starting at the moment, and in the long run I think we’ll come to see it as a general thing.
A very broad range of ideas on what should shape game design at a fundamental level. I greatly enjoyed this for the way it jumped to a bunch of related but competing ideals and perspectives.
Also very interesting for including a 20-minute section on How to Design for Alternate Reality Games (not billed as such, but that’s what it was: a theory on how to think when designing ARGs).
Section 1: Flow, and how to evaluate games
Section 2: Games break down into inputs and outputs
Section 3: Theories of design for Alternate Reality Games
[1] Kellee Santiago
[2] John Mak
[3] Pekko Koskinen
My own occasional commentary is in [ square brackets ]
Graphics over gameplay, AND gameplay over graphics don’t actually mean anything
Games break down into inputs and outputs. The game doesn’t exist without outputs, nor without inputs, so it’s meaningless to ask which is “most important”.
[Adam: I think you need to play ProgessQuest more… :P. Although I innately agree with this, or used to for many years, PQ eventually persuaded me that this was more of a personal self-delusion than a truism. Useful, but definitely NOT the full picture.]
You need to recognise that it’s not a game if there’s no ownership of inputs; you see something happen, and feel that’s it because of something you did.
Guitar Hero (GH) sucks because pressing a button when you have to isn’t owning any outputs, only owning an input. But … by giving you rock music when you press the butons, it DOES give you an output to own.
I had a sucky game that I was prototyping, and thought it was just really boring, I’d never pay for it, and then I added some cool graphics, and suddenly …it actually became really enjoyable. So I realised that graphics are actually essential.
I did a simple test where you could just jump high and low (small red ball on white bg).
All I did next was map every interaction to some kind of output.
Jumping made you squish narrowly, and when you move left and right a propeller on top rotates. Landing makes you squash out as you splat. Exponential decay on the animation of propeller.
All the gameplay rules are EXACTLY the same, but somehow it’s suddenly more compelling, and that’s what’s been blowing my mind.
[c.f. freecraft – try the early releases where no-one had created copyright-free art yet, so it was all just magenta blobs versus green blobs, and although the ruleset was standard Warcraft 2, the game itself sucked ass]
[c.f. Pixar’s very earliest animation work, the mini-story of the angle-poise lamp – look at how much inferred meaning humans can get out of the simplest of graphics, but they need SOME clues as to intent; in the pixar animation, the angle of the lamp, the speed of movement, and the direction of the light beam give you just enough to anthropomorphise it]
[1]
Its interesitng because I’ve seen a lot of designers wrestling with this, they feel the publisher isn’t creative, and doesn’t “get” the vision, and it’s because they’re showing the plain simple boxes and lineart version.
I think I see that there’s a certain amount of graphics that you need to even show your basic vision.
[2]
If you can’t see it, then it isn’t there.
The game developers are sort of projecting the gameplay, the feedback especially into the game that they know is going to be there, but isn’t there yet, because they have a library of this stuff in their head and know what it will be.
[1]
I’m wondering what is the level at which skinning the same mechanics does lead to a different experience, a different game.
What are we innovating on, how much is actually necessary innovation.
[2]
We talk about games as expression, and then go into the technical stuff. But I think a lot of the expression is simply “what you see and what you hear”.
Rez has very simple gameplay, not much expression, but the expression in fact IS how the visuals and audios all come together.
What if Call of Duty 3 (COD3) had Rez graphics? I realised that I would go from thinking it was boring and dull, to thinking that it was all about outputs, and that was when I started.
[3]
Much of the gameplay is seeing the difference between what you expected to happen when you did something, and what actually happened.
If you see exactly what you expected, then it’s dull.
If you see nothing like what you expected, then it’s ??? pointless??? [didnt hear this clearly]
The audio-visual are part of this feedback, they actualise the feedback. That’s the only way we get to see into the [FSM] of the game to see how it’s reacting to our actions, and to what extent.
A very broad range of ideas on what should shape game design at a fundamental level. I greatly enjoyed this for the way it jumped to a bunch of related but competing ideals and perspectives.
Also very interesting for including a 20-minute section on How to Design for Alternate Reality Games (not billed as such, but that’s what it was: a theory on how to think when designing ARGs).
