tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84255246147945847112024-03-16T14:28:47.163-05:00Ludicrus GamingIt's an absolutely wildly bonkers idea to mix creative storytelling with the mechanics of a game; that's why I made a blog to do just that. Ludicrus Gaming is my lair of mad gaming science. Tread with caution.Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.comBlogger58125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-69500183912751519432024-03-16T14:27:00.006-05:002024-03-16T14:27:55.370-05:00Sandboxes and Skilltesting<p>Magic: the Gathering is an omnipresent game in the nerdy gaming space. It's been around for decades and shaped multiple other major games in the field, defining what customizable card games (CCGs) look like to multiple generations of players. Many of Magic's fans think of it as the best thing since sliced food tokens. My own relationship with the game is more complicated. There's plenty I appreciate about it, but I've also come to feel that it's more of a sandbox for doing things than it is an interesting game.</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><h2 style="text-align: left;">The Sandbox of Magic</h2><p><b>One of the things that most contributes to Magic's enduring popularity is the fact that it's an engine for expression</b>. You get to choose every single card that goes into your deck, you get to choose how greedy you want the playable component of your deck to be, you get to choose tech cards for your sideboard--cards that you can add to your deck for a specific matchup. Magic is pitched as a game where you can do many things, and every faction in the game has unique capabilities and sometimes win conditions. There are many cards that offer all sorts of potential to players, to the point where one of the most popular formats of the game (<a href="https://magic.wizards.com/en/formats/commander">Commander</a>) often sees players calibrating the strengths of their decks to accommodate deck strategies which are significantly weaker than what you can assemble within the available pool of cards.</p><p>It gets to a point where it sometimes feels like Magic's essence is in the conversations it inspires, and the deckbuilding and thinking that players do outside of the game. Players talk about how many lands to run, how to exploit newly-revealed cards, and how to build out the bulk of your playable cards so that you don't fall behind on board tempo while trying to win. And sometimes, the conversation is about absolutely broken combinations of cards. Ways to set up board states that lock the game or outright win the game in absurd fashion. <b>Things that are about fundamentally trying to avoid the core costs and interactions of the baseline game mechanics.</b></p><h2 style="text-align: left;">When Games Aren't Interesting</h2><p>I've thought a lot about why, exactly, Magic sees broken combinations pop up again and again. Obviously, this is inherent on some level to any game with a large amount of moving pieces, but I also kept wondering: is there something inherent to Magic's design that promotes overpowered synergies? Is there something that pushes it to be less of a game? Because, make no mistake, in my mind, broken combinations and overpowering synergies do make something less of a game, because they make it more obvious--it's a race to see who can assemble their combo first. One way to view games is through the lens of "<a href="https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/gdc-2012-sid-meier-on-how-to-see-games-as-sets-of-interesting-decisions">a series of interesting decisions</a>", and <b>when something dominates the game with no downside, that makes your decisions less interesting</b>--no matter <a href="https://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2019/09/card-counterplay-interacting-with-your.html">how many direct counters</a> exist.</p><p>And I think there is a fundamental issue there. Magic is a game built around letting players do things. You have lands, which continuously provide resources every turn with no caveats or downsides--income from nothing. You have cards, which have different effects and can be played from your hand to accomplish things. And...that's really it. The only other major universal rules are the combat rules, and those require cards to enter play. If nobody played any creatures to the board, you wouldn't have the combat rules. So, Magic is a game about converting cards into benefits by using the resources from your lands--and those lands represent an unlimited font of potential power. <b>It's an engine that traces itself all the way back to a limitless energy source!</b> You're limited in what you can play by the number of cards in your hand, but there are cards which let you draw more cards. You're limited in what you can play by the amount of lands that you have in play, but there are cards which let you play lands more often. Anything which could be a limitation has an overriding factor.</p><p>Obviously, CCGs are to some degree about allowing individual cards to override the core mechanics of the engine, but in Magic, it feels like those core mechanics are incredibly simplistic and exist in order to be overridden. There's nothing like the inherent interaction of, say, the game Flesh and Blood, where cards can almost be universally used to block damage (at the cost of dampening your next offensive turn), or the various default actions available to a runner in Android Netrunner, none of which require cards to utilize. Obviously, one solution here is to make the base game more involved, allowing players to hook into more levers that can control the game, but is there a way to take a basic "do things" game and make it interesting again? I think there is such a game.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Slay the Spire's Skill Test</h2><p>One of my absolute favorite takes on the cardgame genre is Slay the Spire, a single-player roguelike where you draw cards, play cards, and try to survive a gauntlet of enemies as you ascent the titular Spire. It's filled with variety and careful decision-making, and despite being based on the same skeleton I call Magic out for above, it leverages several things that help make it more of an interesting game. <b>It walks a line between allowing that expression but also keeping things tough and challenging.</b></p><p>In Slay the Spire, you get three energy every turn, guaranteed. You get a full hand of cards, guaranteed. There's even <i>fewer</i> natural limits on play than in Magic, and there's plenty of cards that can be combined to create unbalanced and broken scenarios. So how does that add up to a game that's fundamentally still interesting in execution? What pushes you towards those difficult decisions that keep the spice in games?</p><p>The answer is that there's several things that create skill tests in Slay the Spire, things which mean that you don't get to devote all your focus to evading what little limits the game engine inherently has. You have limited freedom to build your deck, and the constant pressures of the game's asymmetry mean that there are secret fundamental limitations that aren't obvious at first glance. <b>The game as a whole is designed to consistently give you a hard time, to deny you the space to render it irrelevant, while still giving you the space to express yourself in strategy.</b></p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Slay the Spire's True Limits</h2><p>The first limit in Slay the Spire is the way deckbuilding works: you don't get to assemble cards however you want. Instead, the game presents a trajectory where you slowly accumulate cards in your deck, get chances to upgrade cards into more powerful forms, and also occasionally get powerful "relics", which provide constant, universal bonuses to your gameplay. <b>You start with mediocrity, and slowly build your way into something that's able to work powerfully within the engine of the game.</b> This might be a very solid build, or it could be a broken synergy that can trivialize parts of the game. The truly broken builds, however, aren't something that you can reliably assemble all of the time--that rarity helps those moments feel special and novel, while ensuring that doesn't describe the main experience.</p><p>While deckbuilding, you also have to face the most important (and subtle) aspect of the game: "damage checks" (not a term used in the game, but a very important concept to understand--how much damage do you need your deck to consistently deliver in order to quickly end fights?). You battle your way through many different fights, and each fight features monsters that consistently rain damage down on you, until you reduce their healthbars to 0. You can play cards to defend yourself, but slow attrition is usually a failing strategy, because some enemies are able to amplify their ability to deal damage, and some enemies are able to hinder your ability to defend yourself. If you want to protect your life total, you have to end fights quickly. This means that as you're assembling your deck, there's a tension here: <b>you want to pick up combo pieces and synergies that will pay off later, but you <i>also</i> need to accumulate immediate power that will end fights <i>now</i></b>.</p><p>As one more significant skilltesting factor, enemies escalate in strength over the three "acts" of the game. They have more health, they deal more damage, and they can hit you with more debilitating effects. As you grow in power, so do they. That may be the biggest factor affecting the way that you interact with the game: it remains a game of interesting choices, because the thresholds you have to surpass also increase over time, and they're calibrated so that most decks will find it a challenge to keep up with. <b>As you work to trivialize the challenges, those challenges keep getting nastier.</b> You have to find ways to keep up.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Reframing the Game</h2><p>If I had to sum up the differences between Slay the Spire and Magic, the most important ones would be what I call "framing". Slay the Spire sees you going up against dozens of fights, each of which is part of an overall arc where you improve your capabilities one piece at a time. Within that framework, you hunt for strategies and try to balance immediate improvement versus overall power level. There's room for expression, but there's also the tension of a game here, where you have to make tough calls and test yourself. Your decisions have meaning--they're not just about having preferences and following optimizations.</p><p><b>There's a framing of Magic that this reminds me of, actually, and it's the form of play that I do enjoy: Limited format, specifically <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/104682/building-and-playing-magic-gathering-cube-part-one">drafts (especially cube drafts)</a>.</b> While it's not perfect (and individual matches still feel less interesting to me), each draft in Magic is a tension between trying to build up a strategy and trying to make sure you have enough of a solid deck to play the game. The overall arc of a draft, before you launch into play, has that combination of expression but also decision-making: it's not a game where you can just "pick good stuff". Actually playing the decks can become a bit more rote, but that's because you frontloaded all the decision-making. I think there's a very clear reason why drafting games like <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/68448/7-wonders">7 Wonders</a> or <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/271324/its-wonderful-world">It's a Wonderful World</a> don't spend too much time on the execution phase: you draft cards as the game goes on, and your card choices are very quickly evaluated for points.</p><p>My biggest takeaway here is that there's no one inherent system in a game that prevents it from having interesting gameplay, interesting decisions. Slay the Spire gives guaranteed resources, but still uses elements that create interesting decisions because<b> it focuses the game on a slow progression of a deck of cards</b>, asking you to evaluate how best to upgrade your capabilities over time. It makes the actual gameplay element brisk and simple to work through, something with a few interesting decision points but not something that takes the bulk of the game. Equal space is devoted to the portion of the game where you assemble your power--and it's not something you can just mess around with with no restrictions.</p><p> Sometimes, all it takes to make an interesting game out of something is a bit of pressure.</p>Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-85504290547944249052024-02-23T13:21:00.000-06:002024-02-23T13:21:07.193-06:00Games That Clicked: History, Harkonnens, Heartbreak<p>I've been shaped by so many games. I wanted to make something like a "Top 5 Games that meant something to me" post, but I quickly realized that it was <i>hard</i> to boil things down that much. Instead, I wanted to do something more casual, something brisker, and just chat about some of the games that stuck with me over the years. Every game I've played has left me with something, no matter how small, but these are the games that captured me, games that connected with me, even for just a fleeting moment.</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><h2 style="text-align: left;">Civilization II: the Vast Unknown</h2><p>I have a <i>long</i> history with the Civilization series, and it all goes back to the day that I was in a Staples store and found the CD case with "<a href="https://videogamegeek.com/videogame/69189/civilization-ii">Civilization II</a>" on the cover, amidst drawings of inventions and landmarks from human history. I didn't know what it was, but I knew that I wanted to give it a try. When I installed the game, the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa7-lp3i38s">main menu music</a> drew me into another world, an ancient world. When I started the game, seeing a lone settler alone in the middle of an unexplored dark void was the moment that left an impression on me. The mystery of that unrevealed space, the way that it spoke of discovery and let me explore, slowly uncovering a massive world--not just spatially, but technologically.</p><p>There's a lot to unpack about this series: it's built on myths of colonialism and exploitation, and it erases large parts of history--especially back in the early days of the franchise. It continues to carry a complicated relationship with me because of that, especially because even my initial awe and wonder at an "empty, simple world" at the dawn of human civilization is tangled up with those ideas. But I can't deny that specific narrative alchemy, that feeling that the game created.<i> Civilization II</i> gave me a sense of mystique, and that is an experience I'll keep with me.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Dune, the Board Game: the Weight of Adaptation</h2><p>A lot of my college days have faded in my memory, but moments still stick out. One of those moments was the day that I and several fellow students went to our economics professor's house, to the basement where he kept a portion of his colossal boardgame collection, to play Avalon Hill's <i><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/121/dune">Dune: the Board Game</a></i>. It was his original copy, straight from the 1980s. The layout, the text, the artwork all spoke to an older time of vintage science fiction, draping the game in old-school production design, and I could already feel the connection sinking in. Then, the game explanation began.</p><p>I quickly realized that the game was liberally doused in loving nods to the book, from rules like destroying the shield wall on Arrakis, or the special rule for using lasguns against shields in a battle, to the flow of the game, where the semi-predictable spice blows deposit valuable spice on the planet, ripe for harvesting. Most striking was the asymmetry of the game, where each faction not only had a unique setup, but also powers that evoked their position in the story. Harkonnen got to have their hands on a whole passel of traitors. The Fremen got to ride sandworms. The Bene Gesserit had a rule that let them <i>foretell the winner of the game</i>--and then supplant the victor if they predicted correctly.</p><p>It impressed on me the ways that games could use both atmospheric and mechanical elements to build the feel of a richly-detailed world. It was a truly lavish game, and in that regard I saw very little that surpassed it, at least until <i>War of the Ring</i>, but that will have to wait for another day.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Monsterhearts: the Tragedy of Feral Hearts</h2><p>I've played a lot of roleplaying games at this point. Even at the time that I encountered <i><a href="https://rpggeek.com/rpg/17173/monsterhearts-1st-2nd-eds">Monsterhearts</a></i> (which was many years ago at this point), I'd at least had some experience with games in different genres, games that mixed up the rules from your traditional form. I <i>started</i> tabletop RPGs with a campaign of "so it's Hunter: the Vigil, but pick whatever kind of supernatural being sounds cool, and we'll just staple it all together". Monsterhearts shocked me, it rattled me, and it showed me a visceral side that RPGs could possess.</p><p>I still remember the session. I was playing a Chosen, a type of character inspired by monster-hunters and monster-killing heroes. Along with several young monsters, I was working to unravel the secret of a murderous monster at our boarding school. Along the way, I got emotionally entangled with my vampire ally, something that my character was too confused to act on but too aware of to dismiss. We made it to the finale of our one-shot adventure, and faced off against the Big Bad.</p><p>And then, in the midst of the fight, as my Chosen landed the final blow, things went a little wrong and something snapped. She fell into something that Monsterhearts calls the "Darkest Self", a reflection of a character's worst impulses that compels and pushes them to do terrible things. And a Chosen? Their Darkest Self is to seek the most dangerous fights, the biggest enemies in the room. Now that the Big Bad was dead, that biggest threat was the vampire in the room. And the Chosen did as heroes do--she hunted the vampire. It was tragic, it was dramatic, it was horrifically messy and brilliant. It left me with an understanding that games could show you what happens when imperfect people try to use flawed tools to solve their problems. That you could witness what it meant to make the most out of a really bad situation, in visceral form.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Mystery, Awe, Heartbreak</h2><p style="text-align: left;">At the core of it, these three games showed me moments that drew me into their world in different ways. In Civilization II, I was captivated by the mystique of exploration and development that it presented. In Dune, I was spellbound by the way that it created a sense of loving appreciation and reverence for a fictional world, through careful details. In Monsterhearts, I could get carried away by the dramatic flow of one mechanic snowballing into another and causing grave consequences.</p><p style="text-align: left;">What are games that stuck with you, games that drew you into their worlds? I'll be back with more.</p>Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-91977274964455555242024-01-31T14:00:00.001-06:002024-01-31T14:00:00.137-06:00Playing With Pinball<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilq7q0Er0Jtieh1lLeCbrNTtGE9c7LPCXeoAxbzrLBXSkSQocBWChu7phL6tUYtPckKK8zvjlys-fmD32QviBGB-g2VvKmOhxHr8QKSOcfVODLfNkbYZo8tMUYkogIRLRArg0EwjOrpSuBUX1oIdv6bQnwkZ2rhTo9OAV8O8YL1QNMiqzYrFtbzKKYU8s/s1121/SpaceCadetPinball.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="An image of a pinball game, with the name "3D Space Cadet Pinball"" border="0" data-original-height="663" data-original-width="1121" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilq7q0Er0Jtieh1lLeCbrNTtGE9c7LPCXeoAxbzrLBXSkSQocBWChu7phL6tUYtPckKK8zvjlys-fmD32QviBGB-g2VvKmOhxHr8QKSOcfVODLfNkbYZo8tMUYkogIRLRArg0EwjOrpSuBUX1oIdv6bQnwkZ2rhTo9OAV8O8YL1QNMiqzYrFtbzKKYU8s/w400-h236/SpaceCadetPinball.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Good ol' <i>Space Cadet Pinball</i>. How's that for a throwback?</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Once upon a time, I learned the joys of a wonderful little game called "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Tilt!_Pinball#Space_Cadet">Space Cadet Pinball</a>". I bashed the flippers, I sent the ball rocketing, I even learned how to shoot the ball up that left ramp over and over again. Then times changed, that little pinball game on my computer was no longer compatible with my version of Microsoft Windows. I had to tuck it away in the corners of my memory, but I always thought about it now and again. Then last year, I picked up a free pinball game. I quickly got enough enjoyment out of it to buy a selection of tables, and I've been playing them <i>a lot</i>. And I've had some interesting thoughts about how, exactly, these games build the experiences they do--including, surprisingly, storytelling.</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><h2 style="text-align: left;">Pinball That Tells Stories</h2><p>The narrative element of pinball seems more obvious in recent years: rather than just being flashing lights and noises, most pinball machines these days (and going back at least a few decades) are rooted in a strong theme. You've got licensed machines for everything from <i>Stranger Things</i> to <i>Demolition Man</i>, and you also have games which aren't licensed but still ooze a specific atmosphere or even story. The themes are pretty obvious even from a distance: they're visible on the eye-catching backboards of each pinball machine, and then when you get closer, the machines themselves are filled with art that supports the theme.</p><p>But can pinball tell a story? How can pinball tell a story? Games can end in a matter of minutes, and games are defined by chaos as the ball ricochets from target to target. Early games didn't build very much in this arena, but as the genre developed, the narratives of these games became more and more important. Today, there's all sorts of structures that come together to build a narrative in a pinball game, and instead of telling a linear plot, they work to build a specific feeling within the flow of the game. </p><p>Pinball stories come from the use of several different techniques that help to build a sense of the world of the machine. These techniques reinforce the story that the designer wants to tell, doling it out in bits and pieces that mesh with the actual game that players experience--because when you're playing a game, it's the act of play that's still the most important.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">The Rule of Repetition</h2><p>The first technique that pinball games leverage is repetition. Many "elements" of a table are ones that you need to launch pinballs at, over and over and over. You can eventually "complete" some elements on a table, and this escalates the story and advances a miniature plot of some kind, within the mechanics of the table and the story itself. For example, in the <i>Medieval Madness </i>table, the "Catapult" ramp requires you to repeatedly shoot a hard-to-reach area on the left side of the board. Hit it three times, and you get an animation of launching a catapult (and a minigame where you have to choose an object to launch in the catapult)! The repetition reinforces the basic "plot" of the element, while also investing you more in it.</p><p>Repetition can also get more involved, with more complex cycles. In <i>Medieval Madness</i>, there's also a central castle feature, which represents different castles in the kingdom that you're attacking. Attacking each castle is a three-step process:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Launch balls into the castle moat a certain number of times, which opens the drawbridge</li><li>Launch balls across the drawbridge and into the castle gate to damage it, which eventually destroys the gate</li><li>Launch the ball across the drawbridge and into the castle, which destroys it!</li></ol><p style="text-align: left;">Once the castle is destroyed, it resets, and you get to do the whole process all over again, starting with the moat! However, the amount of times that you have to launch into the moat (and the amount of times you have to damage the gate) increases, making it harder--and the next destroyed castle is worth more points! Furthermore, each castle you destroy features a different enemy knight who taunts you from within the castle, with unique dialogue. So while you repeat the same cycle, there's variations on it that add novelty and a sense of progression in your own story.<br /></p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Building Up</h2><p style="text-align: left;">In the castle example from the previous section, you saw a bit of this principle: pinball games build a sense of progression with features that have some sort of buildup. The most common example of this is "ball lock" mechanics, which are common setups for multiballs: you have to lock one, then two, then three pinballs in holding spaces, then they all get unleashed in a chaotic mode of play where all of them get dropped into the table! </p><p style="text-align: left;">Here, the narrative techniques work to create a sort of momentum in the game, and pinball tables will sometimes play off of that. For example, in <i>Theater of Magic</i>, the most common form of ball lock comes with animations that show the pinball getting wrapped up by wires as it's collected--and there's unique animation for both the first and second locks. Then, once the second ball is locked, a magnetic spot appears in the middle of the playfield that attracts nearby pinballs. Once a ball sticks to it, the game begins (with a flood of flashing lights and noises) the full multiball!</p><p style="text-align: left;">There's a few things going on here: first, the game builds anticipation by setting up something big, and then it builds a sense of rhythm. One, two, and three unleashes the payout! <i>Attack From Mars</i> has features that work similarly: you shoot them three times, and the third time unlocks a "hurry-up": a short timer where you have to make a shot to the center of the pinball table. Each time, the hurry-up is a capstone for the mini-narrative of that feature: for example, after a series of shots where the aliens are taking captives, you have to shoot the flying saucer to rescue the abductees! The capstone makes it feel like a simple storyline, even though it wasn't very complicated. You did the same thing three times, and the narrative you got was fairly straightforward, but that sense of progression makes it feel like a complete narrative once you land the final shot.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Slices of Story</h2><p style="text-align: left;">The most explicit part of narrative technique, especially in modern pinball tables, is the way that different parts of the table communicate a specific slice of the table's story or theme. Often, this comes in the form of a "mission" system, where players can activate a mode of play that represents a "plot" within the world of the game. This is used frequently in tables based on fictional universes (like <i>Star Wars</i> or <i>Stranger Things</i>), but missions show up in many other places. Monster Bash, loosely based on the classic <i>Universal Monsters</i> movies, is an example of an older table that plays with mission-based story, as your gameplay sees you working through different modes for each monster. Activate the Wolfman, and you start a mode where you have to loop shots around the table in "Full Moon Madness". Wake up Dracula, and he pops out of his coffin and drifts across the table, as you try to hit him with a pinball!</p><p style="text-align: left;">A mission provides a chance for the table to slice away a specific linear storyline from the table's overall narrative, giving it a specific shape. For a brief bit of time, the pinball table shifts to put this one specific storyline front and center, making gameplay more linear. Missions are often more gimmicky than normal play, because they make themselves the center of attention while they're active.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Another way that pinball tables can dip explicitly into the themes and narrative of their world is by attaching specific parts of the fiction to different table elements. Many tables do this by having a "collection" feature: you have to hit specific targets to collect members of a set, like how the <i>Lord of the Rings</i> table sees you collecting members of the Fellowship of the Ring, or collecting elven/dwarven/human rings by doing specific things. While missions provide a more linear focus on the story, collection elements are more open-ended: you can collect some pieces of a set, go off and do other things, and then come back to it later--often working on more than one set at a time. When the collection completes, you get a bonus and a reminder of what the whole set represents in the story that you're playing through.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Putting the Story Together</h2><p style="text-align: left;">In just one post, we've covered many techniques that pinball tables use to build a sense of story. What makes this different from more traditional storytelling? It has to do with the way that different storytelling techniques are mixed together. Some portions of a table can have a more traditional narrative, while other narrative pieces exist in a very abstract way: they remind you of specific things from the story that you're following, or build up texture with things that don't make literal sense. What ties everything into one unit is the game itself, the player mixing their experience of these techniques at their own pace.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Pinball tables unfold story in a way that tests the limits of how story can be conveyed in a game. They're a unique addition to the pool of interactive storytelling, and have only continued to develop over time. I'm going to do some more specific table breakdowns in the future, to give you a better idea of how exactly this process works in a more concrete form. Stick around!</p><p></p>Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-24567977842553335262023-10-21T21:50:00.000-05:002023-10-21T21:50:03.257-05:00Creating Emotion in Games: Wrapping It Up<p>I didn't really expect <a href="http://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/search/label/creating%20emotion%20in%20games">my retrospective of Creating Emotion in Games</a> to wind up like this. It's been a while since I've been motivated to recap the next part, and there's a few reasons for that. With at least five, six more blog posts that need to be surmounted in order to finish the project, it was beginning to look <i>intimidating</i>, especially because they just weren't getting creatively fulfilling to me. I'm going to unpack some of that here, along with some of the other things that were beginning to make this a frustrating project.</p><p>So I think it's time to call it. Officially, this is going to be the last post in the retrospective, but I'll be talking about the things I want to write about going forward, because I have plenty of ideas ready to go!</p><p></p><p></p><span><a name='more'></a></span><h2 style="text-align: left;">The Toolbox of Techniques</h2><p>This book is one specific thing: it's a toolbox of different bespoke techniques for making games more emotionally involving. There's a sort of utility to that: you can pick up a chapter, get something interesting, even implement it right away. The execution is also a bit cramped. It's hard to really understand what exactly ties it together or structures it--things that seem like they might organize the book give way to a fuzzier, sloppier order. On top of that, certain points start to feel repetitive as they get re-examined through slightly different lenses--did we really need to cover things like character diamonds and relationship layers multiple times?</p><p>It's not just a structural issue for me, though--it's that it's hard for me to find unifying philosophies in the book. There aren't big ideas that tie everything together, it's all very utilitarian, "here is a specific way to do a specific thing in games". This isn't a bad thing to have in a book, but it starts to feel like a reference manual and not a guide to a new way of approaching games. But the book pitches itself as a new method for infusing games with emotion! What the book feels like is that, rather than teaching a method, it's dispensing a lot of small ideas and asking the reader to tie things together. None of the biggest connective tissue comes into being, because I think the author is just a bit tucked into his unexamined perspective. For him, games are a matter of narrative polish, and finding ways to recreate cinematic writing within a game framework.</p><p>That's fine enough, those sorts of things are useful within a particular context, but they're not very good at providing material to chew on or comment on. They're not much for responding to, which was making this retrospective more of a recap and summary. I was expecting insights and higher-level discussion I could engage with, but the book wasn't really delivering on that, which made it a slog to work through.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">A (Lengthy) Sidebar About Women</h2><p>Oh boy, so. Here we go. The other big thing that really started to grate on me. I understand it was 20 years ago, I know this was the video game industry, but was it too much to ask that this book be <i>reasonably normal about women</i>? There was this thing that started happening as I was reading the book, little drips here and there, until it all started to roll over into a tipping point that really just helped sour me on the whole piece. Heads-up, this is going to hit on some sexist/misogynist content that's at least distasteful, and some stuff that's going to be gross in a kinda troubling way. It's totally fine to bail on this section and move on to <a href="#jump-link-1">the next big header</a> if things start getting rough for you.</p><p>Initially, there were little things here and there. Not a lot of eyebrow-raising things or particularly unusual things (except for the one weird attempted joke that went "If you wouldn't invite a bore to your dinner gathering or marry one off to your daughter, sister, or pet, then don't put one in your games."), but over time I started to pick up on that familiar pattern. I chalked it up to a "dead angle", a spot outside someone's view that they aren't able to directly track or notice (usually because of existing bias). Sure, that made sense enough.</p><p>But it sure was something how frequently the women mentioned in the book's hypotheticals and examples were in positions of weakness or objects of desire. There's a particularly heavy-handed passage in chapter 2.7, where the author chooses to introduce a femme fatale figure as part of a character dynamic.</p><blockquote><p><i>You meet a sexy, dubious damsel in distress, who dresses in red and looks at you with bedroom eyes while relaying a sad story that may or may not be true.</i></p></blockquote><p>I dunno, bud. If there were more roles that women played in these hypotheticals, I could understand it more. If there were more men in these sorts of roles in the examples, I could definitely understand that better. But this singular focus on women as <i>things</i> echoes some very ugly themes in the wider culture that far better-written people than me have gone over. If you don't see it, I can't make you--but to me, it began approaching the point where it bugged me. I was rolling my eyes in chapter 2.13 as an example of creating "mixed emotions" used a World War II squadmate flirting with a "sexy and spunky girl...[who] turned you down in favor of him", when I got whammied from left field.</p><p>Skimming ahead a few chapters to mentally gear up for the upcoming posts, I hit a point where the author starts joking about the possible "roles" that a character in the United States of America might take on. (Man, why does all the worst stuff pop up when the author tries to be a clown?) Like, sure, "Over-caffeinated novel-writing retro-beatnik" got a chuckle out of me. Then at the end of the list, I get smacked by a phrase I never wanted to see in this book, "Belly-ringed bored nubile tenth-grade goddess" like <i>man</i> I'm pretty sure 90% of writers just need to be banned from the word "nubile" preemptively. I just...it really brought to a head a lot of things, because there is so much to unpack here and I don't want to.</p><p>It didn't help that the art in this book is similarly directed. Like sure, there's plenty of women depicted in the book, some of whom are relatively normal (like, they're movie star-level pretty, but that's pretty much normal for women in media I guess), like the World War II girl described as "sexy and spunky" above. And then, well. I started going through the art for about half of the book, because I believe in having hard data when you can. By that point, I'd done some tallying, and it turns out that literally half of the women depicted in the art are significantly sexualized in some way. Cleavage shots, provocative poses, clothes that look more like netting, oh and about a sixth of the women depicted in the art are just straight-up naked (with almost all of those examples being in positions with limited or no agency). (Meanwhile, about 4% of the men are, if I'm being generous, sexualized. One of them could be considered naked, if we count a loincloth--which is a far more lax standard than I'm using to tally the art of women in this book.)</p><p><i>Aside: if you're interested in my numbers, I went through the first 230some pages of the book, finding 78 distinct pieces of art. Of those, the split was 46:28 for male to female (with a few of indeterminate gender), and 16 characters were, I felt, significantly sexualized. 2 of those were male, 14 female, and 5 of those female characters were outright nude.</i></p><p>This is a textbook on game design.</p><p>Like look, evocative art to talk about different fantastical settings and evoke atmosphere? Sure. But <i>come on</i>. I just...<i>come on</i>. I know that people get desensitized to this after a point, but this is exactly why the digital game industry struggled with things like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign)">Gamergate</a> or the more recent <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Department_of_Fair_Employment_and_Housing_v._Activision_Blizzard">harassment revelations surrounding Activision-Blizzard</a>. Women are people too, and women deserve to be treated <i>normally</i>. A textbook on game design is not the place to show off your art of spicy ladies, and look--<i>nowhere</i> is an appropriate place for you to make edgy jokes about attractive tenth-graders. Ew.</p><p>Can we just...not? Seriously. We have got to be better than this. Fortunately, I <i>have</i> read books that were better than this, in the area of game design, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.</p><a id="jump-link-1"><h2 style="text-align: left;">What We Can Learn</h2></a><p>So the book frequently put me off and frustrated me for reasons I've discussed above. However, I do still find some valuable things in it--it's still something that I can see myself referencing from time to time as need be, just with some caveats and understandings of its limitations. I don't know that I would recommend it offhand to people (there's better choices out there), but as someone who already has it, I can use it within the context that it's built around.</p><p>The techniques that the book outlines are very useful for particular types of design--they're most useful for AAA video games that incorporate narrative, but the general techniques of building connection between players and the game can be extended and adapted for other contexts. It's still true that there's a lot of things games can do to successfully execute on their emotional connection with the player, and having ideas in mind helps to make things that I design better. They don't build interactive narrative on their own, but they will enhance the way that a game narrative comes across.</p><p>But those lessons can come from a lot of places, and I don't think that I'd personally seek them out from a book that has various scattered problems like this one, at least not as my first choice.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Into the Future</h2><p>On that note, I did actually pick up a couple of books that have me incredibly interested. One of them is a prior read (the fourth edition of Tracy Fullerton's <a href="https://www.gamedesignworkshop.com">Game Design Workshop</a>, of which I previously read the third edition), and one of them is new to me (Katherine Isbister's <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262534451/how-games-move-us/">How Games Move Us</a>). Both are incredibly promising for different reasons. How Games Move Us looks like it's going to tackle similar subject matter as Creating Emotion in Games, but with an angle far more focused on the overall concepts, and digging into specific case studies with a far wider perspective. Meanwhile, Game Design Workshop is an absolute masterclass in game analysis, I cannot overstate how phenomenal it is as a resource. This thing is an exhaustive dive into all sorts of aspects of game design, complete with case studies and articles from different pivotal figures in game design, both digital and analog.</p><p>I hope you've found enjoyment and some sort of enlightenment on this journey through an old, flawed textbook. I'm not entirely sure what I'll be doing with these new books (Game Design Workshop in particular is <i>intimidating</i> in scope, but very worthwhile), but rest assured I want to come back to this. Thank you for reading along.</p>Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-9553237533073021742023-10-09T11:47:00.000-05:002023-10-09T11:47:46.789-05:00Game Moments: an Outburst in Girl by Moonlight<p>There's a moment in an RPG session that's going to stick with me for some time, I think. Not necessarily for how dramatic or important it was, but for how miraculously <i>effortless</i> it was. I was playing a session of <a href="https://www.girlbymoonlight.com">Girl by Moonlight</a>, a game about magical girls in the midst of turmoil. My character, Aster, was doing physical training at the gym with her teammate Solania-Vetis when she pushed too far and collapsed. When she was advised to be mindful of her limits, Aster lashed out and said "I don't want to have limits!"</p><p>It surprised me, because it just popped out, and yet it also perfectly fit the situation, because of the way that the game set things up--it was the sort of spontaneous outburst that I hadn't really experienced in games for some time. Let's have a look at what came together for that moment...</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><h2 style="text-align: left;">A Bit of Context</h2><p>Within the game Girl by Moonlight, there are several "playsets", each of which has a different theme and different inspirations. For this campaign, we were playing with the "Sea of Stars" playset, where instead of usual magical girl costumes, the characters bond to semi-magical giant robots to fight colossal enemies. Here, we were protectors of the Bastion, a mobile fortress-city that protected humanity from the Leviathans, otherworldly beings who devastated humanity when we opened portals that we probably shouldn't have.</p><p>All the characters were members of the Returned, a number of teens who had been taken by the Leviathans, and then mysteriously returned to the Bastion. Most of them obtained the ability to interface with the Engines, creations of older human civilizations and long-lost technology. Aster was created using the "Unlikely Hero" playbook--a character type defined by lacking the central alter ego of the other characters, who is able to eventually, in a moment of crisis, gain this ability in a triumphant swing of fate.</p><p>This played heavily into Aster's scenes. I'd already decided that she felt guilty for not properly "doing her duty" (we decided that the Bastion was heavily demanding in terms of "duty" and "honor"), because instead of piloting an Engine, she flew out with the rest of the team in a small support ship. She went through tests that tried to determine why she was powerless, she tried connecting with characters who she believed to be powerless (although one of them was secretly her teammate and very much a powered character). It was a core part of her identity. And in that training scene, she was working with a character who she looked up to as leader. But it wasn't just this framing that made the scene work.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">The Pressure of Mechanics</h2><p>Girl by Moonlight doesn't just leave the struggles of its characters to the players: it uses reminders of the constant pressures that face the protagonists in their everyday lives. Like many <a href="https://bladesinthedark.com/forged-dark">Forged in the Dark</a> games, characters have a resource called "stress", which they can accrue in order to push themselves beyond their capabilities. However, it's also something that characters can't pile up with impunity. Acquire too much stress, and bad things happen, causing permanent changes to your character. Girl by Moonlight runs things a little differently.</p><p>Like other Forged in the Dark games, it has a cycle based around missions that the characters go on. In between, there's downtime, where characters recover, bond, and prepare for the next mission. However, there's another part of the game that acts as a prelude to the mission: the Obligation phase. In Blades in the Dark, characters have to spend actions during downtime to recover stress incurred during the mission--Girl by Moonlight flips this on its head, and characters recover all stress for free after the mission...but get stress from the Obligation phase, to give the stress economy some texture. In the narrative, the Obligation phase is the Gamemaster's chance to showcase the pressures that the characters are under.</p><p>Aster constantly had Obligation scenes that highlighted her powerless nature, that highlighted the irresponsibility of her desire to fight alongside her companions. These Obligation scenes constantly kept attention on that duality inside of her. The stress mechanic also contributed significantly, however, because of something called Eclipse: the consequence for accumulating too much stress.</p><p>When a character enters Eclipse, their accumulated stress becomes a sort of lifebar--they get to drain stress instead of accumulating it, but if they run out of stress, the character dies or leaves the story permanently! Everything becomes higher stakes, and the Eclipse itself also gives instructions for how a character behaves, and what can bring them out of the Eclipse. Here's what Aster's version of Eclipse looks like (it's different for every character archetype):</p><p></p><blockquote><p><b>You are not who they need you to be.</b> You’re weak, useless, unworthy of their friendship. They have given so much to you, and in return you give them nothing. You throw yourself into danger, desperately seeking any way you might possibly be of use.</p><p><b>You escape eclipse</b> only when someone engages you in a dialogue about your feelings, and shows you that they have felt the same.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Shortly before the training session, Aster had actually fallen into Eclipse during a mission, and just barely recovered by having a vulnerable scene with Solania-Vetis. Throughout all that time, I made sure to keep playing to that prompt, playing up the ways that she felt useless to her team, which made her recovery <i>incredibly</i> cathartic.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Many Moving Parts</h2><p>All of this added up to this one memorable moment. It was an Obligation scene where Aster was training, representing the pressure on her to keep up and be as strong as her allies. With the struggle of the past mission fresh on her mind, Aster was in a place where this conflict came to the front. It wasn't intended as a scene highlighting her feelings about being limited, but in that moment, when my fellow player started talking about the topic, the response that came felt completely natural--because everything about the game was practically <i>screaming</i> that aspect of the character.</p><p>That, to me, was a profound success within the game's rules. It wasn't necessarily that it was pushing me to explore something about the character that I didn't want to. Rather, it empowered me to easily slip into the mindset of the character, and to shoot from the hip. It primed and conditioned me to think from her perspective, and that, I feel, is the most powerful thing that a roleplaying game can do.</p>Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-31186854492430526592023-09-10T20:36:00.001-05:002023-09-10T20:36:05.000-05:00Creating Emotion in Games, Part 5: Digging into NPCs<p> In <a href="https://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2023/08/creating-emotion-in-games-part-4-groups.html">Part 4</a> of the <a href="http://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2023/07/creating-emotion-in-games-part-1-intro.html"><i>Creating Emotion in Games</i> retrospective</a>, we had a bit of a double feature, covering the core concepts of Groups and the fundamental ideas behind NPC dynamics. This time around, we're going full-on into the meat of NPC techniques, exploring plot arcs, chemistry with the player character, and more!<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Building an NPC Arc</h2><p>Something I've come to understand about stories is that everyone has their own preferred template for how to put together a character and their arc. There's useful things in all of these templates, but at the end of the day, you're picking what makes the most sense in your mind. The thing I like about this chapter is that the model character arc is simple, functional, and not needlessly formulaic (I've had my fill of monomyth-inspired takes on character arcs, thanks): your character has a fear, limitation, block, or wound ("FLBW", in the book's parlance), and over the course of the movie/book/game, they grow through this. It's a staple of TV storytelling in particular (I'm reminded of the tabletop RPG <a href="https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Primetime-Adventures-3e-Print-PDF.html">Primetime Adventures</a>, which puts a character's "Issue" front and center for their character arc), but it also works great for any character. The book goes on to note that not every character will actually grow through their FLBW, and there's a lot of variations you can play with here.</p><p>However, there is one factor that leaves me a bit confused--nothing here seems to talk about why this kind of arc is uniquely suited to non-player characters. My suspicion, based on scraps of things that have been mentioned (and me peeking ahead a tad) is that Freeman is skeptical of the ability of a game to deliver a traditional character arc for the player character (and maybe rightly so!). Thus, NPCs get traditional character arcs. I do feel like the chapter should acknowledge that in a game, NPCs also have limitations in terms of the ways that you can showcase their character development...but I think the fact that this chapter revolves around such a simple core goes a long way in helping it.</p><p>I've been playing <i>Dragon Age: Origins</i> recently, and noticed this technique in full force when it comes to the companion characters who accompany you on your quest. Not only do they have romance arcs that involve confronting an FLBW (self-doubt or a secret birthright, for example), but they also have unique quests which you can pursue, if you engage with them enough--these quests give insight into their pasts, and help them move beyond something that was holding them up.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Root, Root, Root for the NPC</h2><p>The chapter about developing a "rooting interest" in an NPC stands out to me, because it's the first time I feel like we've gotten a chapter that's directly about building an emotional bond. There's been plenty of content that's about presenting characters and situations that are both interesting and deep, but there's something more intentional about getting the player to root for a character in a game. It's no longer showing them something that should interest and engage them--it's about evoking a reaction from them, <i>towards</i> something in the game! As the book points out, this is about creating empathy with a character, and the difference between a storyline where you have empathy for a character and one you don't is <i>massive</i>.</p><p>The actual techniques start with some pretty straightforward ideas: having characters show bravery, self-sacrifice, misfortune that they don't deserve, simple things like that. Where I think it gets <i>really</i> interesting is the final two techniques:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Investing characters with life, like the characters in <i>The Sims</i>. This one comes in a great many forms, and it's also the technique that's least applicable to traditional cinematic video games. You can see this in games like <i>Dwarf Fortress</i>, in any tabletop roleplaying game, and even games where you have less direct involvement--this perfectly summarizes the way that fans became attached to the online game/event <i>Blaseball</i>, which was almost entirely a spectator sport, but commanded immense levels of affection for (and investment in) the virtual players of the game, who were identified merely by autogenerated names!</li><li>Characters you have responsibility for. While the sample given here is an adventure scenario (you rescue a woman from a thousand years of torment within an ancient artifact), I find this to ring even truer with games where you manage characters as part of a larger whole. My responsibility to bring back <i>X-COM</i> soldiers alive makes it all the more devastating when I lose one in a mission, and I've felt moments of dread during a game of <i>Stellaris</i>, watching an alien swarm slowly eradicate the inhabitants of my homeworld, who I should have been able to protect. (The latter case also made it all the more cathartic when I mounted a comeback and crushed the swarm, building a new homeworld on the ruins of the old!)</li></ul><p></p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Building Chemistry from Players to NPCs</h2><p>Chapter 2.11 is about establishing chemistry from players to NPCs--judging by the next chapter, this looks like it's an equivalent to "Player-NPC Relationship Interesting Techniques", but there's a bit more impetus here. Contrasting with the previous chapter, the book explains that while giving a character rooting interest helps you identify with them, you need other techniques to make players feel chemistry with them--techniques to make players like them, and enjoy them. Looking around at the vast number of "smooch your companions" RPGs, this feels like a topic that's even more important in the modern age of game design.</p><p>There's some pretty straightforward techniques here: an NPC admires you, "reads your mind", has things in common with you, anticipates your needs. They're all things that people do to be likeable. I can imagine plenty more along those lines as well: be a good listener, say nice things, express trust in the player, tease the player once there's some rapport. Wrapping the chapter up, though, is something more interesting, because of how aspirational it is: "make the player grow to be a better person". It's more of a big payoff thing, where an NPC gives you opportunities to do the right thing, with or without negative consequences, but if played right, it can definitely generate a huge amount of chemistry with the character.</p><p>I'm reminded of when I first played <i>Dragon Age 2 </i>(spoilers for a companion sidequest follow), and started following what I thought was Aveline's romance questline. Well, it was--but over time, it slowly became obvious that it <i>wasn't</i> a romance with the player character. After feeling a little bit like the game had bamboozled me, I actually stopped, thought about the situation, and realized that I'd been putting expectations on this character that didn't match her own desires. That reflection made me a better person, and that connection made me care more about Aveline as a companion in the game.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Deepening Player-NPC Relationships</h2><p>For this last section, I'll actually be mashing together thoughts on Chapters 2.12 and 2.13, because they cover two sides of the same dynamic...and 2.12 is like, two pages long in terms of the actual ideas it presents (which are largely redundant with earlier material). From the NPC side, it's layer cakes, like in the last section of <a href="http://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2023/08/creating-emotion-in-games-part-4-groups.html" style="outline-width: 0px !important; user-select: auto !important;">part 4</a>: multiple layers to the way an NPC feels about you. The book uses the Han Solo/Princess Leia dynamic as an example, building out several hypothetical scenarios with a cocky, rough man as a main character, with a woman who's harsh towards him but secretly harbors affection for him. There's some fleshing-out, but the important part is: layers, and I can honestly think of a lot more ways to do it that are more compelling than copying that specific dynamic wholesale.</p><p>2.13 is similarly brief, now that I get down to it, and it covers the idea that you can deepen the relationship between the player and an NPC by using mixed emotions, which is kind of another way of saying layer cakes. I'm not sure why both of the examples have "goes after the woman you're interested in" as an aspect of mixed emotions, but I'm certainly adding data to my file. Again, could have many more interesting examples here. At any rate, the overall idea is solid: mixed emotions, layers of reaction, things that build on one another. There's not a lot here that hasn't already been implied by some of the earlier chapters (they bring to mind, among other things, the idea that emotional ambivalence is a good way to deepen an NPC), so I don't have a lot more to say here.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Next Time...</h2><p>Like earlier, we're going to be able to hit some more interesting and even game-specific content again, going back to groups and also starting to dig into Plot--a strange but important aspect in game narratives. Come back next time to see!</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>How to build bonds with groups</li><li>How to build emotionally-complex situations (this is a MONSTER of a chapter, but hopefully I can boil it down)</li><li>Making plots interesting</li><li>Making plots deep</li></ul><p></p>Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-47623304275285955692023-08-28T17:44:00.004-05:002023-09-10T20:36:44.475-05:00Creating Emotion in Games, Part 4 -- Groups and NPC Relationships<p>If you're new to my retrospective on <i>Creating Emotion in Games</i>, start at <a href="http://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2023/07/creating-emotion-in-games-part-1-intro.html">the first post</a> and work your way forward; it'll make more sense! If you're just catching up--<a href="http://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2023/08/creating-emotion-in-games-part-3-npcs.html">in part 3</a>, we got introduced to the book's basic ideas--how to define non-player characters (NPCs), give them interesting traits, and then add deeper texture to them. This time around, it's a bit more of a mix of content--there's still more about NPCs, but we're also going to move into some more unique (and game-specific) territory: groups and factions.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Making Groups Interesting</h2><p style="text-align: left;">Like I mentioned--while it's true that groups and factions are part of books, movies, TV shows, and other traditional media (the book even uses <i>Star Trek</i>'s Klingons as an example), they have a unique connection to game design. Games often ask players to commit large amounts of time to them, which means they have the space to present complex, nuanced groups to players. Within a game, you have the ability to both present the broad strokes of a group, and also give them as much detail as they feel like exploring--this applies not just to video games (like the open-world <i>Dragon Age</i> series or the convoluted lore of fighting game series) but also to tabletop games, like the lore-rich <i>World of Darkness</i> roleplaying games.</p><p style="text-align: left;">When it comes to making them interesting, the book follows the same advice that it did for NPCs: give them a "diamond" to define them. The traits presented here are more lengthy and less concise than in the NPC chapter, but overall it's a good, straightforward way to condense the ideas you want to explore in a group. Again, it reminds me of the way that the <a href="https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/setting%E2%80%99s-big-issues">roleplaying game Fate uses "aspects"</a> to organize themes and groups within the game's framework, in a qualitative way. Within this chapter, the author also reminds us that it's important to have specific manifestations of this trait, offering us some examples of ways we could depict a sample trait of "affinity for music":</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>This group has finely-crafted musical instruments; if you have one, you can trade it for supplies/money/etc</li><li>You befriend a female musician from this group, whose music gives you healing powers (<i>hmm. You might gather that a pattern is developing in these examples, and I'm even leaving out some. More on this later on.</i>)</li></ul><p></p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Making Groups Deep</h2><p style="text-align: left;">While this chapter is much shorter than the previous one, it also has what I feel are more interesting takeaways. I've come to recognize that there's a lot of issues sort of woven throughout the text, but this section has, in some ways, aged very nicely, because it focuses on looking at groups as real entities that deserve respect, especially when they have values and perspectives that differ from what we're used to. </p><p>There's a few different things suggested here--wisdom, aesthetics, nobility. They're all values, somewhat intangible, with a hint of something transcendent to them. Thinking about this in more detail, these are all things that the book suggests be buried beneath the more overt and objective traits. What's interesting here is that the <a href="http://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2023/08/creating-emotion-in-games-part-3-npcs.html" target="_blank">NPC Deepening Techniques</a> put emotional pain and regret front and center, but those are nowhere to be found here. I can think of a couple of good reasons for that, whether or not they were intended by the author:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It's easier to work with the buried secrets and specific emotional pain of an individual, whereas the same things won't be true of an entire group of people--while there might be painful events in the past of a people, not everyone will internalize them the same way or associate the same meanings with them</li><li>Defining a group of people by their trauma is dicey at best; while overusing the pain of a single character might feel cliche and obnoxious, overusing the trauma of a whole people mirrors some very exhausting tropes in fiction that reduce living cultures to the objects of pity, and can often echo some of the same feelings</li></ul><h2 style="text-align: left;">NPC-NPC Chemistry</h2><p style="text-align: left;">I think it's incredibly interesting that the book introduces techniques for building chemistry between NPCs before it introduces techniques for relationships between NPCs and the player's main character, but it also makes sense to me. The dynamics and relationships between NPCs are simpler, and they work off of some of the basic building blocks that get used to build relationships with the player character. They also work to build an engaging emotional backdrop that doesn't require the player to weigh in--it just happens on its own. This means it doesn't require as much intensive focus, so it's a good way to start thinking about character-relationship concepts.</p><p style="text-align: left;">There's a variety of techniques that get mentioned in this chapter, such as having characters use the same mental models/think in the same way (the book gives the example of a film noir game where a "sexy, dubious damsel in distress" and her otherwise undescribed sister use metaphors about toys to describe things in the world--communicating a specific commonality between them). One example where NPC-NPC chemistry worked well for me was the network of relationships between the various survivors in Telltale Games' <i>The Walking Dead: Season 1</i>. There were clusters of survivors with pre-existing relationships, who would talk with one another and also talk to you about each other, but there were also interactions between members from the different groups, which eventually started to drive the plot. It built the idea that there was a complex web of characters that formed your network of survivors.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">NPC-NPC Deepening</h2><p style="text-align: left;">This chapter is short, but it's also such an interesting and memorable idea that it's one of the few things that came back to mind as I thought about this book, years later. It's a simple but compelling idea called a relationship "layer cake", and it's informed not just how I think about characters in games, but how I do character analysis for stories in general. While I don't explicitly invoke the metaphor, I have often talked about a character dynamic by going through a "layer cake" in bits and pieces.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The idea itself is straightforward enough that you've maybe guessed it: relationships between NPCs get deeper as you add layers to them, layers of ways that they feel about one another. One NPC might admire another, as one layer, then see their younger self in the other, as another layer. In the book, the example given is four layers deep, which seems like a good (albeit maybe heavy) number. Not all of these layers will be demonstrated consistently over the course of a game, but it's at least a cool idea. I do wonder how much of that is practical to have in a game, however. Oftentimes, very simple character dynamics are all you need for the relationships between non-player characters, although some games (like those in the <i>Fire Emblem</i> series) derive a lot of value out of building up rich connections between NPCs.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Looking Ahead</h2><p style="text-align: left;">With these chapters under our belt, we're past the first quarter of the book! So far, the techniques have been focused on very fundamental ideas, nothing too unusual, although there has occasionally been oddity and datedness around some of it. There's a particular focus on cinematic writing--partially because of the author's background, but it's also a reminder that games still draw on traditional storytelling. This is more clear now than before, where lavish open-world games and massive RPGs have taken up a space as a significant genre. Games like Crystal Dynamics' <i>Marvel's Avengers</i> and Larian Studio's <i>Baldur's Gate 3</i> exhibit narratives that are most like movies and TV shows, but giving players the ability to explore the narrative in-depth at their leisure.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Here's what we've got coming up in <a href="http://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2023/09/creating-emotion-in-games-part-5.html">part 5</a>, as the scope of the book develops:</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Giving NPCs character arcs</li><li>Giving "rooting interest" to NPCs</li><li>Techniques for Player-NPC chemistry</li><li>Techniques to deepen Player-NPC relationships (from the NPC side)</li></ul><p></p><p></p>Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-41648064294731440872023-08-14T10:00:00.003-05:002023-09-07T20:45:56.013-05:00Creating Emotion in Games, Part 3 -- NPCs and Dialogue<div>
If you're new to this series, start on <a href="https://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2023/07/creating-emotion-in-games-part-1-intro.html">the first post</a> and go from there!
</div>
<div><br /></div>
We wrapped up our introduction to this book in <a href="https://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2023/08/creating-emotion-in-games-part-2.html">the last post</a>, looking at a few miscellaneous things that the author has to say about
building narratives in games, and also exploring his idea of the "deep" and
"interesting" axes. While these are largely focused around presentation within
the game (not surprising, given the author's background in screenwriting), I do
plan on drawing this back to actual mechanical design and game structure as much
as possible, in a way that builds on the book. So with that said, let's dive
into the first Emotioneering™ techniques! These ones focus on non-playable characters, "NPCs".<a name='more'></a>
<h2 style="text-align: left;">Making NPCs Interesting</h2>
<p style="text-align: left;"> Diamonds are a writer's best friend, or so Chapter 2.1 posits. The cure for boring characters, as the author explains, is simple: a diamond. Which, as far as I can tell, is a fancy way of saying "give them four distinct character traits" (although sometimes you can narrow it to three or expand it to five--"diamond" is just a handy visualizer). While it's a bit less revolutionary and less of a system than I'd hoped, it is still good advice. After all, the roleplaying game <a href="https://fate-srd.com">Fate</a> works on the principle of establishing five Aspects, cornerstones of your character that serve as anchors to define them. It's a legitimately good way to make things interesting.</p><p style="text-align: left;">What's particularly interesting in this chapter is the way that the author points out that traits can and should be established outside of dialogue. In the sample cutscene provided, an NPC has the traits Athletic and Aesthetic, and repeatedly demonstrates them by moving with great catlike agility, contrasting with lines of dialogue that showcase traits like Sad and Insightful. While this isn't unique to games, it's something that games can still embrace in unique ways. Especially with the wide variety of mechanisms available in games, from actions to incidental dialogue to journal entries to specific game mechanics, centering them on a handful of traits for a given NPC helps to make that character both distinct and identifiable.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Making NPCs Deep</h2><p style="text-align: left;">So there's one axis, what about the other? Chapter 2.2 is a little harder to summarize, because the techniques are more disparate, but if I were to summarize them in broad terms, it would be "pain" and "hiding". It's one of the classic combos, and it's one I use all the time when I build emotionally-complicated characters for a tabletop roleplaying campaign. Take a wound, layer something on top of it, add an external pressure, and suddenly you've got all these levels that are working against one another, but in a really compelling way. It's that good, delicious drama you get by holding all of those elements in tension, cooking up a mess of a character!<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">But there's another half to it, something that I think gets missed in this chapter, which is that the pain needs to hold a promise of release--and after that release, the character needs to retain depth. One example that comes to mind is the character work done with Asgore in the game <i>Undertale</i>: while many of his layers are built pain that's hidden behind his literally soft exterior, there's also a catharsis when you achieve an ending that sees him finally beginning to heal from those wounds. We start to see layers emerge that aren't defined by pain, but by the more powerful passions which drove him through his pain and sustained him.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Making NPC Dialogue Interesting</h2><p style="text-align: left;">For Chapter 2.3, we move into some more practical applications again. Now that we've talked about some of the base theory of what makes characters interesting, we get to some examples of bringing that to life, through dialogue. Something I enjoy here is that the book acknowledges a few purposes of NPC dialogue: adding color (such as "barks" or filler dialogue), prompting action, and providing information. No matter what, the directive here is to take the NPC's character traits (the "Diamond") and use that to flavor the dialogue. For example, the book takes the bland filler line "Here's your food." and uses the traits Caring and Cynical to turn it into "It's bad, I know (Caring). But hey, at least you're alive to eat it. (Cynical)"</p><p style="text-align: left;">There's a point here where I think it's maybe a bit overdone, where it's unclear whether the traits are <i>actually</i> being referenced in the line of dialogue, but I think the overall point stands: NPC dialogue shouldn't be a regurgitation of its main purpose, it should be informed by the character of the NPC. I've been playing <i>Dragon Age: Origins</i> recently, and it manages to do this a lot--while some of the dialogue is bland, it still gives emotional inflections to dialogue that comes from NPCs. At minimum, there's plenty of dialogue that gets colored by an NPC's outlook and traits, especially in terms of the companions who constantly fight by your side. (The standoffish frankness of Morrigan is a particular standout--although Claudia Black's voice acting elevates the writing immensely as well; the bluntness of Sten's dialogue also carries an incredible amount of flavor.)</p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Dragon Age</i> also uses an interesting technique where it floats conversations between your companions into your hearing, so you get to hear them interact with scripted dialogue--these sequences do a great job of not just showcasing the interesting traits of your companions, but also building up the idea that they have rapport with one another.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Deepening NPC Dialogue</h2><p style="text-align: left;">Chapter 2.4 gets a bit fuzzy, because parts of it feel very similar to the previous chapter. It's hard to tell the difference between "tweak NPC dialogue to be interesting" and "tweak NPC dialogue to be deep", because, well, dialogue is short. I think the missing piece here is that you don't try to punch lots of depth into one line of dialogue; instead, you scatter the depth across lots of lines of dialogue, planting glimpses into the inner world of the NPC in bits and pieces, where they may or may not get caught by the player. Keep them frequent enough that players will catch some of them, and they'll still build up that character.</p><p style="text-align: left;">There's a couple other noteworthy ideas in this chapter. The first one is paying attention to subsurface emotions. In the example given, your female companion (whose given roles seem to be: missing you, saying she loves you, and giving you a cool gun...sigh, there is an ongoing theme in this book so far that I think I'll find space to touch on later) has a line where she's supposed to reveal her emotional bond with you, but the book suggests subsuming that feeling under a layer that somewhat masks it, letting the true feeling peek out. Anger, superficial affection, and cold frustration are all suggested ideas here--while I can't say I care for this specific example, there's some good ideas here. Layering emotions is an A+ technique.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The second idea, which I am uncertain about (ironically enough) is the technique of <b>ambivalence</b>. Freeman talks about how having an NPC's dialogue be more noncommittal/vague can give them a sort of suspenseful depth. I don't like this one as much, because of the way that the pacing of games tends to work. Gameplay is spread out over time, and not necessarily orchestrated like a TV show or movie--so when you get reactions from NPCs, they need to communicate something clear. If you don't get a clear communication of anything, the exchange is going to filter away into the background--and you're not likely to experience that moment again for a long time, if ever.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Wrap-Up</h2><p style="text-align: left;">That was our look into a lot of NPC techniques. I think there's things worth exploring here, but a lot of it is also pretty straightforward character work stuff, without a lot of consideration for video game adaptation. However, <a href="https://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2023/08/creating-emotion-in-games-part-4-groups.html">next time</a>, we're digging into some much more game-centric topics:</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Group Interesting Techniques</li><li>Group Deepening Techniques</li><li>NPC-NPC Chemistry Techniques</li><li>NPC-NPC Relationship Deepening Techniques</li></ul><p></p>
Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-14697496185108234932023-08-01T10:30:00.003-05:002023-09-07T20:45:44.795-05:00Creating Emotion in Games, Part 2 -- Finishing the Intro<p>
<a href="https://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2023/07/creating-emotion-in-games-part-1-intro.html">Last time in Part 1</a>, I covered the first part of the introduction to
<i>Creating Emotion in Games</i>, which sets up a sales pitch for "why invest
in games storytelling?", introduces the author's concept of Emotioneering™,
and explains some of the difficulties that professional writers from other
media have when transitioning to games writing. Today, we're going to wrap up
that introduction with a few miscellaneous sections that make their way in,
completing the pitch and setting the stage for the actual techniques to come.
</p>
<a name='more'></a>
<h2>When Game Designers Write</h2>
<p>
Just as in the previous week, Freeman devotes a lengthy amount of time to
discussing the issues that screenwriters face in games writing, he turns
around and makes some points about the problems that game designers face when
attempting to write. This chapter (Chapter 1.5) isn't quite as lovingly
detailed as the previous one, and largely boils down to making some points
about how many people deeply underestimate how layered screenwriting is, how a
single scene pulls a lot of weight in several different categories.
</p>
<p>
It's very true! I think this is particularly an aspect that was
underappreciated back in the day, when it came to writing, and it's something
that atmospheric games began to explore more and more, in the years
afterwards. While attempts have sometimes been clumsy, games are working a lot
harder at building the layers of narrative necessary to be engaging. This
chapter is also a good hint towards the techniques that the book is going to
emphasize--the author is <i>big</i> into layering, and in avoiding
single-purpose scenes/lines/characters.
</p>
<h2 style="text-align: left;">A Few Odds and Ends</h2>
<div>
Chapters 1.6 and 1.7 are very, very brisk one-page chapters that talk about
the scope of Emotioneering™ and set some expectations. The main points
established here:
</div>
<div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>
Writing isn't just about dialogue, it's about developing a plot with
thematic dynamics and emotional beats, techniques that are larger than
in-the-moment lines
</li>
<li>
The best games writing and narrative design work will be unnoticed and
subtle, building up emotional attachment without calling attention to
itself
</li>
</ul>
<div>They're good points, and always worth keeping in mind.</div>
<h2 style="text-align: left;">Deep and Interesting: the Core Thesis</h2>
<div>
Chapter 1.9 is only two and a half pages, but it provides some of the most
crucial insight into the following pages. Here, we get an illustration of
what feels like the core concept behind Freeman's mindset: the twin axes of
"deep" and "interesting". From the description in this chapter, "deep" means
that something is layered, sometimes in unexpected ways, while "interesting"
has to do with the breadth of their appeal, the ways that they are
interesting to engage in. Based on some of the examples given, "interesting"
also seems to have a lot to do with the execution of a concept, where "deep"
has to do with the substance of things in the story, the foundation that the
creativity of the interesting is built on.
</div>
<div><br /></div>
<div>
In screenwriting, he identifies five areas that can be made deep or
interesting: dialogue, characters, relationships between characters, scenes,
and plots. He explains that because each of these can have techniques that
make them deep or interesting, there are ten total categories of techniques
to add emotion to elements of stories. This is also the root of his 32
Emotioneering™ categories: while it's not quite as neat and tidy, we can
start to see some of the same patterns emerge if we look through the Table
of Contents at the chapter titles, such as "NPC Deepening Techniques" or
"Plot Interesting Techniques".
</div>
<div><br /></div>
<div>
Based on these chapter titles, it looks like the following elements are
identified:
</div>
<div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>NPCs</li>
<li>Dialogue</li>
<li>Groups</li>
<li>NPC-and-NPC relationship/chemistry</li>
<li>NPC arcs</li>
<li>Player-NPC relationships/chemistry</li>
<li>Emotionally-complex moments</li>
<li>Plots</li>
<li>World</li>
<li>Roles</li>
<li>First-Person perspective</li>
<li>Character complexity</li>
<li>Symbols</li>
<li>Agency</li>
<li>Motivation</li>
<li>Cohesion</li>
<li>"True-to-life" (?)</li>
<li>Player demographics</li>
<li>Story elements</li>
<li>Gameplay and mechanics</li>
<li>Cinematics</li>
</ul>
<div>
...okay, that's actually a bit messier than I was expecting. While it
starts out with the same familiar pattern (an Interesting and a Deepening
technique for a given element), it actually kinda goes off the rails into
whatever categories seem pertinent. While I'd like it to be more
systematic, there's still a lot I like here, especially the promise of
exploring agency and mechanical integration.
</div>
</div>
<div><br /></div>
<div>
Furthermore, the idea of identifying various techniques that can be used to
build up an impactful narrative is the best way to teach this topic: there's
no such thing as a magical formula that can produce a great story, but if
you build up a utility belt of techniques that can be used to move your
audience in different ways, you'll be able to make that story land
successfully.
</div>
<div><br /></div>
<h2 style="text-align: left;">A Sneak Peek Ahead</h2>
<div><a href="https://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2023/08/creating-emotion-in-games-part-3-npcs.html">In Part 3</a>, we're going to kick things off by trying to cover four techniques at once! (If this winds up being a bit too much, I'll probably tone it down in future posts.)</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>NPC Interesting Techniques</li><li>NPC Deepening Techniques</li><li>Dialogue Interesting Techniques</li><li>Dialogue Deepening Techniques</li></ul></div>
</div>
Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-77469922265557815562023-07-30T09:42:00.002-05:002023-08-02T17:36:26.713-05:00Creating Emotion in Games, Part 1 -- The Intro<p>Let's turn the clock back about 15 years. I was in college, I was pursuing a Communication Arts -- Multimedia degree, and I was taking a course (in my woefully underprepped department) on writing for games. It was pretty barebones, and I don't even know where my class project wound up, but I did keep the textbook from that class, David Freeman's <i><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1918633.Creating_Emotion_in_Games">Creating Emotion in Games</a></i>. I had some misgivings about it, I had some opinions about it, but I still kept it around. I just decided to crack it back open, and do a cover-to-cover reread. I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to find, but let's have a look together.</p><a name='more'></a>
<p>The thing that I'm most interested to find out is how the perspective of a decade and a half has changed me. I've spent a lot of time thinking about game narratives and playing different game narratives--mostly analog games, but I've also done some analysis of digital storytelling as well. Plus, that decade and a half has seen a large number of narrative-rich games come out, games that defined what narrative means for me, like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walking_Dead_(video_game)">Telltale Games' <i>The Walking Dead</i></a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undertale">Toby Fox's <i>Undertale</i></a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Is_Strange"><i>Life is Strange</i> series</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Protocol">Obsidian Entertainment's <i>Alpha Protocol</i></a>, and even <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Age:_Origins"><i>Dragon Age</i></a>. I'm hoping that it'll be interesting to see predictions that were borne out, predictions that weren't, and the way that game narrative has evolved in the 20 years since this book was first published.</p>
<h2>The Introduction Part</h2>
<p><i>Creating Emotion in Games</i> is ultimately David Freeman's sales pitch for a technique he calls "Emotioneering™". Yes, that's how it's written throughout the book. Yes, <a href="https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4802:wi1kmn.2.2">it's officially trademarked</a>. No, I'm not going to consistently dunk on it, because at the end of the day I do legitimately want to explore the techniques it posits--and I do remember there being plenty of good, cohesive ideas in there, even if I found the presentation to be a bit pretentious and even dogmatic. But then again, college me was intensely rebellious against formula writing (do <i>not</i> get me started on Campbell), so maybe it's not as bad as I'm remembering.</p>
<p>These first chapters are really a way of setting the stage for the meat of the book, which is 32 categories of Freeman's Emotioneering™ techniques. From a game design perspective, there's not a lot to write home about, because these are where David establishes bona fides and also puts together a sales pitch--I mean that quite literally. He's very open about his notion that building emotional moments into games is a financially sound decision as well as an artistic one, and he puts that right upfront--the very third section of the intro chapter, in fact. This leads into why I want to still cover this part of the book in blog posts: because it's <b>context</b>. At the end of the day, all of these techniques are coming from a specific perspective, David Freeman's perspective. They've been honed and tempered by experience, but they're still coming from him, and they bear his biases and personal views. I don't have the academic knowledge to point out some of the other options to the ideas he puts out there, but I will try to at least identify places that his confidence might belie an oversight.</p>
<p>The first section (Chapter 1.1) is very barebones, and acts as a primer. It gives two of Freeman's websites (neither of which are operational any longer, which--it's been 20 years, I'm not wholly surprised--and points out that avenues such as art and music are not being considered here. Fair enough! We move into Chapter 1.2, which is the introduction proper to the book. (Side note: there is a surprising amount of time devoted to an honestly kinda cringeworthy joke, where Freeman, recounting the silence of game developers asked to describe a profound emotional gaming moment, quips that they had "become accidental Buddhists". I bring this up because it's another reminder of the limits of his perspective--in this case, culturally. Anyhow, he uses the phrase three or four times in the chapter, and it just turns into one of those moments that starts feeling weird.) The mission statement, as set forth in the book, is to transform game design and writing: Freeman came to games from a screenwriting background, and felt a lack of attention being given to writing in games. This section also touches on the difficulties of emotional design in games, because of the lack of (or changes in) linearity compared to film, and the variety involved.</p>
<p>He identifies two ways that film and TV emotionally engage the audience: creating characters who they identify with, and having those characters undergo emotionally moving (I would also add "resonant") experiences. Based on my vague memories of reading the book previously, these two things will probably be the pillars that Freeman uses to approach creating emotion in games. The challenges in games, he notes, are that you don't always have precise control over the order of events, you can't always control the timing between events, and you can't guarantee that the audience will truly inhabit/identify with characters (although to be fair, this also applies to film, I would think). I've definitely noticed some ways that more modern games work with those constraints, although I'll wait to talk about that until we hit a more relevant chapter.</p>
<h2>The Sales Pitch</h2>
<p>I'll be honest, I don't much care for Chapter 1.3 ("Why Put Emotion Into Games?"), but that's mostly because it's a sales pitch, and I'm not here for the sales pitch. I've already bought into the idea of building richer emotional experiences in games. Furthermore, I think this is the section that may have been made the most obsolete in the past 20 years, because we now have a wide body of work to draw on that proves there is a meaningful audience for games with resonant emotional beats. From my vague memory, it definitely seemed much less of a given back in the day, though. Most games that were acclaimed for their narrative were games unfamiliar to US audiences, such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon:_Remix_RPG_Adventure"><i>Moon</i></a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_Attorney"><i>Ace Attorney</i></a>. Nowadays, we have AAA games like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man_(Insomniac_Games_series)">Insomniac's <i>Spider-Man</i></a> series, which are heavily regarded for the stories they're built around, and are incredibly successful.</p>
<p>However, I <i>do</i> want to pick on Freeman for one little thing, mostly because I think it helps to illustrate some of the author perspective here.
<blockquote>"But gamers complained that the story [of <i>Metal Gear Solid II</i> was unengaging--even trite and silly... And how much damage was done to the brand? How much will the next sequel <i>not</i> make because of the lessened passion U.S. game players felt for <i>Metal Gear Solid II</i>? (Freeman, Chapter 1.3)</blockquote>
I get that it's an attempt to tie concrete numbers to things. And yeah, I have my own issues with Hideo "you will be ashamed of your words & deeds" Kojima. But c'mon now. Making the story of this series <i>less</i> trite and silly would actually be fundamentally damaging to the brand, and probably do an even worse number on sales--the memetic silliness of the story crossed with its commentary on geopolitics is what makes it fundamentally compelling to most of its fans.
Which is an important reminder, going through the book: while Freeman's perspective is that games need these emotioneering techniques in order to engage the player and be more appealing, it's key to remember that <b>they need to be applied in pursuit of the game's core themes/atmosphere/approach</b>. Indeed, the <i>Metal Gear</i> games are prominently known for using novel and sometimes obtuse gameplay mechanics in order to communicate narrative in idiosyncratic ways. You can make a game emotionally resonant, but true resonance doesn't come without a stronger purpose behind it.</p>
<h2>The Trouble With Screenwriters</h2>
<p>Wrapping this post up is Chapter 1.4, where we get a slight detour to talk about the specific challenges that games writing poses to screenwriters (the writing culture that David Freeman is most familiar with). There's a few more sections to Chapter 1, but we'll cover those in another post, and then start moving on to the actual Emotioneering™ techniques after that. Here, the book addresses the question, "Why isn't simply hiring a screenwriter--even a famous or a talented one--always the 'magic pill' that games need?" (Freeman, Chapter 1.4) It's still part of the sales pitch, but what makes this bit interesting to me is that it sheds light on the unique perspective of comparing and contrasting two types of writing.</p>
<p>The first major category called out is <b>linearity</b>: while (most) film and TV can rely on a linear progression to tell a story, calibrate tension, establish moods, and draw viewers in, games are often unbound by these constraints in one or more ways. I'm currently playing <i>Dragon Age: Origins</i>, a game with several major storylines that can be played through in whatever sequence you want--or even sometimes in parallel, with you hopping back and forth between some of them. On top of that, the linearity of story exists not just in chronology, but in the way that players interact with the story--Freeman points out the varying ways that players interact with the game <i>Grand Theft Auto III</i> as an example, and there's many others in modern game design. The "nice/mean" playthroughs of Bioware-style RPGs (e.g., Open Hand/Closed Fist, Paragon/Renegade, and so on) represent radically differing takes on a game's themes and the way players interact with a world.</p>
<p>Next up is a very interesting, subtle point: while screenwriters might have notions of getting a player to <b>inhabit a role</b>, that's a <i>big ask</i> from a player perspective, and absent the presence of techniques to get the player directly invested in playing the role of the main character, they're likely to bulldoze over any work done by the writers, in favor of substituting a simplistic role onto the character. In my experience, the most successful games at doing this are ones that use small, gradual reinforcement. One of the reasons that <i>Life is Strange: True Colors</i> engaged me so thoroughly is that it gave me gradual invitations to interact with people, places, and things in the town of Haven, each time revealing a bit of main character Alex's perspective and thoughts. It's a very different kind of writing from the more directed tactics employed in screenwriting.</p>
<p>There's a few more miscellaneous points here, about <b>dialogue</b> (games dialogue can't usually afford to be lengthy and detailed) and screenwriters wanting to use <b>cinematics</b> (not to be relied on in games, because they pull players out of the game). But what really gets the next chunk of description is a heading about <b>the games-writing process</b>. Like TV writing (and some film writing), it's a group process, but games need a large variety of things, from overall narrative to plot-important dialogue to incidental NPC dialogue to audiologs/lore snippet text. On top of that, the book points out that there's a sort of programming logic to games writing: like some gamebooks (e.g. <i>Lone Wolf</i> and others) or the well-explored ground of dating sims, player choices can have tremendous impact on things that <i>aren't</i> plot, such as the intensity of character reactions.</p>
<p>This is all actually really good stuff to chew through, and while writers have been adapting to these challenges, these are fundamental things that narrative design always needs to keep in mind. There are processes being developed in the games world to have clear tools for these challenges, but anyone coming to games from another writing background still has to deal with them.</p>
<p>Then the book goes into a weird tangent about why the author doesn't like hiring comic-book writers (which is odd; I wasn't aware that comic-book writers were particularly considered for games writing, back in the day, and I suspect this is more of a personal bugbear of his), and wraps things up. It's the first substantial section of the book, and though I disagree with the pat method of "use these 17 easy points to identify the struggles of a screenwriter you're bringing onto a project", I think there's some important abstract topics here.</p>
<h2>Next Time...</h2>
<p>And with that, the first segment of this retrospective is done. We'll finish the introductory chapter in <a href="https://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2023/08/creating-emotion-in-games-part-2.html">the next post</a>, which hits topics like:</p>
<ul>
<li>Why letting game designers do the writing can be a problem</li>
<li>The importance of the term "Emotioneering™"</li>
<li>Other miscellaneous things</li>
</ul>
<p>After that, we'll start diving into the meat of the book, the 32 Types of Emotioneering™ Techniques.</p>Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-41600387585524667872022-08-27T08:00:00.001-05:002022-08-27T08:00:00.160-05:00Blood At the Witching HourThe day was ticking onwards. I had been slowly working to earn the trust of the villagers, working to seem helpful while I divulged information that I had supposedly gleaned from my abilities. Of course, I was actually a Demon who had been slowly killing them off, one at a time, and in actuality I was scrambling to make sure my cover story was accurate. Unfortunately, my alleged ability only gave me information about people who were sitting next to me, and I had unluckily been seated near my devoted minion, who I was forced to implicate early in the game. Even worse, unbeknownst to me, a mastermind had been piecing together information to great effect...soon after, I was executed by the town, and they celebrated victory.
