January Challenge #11: A Powerful Alchemy

Reposted on new blog at http://dynamitochondria.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-11-powerful-alchemy.html.

I socialize mainly with other game developers, people who speak the common lingo of games; genres and 3D art and gameplay and revenue models and playstyles and and and...

So for the most part, when I refer to a game as casual, social, or viral, I have a reasonable expectation that the listener knows what I mean. The game industry is in its infancy, relative to comparable disciplines, but our jargon is coming along nicely, thank you.

It's easy to forget that not everyone has an easy referent to derive meaning from our funny little words.

Except in the case of casual games, social games, and viral games. The gaming press seems to have no idea what these words mean, so every time I see an article with one of these in the title, I know the actual topic is going to be a crap shoot.

Casual games are misinterpreted the least. That makes sense, given that they spent quite a bit of time in the headlines before social games and viral games made their combined splash. Casual games are typified more often by their contrast with video games as they are more generally understood. They require less commitment to play successfully. It's easy to get there from the word casual.

Casual games can be played for a few minutes as often as you like, whether killing time between tasks at work or each night before dinner. They don't require you to plan your level progression or study a strategy guide or drill your hand-eye coordination. Not that these activities aren't useful or won't lead to improved performance. But a casual game won't feel like it's punishing you for not engaging in them.

It's worth noting that in gaming, the word casual is heavily contextual. Though some would disagree vehemently, World of Warcraft is commonly described as “casual friendly.” You heard me. The intent of the statement is that it's possible to play intermittently for short periods of time, without grinding for elite gear or waiting around for 2 hours for a raid to get started, and still have a good time.

Soapbox
Sure, it's possible to play the game that way, but be aware that the common denizens of World of Warcraft will treat you like a second-class citizen for not having the best available gear for your level or not tolerating the mind-numbing boredom of getting a raid going. If you can find or make a group of casual players who like to play together, choosing gear for a cool look over uber stats, not sticking to over-analyzed optimal builds in order to play an interesting combination, and frequently having to fight green mobs at higher levels because of it but not really caring because less XP means experiencing more content before out-leveling it, treasure them.
/Soapbox

Social games are actually exactly what they sound like, a game which features social interaction with other humans. No matter how intuitive this sounds, it is the most frequently misused genre name in the industry. World of Warcraft is a social game, but you'll rarely hear it described as such. Mafia Wars is not, and neither are its gajillion skinned clones, but the gaming press persistently calls them social games.

And you can't just throw a chat client on your game and call it social. If the gameplay does not feature meaningful interaction with another human, then it's not a social game.

Traditional board games and card games are nearly all social games, and not just because you usually play them face to face with your opponent. Every action you take within these games affects efforts of your fellow players. That's what I mean by meaningful interaction. On the other hand, eight people each playing their own game of solitaire around the same table might be socializing while they do it, but they're not playing a social game.

Viral games are sort of a misnomer. Usually the game itself isn't viral, but the marketing efforts are. The term viral comes from epidemiology, referring to person-to-person spread, or cell-to-cell within a single organism. It thus has to due more with vector of transmission than with symptoms, that is more to do with marketing than with game design.

Viral marketing campaigns aim to encourage players to recruit their friends, who recruit their friends, who recruit their friends, etc. This is typically encouraged with in-game advantages and abilities that can only be earned by recruiting other players.

If an adoption rate significantly greater than the departure rate can be sustained, the player base expands extremely rapidly. Of course, much like a good restaurant might lose its charm and quality of food or service in the face of extreme popularity due to scaling problems, an otherwise good game might lose its appeal as the servers bog down with the load, or the enemy spawn rate can't keep up, or any of the woes of overcrowding become more annoying. These things increase the departure rate, which will directly decrease the adoption rate, and both will negatively impact the growth rate. The game has hit its peak and will steadily decline into obscurity.

That's OK with the typical viral game studio. They're already onto the next five or six games. A demonstrably successful business model is to madly throw lightly developed games at the target demographic until something sticks and devote resources to further developing that game, but still keeping throwing games at the target in the hopes that the next winner will be found before the last one dies.