Section 1: Flow, and how to evaluate games
Section 2: Games break down into inputs and outputs
Section 3: Theories of design for Alternate Reality Games
[1] Kellee Santiago
[2] John Mak
[3] Pekko Koskinen
How do we measure games?
Katamari Damacy (KD) valued as “a few hours of short, sweet entertainment”, but also “something you go back to again and again”. How does that makes sense?
I spent more time playing KD than God of War (GoW), but the latter was $60 as opposed to $20.
Is time the way we should be measuring the value of a game?
Tried to design Flow as something you COULD play over and over again, but would potentially play very differently every time. Many players didn’t notice this because of the strong simple central gameplay.
[2]
Play value may be more important in terms of “how much longer afterwards you continue to remember / think about it”, like books and films that make you go away and think afterwards, long after you’re no longer experiencing the entertainment.
[3]
How you’ve been changed by reading a book is a way of measuring its value/effect, but this is something we don’t do with games.
This is sad, as games have much more potential to affect players.
Maybe its necessary to talk about the number of horus of gameplay, and the replayability, to market and sell game, but I don’t think it has any value for the design of games.
[2]
You play a game differently by knowing what’s going to happen next, so replayability actually is very important, potentially. e.g. why are you able to study and re-study a great book over and over again, how do you not get bored / seen it all after the first few times?
[1]
KD made me think how even we in the industry don’t place enough value on the “meaningful content” – the fact that we only set a price of $20 suggests we’re not thinking it ourselves.
[3]
If we approach the player as “was he entertained? Was he feeling good afterwards, was he taking anything in?”, with design I think we have to look sometimes at the ACTUAL effects that took place – what skills did the player experience, what did they learn while playing?
[2]
I don’t think about the player too much when I design games, but that’s because I guess I just design for myself, mostly.
[3]
It’s an interesting thought that you can make world design part of the game design. Designing the game-world so that the rewards are integrated into it. World could be small-enviroment, I mean it abstractly.
[2]
It’s just another tool, non-intrinsic rewards. It gives some extra meaning to the game. e.g. Geometery Wars (GW) uses points to show that it’s about perfecting a certain skill.
[1]
Extrinsic rewards either tap into Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or into competitiveness.
If that’s what you WANT to tap into, go for extrinsics, otherwise you have to think more about what exactly the rewards are encourgaging in the player.
[3]
We don’t actually think how many rewardlike elements there in the game. For instance, in GW the size of explosopns., the graphic effects, are rewards in themselves. The glorious mega explosions are a special reward too.
Also known as: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
(because I’m now deviating from the original schedule I outlined in Part 1; what the heck, it was only a rough agenda anyway…)
First of all, there’s a bunch of good questions that have been raised in response to the first two posts:
Let’s start with that last one first.
Andrew Chen has a great post on how people use Facebook and why MySpace pages are so ugly
I particularly liked the straightforward comparison between the opposing viewpoints on design, i.e.:
Facebook / Google / “modern” web companies:
Myspace / GeoCities / “poorly designed” web presences:
So. Scrapbooking. A $2.5 Billion industry, huh? Serious food for thought for game designers trying to think up ways to take advantage of Web 2.0, but struggling to break out of the boring “chat”, “friends lists”, and “character pages” ideas…
Sadly, there’s some disagreement about what exactly an Entity System (ES) is. For some people, it’s the same as a Component System (CS) and even Component-Oriented Programming (COP). For others, it means something substantially different. To keep things clear, I’m only going to talk about Entity Systems, which IMHO are a particular subset of COP. Personally, I think Component System is probably a more accurate name given the term COP, but then COP is improperly named and is so confusing that I find if you call these things Component Systems they miss the point entirely. The best would be Aspect Systems, but then AOP has already taken ownership of the Aspect word.
An entity system is simply a part of your program that uses a particular way of breaking up the logic and variables of your program into source code.
For the most part, it does this using the Component Oriented Programming paradigm instead of the OOP paradigm – but there’s subtleties that we’ll go into later.
Another couple of days since the first one-day effort, and SFE single player is now working, albeit with a seriously crap AI:
