January Challenge #31: Flawless Victory

Reposted on new blog at http://dynamitochondria.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-31-flawless-victory.html.

So what do you know? I did it. A blog post every day for the month of January. I'm pretty happy with the results, 31 fairly meaty posts, mostly of decent essay length. Only #23 was super short, but I couldn't resist the gag, and when it was done, it was done.

Observations

Writing an essay for public consumption every day is not easy. When I put together the two separate exercises of write daily and write for public consumption, I didn't really think about what that would entail. I was worn out creatively after each post, and there wasn't much time or inclination left for other creative pursuits.

Freeform essay writing is easier and more fun than structured technical writing. When I tried putting together the skeleton of a post and then working on each section individually, the results didn't seem as good as when I just started blathering and hit Post when it felt done. Some of that was time pressure. Building the skeleton takes time, and while it helps in the long run to make the work easier to organize, the daily 2-3 hours I gave this task wasn't sufficient to see the payback in time saved.

Writing actually did come easier each day. As promised by many of the writing gurus, the habit builds on itself. Topics came more easily as well. Early in the month, I sat down to the keyboard a few times and just stared dumbly at the monitor for a while. By the end, I didn't need to cop-out with a post about Writer's Block, my last emergency topic, but some of the material for that wound up in the post about Thinking Outside the Box.

Making promises about what to write later was not a great idea. That was pressure I didn't need. Ideas in my journal grew easier without the deadline of wanting to get them posted this month.

Next Steps

First off, the posting rate gets to drop. I have some projects on the backburner that need some attention, including a demo game for Zynga. I don't intend to drop below a post a week.

I want to try again to integrate subskills from technical writing. Blogging once a week will allow more time for document planning and design, and the effort invested in working up a skeleton for each post will have time to pay off.

I have a few ideas for shorter bits to turn into regular side features. Book and game reviews, limited-scope game design thoughts, a more personalized weekly "status report", and assorted similar miscellany.

Thank you, everyone who took the time to drop a note. Your words of encouragement (and criticism) made this experiment easier and more fulfilling.

Thank you, everyone who took the time to read one or more of my idiot ramblings, whether you took the time to comment or not. I wasn't writing for you; I was writing for me. But knowing that you were out there reading my words drove me to make my thoughts as cogent as possible.

Watch this space.

January Challenge #30: Outside the Box

This is my first blog post written outside my apartment. This would come as a surprise to some people. For instance, if asked, the barristas at my favorite cafe would say that I'm never anywhere else.

It's not that I needed out of my space today, but scheduling dictates that I haul my laptop and blog out on the town between stops. And it's a nice experience. The different surroundings draw my thoughts onto different paths than when I'm writing in my cave. I'm outside by box.

Thinking outside the box has me thinking of thinking outside the box. Everybody says "Think outside the box." But no one ever explains what that means. There's a (possibly reasonable) expectation that the listener intuitively understands or can at least derive from past experience the meaning of the phrase.

But from experience, I'd have to guess that some speakers don't really understand what it means. The most common misuse I've run into is covering for a lack of comprehension of the topic at hand. When confronted by a knowledgeable authority that their proposal demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the problem, the offender replies "Hey, just thinking outside the box."

So here's my first assertion on the topic. You have to know the dimensions and contents of the box before you can think outside it. Otherwise, you're fishing with a hand grenade. You may get some fish, but they'll be blown to crap and you'll probably hurt yourself.

This assertion is similar to the recommendation that you learn the rules before you break them, which in turn hearkens to the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. At the first two levels of the model, Novice and Advanced Beginner, it's more effective to follow the existing ruleset and modes of thinking than to challenge the paradigm and make it up as you go.

A friend once desribed himself as thinking so far outside the box, he'd lost the box. I got his meaning, but the metaphor is flawed. The box mustn't be allowed to constrain your thinking, but it should inform your thinking.

Thinking outside the box is partly about escaping constraints, realizing when a useful rule for novices is no longer an aid but a hindrance to you. It's important to understand why the rule was created in the first place, but also to understand that rules are inherently limited in usefulness.

Once a rule has been stated in a digestible form, it is immediately obsolete. Rules are not amenable to the answer "It depends" but that's the only answer that's right 100% of the time. Thus all rules are wrong in some cases. A good rule will be right in as many situations as feasible, but it's our responsibility as practitioners of whatever skill to know when it must be broken.

You've heard "Rules were made to be broken." Now you know what it means. It's not an excuse to act without regulation. It means that rules can never be explicitly stated in sufficient complexity to cover all contingencies, and that blindly applying them will eventually betray you.

Thinking outside the box is helpful in another way that all practitioners can benefit from, regardless of their current position on the Dreyfus model. Oddly, this might be easier for those lower on the model than higher, but more important for those higher.

It's very easy for humans as cognitive thinkers to fall into repetitive patterns of thinking. Our thoughts themselves are patterns of associations in the neural network jelly of our brains. These associations allow us to effortlessly remember how to add, spell, drive, and a bajillion other daily activities. But when it comes to creative endeavor, following the same associations is a block to creativity. If you always string words together in the same way, always paint with the same strokes and colors, always design with the same core components, your work risks becoming stale.

So thinking outside the box also entails purposefully inserting new elements into our established patterns to see what new associations emerge. Sitting here in my favorite cafe, the sights, sounds, and smells not normally present in my apartment nudge minutely at my train of thought and subsequently on my flow of words.

Once I had my topic in mind, but before sitting down to write, I wandered the attached bookstore, looking at titles, occasionally pulling out a volume to scan its backmatter and table of contents, all the while letting ideas for today's post simmer with the bits and pieces I was adding.

Another means to the same end is to purposefully alter your creative process. There are a ton of books and tool available for this purpose. In particular I recommend Roger Von Oech's Creative Whack Pack and its companion volume A Whack on the Side of the Head. Each card in the deck and exercise in the book challenges the reader to try something new in their creative process. And if you like these, there dozens of products just like them.

Watch out though. These techniques are inherently limited. Once you've used a trick a few times, it's in your box. It's no longer a whack in the head, a kick in pants, or any other metaphor for a new thinking pattern. It's no longer thinking outside the box.

January Challenge #29: In Defense of Aquaman

Aquaman don't get no respect. I mean it. Pop culture has been relentlessly unkind to this poor guy. And frankly, he deserves better.

Yeah yeah, I hear you snickering to yourself. Water breathing and talking to fish, you think, Spongebob Squarepants can do that. Maybe he should be a superhero.

And you're not to blame for thinking that. You've been on a steady diet of anti-Aquaman propaganda for decades. He's been seriously dissed since the Super Friends in the 1970s. You can't be expected to examine his backstory and depiction and think about the implications. Nope, just go ahead and take the surface story at face value.

I suppose I really shouldn't blame the writers either. After all, coming up wth contrived situations to use a character you don't understand is hard when you have the writing skill of a dead mollusk.

So with no further blamestorming, here's a rundown of Aquaman's capabilities and why he deserves better than he gets.

Super Strength. Maybe you didn't realize it, but Aquaman is super strong. It's an extension of being able to survive the crushing depths of the ocean and swim at super speeds at that depth. In the Super Friends, the most referenced source when dissing him, Aquaman hefts a bulldozer blade and cooperates with Superman to break up a tidal wave. Yeah, it's unrealistic to begin with, stopping a tidal wave with two bulldozer blades, but the implication is clear. It's unlikely that Superman is just barely not strong enough to stop the tidal wave himself and Aquaman contributes the tiny bit extra to get the job done. I'm not saying he's Superman-strong, but he's definitely no pushover.

Durability. And about that surviving the crushing depths of the world's oceans. Maybe you just don't understand what that means. Aquaman has been protrayed as having no depth limit. At the bottom of the Hadalpelagic Zone, deep in the oceanic trenches, ocean pressure is an incredible eight tons per square inch. I'm not sure if you're bouncing bullets at that level of resilience, but it's nothing to sneeze at. While we're down in the trenches, the temperature is just above freezing. Consult any decent marine survival guide about the dangers of staying too long in 50° water. From the United States Search and Rescue Task Force, "Normal body temperature of course, is 98.6. Shivering and the sensation of cold can begin when the body temperature lowers to approximately 96.5. Amnesia can begin to set in at approximately 94, unconsciousness at 86 and death at approximately 79 degrees. [...] Cold water robs the body's heat 32 times faster than cold air."

Supermove. Can you say hypersonic? Underwater? Aquaman can. Drag in water is about 1,000 times as great as in air. Suddenly, the Flash ain't all that. As nearly as we can figure by modern science, the only way to accomplish this is by supercavitation. Plainly, there's yet more to Aquaman than meets the eye.

Animal Control. Don't start getting smug yet. Yes, this is the "talks to fish" power, but again I don't think you get it. He doesn't just talk to fish, he compels them to action. He causes them to perform complex actions in large numbers. Ichthyoids, mammals, crustaceans, if they live in the oceans, they are his loyal subjects. Imagine tens of thousands of crab claws engaged in concert to a single task in Boston Harbor. And the communication is two-way. If it's in the ocean, it cannot hide from Aquaman. How many MacGuffin-based plotlines get circumvented by that little stunt? "OMG we have to find that sub!" It's Aquaman's turn to look smug.

Wealthy Sovereign. Think Batman's rich? Pocket change. Aquaman is the absolute monarch of an undersea nation, with ready access to resources that cost too much to exploit for surface nations, not to mention high tech artifacts and Atlantean-Freaking-Sorcery. I bet I know who's bankrolling the Justice League. Seriously, judging from the depictions of chests of sunken treasure in Aquaman stories, if he chose he could destabilize the world's gold market.

Marine Science. Go ahead and scoff, but there is no greater authority on oceanography and marine science than Aquaman. Batman gets big props for his mastery of criminal science and forensics. When it's the useful knowledge of the moment, being the authority is a superpower in itself.

So what do we have. On dry land, nowhere near an appropriate body of water, Aquaman is super strong, super durable, and super rich. That's not bad. Plenty of superheroes get by on less and take a lot less flak for it. Get him near or in the water, and he ramps up quickly in ability and resources.

How much of the Earth's surface is water again?

January Challenge #28: Atoms & Patterns

I've mentioned the concepts of story atoms and game atoms in previous posts, but without taking the time to explain what they are. In theory, an atom of any field of study is an irreducible component. Much as in the physical sciences however, a close examination reveals that atoms are actually made up of even smaller bits.

When it comes to the chemical elements, by the time we understood that atoms were not the smallest unit of matter, the definitions of atoms and the elements were already set, so it's easy to identify when we're dealing with something else.

It's harder in creative endeavors, where you are literally working with the stuff of imagination. When you conclude that the creative atom you've been exploring is really a composite of two smaller elements, do you have two separate atoms, or do you have two units of something else that combine to create an atom? You can't determine it's physical properties to make the judgement. An experienced practitioner will have a good feel for the difference, but as I've noted before, there's plenty of disagreement to be had among experts in every field.

Creative atoms actually come in several types, the more widely inclusive of which verge into a similar concept, patterns. Patterns are well-known, recognizable arrangements of atoms, frequently named to ease communication between creators. The names of the patterns form the core of a descriptive jargon within a creative field.

In the field of storytelling, Joseph Campbell published the best known set of patterns in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell outlines the Hero's Journey in three broad "Acts", Departure, Initiation, and Return. Each of these is comprised of several optional patterns, such as the Call to Adventure, the Road of Trials, Apotheosis, and Rescue from Without. To anyone who's created stories in any medium or consumed them, these are recognizable patterns used again and again.

In the field of game design, the patterns are little different, but the similarities rapidly become apparent. The best single source for these, in my not-very-humble opinion is Björk and Holopainen's Patterns in Game Design. Their book names and describes over 200 patterns and atoms found in games, such as Aim & Shoot, Privileged Abilities, Imperfect Information, Avatars, Pick-Ups. Like the Acts of the Hero's Journey, there are also Boundary and Structural patterns to games, such as States, Instances, and Sessions.

Most of both kinds of patterns are too large and inclusive to be considered atoms. Atoms are generally much smaller and don't leave much room for confusion. Two examples, one from each of games and stories, illustrate. In stories, a common encounter for the Hero is the Wise Old Woman. The Wise Old Woman is fairly irreducible without losing the essence that you understood implicitly as soon you heard the three words. Remove any one of those words, and the implications of the figure change.

In games, a Pick-Up is a commonly used mechanic, an object that the player takes or captures to replenish or buff their abilities. Again, this is fairly irreducible. You could specify Bullets or Health Packs or Flamethrower, but Pick-Up communicates the intent of the design, whereas any of these literal objects could conceivably be MacGuffins, or Plot Tokens, items that must be acquired to advance the plot but can't actually be used to any advantage.

The main difference between game patterns and atoms and those of stories is one of usage, how their respective grammars are utilized. The grammar of game patterns and atoms is descriptive, while the grammar of story patterns and atoms is expressive. Try discussing the major elements of your favorite story. You'll find that you end up telling the story, just with different words. Then discuss the major elements of your favorite game. You end up describing particular pieces and how they fit together in an interactive experience, but not as a sequence of event.

The fun comes when the two grammars are used in combination. Some games don't tell a story, but many do. Most AAA games have an arching plotline and numerous side plots to entertain the player. A depressingly large number of them make little to no effort to blend the two in a meaningful way, to support the story being told with engaging gameplay that drives immersion in the scene, or to truly build the story into the gameplay elements. Instead it's more common to let the player have some game, reward their success with the next scene in the story, then give them some more game. Rinse & repeat.

But we have been getting steadily better. Studios are hiring writers, writers that can actually craft a story, whereas in the past the job was often relegated to the game designer as the visionary of the game as a whole. The two roles are very different and require different skills and creative sensibilities. I think we can look forward to ever-improving stories in our games, solidly integrated into holistic experiences. And it starts with an understanding of the base elements, the atoms of storytelling and game design.

January Challenge #27: Sabrepunk

I've posted previously about mashups of game types. Another favorite topic of mine is mashups of setting genres, such as Old West Zombie Apocalypse (Deadlands) or Urban Fantasy Cyberpunk (Shadowrun).

Of lesser fame is a genre mashup called Sabrepunk, a union of Cyberpunk and High Fantasy. Where Shadwrun places traditional Tolkienesque fantastic elements into a near-future cyberpunk setting, in Sabrepunk the transfer goes the other way. Cyberpunkish elements are added to a traditional Fantasy setting. Where Cyberpunk is said to focus on high tech and low life, Sabrepunk focuses on high magic and low life.

If we're not talking about high technology, then what setting elements are we talking about? The Cyberpunk genre is deeper than just a Film Noir/Action Adventure with lots of technological toys.

Cyberpunk stories are frequently allegory for the problems faced by today's world, magnified for effect. Thus rampant ecological damage, enormous inequality between social classes, and runaway social change are often featured prominently. China Miéville's Perdito Street Station features all of these and is an outstanding example of Sabrepunk.

We have a lot possibilities for ecological damage in a High Fantasy setting. In Perdito Street Station, it's the result of a combination of an industrial revolution in full swing and a high concentration of magical research, both unmitigated by any sort of regulation. Another favorite is fallout from magical weapons of war. Entire stretches of land can be reduced to harsh wastelands inhabited only by the undead or magical mutants.

Inequality between the social classes is frequently swept under the rug in more cheerful genres, even though it's been a grim reality for most of our history. Cyberpunk, and by extension Sabrepunk, decline to do so. The wealthy minority controls vastly more resources than the remaining, but there's more to it than that. The elite minority maintain their hegemony with the tacit cooperation of the downtrodden majority. In Cyberpunk stories that examine this, goods and services are usually the key. Pure capitalism has concentrated the means of production into the hands of monopolistic engines of industry, and marketeers wield the power of advanced memetic research to keep the masses buying.

This can be replicated in Sabrepunk to an extent by realistic depictions of feudalism, but fantastic elements can be employed to widen the divide. An oppressive fighting nobility can be elevated even further if the alternative is even worse. Imagine a world infested by demons or suffering the Zombie Apocalype, and only the nobility have the resources and fighting skill to respond with sufficient force to incursions. Between battles, they could get away with a lot.

Runaway social change is typically driven by some other form of rapid change. In Cyberpunk, technology has been harnessed to drive us closer to, or further into, the Singularity. Since conditions after the Singularity cannot be described in terms of anything before, humankind lives in a continual state or culture shock. In Sabrepunk, this is an interesting opportunity for the author to engage in sociological speculation. In Wizards of the Coast's Ghostwalk campaign setting for D&D3e, the barrier between life and death is thin to the point of being nearly meaningless. In Ghostwalk, culture has long since adapted, but if this were a new situation, where spirits walk and talk and shop and come back to life regularly... It's the Singularity from another angle.

The inspiration for this post came from a file I found on my PDA today. It's from last year, right after I finished reading Perdito Street Station, and it came out all in a rush as a wall of text. Miéville's influence, and that of Wizards of the Coast's Eberron campaign setting should be obvious in this copy/paste directly from the text file.

A steampunk setting with Victorian overtones is emerging from a low-fantasy high-magic agrarian setting. The known world is recovering from a brutal war waged with terrible arcane weapons. Cultural backlash against all forms of magic is extreme, and no price is too great to pay to leave it behind, even the destructive repercussions of an out-of-control industrial revolution. Reminders of the magical age abound, and there is no escaping them. Many otherwise ordinary people bear the visage of humanity's past dalliances with creatures and entities of myth and legend. These souls experience every sort of treatment from blatant hatred to grudging acceptance to enthusiastic embrace in certain cases. The newest race to walk the land are the Forged, intelligent beings created from the marriage of sorcery and mechanical engineering. Created as powerful soldiers in the later years of the Mana Wars, the Forged were the instruments of tremendous violence before rebelling against their masters and working to end the war. Remembered more for their contribution to the war than for their opposition, they escape what might otherwise be hideous prejudice by enthusiastically embracing the industrial revolution. Their durable construction enables them to perform functions impossible to unenhanced men, and without them, industrialization would be much less advanced. Paradoxically, humanity's most beloved edifices were forged with arcane craft, but most of them are more evocative of a golden age then the age of tyranny and horror most people associate with the age of magic. In theory, the dominant form of government to emerge from the Mana Wars is democracy, but in practice, the fledgling democracies of the known world are dominated by the surviving remnant of the aristocracy. Nobility is legally a courtesy title only, but it is more frequently than not associated with great wealth, social prestige, political position, and privilege. The aristocracy is one of the last circles in which magic is not yet reviled, and arcane studies are encouraged along with the sciences and other intellectual pursuits considered worthwhile. Popular amongst the aristocracy and their retainers is modification of the body by the grafting of foreign body parts through a marriage of magic and medical skill. The grafts available to these Chimera range widely and include animal parts, alchemical materia, Forged prosthetics, and more exotic appendages claimed to be of celestial or infernal origin. An individual might choose to become a Chimera for functional or cosmetic reasons.

January Challenge #26: Crafty Combat

Earlier this month, I promised a look at one of my fruitier ideas for a combat skill system. It would work best in a setting where advanced armed and unarmed combat techniques are highly valued by the social elite, such as a game set in Renaissance Europe and focused on fencing masters and their salles, or Mythic China with its wandering martial arts masters and fighting monasteries.

All combat skills in the game are reducible to individual components that define the attributes of the skill as a whole, such as speed, accuracy, power, aggression, balance, weapon type and weight, required hands, and potentially many more. A player can't directly improve their rating with these individual components. Instead, they advance them indirectly by improving the composited combat skills. The contribution to the component rating from a single skill quickly hits a point of diminishing returns, so players are encouraged to learn many different skills in order to master the components. Components covering a given attribute of the composite skill are available in several levels, the less powerful easier to learn, the more powerful harder to learn.

What's the point of this? Threefold.

A rising tide lifts all boats. High rating in a combat component will improve that aspect of all skills that incorporate it. For instance, all skills with the Speed of the Mongoose component will strike faster when mastery is attained.

When you can snatch the pebble from my hand, I will train you. Learning a skill with components you already know is easier than a completely new technique. Further, all but the most basic skills will have minimum requirements to learn, maybe of a lesser component. For example, any skill with Power of the Mountain requires mastery of Strength of the Bear to even begin to learn.

When I left you, I was but the learner. Now I am the Master. This is the fruity filling of the system. A player may combine known fighting components into new combat skills of their own devising, much like crafting in many MMOs. This requires a template with slots into which to place the components. The template has a number of required slots to create a minimum workable combat skill, and many have optional slots for additional hack & slash goodness.

The components can't be used up, since they are inherently part of the character, but the templates are a limited resource, abstract rewards as part of the experience system. Think of them as the core inspiration to develop a new combat skill.

The more components, and the more powerful each, the more deadly the end-product skill, but the more risk once finalized. While a new combat skill is still in development, the player can swap around components and actually use it in fights, though at a penalty. Once the player is satisfied with the combination, the skill can be marked as complete, which will accomplish several things. The template is consumed, and the skill can now be used normally. Also, a final set of bonuses and penalties is randomly generated, representing unguessed synergies and incompatibilities between the various components. The player's existing ratings with the relevant components, known skills with similar component combinations, and time the template spent unfinalized with exactly the final components slotted will all affect this determination.

Most importantly, finalization means the skill can now be taught. Imagine fighting monasteries and fencing salles as "auction houses" of combat skills. You visit a monastery to partake of their hospitality, and while there you teach your unique combat skills to the resident masters and students. Other players visiting the monastery can now learn the skill you made available there. Every player that learns your skill gains you some form of reward, such as reputation (most realistic), services at the monastery (also fairly realistic), or money (not very realistic in a Mythic China type setting, but more so in a Renaissance Europe type setting). I prefer reputation as a parallel economy, capable of acquiring goods and services otherwise unavailable for blood or money.

Unlike current player economies, combat skills are evergreen products and not subject to artificial scarcity. Limiting their long-term value is the fact that other players will also develop their own skills for sale, and there's nothing preventing another player from duplicating the maneuver you created, and maybe getting a better final outcome. You won't stay the fastest sword in the Orient if you don't keep pushing better and better techniques.

So yeah, as promised, pretty fruity. It's got plenty of potential for exploit and abuse, but so does any system allowing community created content. In all, I think this a promising core of a system with good potential, a worthy contribution to a System Designer portfolio.

January Challenge #25: Return to Jingo Corner

There are days when I just want to slap the stupid off someone. It's not nice, and it's not fair, but that doesn't make the urge go away.

Earlier this month, I complained about jingoism in gaming. I was mainly speaking in reference to the games each of us likes to play, but this time it's about the games we make.

There's something that needs to be said to everyone out there making their living in the game industry, especially video and computer games. Listen to me, people. We make games for a living! Games. Amusements. Entertainment. For a buck. We are not feeding the hungry, healing the sick, or housing the homeless, and we are not doing it out of the generosity of our loving souls. So for chrissakes, do not try to claim that the type of game your studio makes is somehow inherently more worthy than the type of game the next studio makes.

Does this really need to be said? I'd like to think not, but as soon as you assemble game developers from two or more different market-genres, feathers are going to get ruffled. Someone will say something dismissive about someone's demographic or something pointed about hardware requirements or something uninformed about a platform. Sometimes they get an answer in a spirit of helpful education, and even then it frequently goes badly from there, but more often the response is heated.

In the spirit of not-so-charitable education, here are some things to keep in mind before you open your mouth at the next convention. I've either used or had occasion to use each of these in the past month.

Social game developers did not just stumble into a magic formula for popular games. It's the result of some very shrewd design well informed by solid marketing sense. Your "obviously superior" AAA game will not do even better at the same trick once you figure it out.

AAA game developers are not bitter about the runaway popularity of your very successful social game. Dismissive maybe, but that's more out of honest ignorance than a grudge.

Casual game releases look just as good on your resume or portfolio as AAA game releases. And for the same period, the casual game developer released on average six titles to your one AAA title.

More women in their twenties buy and play games than do teenage boys. Just because we're still struggling with gender inclusive game design doesn't make the market worthless to pursue.

The Hispanic market is a potential gold mine with literally trillions of dollars to spend if we can figure out how to make games with broad appeal to that market. Or even niche appeal within the market. A game aimed at Hispanic Tweens that hits the mark will seriously put a studio on the map.

Shovelware not withstanding, there are still more Wiis in homes than Xboxes and PS3s put together. Its "lesser" hardware capability is not making Nintendo any less money. Their target demographic doesn't care and neither should you.

There are plenty of people outside our industry who are down on us because our contribution to the human condition is something as frivolous as games. They don't understand the value of games and play to the human psyche, the potential good for the global community as a whole, that positive messages can be carried as well or better by gameplay as by oratory. Doesn't it seem more than a little stupid to be down on each other because you or I don't understand the value in the other's specialty?

The "plenty of room under the bigtop" allegory is overused, so I'll tweak it a bit. There are plenty of desks in the classroom for all of us to teach and learn from our colleagues who might be doing something a little different.

January Challenge #24: Dissent

As I've mentioned before, I read widely, especially in game development topics. I get a chance to sample the wisdom of many different minds in the industry, from the brilliant to the banal, and they all have one thing in common. They're all wrong.

They're not all wrong all the time. None of them are wrong all the time. But none of them are right all the time either.

Who says so? I do. And so do they. Pick any two authorities on any topic, really knowledgeable figures, and compare their works and opinions. If they have both done original work and thinking, points of contention will be found in their respective material.

But who am I to disagree with ten, twenty, and thirty year veterans of the game industry? I'm just some guy with his own opinions, a relative newcomer to the professional side of the field, though I've been playing games more sophisticated than Monopoly for more than 30 years. I have something of an outsider's viewpoint, a grasp of the lingo, and an awareness of the history of the industry, for whatever all that is worth. No, I'm just another voice in the wilderness, but as I've noted before, I won't let that stop me.

And neither should that stop you from having your own opinions on the topic. Only a rank novice student should take as gospel any material they're given to study. Once the general shape of a given discipline begins to take shape in the novice's mind, they need to allow that shape to bend and contort to accept differing opinions and viewpoints. Otherwise, the first position fed to them on a particular point will be treated as immutable fact. When the masters don't agree, the apprentices can't afford to stay in lockstep with any one of them.

As I read from the masters of the craft, experts in game studies, design, programming, production, testing, I hear their words as the voice of wisdom and experience, but certainly not gospel or sacred writ. For example, here's my particular bête noire among widely held ideas in the profession.

I've heard it said that game developers can't have fun with games anymore. This comes in a variety of flavors. The most common is that once you start to see the patterns in gameplay, the magic is ruined; you can no longer ignore the man behind the curtain.

Bull.

That's like saying that skilled authors can't read books for enjoyment anymore. I hold the opposite viewpoint. A skilled game developer has a richer understanding of the medium, the ability to understand the interplay of mechanics and dynamics that make up the end experience. The uninitiated may find a painting beautiful and moving, but a fellow artist will marvel at the use of color and texture or appreciate the bold composition of the subject matter.

In my honest opinion, if this experience ruins your enjoyment of games, you're in the wrong field. You don't actually love games, you just want a mostly passive experience in interactive entertainment. You want to look at the painting and say "Pretty."

But what do I know? I am, afterall, by my own thesis, wrong.

January Challenge #23: Free to a Good Home

cape canaveral notcraigslist > for sale/wanted > free stuff
Date: 2010-01-22, 4:59PM EST Reply to: freespaceshuttle@nasa.gov	please flag with care: stupid mean too true um... what?
On Offer by Original Owner Gently-Used Orbital Vehicles (2)
The end of an era is always sad and budget cuts are even sadder, but our loss is potentially your gain. We are looking for homes for two ultra-rare collectible vehicles, the ultimate orbital pickup trucks. With a 59 foot truck bed, max payload of over 55,000 lbs, and flexible seating for 11, these workhorses will haul your entire national space effort from surface to orbit with the power of three Rocketdyne Block IIA SSME engines putting out 393,000 foot-lbs of thrust each (mileage varies between sea-level and LEO). These are very reliable vehicles with very little history of catastrophic failure. With a new era in orbital tranport and serious budget cuts looming, we're motivated to move these vehicles at the very reasonable cost of absolutely free. That's right, own a big freakin' piece of spaceflight history for the low low price of diddly/squat. These are expected to move fast, so contact ASAP. solid rocket boosters not included price: free, no cost, zip, nada, zero dollars, no dinero (OBO) you haul Location: Cape Canaveral, FL it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Go ahead and think I'm kidding.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/18/shuttle_sale/
http://www.asylum.com/2010/01/22/nasa-gives-away-space-shuttle-engines-asylum-tries-to-claim-one/
http://www.scpr.org/news/2010/01/19/space-shuttle-keepsakes-up-for-grabs/

January Challenge #22: Computationally Epic

Yesterday, I promised to share one of my more half-baked ideas. I've fired this idea across the bow of more than a few colleagues. Some think the idea has promise, some think I'm an idiot, some are dismissive, some feel threatened.

One of the great strengths of multiplayer virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Everquest is the shared experience. Maybe you've never played with a certain person before, but if you've both played the content in a certain realm of the game, you've played the same quests. You have an instant connection and topic for conversation.

But I think this great strength can also be viewed as a great weakness. The notion of a world setting with such a tremendous population of an "adventurer" social class (read: armed vagranta who make their lives in the cracks of society, dangerous to the ruling class but too useful to be done away with) is a pretty big stretch. But once you swallow that pill, the nature of the dominant quest system shatters any immersion you might have attained.

The old man at the edge of town has been ranting about the same bunch of ghosts that no one else has ever seen down in the mines, no matter how many times they've been cleared out. The Baron's daughter never stays rescued from the trolls. The dark figure in the corner of the inn keeps offering a sack of gems to anyone who will clear the demons out of his ancestral home.

These stories are never resolved. It makes a certain sense from a development standpoint. Those quests took time and talent to design and implement. The studio wants to get maximum value for the effort.

I'm suggesting something much more ambitious, a quest generation system that assembles a quest from the base elements of story and game design and presents it to the first player to come along.

Story atoms are arranged in a pleasing, meaningful way to create a good story. The method of this arrangement can be thought of as a grammar, a set of rules to define how elements are combined and flow from one to another to create meaning. Anyone with a computer science degree reading this is starting to nod their head. An important early exercise in the study of computer science is the construction of a basic grammar.

A quest system designed to assemble potential stories looks for atoms in the virtual environment to connect according a grammar. But where do the atoms come from, especially if these stories are expected to reach conclusion and go away?

Saga of Ryzom features an ecological modeling system. If a prey species grows in population, one or more predator species will likewise grow in population to eat it, and the prey's food source will shrink from over comsumption. These variables and many more dynamically create an emergent ecology.

Think instead of an ecology of story atoms. Different sorts of atoms connect to others in different ways, like a predator species eats a prey species. The element on each end of the connection contributes an interface that can connect only with compatible interfaces. Uncoupled interfaces are detected by the ecology simulation and the chance of spawning a story atom with a compatible interface is increased. So a kidnapping victim is only a potential victim until a kidnapper is spawned.

The element that the system shouldn't spawn is the Hero. There should be plenty of those wandering around, directed by the human participants in the simulation. Once one of these is added to the equation, the Distraught Matriarch with Money to Burn offers a reward to Rescue her Son from the Ogress on the High Mountain, and the Call to Adventure is issued.

Notice that last named atom, Call to Adventure. The stages of Campbell's Monomyth are also story atoms but are interstitial, more part of the grammar than ruled by it, though they can be said to be ruled by their own grammar. Thinking in terms of finite state machines, the stages of the Monomyth could be defined as states through which the story as FSM must progress to reach conclusion. Each state defines the specific rules of the story grammar differently and sets different rules for entry to and exit from the state.

I'm not saying that this would be an easy system to implement. Far from it. But I think it's ultimately possible and worthy of the effort. I'm also not saying that quest/mission/level designers and writers would be obsoleted. I envision this system as providing a source for infinite non-repetitive side quests for players to pursue at leisure. The core quests and arching meta-plot for the setting should be human-crafted for that special touch that computational systems can't provide (yet).

But the freed-up creative energy, no longer bogged down with the challenge of designing engaging side content, could be put to much more productive use making a knockout central story. And I think that would benefit everyone.

January Challenge #21: What Form Your Fiction

I've always been attracted to the art of story, which is a little ironic for a guy who can't tell a traditional short-form story joke to save his life. Personal anecdotes, one-liners, rejoinders, I'm pretty good at those. But the conventional "A zombie, a vampire, and a mummy walk into a bar..." type jokes, I can't get a laugh for nuthin'.

Oops, tangent. Back on topic.

The art, craft, and science of story interest me greatly. I've taken creative writing classes, read shelves of books on creative writing, and started at least five novels that I remember specifically. None of these novels got past ten pages.

For a long time, I really didn't know what the roadblock was. I worked up extensive setting notes, diagramed plotlines, developed deep character personality models, but when it came time to connect up words end-to-end from Once Upon A Time to And They Lived Happily Ever After, I quickly lost interest and moved on to another project.

I probably should have seen it at some point in the thirty-odd years I've been playing tabletop RPGs. Setting notes, plot diagrams, and character descriptions are the bread and butter of that hobby. I mean as in clean up, publish, and sell as campaign settings, adventure modules,and NPC collections. These are what the RPG industry is about.

Complete novels? Please. I've read enough game-based novels to know that most of them are awful. With some exceptions, the creative geniuses of gaming don't write good novels, no matter how brilliant their source books. The craft of writing RPG material is distinctly different from writing linear fiction, even though many of the supporting skills are the same.

But it wasn't until I started working in video game development that it first clicked for me. I'm interested in story, but I'm not interested in writing, not linear fiction anyway. I don't mean that I would rather make films or write plays; those are still linear fiction. It's the linearity that kills it for me.

I'm much more interested in the bits, the atoms of a story, the big bad wolf, the wicked witch, the tall mountain, the insoluble puzzle, the unattainable love, the deus ex machina, the plot contrivance, the call to action. And especially the interstices, the ways that these things connect, how they string together and inter-relate.

Two books I've read from in the past year especially illuminate the point for me, Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, and Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games.

A quick word about Chris Crawford: You don't need to agree with him to get value from his work. I personally think he's a crank. But he's a very smart crank with a ton of experience in game development. Importantly for this topic, he's been thinking hard about story for at least the last fourteen years. Crawford has not been working in games since 1995. He's been working in interactive storytelling, working on systems that create stories in active cooperation with human users, provide an interface to allow the user to utilize natural language to guide their part in the story, and generate and remember reactions and relationships with the purely digital characters in the setting.

In his book, Crawford discusses grammar, not simply the grammar of natural language, but the grammar of story elements. How are they sequenced in a meaningful order? How do they collect into an epic tale? Story atoms at a certain level of abstraction are very like the parts of speech, nouns, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions. Like the parts of speech, their assembly has certain rules of grammar and semantics, and each affects the forms of the others, conjugates them.

In Persuasive Games, Bogost hits the reader with a challenging concept, Procedural Rhetoric. Rhetoric is the art of communicating persuasively, and procedural describes something done in discrete steps, a process. A creator can communicate with an audience with process rather than words. The art of procedural rhetoric is to use process as persuasive expression. Like many brilliant thoughts, it may seem obvious in retrospect, but it boggled my mind at first. Process as a communication tool is immensely powerful, whether we wield it purposefully or not.

Putting together the themes and ideas from these two books, I've re-examined my lifelong battle with the craft of writing, and the conclusion startled me. I've been fighting the wrong battle. I don't want to create a static story for others to digest in exactly one way. I want to present the audience with a stage, characters, props, and situations, the tools to create a story in collaboration. I want the artifacts of my imagination to inspire the imaginations of others.

In RPGs, these artifacts take the form of the material I spent years crafting for the simple pleasure of doing so. In video games, they take the form of games themselves. Less so in games of simpler abstraction like Asteroids or Geometry Wars. These games are worthy, fun, and engaging, but they don't tell much of a story. I'm speaking more of games that stretch the definition of game, games where the player sets their own goal and acts to achieve this goal by interacting with the elements they find within the setting.

Tomorrow, I'll share a half-baked idea of a game that understands the grammar of story, including the player's role as the Hero of a Thousand Faces.

January Challenge #20: &#%$@&

Swearing, cursing, whatever you call it, colorful language can make a fictional setting either come alive or sound really dumb. Using ordinary 20th and 21st century "bad words" is jarring and breaks immersion, so most writers and authors dealing with alternate settings utilize made-up vocabulary for the purpose. It's also helpful for television and game media to bypass the self-appointed keepers of audio morality.

The difficulty is that many creators don't have a strong grasp of what makes good foul language or why we use it, so we end up with characters who overuse a single word, like "Shards" in McCaffery's Dragonriders series of books. Swearing needs to be tied to the core values of a fictional society to feel like it fits. There are several purposes and types of good cursing.

Verbalized Punctuation

Is an implied exclamation point or all-caps to your speech insufficient? Scatter in a creative variety of imprecations and obscenities. These are most commonly delivered with strength, so choose words with hard consonants and hissing sibilants. Shock value can also be important here, though a habitual user of this type of swearing has become completely inured to their own speech.

Imprecation

To imprecate is to invoke ill fortune on another. "Gods damn you" and "demons take you" are weak examples, iterating slightly on earthly maledictions.

Denunciation

Swearing is frequently used to accuse the subject of ill-doing or unseemly habits or to declare them anathema. This includes denunciation of ancestry, declaring parentage unsuitable or somehow unclean.

Taboo

Forbidden topics, such as sex or excrement, are common to the rough language of every known earthly culture. Excrement in particular makes sense from a primitive public health standpoint.

Oath

Oaths are some of the more interesting sources of colorful speech, sometimes escaping the label of cursing, sometimes not. Declaring "Amen" or "So say we all" during or in response to oratory is a good example of an oath.

Blasphemy

Irreverence toward religious figures, artifacts, and beliefs is also a very common source of colorful language, and frequently the target of much greater disapproval by community leaders who may feel that they owe their status to religious authority of some sort.

Slander

Many of the other types may be used in an outright slanderous way. The target of your ire need not be "thrice damned" to be declared so.

Mix & Match

These simple types of swearing are the most fun when combined creatively. Oaths and blasphemy go very well together in "Od's Blood!" Verbal punctuation is frequently combined with taboo. "I want every swinging Richard on the front lines by dawn!" Put together three, four, or even five types for some really interesting verbage.

The point is to think about each category with respect to the fictional culture in question. Start with a few simple words for each, even if they sound a little dumb by themselves. Then use these building blocks to construct more elaborate combinations.

For good examples, I refer you to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series of books. Jordan repurposes perfectly ordinary words into combinations and contexts that make the speakers' meaning clear and faces them with genteel disapproval to drive it home. His characters swear by the Light, the Dark One, Blood and Bloody Ashes, and more in a reasonable array strong language.

January Challenge #19: Gaming the Undead

The Restless Dead, Part 3

In this final installment of the Restless Dead series of posts, I'm looking at zombies from a game perspective. To begin, I'll suggest some reading/playing material from the tabletop world.

If you can find a copy, GURPS Undead is probably the single best information source about gaming folkloric and cinematic undead, both as monsters and as player characters. Sean "Dr Kromm" Punch has thoroughly researched the topic and written a top-notch book. GURPS Undead is unfortunately long out of print and has not yet been released as an eBook.

All Flesh Must Be Eaten is the definitive tabletop roleplaying game of the Zombie Apocalypse genre. This extensive line of books includes bestiaries, genre advice, and plenty of options to customize your zombies. Video game designers, programmers, and producers should read all or most of this line if they want to create awesome zombie games.

Cheapass Games made a trio of excellent games featuring protagonist zombies: Give Me the Brain, Lord of the Fries, and The Great Brain Robbery. For an example of zombies as cute caricatures, take any of these for a spin.

Under the Hood

Tabletop RPGs have plenty of source material on the undead, but a lot of game programmers overlook the system resources available from the same books. GURPS and D&D feature undead templates that can be applied to existing creatures and characters. Does this sound like multiple inheritance to anyone else?

In the tabletop world, RoleMaster has always been a bit player at best, but the aspects that make it so are interesting opportunities for video game system designers and programmers. The hierarchical nomenclature of its mechanics, including undead monsters, translate well into class structures. I wouldn't be shocked or dismayed to run across Types I-VIII Created Spectral Undead in a UML diagram for a virtual world game.

Killing the Damned Things

It's difficult to reconcile the modern methods of destroying the undead with the original source material of horror fiction and folklore. In the Zombie Apocalypse genre, zombies can be put down by shooting, chopping, bludgeoning, running over with cars, or whatever awesome mayhem designers can cook up and artists and programmers can implement. In folklore and horror, the undead are usually quite a bit more resilient, frequently only falling once a ritual has been completed, such as properly preparing their gravesite or trapping them between a young virgin and an ancient crone on sacred ground at midnight in the light of the full moon.

It's harder yet to combine these in a way that makes a good game. A scenario where the player(s) have to discover why a single powerful undead monster had risen from the grave, work out the ritual to put it to rest, and then implement the plan, all the while being hounded by its mindless minions, might be of limited appeal. Then again...

With that, on to the game ideas.

I'm Lookin' fer the Man What Shot My Pa an' Me

The player takes the part of an Old West gunslinger risen from the grave as a revenant to exact revenge for his own death. The extreme physical prowess typical of the walking dead make any number of video game conventions more credible, such as withstanding more bullet wounds than humanly possible and respawning after defeat. But the undead portion of the program can be played up to introduce some interesting mechanics and tell an interesting story.

The gunslinger may rise again from his grave after defeat with full hit points and physical capacities, but retains the visible wounds inflicted by his opponents. At the beginning of the game, he appears very nearly normal and can interact normally with townsfolk and other NPCs, but as his appearance becomes ever more hideous, reactions become more extreme. The exact reaction may vary with the attitudes of the individual NPC and by past interaction, including among others fear, disgust, and sympathy. Any of these can be cast as advantages or disadvantages to the player.

Artificial Unlife

I've been reading about A-Life recently, so this struck me as a natural progression of both topics. In one variation, the player influences the design and evolution of some form of undead and sets them loose on an unsuspecting populace, a prepared mundane army, a team of plucky paranormal investigators, or what have you. This could play out as an interesting reversal of the Tower Defense genre or another flavor of Real-Time Strategy.

The flipside of the first option plays more like the normal Zombie Apocalype type of game, only utilizing A-Life principles under the hood to evolve the undead horde into a more challenging threat over the course of play.

A third option is to pit hordes of engineered undead against one another or against some other flavor of A-Life opponent, zombies vs cyborgs or undead microbes vs nanovirii perhaps. This option would likely be best as a multiplayer game.

The first two examples could also be combined into a multiplayer fourth variation, with one or more players directing the undead and the others directing the humans. Even more interesting would be introducing factions within each side that might find some advantage to temporary cooperation with the enemy. Vampires and zombies compete for the same prey, and the goths might betray the nerds to the vampires in return for some cool blood-powers.

Zombie Outbreak Simulator

In response to Part 2, a friend posted a link to an article about a zombie attack simulation model published in a real world, serious journal of infectious disease. This got me thinking. In the same vein, a serious game could be crafted to teach the principles of epidemiology and crisis management via Zombie Apocalypse. The player must manage military, scientific, and other emergency response resources in real-time to minimize loss of life and contain the threat before it's too late. Evacuation and nukes are an option, but only after the crisis has reached sufficient proportions to drive the political will to enact extreme measure, and each has their dangers. Evacuation may unwittingly carry the outbreak to a new region, and think atomic zombies for a moment. I did. It made me smile.

January Challenge #18: Status Report

This was supposed to be Part 3 of the Restless Dead series, but I didn't sleep well last night and wouldn't do the topic any kind of justice. Instead, I'll celebrate passing the halfway point of the January Challenge with some thoughts on the experience.

After seventeen entries out of a promised thirty-one, I'm more comfortable sitting down to write on a daily basis, although I catch myself engaging in avoidance behavior from time to time. Overall, this has been a very rewarding endeavor, but I still face a bit of anxiety as my daily task approaches.

I still sweat over every word. It may be that I never find writing easy. After posting, I'm not left with much creative energy for other projects. This should get better with even more practice, but I have a couple important items that can't wait any longer than the beginning of February. I'll likely cut back to weekly posts after the Challenge is over.

I've run up against Writer's Block twice, utilizing two of the three plans I'd made against the possibility. I suppose I could do another Wall of Text if necessary, though I'm more likely to reuse the Get Drunk Then Write method. The third contingency plan will remain a surprise until I employ it, but don't get excited; it will seem obvious once you see it.

I'm structuring the effort better than when I started. I have extensive notes for three more posts and ideas for four more, not counting my last silver bullet for Writer's Block. I've started employing Technical Writing technique, but I don't like the impact on my style. It will take some more effort to use those tricks and still hit the voice I'm aiming for.

Nurturing ideas is among the big ticket payoffs of this exercise, and that's working out nicely. In a parallel effort, I have a pair of notebooks, one pocket-sized and always with me for immediate scribbling, the other fatter and nicer for working out ideas in greater detail. I find ideas popping up and sticking with greater frequency now that I take the time to give each a little TLC.

So still going strong and picking up steam. This has been hard work, but been fun and rewarding at the same time. After I get some other projects kicked off, I may find that weekly posts are insufficient and kick up the pace.

Thanks for sticking with me. I hope you enjoy the rest of the month.

January Challenge #17: One Little, Two Little, Three Little Zombies

The Restless Dead, Part 2

"Regardless of their form, all undead have one thing in common: a renewed presence in the mortal world after death."
GURPS Undead, Sean "Dr Kromm" Punch

"Beings of fear and horror, undead are animate reminders of death's inevitability."
Open Grave: Secrets of the Undead, Bruce Cordell et al

Today, I'm tackling a partial taxonomy of the restless dead, concentrating on the close cousins of zombies, the corporeal undead. It's not that the non-corporeal, or spectral, undead aren't interesting. It's a matter of scope. The line must be drawn somewhere, and I'm drawing it to exclude ghosts, spectres, shadows, and the like.

I'm also leaving out vampires. Not only have they been done to death, so to speak, but their variety in folklore and modern media is so vast that they form a category all their own.

Where Do They Come From?

In most early folklore, the restless dead are not made; they just happen. In many cultures, it was widely believed that the dead had to be helped into the afterlife, and that improper disposal of the dead would result their rising to endanger their erstwhile neighbors. Similarly, disturbing the remains of the dead was considered a likely way to rose an angry corpse. Many of the funerary rites we practice today have their origins in preventive measures.

In some cultures it was believed that a spirit could not enter the final rest while their time in the mortal coil was not done, whether because of untimely death or unfinished business. Sometimes this is enforced by some agency of the afterlife, or it may be matter of will on the part of the individual. Vengeance is a powerful motivation that may drive the dead to rise from the grave.

Popular in fiction is the idea that some souls are so evil, that they are barred from the afterlife and left to wander the mortal world. This sort of figure is malevolence incarnate, and when coupled with the physical prowess typically associated with the undead, it makes a powerful antagonist.

Some undead carry a taint that can spread like a contagion. If a zombie eats your brain, you might arise hungry for the brains of the living. This sort of viral spread is popular in Zombie Apocalypse fiction, as it explains how we got quite so many zombies.

Vile spirits wandering unseen in the mortal world may be looking for a chance to possess a recently disinhabited body. This again causes a culture to be very careful about funerary rituals. Sewing up the mouth of a corpse has its origin in barring entry by evil spirits.

An external agency may be responsible to for raising the dead. Necromancers of sword & sorcery fiction raise armies of the undead to conquer the land. Similarly, military labs research nano-machines to enable soldier to fight on after death.

Many religions, both ancient and modern, teach that on Judgement Day the dead will rise up and choose sides in the final battle, not always the side of evil. Variations on this theme are also popular in Zombie Apocalype fiction to explain the sudden massive zombie population spike.

Sources of Power

Left unstated in many works, there looms the question of what empowers unliving flesh to reanimate. Early cultures often simply accepted it as a base fact without need for explanation, but since the Age of Reason, Western culture insists on over-analysis.

Evil may be so antithetical to life that no other motive power is required. The undead hate life so much that severed tendons and rotting muscle continue to make their exertions felt.

If life can be thought of as an unexplained phenomenon, then there might be an opposite energy, unlife if you will. D&D featured this source of power for many years, as Negative Energy in opposition to the live-giving Positive Energy.

Necromancers casts spells to animate the dead to their bidding. Whatever explanation for sorcery in general in the fictional setting can be applied to pushing dead flesh around. Super science of some flavor can also play this role.

Zombie

A staple of Revisionist Fantasy and Survival Horror, the zombie is a relatively recent actor on the folklore stage. The walking corpse as the mindless servant originates in the blending of African and Western spiritual beliefs in the Carribean in the 18th and 19th centuries. The zombie take its current role as slavering devourer of brains until the survival horror movies of the mid- to late-20th century.

Revenant

Revenants are the type of undead most likely to play the protagonist in an action movie. For example, in The Crow, Brandon Lee plays a revenant. A revenant has refused to pass into the afterlife, or been denied, until it can settle unfinished business, usually righting a wrong or exacting vengeance. As the revenant is usually a very fresh corpse, unless its business runs long, its appearance is often the most human.

Wight

The first modern portrayal of the wight comes to us as Tolkien's Barrow Wight in The Lord of the Rings. Wights typically result from improper burial or the disturbance of the burial site. Not necessarily malevolent, Wights act out of anger at the disruption of their rest, which makes certain implications about the afterlife. Immediate judgement is a recent religious invention, and the souls of the dead were widely believed in Western cultural antecedants to remain with the interred body until Judgement Day. A corpse that has lain undisturbed for a longer period of time will appear more decomposed and may have forgotten earthly relations, sparing not even family members in its violent outbursts.

Lich

Originally meaning simply human corpse in Middle English, the lich now epitomizes the "sorcerous" undead. The lich has unlocked some secret to suspension between life and death, neither truly alive nor fully dead. This secret might be magical, spiritual, super science, or some chi trick known only to 600 year old martial arts masters.

Wraith

Wraith was originally a synonym for ghost, but the hand of Tolkien is felt once again in the Ring Wraiths of The Lord of the Rings fame. There is some disagreement among the authors of Revisionist Fantasy whether the wraith is corporeal or non. There does seem to be a tenuous consensus that whatever their animating power, wraiths are tied to a physical object, sometimes called a fetter. In the case of the Ring Wraiths, the fetter takes the form of the rings gifted to nine mortal kings by Sauron.

Ghoul

Though defined by many authors as undead, ghouls are more frequently portrayed as still living creatures whose debased ways have imbued them with zombie-like characteristics. They may act as carriers of the zombie plague, immune to complete conversion due to built-up immunity from their daily habits.

Weird Stuff

Undead microbes make a good basis for a zombie contagion that starts the Zombie Apocalypse. They would also make an untreatable plague, since the undead are commonly considered proof against poison.

Swarms of small zombie creatures, nearly harmless inidividually, make a terrifiying threat. Invulnerable to poisons, little affected by blades and bullets, these aggregate enemies are vulnerable only to fire.

Depending how you define the metaphor of death, broken technology might be subject to zombification. Rattling, rusted cars that run without gas or maintenance. Broken machineguns that fire from belts of spent casings. Evil skyscrapers that entrap survivors in their crumbling walls.

In Part 3, I'll take some of these ideas and a few more and try to spin them up into game concepts and elements.

About Today's Process

Today, I employed a different process than usual. In previous entries, I just started typing and let the words spill out, then went back to make minor edits, and posted the result in more or less rough draft form. Now that I'm more comfortable with sitting down and writing creatively, I'm pulling in skills from technical writing. This post was built up from a skeleton of major headings, first with a premise statement for each paragraph, then the meat of the text. I'm happy with the results, but it does seem to impact my style.

January Challenge #16: BRAINZ

The Restless Dead, Part 1

I'll open with a bold assertion. I like zombies more than you do. Something about the restless dead gets my creative juices running. The very first D&D session I DM'd in 1979, I achieved a TPK with way too many zombies, and it's been downhill from there ever since.

Zombies are very hot in gaming and pop culture right now. From Left 4 Dead 2 to All Flesh Must Be Eaten to The Zombie Survival Guide, the Zombie Apocalypse is upon us.

And who doesn't love mowing down zombies by the score? They're already dead. They're evil, mindless, and damned. They're hungry for your brain. They're a guilt-free hack-fest.

We're culturally programmed to automatically think of the walking dead as a blight to be destroyed, but it wasn't always that way. The roots of this concept lie in Zoroastrianism, the first major theological school of thought to teach that the dead rising before the End Time was forbidden by the Creator.

Today, this rule is broken deliberately by some writers to make a point. In his Xanth series, Piers Anthony features zombies as sympathetic characters. One zombie in particular is personified enough (and fresh enough) to serve as a love interest. Terry Pratchett goes a step further in his Discworld series, featuring protagonist zombies such as Reg Shoe.

Maybe these are not truly examples of zombies. Many sources consider zombies to be mindless by definition, whether under the thrall of their creator or driven to brutish action by baser needs (BRAINZ). Willful undead are frequently given different labels, such as revenant, wight, or lich. There's actually a very broad taxonomy of restless dead of all sorts from many folkloric traditions. They arrive in our modern culture through the lense of writers and film makers, such as Tolkien and Romero, who exercised a great deal of literary license with the original material.

In Part 2, I'll tackle a partial list of undead types from gaming and folklore, and in Part 3, I'll throw out a bunch of ideas about how to make video game zombies even more awesome.

January Challenge #15: This Guy's a Programmer?

Some of you may have seen my resume. For those of you who haven't and are actually interested, a flavor of it can be found here. For those of you who are not, here's the short version: I'm a game programmer.

Awesome, you say. Where's the progamming?

Yeah, I haven't blogged at all about programming, despite it being my professional emphasis. What's up with that? Do I secretly hate programming?

I don't think that's it. My first job that actually defined programming as one of my duties was the best time I'd had in years. Of course, that was also my first job in games, and it also doubled my salary from my last job. By changing more than one variable, the data is made ambiguous. Was that a great job because I loved programming, games, or money?

No, I think I liked all of it, so I probably don't secretly hate programming. So why not blog about it? It's not precisely a new discipline for me.

I wrote my first game program in high school, a primitive little thing on the TRS-80, text-driven with simple graphics. It was atrocious spaghetti code, badly architectured, but not bad for a freshman in high school in the 80s.

(No, I don't still have the source code. I tried a few years ago to retrieve the source code from the 5½ diskette it had sat on for 20 years. No such luck.)

And I don't think it's that I'm not still exploring the programming space. As a hobbyist programmer for many years, there were and still are many holes in my knowledge of the subject. I have enough engineering background and experience with learning new skills to recognize the sheer volume of what I have remaining to learn about modern programming.

I've been exploring data structures, algorithms, object-oriented software design, graphics libraries, coding standards, scripting languages, artificial intelligence... you name it. These things occupy a large chunk of my consciousness.

I think it's the gap between the two modes of expression, words and code. Some concepts are more easily expressed procedurally, as a series of instructions that produce a desired result. Others are more easily expressed in human language, with style and verve and... expressiveness.

And I'm no master of either form. I've been striving to improve in both, but there's a lot of road left to travel. Hence the January Challenge, an effort to drive myself to develop better habits and practices.

I've noticed that a lot of subjects begin to blur with others as you reach their more rarified heights. Philosophy, linguistics, and computer science start to intersect in the region of cognitive science, for instance. In my more advanced studies, coding and writing are starting to develop more commonalities, such as symbology and semiotics.

So is that it? Once I make a conceptual connection between computer language and human language, I'll post more and more about programming, less and less about anything else? Again, I don't think so.

In both writing and coding, the creator needs to consider the audience. The style and substance must both be crafted to target the consumer of the work, whether a reader, a player, or a compiler. The challenge frequently lies in identifying the audience. Just ask any marketeer.

So the question is, who is my audience in this forum? Friends? Colleagues? Random Internet users? My own ego?

January Challenge #14: Some Books I Think We Should Read

This is the portion of the program where I claim to be smarter than you and try to tell you what you should and shouldn't be reading to be more like me.

Not.

Anyone who's had to put up with me for any length of time will likely have noticed that I have a different bunch of books on my desk, stuffed in my pack, or scattered across the table nearly every day. You've heard of the "voracious reader"? I'm more of a snacker, to stick with the eating metaphor.

I like to read a section or a chapter of a book, put it down, read something else, put that down, read something else entirely, and eventually pick up the original book and read the next bit. This habit is hard on the bookmark supply. Worse, I'll resume a book at a different spot than I left off and end up with two or more bookmarks in a book.

We keep our bookmarks in a 1.5 liter beer mug. Gathered all together, I don't think they'd fit. And I'd lose all my places!

So where most people have a To-Read list, mine is a literal Reading list, emphasis on the present tense. I have a stupid number of books in process. For every book I finish, I've started two or three more. An author recommends another author or makes an interesting reference, or I just stumble on a promising title, and I'm off to the bookstore.

This habit probably makes me the worst book reviewer ever. By the time I've finished a book, I've stopped and started probably at least five times, read from several other books during the process, and have all their styles, tones, and contents blurred together.

Not like I'm going to let that stop me. What follows are some books that I think are important for any student of games to read. Whether your discipline within games is writing, design, development, programming, testing, or studies, most of these books will have something for you. You might have to stretch the boundaries of your specialty, but all of these topics begin to merge at their apex. An experienced game professional knows a little something about the adjacent disciplines, or they haven't been paying attention and are worse at their job for it.

A Theory of Fun for Game Design Raph Koster knocks it out of the park in the best investment of your reading time you'll make this year. This book is so short that I read it in a single sitting. (See above if you skipped straight to the reviews.) I have an issue with his choice of the word Fun in his central thesis, as Fun carries a lot of baggage. Engagement would have been a better choice, I think.

Patterns in Game Design If you're a game professional, do yourself and the industry a favor and read this book. I cannot give this book a higher recommendation than it deserves. Bjork and Holopainen break games into individual atoms and then give them the design patterns treatment. Each pattern comes with discussion of its use, consequences, and relations to other patterns. Not only will it take your analysis of games to a new level, this book makes a large contribution toward a shared vocabulary of game design. Patterns that were cut for space considerations appear with the rest on the included CD in a wonderful cross-referenced hypertext document.

Mathematics and Physics for Programmers Afraid of numbers? Don't be. This book assumes no prerequisite knowledge and starts off with the nature of numbers, including numbers as understood by computers. A baseline understanding of the math of game programming and the physics of simulations is valuable to even the most non-technical contributor to the modern game studio. Imagine the look of surprise you'll get when you speak knowledgeably of quaternions. That alone should be worth of the effort of this surprisingly accessible book.

Designing Virtual Worlds You might think that a book on this topic from before World of Warcraft released would be hopelessly outdated. Not so fast. Richard Bartle, virtual world luminary from the MUD1 days, give us observations that hold true even after Blizzard's literal game-changer rocked the world.

Understanding Comics This book is amazing. Replace the word Comics with Games as you read the book, and let the insights flow. Scott McCloud explores the Jedi mind tricks of how your readers -um- players become your willing allies in making your game work. Do not underestimate this book for its graphic novel format. McCloud's pictures really are worth a thousand words.

Reinventing Comics The spiritual sequel to Understanding Comics, this book should be read with the same find/replace trick. McCloud discusses the roadmap to success for the individual creative professional, as well as an entire creative industry, along twelve separate axes. After reading this book, you will have a new perspective on your career.

Note: McCloud's Making Comics is not written for you unless you are interested in actually making comics. The Comics/Games replacement trick does not apply here.

These are my top recommendations for your reading pleasure. Now that I have the Amazon widgets working, expect a couple more of these, with different emphases, later in the month. (just gotta figure out why some of the cover images are broken)

January Challenge #13: Internet Resources

Reposted on new blog with updates at http://dynamitochondria.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-13-internet-resources.html.

The Internet is overflowing with useful info for game developers, useful info for everyone else, and info that's useful to no one. Today, I'm sharing some sites I've stumbled across that you might find useful.

Obligatory disclaimer: Unless I mention it specifically below, I do not endorse any products or services offered on these sites.

Advocacy

To roleplayers from the 1980s, it's old news when some religious or political leader tries to pin the world's woes on gaming and gamers. To younger folks, sometimes it's little surprising. Either way, it can be challenging to marshal a moderate response. Sites like these aggregate relevant news and provide tips for holding your own in a debate on the merits of gaming.

Game Politics
Video Game Voters Network
Commitee for the Advancement of Role-Playing Games (CAR-PGa) - This site focuses on pen & paper roleplaying games, but the info provided is no less useful in the defense of video games.

Free Stuff

Looking for code libraries, graphics, audio, development tools, emulators, or just about anything else? Looks at these sites. Take note: A lot of these goodies are not in the public domain. There are actually limits to your license to use them. Some are freely usable in any non-commercial project but require a license fee for commercial use. Other may require only attribution. Still others have a viral license that requires that a project that incorporates them be release under the same license. Do your homework first!

thefreecountry.com
www.freeprogrammingresources.com
Allegro
Lua
Free Game Development Libraries
Game Creation Resources
Blender - I can't get over how many professional 3D artists have never heard of Blender. Then they claim that if it's free, it must be crap. This is only my opinion, but... Blender is better than anything Autodesk makes. Don't believe me? That's fine, but see for yourself.

Organizations

If you're a professional, you owe it to yourself to check these out.

Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences
Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association
Entertainment Software Association
International Game Developers Association
Serious Game Institute
Project Horseshoe
gamedevmap - Not an organization itself, but this site will help you find them.

Conferences

Go, play, socialize, network, learn fun stuff, score swag.

DICE Summit
Game Design Expo
Game Developers Conference
Games Convention Online
Penny Arcade Expo

Jobs

In this economy, we need all the help we can get.

Game Career Guide
Game Jobs

All-In-One Sites

These sites cover so much territory, that they're impossible to categorize (even though I just did).

Gamasutra - Don't know about Gamasutra? Shame on you. Click. Now!
GameDev.net

That's all for tonight. Later this month, I'll give up URLs for some industry luminaries.

January Challenge #12: Mashups

Reposted on new blog at http://dynamitochondria.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-12-mashups.html.

Who doesn't love a good mashup? Discovering two otherwise familiar experiences combined in an unexpected way can be delightful. A sweet synergy makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

It could be argued that the core concept of the mashup, putting two elements together in a new way, is the root of creativity. Our conceptual space is the sum of our experiences, and we can't discern with any accuracy where any new idea that springs into our head actually originated. Did we think a totally new thought, or did a combo of two things we've seen, one last week and the other twenty years ago, suddenly fit together in our consciousness?

"There's nothing new under the sun" is frequently interpreted at the macro level to dismiss a seemingly new phenomenon as something someone else did earlier (and better). I prefer to interpret the phrase at the micro level; when we break a new idea down far enough, it turns out to be constructed of existing atoms of experience.

Games are similarly made up of atoms, elements of design that combine to form the experiences that obsess us. More broadly than individual games, game genres are made up of established complexes of game atoms to create a recognizable type of game experience.

Examination of these established complexes, taking the time to deconstruct them into their atoms, enables us to consciously find compatibilities between genres that maybe haven't been joined before. A particularly good combination might form the basis for a new genre. MMORPGs are simply sandbox social RPGs, but they caught on as their own phenomenon. The next big revolutionary genre of gaming will probably be a similar mashup.

So let's try a couple.

A-Life Strategy. There are games that use Artificial Life concepts as development or programming tools that the player never need experience directly, and there are those that feature it as the core game. Conway's Life is the earliest example I'm aware of. A-Life games derive emergent behavior from the intersection of simple rules, frequently by use of genetic algorithms to select for successful combinations of attributes. A strategy game could make use of this in two ways simultaneously. The player uses an A-Life studio to specify success criteria, combine successful genomes, and introduce random change in order to improve friendly units between deployments. At the same time, initially random enemy units are selected for success, have their genomes combined, and mutated. The next generation of units then meet on the battlefield. Rinse & repeat. The beauty is that the genetic algorithms should slowly converge into enemy behaviors optimized to fight the player's style. Does the player tend to turtle? The enemy should eventually develop hard-hitting fighters with little defense. The advanced player may adopt a given tactic for several rounds to encourage the evolution of behaviors that can be exploited with a change of tactics. Like in Spore, the enemies and friendlies that the player evolves through play could then be shared with other players of the game.

Multiplayer Serious Sports Resource-Management. Serious games, an example of genre of purpose, have a goal other than strictly entertainment, usually to teach a skill or preach a position. In this mashup, the player takes on the role of the coach and/or owner of a sports team. The challenge is to manage salaries, training schedules, media exposure, team member egos, endorsements, contracts, and the like to produce a winning team. Winning is measured in many ways: winning games, maintaining popularity, keeping great players on the team, and all the other ways that sports teams are seen as winners in the real world. As a multiplayer game, teams are pitted against one another in games that the players may or may not be able to affect during play, at least directly. If the team members are fully developed AI NPCs, they might play out the game independently, while players perform actions more appropriate to their role, like yelling at referees, dealing with media spin, or just enjoying an emergent game experience like one might watch a game on TV. The multiplayer aspect also makes for interesting play in the form of bidding for contracts and competing for draft picks.

Try one yourself. Find a handy list of game genres, pick two or more, blend, and serve.