Occasionally, the game itself goes viral by its own merit. I've heard marketeers say things like “Let's make that go viral!” Rubbish. In my opinion, there's only one thing you can do to spontaneously “go viral”: make an awesome game. Simple phrase, not so simple execution. Playing your game must make the player want share it with their friends. Seeing your game being played or trying it out must make the friends want it more than they want the money it costs, a lot more. You can't measure that sort of thing, except maybe in couch multiplayer high-fives per unit time.

Think about the things I've said about casual, social, and viral games. Now think about this: these descriptors are not mutually exclusive. Let that sink in a moment. There are a lot of very smart developers thinking hard about this very fact. A great deal of creative energy is working toward a game that can be played a few minutes at a time as often as you care to participate, features meaningful interaction with your fellow players and tools to facilitate various channels of communication with friends, has gameplay that encourages you to bring your friends along for the ride, and just might be totally awesome.

That's a powerful alchemy.

January Challenge #10: Ethical Considerations

Reposted on new blog at http://dynamitochondria.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-10-ethical.html.

I had planned to make an entry about ethics in game development, so I've been reading and brainstorming the topic on and off for a week or so. What I've discovered is that no single post could ever do the topic justice. Depending how far you stretch the definition of the word Ethics, and the word has seen some serious stretching, the topic is HUGE.

I'll probably make some more focused entries on the subject later in the month. Today, I'm running down a partial list of the areas of ethical concern in game development, with a few words about each. I won't try to get any depth on any of it, just a view from 50,000 feet.

Early in the process of making a new game, even choosing your target audience is potentially an area of concern. There may be a conflict between what demographic your marketeers are selling to and the age-appropriateness of the content envisioned by the designers and artists. What rating are you going to aim for? Will you choose to push the boundaries of your target rating? Will you sacrifice your artistic vision to make your game a better fit for the rating?

What will your revenue model be? If you're going to experiment with micropay, where do you draw the line between driving legitimate traffic to the company store and predatory marketing tactics? Are you determined to see that players get good value for their money, or will you resort to whatever it takes to get their cash?

Will your game collect personal information about players? If you have their credit card on file for subscription or micropay, there are legal requirements to both collect and protect this information. How far will you go to keep this information out of the hands of potential stalkers and pedophiles?

How rigidly or loosely will you define harassment and griefing? What will the penalties be to the player who engages in these behaviors? What recourse will the victim of these activities have within your customer service system?

What recourse will players have when they feel they have been treated arbitrarily by your customer service department? Will this recourse be handled within customer service or from outside the department?

How will you handle credits to the team? Egos and careers are at stake here. I've spoken to an industry professional who was left out of the credits after working for 18 months on a project, but an admin assistant at the publisher that no one at the studio has ever met, and probably did zip-nada, made the cut.

Will you pursue the latest psychological research into engaging gameplay, engaging to the point of addictive? What about using your game to express an opinion, maybe an opinion that you think is important, but parents might object to?

Law enforcement rears its head from time to time. How would you handle a subpoena to release a player's private information? From a foreign government? That is known to engagement in political oppression?

Where do you draw the line between homage and derivative? Willingness on the part of the IP holder to sue is just part of the equation. Some IP holders will sue over non-enforceable similarities. Some IP holders are happy to see very derivative homages in other media.

How about production values? Are you knowingly creating shovelware to get boxes onto the shelf? Do any of your managers hide problems from test to make a milestone date and end up shipping a shoddy product?

Are you out to make a difference or make a buck? Are they mutually exclusive? Will you tackle issues of gender or minorities head on in your game, or find a way to whitewash them?

I've drawn from the top page of my notes on the topic to make this post. I've barely scratched the surface of the relevant books and articles I've found. There's a lot to say on the topic, and I don't know how much of it I'm up to. Watch this space, and maybe we'll find out.

January Challenge #9: Tic Tac Toe

Reposted on new blog at http://dynamitochondria.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-9-tic-tac-toe.html.

I kicked a co-worker's ass at Tic Tac Toe this week. Until he threw four orthogonal lines on the whiteboard while waiting for a program to install, I wasn't aware that any adults still play the game with any seriousness.

It didn't go well for him at all. After a few rounds of making him choose which of two winning plays to block, I admitted that I had over-analyzed the game long ago when I wrote a Tic Tac Toe AI that could consistently win or tie unless you knew exactly how it would react to a given game state. It only predicted outcomes one move out, so by manipulating it, you could force it to choose which of two winning plays to block.

Tic Tac Toe is a great learning tool to understand game states. In theory, there are 9! (factorial) ways to place X's then O's onto the game board, but in reality, there are a lot fewer potential game state sequences. First thing, you can remove two thirds of them by realizing that there are only three meaningful opening moves: center, corner, and edge. In response to a center open, there are only two meaningful second moves: edge and corner. And in response to an edge or corner open, there are five meaningful second moves: adjacent corner, non-adjacent corner, adjacent side, non-adjacent side, center.

After that, it's harder to get away with that kind of abstraction, so we're down to 7!*(2+2*5) possibilities. Right? Wrong. Most of these lead to wins before all the tokens can be placed. For example: X upper-left, O center, X lower-right, O upper-right, X lower-left. X wins on its next move, barring catastrophic aneurysm or some other act of god.

Most games descend into reactive play by one or both players by the fourth move and will end in a tie, assuming basic competence on the part of both players. This is why most people lose interest in the game by late childhood. It has two possible avenues to rekindle interest, as a teaching/learning tool to master the concept of game state, or as an exercise in manipulating your opponent.

As I mentioned above, the only way to beat the Tic Tac Toe AI was to know how it would play. The same can be applied to human opponents. I guessed that my co-worker would employ the common wisdom of preferring the center and then the corners, so I made my moves accordingly and won. I then guessed that he would learn from his mistake and alter his approach, and I won again.

In this, Tic Tac Toe shares some characteristics with Rock Paper Scissors, which has a serious following with world championships. I kid you not. In the abstract, RPS is about random choices which should result in even odds of win, lose, or tie. Not so much. It's about reading your opponent, and manipulating them as they try to read you.

Getting seriously stomped at a strategic game can be a valuable learning experience, especially an extremely simple one where you can almost instantly grasp the entire game state, but the fun goes away pretty fast, so I didn't wait long to explain to my co-worker what I was doing. Much like learning how you were fooled by stage magic, the fun was quickly restored. Not a game developer, he might not derive any professional usefulness from the experience, but I hope he learned enough to clobber another co-worker at Tic Tac Toe somewhere down the road.

January Challenge #8: Burbs

Reposted on new blog at http://dynamitochondria.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-8-burbs.html.

Last year, casual games were all the buzz. Everyone was talking about getting into the casual market. Casual this, casual that.

Now casual is last year's news.

Social games are the new casual games. Social this, social that.

Except, upon examination, there's not a lot of social to be found in the social games. They are, for the most part, single-player games with a few features to aid viral marketing. They mostly live on social network sites, but that doesn't make them social any more than Darksiders is a retail chain game because I bought it at Game Stop.

So how do you make an actual social game? I've been thinking about that for a bit. What is a social game? By definition, it needs to involve more than one player, or there's no social. Duh. They also seem to be an outgrowth of casual games, that is, not aimed at the hardcore gamers. Play for a few minutes, that was fun, done now. Importantly, I think there needs to be meaningful interaction between players of some sort. One-on-one basketball is a real world social game. Two people shooting hoops on opposite baskets on the same court is social, but not much of a game.

Multiplayer. Casual. Meaningful interaction. Doesn't sound too hard until you start thinking about how to be casual and still have meaningful interaction. Are we still casual if we have to arrange a time in advance to play online? Maybe for two or three or even four people, but how about twenty? Forty? Somewhere in there, it stops being casual and turns into planning a WoW raid.

So let me toss one more descriptor into the mix: asynchronous.

Most if not all social games live on social networking sites, such as Facebook. Facebook is an asynchronous social platform. It allows users to interact at different times, spread out as they are across the global village. It's an amazingly successful model, so why not build on that idea? What kind of game can be created to allow players to interact meaningfully within the context of the game and yet not need to be playing at the same time?

To serve as an example, I present to you Burbs. Think of it as collaborative SimCity. Each player takes control of a neighborhood, zone, borough, suburb (see what I did there), or whatever within a larger municipal entity. Players make decisions about how their burb is developed, such as zoning and density, public works, schools, markets, police funding, community support, etc... These decision directly and immediately affect primary metrics concerning their burb's pollution, happiness, and crime rate.

The meaningful interaction comes when other players are making their decisions. A given burb can be connected to other burbs in a number of different ways. The most intuitive, and most tightly bound together, is geographic connection. The two burbs are directly adjacent; citizens can freely walk from one burb to the next, and so can police, criminals, traffic, pollution, community organizations, etc...

So if you build a library, nearby burbs will also reap a somewhat reduced benefit from it. It works in reverse as well. If you make a bad decision that increases the crime in your burb, surrounding burbs will also suffer. Or it can be somewhat more complex. Building a police station will reduce crime in your burb but may drive criminals into neighboring burbs.

The game population could occupy a single massive game universe, a megapolis of gigantic proportions, or be split into smaller game worlds representing smaller cities, but aside from technical restrictions, this isn't really all that important, as the "map" of the city would be completely abstracted, allowing for any number of burbs to participate and potentially neighbor any other.

There are plenty of other ways for burbs to be connected. A burb zoned residential can be a bedroom community for burb zoned industrial. If the player of the industrial burb does a good job of attracting good employers, the player of the residential burb will benefit from high housing demand. If the residential burb can't build housing fast enough, the industrial burb may suffer a labor shortage.

Two burbs can decide to link by rail, enabling easy transportation of people but not pollution or other largely stationary features. Two or more burbs can cooperate on a highway project, or jointly fund a homeless outreach program.

The players need to have a lot of interesting choices. Making some choices of more benefit to the individual player and other choices of more benefit to the larger community unless a threshold number of players participate introduces a flavor of the prisoner's dilemma. As in any good game design, optimal strategies should be avoided. Collaborative and competitive playstyles should be supported, and maybe even griefers can be made useful as a part of the landscape. The real world has crooked politicians and other malevolent actors, why not here?

So that's the multiplayer part. How about the asynchronous part?

When a player takes an action, there are immediate first order effects on their burb. A player has a limited number of actions that can be taken in a period of time. This number might be affected by development choices, such as building an extensive bureaucracy, or by buying action tokens at the micropay store. (Hey, social games are already doing some things right. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.)

Once every predefined period of time, say 24 hours (or 25 hours or some other odd time so that everyone around the world is periodically inconvenienced rather than players in one region all the time), the game will "tick". That is, all relevant game variables are accounted, all second order effects of player choices calculated, and a new game state created.

This allows all participants to spend their actions at their own pace throughout the day and deal with the impact of other player actions on the next. Rinse and repeat.

Obviously, there are a huge number of additional considerations to be made before this could form even the most rudimentary game design document, but I think the seeds of an actual social game have been sewn here. What do you think?

January Challenge #7: Wall of Text

Reposted on new blog at http://dynamitochondria.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-7-wall-of-text.html.

I had a couple special bullets in the old six shooter for when I just couldn't think of what to write this month. I was hoping not to have to use one this early in the month. It means I may have to use of them twice or come up with another one. In the section of Pragmatic Thinking and Learning I referenced on Jan 1st about Morning Pages, Hunt encourages the reader to write daily, no matter how good, just write. He gives an example of a guy who resolutely wrote the same sentence over and over again until he noticed, several days into the exercise, that other ideas were beginning to creep into his pages. I'm not planning to try precisely that trick. A long time ago, I payed a bit with stream of consciousness writing, but I found it really hard while writing longhand. Since then, I've discovered that words flow more easily for me on the keyboard than in longhand, but I haven't gone back stream of consciousness since that discovery. Those of you familiar with the style have probably already noted that I'm not really sticking to the pure form, taking the effort to actually form real sentences. But aside from that, I'm just typing whatever drivel happens to occur to me. Maybe I'll produce something worthwhile, maybe I'll make progress building a habit of writing, making occurences of "I have no idea what to write" more rare, maybe I'm just banging on my keyboard. Meh, whatever. I'm also taking the time to edit my spelling, and sometimes grammar, as I go, and when I'm done, before I post, I'll go back through and look for items to mark with relevant links. I've had plenty of people ask me why I do that, and about as many compliment me for doing it. It's one of the things I really like about hypertext, and I've written enough hypertext that it's just habit by now. Heck, I list hypertext on my resume under Technical Writing. It's a handy device when trying to maintain a tone or rhythm in your writing, not having to break out into asides to explain a topic that not all your readers will get. It makes for optional supplementary material for the reader. Knowledgeable readers don't need to follow the link unless they're curious, and topical novices can get valuable background info. If they even choose to click it. I've also gotten comments from people who complain that I've written over their head and either didn't think to click the link or just assumed that it would point to something else they wouldn't understand. I don't get that. I guess that sort of reader just isn't in my target audience. My journalism teacher also didn't care for it, but she and I really butted heads over a number of things. I list AP style on my resume, also under Technical Writing, but I find writing in that style pure torture, even worse than writing for military documentation, (you guessed it) also on my resume under Technical Writing. The military writing style is aimed at a 4th grade reading level. That's right 4th grade, and it's less torturous to write than AP style. The AP style strikes me as assuming that the reader is automatically an idiot and has to be coaxed through the piece with short hypersimplified sentences. I have an average sentence length of 26 words last I checked. I like complex sentence structures that require the reader to pay attention. Writing 6-10 word sentences preferred in AP makes the inside of my skull itch. OK, that's all I had to say about that, so we now return to our regularly scheduled wall of text. As I was saying above, this piece doesn't conform to the standard form of stream of consciousness, and I'm also employing elements of the wall of text form, which is generally considered bad form, as it ignores niceties of paragraph structure or even decent document design. It rambles on and on. Used appropriately though, I see it as the descendant of stream of consciousness. Not that it gets used properly most of the time. Wall of text is typically employed by writers who really don't know how to assemble an essay or a document of any sort, don't know how compartmentalize their text flow or move through their topic in reasonable chunks with a logical flow of ideas. Not that I really consider myself particularly proficient as an essayist. It's a style that I aspire to, but my skill in writing is mainly limited to technical writing, though even that is held back by my love of convoluted sentence structure. I've been asked if that originated in reading Marx, who wrote in the seriously convoluted style popular among German essayists of the late Eighteenth Century. I've read him, but my style really started to emerge much earlier than that. As far back as middle school, my English teachers have commented on my longer than average sentence length, though only my journalism professor in college really complained. I didn't get to Marx until early college. Maybe he had impact, but I really doubt it. I'm starting to wonder just how far I can really push this exercise. Even now, it's starting to get a little meta. That's probably not as helpful as it could be, but it did give me another bit to hyperlink. No no, now we're getting recursive. Time to stop.

January Challenge #6: New Job Day 2

Reposted on new blog at http://dynamitochondria.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-6-new-job-day-2.html.

Microsoft is a big believer in crucible-style OJT. Either you spin-up fast or you flounder and flail a while. This new contract is thus far no exception, but after 3 months at home studying and job hunting, it's a welcome challenge.

Going shopping with the boss was an interesting digression from the normal routine at a big company like Microsoft. We went shopping Man-Style: tools, hardware, cabling. Oh yeah, cabling. Three different employees at Frye's grappled desperately with our cabling requirements. Damn funny. And the pushy sales floor guy who did nothing helpful but poked through our basket so he could write up a sales slip to try and claim a commission? It was very satisfying to toss his little piece of fiction in the trash before checking out.

You know those super-heavy servers of yesteryear, the ones that are seriously obsolete but every company has at least one grinding away in the NOC? Got to play with one of those today, and by "play with" I mean lug it from the 4th floor of one building to the 4th floor of the next building over, yank out one just like it that's not working, install it in place, run some tests, make a config change that I bet would have fixed the other one, lug said other one back to the 3rd floor of the building where I started, and try explaining to the admin assistant that the disintegrating packaging it's in was like that when we got it. Not what I thought I'd be doing today.

But I think the topper of the day was my first time taking apart an Xbox devkit. Before I go any further, read this comic. "Alternative means of entry" is right. These things are seriously not intended to come apart once assembled. Don't be fooled by the Youtube videos of retail Xbox disassembly. Devkits are another beast. There's one step that requires seven tabs to be simultaneously depressed and another step where you have to depress a tab obscured behind two layers of solid plastic, all the while with an extra module dangling by a relatively fragile do-not-break-this-or-you're-screwed-I-fricking-mean-it connector (that doesn't disconnect btw). I've invented a new term for this sort of hardware design: One-Way Engineering.

I got it back together and working. I'm pretty happy about that. Later this week I have forty more coming. Guess what. Rinse & repeat. w00t

January Challenge #5: All Fun & Games. OK, All Games Anyway.

Reposted to new blog at http://dynamitochondria.blogspot.com/2010/01/january-challenge-5-all-fun-games-ok.html.

I totally lucked out on my first game job straight out of school. I got to start out my game career in exactly the sub-field I was aiming at, gameplay programming. As part of the game team, I worked shoulder-to-shoulder with designers and artists to design and implement rules, interface, and player experiences. But all good things must come to an end, and this one-year contract eventually ran out.

Next goal: get another awesome gameplay programming job. I polished up and circulated my resume. I went grinding for business cards at PAX. I lined up interviews.

Lightning did not strike twice.

As any of you who were job hunting in 2009 can tell me, it's a tough labor market right now. From what I hear from colleagues, I performed above average just getting interviews, even if none of them panned out. Three months later, my mandatory break from contracting at Microsoft is up, and I'm back at work at a new job.

From the long perspective, I got a good one, a solid skill and resume builder. By the time I'm done, my existing time on the tech bench will be supplemented with Xbox hardware experience, I will have crafted a solid library of C++ and C# code, I'll have more XDK experience, I'll have good resume bullets in automated testing and test driven development, I'll have learned a ton about optical data formats, and I'll have experience in tools development. In all, it will be a great boost to my engineering credentials.

From the shorter perspective, it's just not as awesome as gameplay programming. I don't get my name in the credits of a hot new game. I don't get to put a notch in my belt for when I'm asked what games I've shipped by some recruiter who doesn't know any other way to measure achievement in the games industry. Worst of all, I'm not actually working on a game.

I understand that what I'm working on is damn important. Without the infrastructure on which game experiences are delivered, there would be no games industry, whether that infrastructure is print publishing, commercial shipping, Internet communications, or Xbox optical drives.

And the work is awesome compared to most of what I've done for a living in the past, including military service, retail sales, and telephone tech support. I'll still be programming and growing my existing skill base with software development experience. In the long run, my resume will be stronger with this "Pay Your Dues" job than with another gameplay programming job.

There's a lesson here, one that I knew was coming and that more aspiring game developers need to have driven home. I already knew that a game job wouldn't be just playing games all day. I have too much real world professional experience to have thought that for over a decade. More recently, I've learned that a game job won't necessarily be making games all day.

A lot of aspiring game developers have yet to learn the first lesson, and when they learn it, many give up on their dream. That's OK. If you want to maximize your game playing time, get a decent paying job that doesn't require much overtime, and play lots of games.

For the ones that stick with it, that second lesson hits like a hammer blow.