While it wasn't a fully unfamiliar experience, my first game of <i>Blood on the Clocktower</i> contained some intriguing surprises.
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<h2>Introducing Yet Another Werewolf Game</h2>
I was originally pretty skeptical of <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/240980/blood-clocktower">Blood on the Clocktower</a>, a much-vaunted game in the Werewolf family. If you're not familiar with Werewolf/Mafia, it's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game)">a game of deception and group paranoia</a> where a group of players try to ferret out and execute the traitor among them before they're all killed off. Into this landscape came <i>Blood</i>, to great acclaim. The reviews I'd seen focused on points like "gives dead players something to do" or "has powers that give out bits of information so that you have something to go off of", and, well...I wasn't impressed by that idea.
The problem was, none of that was new or fresh to me. I've played plenty of excellent Werewolf-style games, whether it was the phenomenal <a href="https://www.level99store.com/products/witch-hunt">Witch Hunt</a> or another, wilder forum Mafia variant. Roles that could appear on good or evil players, unique forms of information-gathering, mechanical puzzles that expressed themselves through the frame of social deduction, and incredibly potent abilities that dead players on both the good and evil sides had access to. When I finally got to play <i>Blood</i>, my suspicions were definitely confirmed: these strengths had been greatly oversold.
But, I discovered some fascinating experiences in exchange.
<h2>What Sets Blood Apart</h2>
For reasons I don't fully understand (although I have my hypotheses), the most interesting features of <i>Blood on the Clocktower</i> don't get talked about at all. There's changes that the game makes which turn the dynamic of a Werewolf game into something substantially different. There's two I can immedialy think of, which surprised me by changing the way I had to evaluate the game--especially when I started the game with the traitor role!
<ul>
<li>Dead players still get one last vote, but more importantly, <i>dead players still get to talk</i>, which is something I have legitimately not seen in this style of game. In fact, allowing dead players any form of communication tends to be heavily restricted to very specific powers in other Werewolf games.</li>
<li>Many roles have decision points which give the moderator options for resolution. The idea that <i>Blood</i> empowers its narrator/moderator to be a "gamemaster" is something that pops up frequently in discussion--but this is the specific mechanic which actually enables it.</li>
</ul>
The change to the way dead players operate was an immense shock to me, because, well, one of the traditional strategies in Werewolf is for the traitor player(s) to kill off insightful players before they can gather too much information about a situation/put things together. I haven't made up my mind how I feel about this change, but it's absolutely a shift in the dynamic of the game. On a mechanical level, it means that the Demon's kills are more of a timer/score. They do reduce the voting power of the town by a portion, but they also no longer prevent the passing-around of information, so the only way they have mechanical effect is that players with continuing abilities are better targets, since they can still gather more information. Anyone who already had information (such as roles that get all their information at the start of the game) is barely impacted. From a user-experience standpoint, though, the change is colossal: not only do you not have the frustration of being unable to speak, but you get to speculate about the game openly in a useful way, without worrying about attracting negative attention.
The "gamemaster" concept in <i>Blood</i> is even more unorthodox, though! In other versions of Werewolf games, all roles are deterministic. If there are decisions to be randomized, they are made at the start of the game, almost always. Roles follow predictable patterns: a Gambler has immunity on odd-numbered or even-numbered nights, the last surviving Musketeer gets to kill someone the moment that the other members of their trio are dead, and so on. The moderator doesn't make decisions, they're around to make the game move smoothly. They're an impartial referee. In <i>Blood</i>, there's a transition similar to the change that happened in role-playing games: the role of the referee began to transition to the role of an administrator with an agenda. In <i>Blood</i>, the agenda is "make the game go to the final day, if possible". What's interesting is that their tools are still limited: they get latitude with some roles, but they don't get the freedom to break the rules that were set at the start of the game--transparency is preserved.
<h2>Games As Experience</h2>
Positioning the moderator as a "Storyteller" means that <i>Blood</i> takes on a different approach in terms of what it is, and what it invites its players to do. Because the moderator shows partiality, with the intent of keeping the game continuously balanced, the game can be disappointing for people who come with a competitive mindset. After all, if doing well just gets the moderator to help the other team, it feels bad to play well. However, that's not the only reason to play a game, and this is where <i>Blood on the Clocktower</i> shines.
The core experience of Werewolf games has always been an ongoing narrative. We see this phenomenon even in the recent digital playspace of <i><a href="https://www.innersloth.com/games/among-us/">Among Us</a></i>, where friend groups get on and laugh, backstab, and goof around. It's the sort of game that gets better when you take it a bit less seriously, because it's a sort of dynamic narrative. You have "character dynamics" between players, you have the suspense of not knowing who the villains are, you have the spectacle of sudden revelations of information, and you even have the tension of knowing things that others don't, as that irony plays out over the course of the game.
It's a reminder that games are an experience, and games tell stories. The story of a game is a combination of the design of the rules and the culture of play that the players approach it with: many games require some level of intentional play and tension, but the experience is sometimes most rewarding when everyone is more interested in exploring the game than in optimizing their chances of victory. (There is a different joy and interest found in that optimization, but that's a topic for another day.) It's about feeling like there's puzzles to unravel, and that you're part of an exciting narrative, and <i>Blood on the Clocktower</i> seeks out a middle ground: more freedom than in most games, but more restriction than even the most structured role-playing games.
It's a game that's meant to be memorable, and on that point, I think it delivers.Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-12576960131960271772019-09-03T12:00:00.000-05:002019-09-03T12:00:02.613-05:00Card Counterplay: Interacting With Your OpponentI get post ideas from some interesting places. Case in point, I was watching <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hksjN3eQlE">a gameplay video from Hearthstone streamer Firebat</a>, which opened with some spicy takes on card design. You don't have to watch the video before you read this post (although Firebat is always fun to watch); I'll lay it out for you here. In a nutshell, he talked about cards that didn't allow for interaction, and how they reduce the game to hoping that you draw into your powerhouse cards that can't be countered. It's tied to a larger idea about "interactive cards" in card games, and while I think he has a point, hearing that bit got me thinking about where, exactly, I disagreed with him, and what you can learn about card games from it.<a name='more'></a><br />
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<h2>What is "Interactivity", Really?</h2>When I see the idea of "interactivity" thrown around in gaming circles, it seems to boil down to one main idea: <b>"if my opponent does something, I want to be able to do something about it"</b>. At its core, this is a deeply emotional desire. When bad things (your opponent having a strong play in a game) happen, you want to feel like you have some control over the situation, or that you had control over the situation at some point. The more obvious that control, the better. This can manifest in different ways; in Firebat's main game Hearthstone, the creatures that your opponent plays can be attacked by your creatures, or you can play "spell" cards to get rid of them or otherwise affect them. On the other end of the interference scale, <i>Magic: the Gathering</i> lets you play cards even during your opponent's turn, spending your resources to "counter" or destroy their cards. In a game like Chess, all of your pieces have the ability to interact with your opponent by capturing your opponent's pieces, but only if you've set them up or lured your opponent's pieces into the reach of your pieces.<br />
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This is where the idea of "counterplay" steps in. This term means many different things to different people, but they intersect on an idea of "when my opponent does something, I should have access to something that stops it". You see a lot of debate over when someone should be able to use "counterplay", what kind of difficulty to gate it behind, and so on, but I'm mostly interested in the card game context here, because of the video. Firebat talks about wanting cards with "counterplay", cards that you can answer with other cards, because that makes the game less luck-dependent. In his view, a card you can't interact with is bad, because games are decided by whether or not you draw the card. And he's right, but I don't think his solution actually solves anything. Now, instead of hoping your opponent doesn't draw their power card, you're hoping that you can draw into your counter card, and that your opponent draws into their power card. (Because if you draw into your counter card and your opponent never draws their power card, you've wasted that card draw.) It's not any less luck-dependent, it just feels like it.<br />
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I think that's because it doesn't solve the fundamental issue here. Even though powerful "uninteractive" cards draw attention, they don't exist in a vacuum within the game. You don't just draw cards and immediately play them; there's often a substantial number of choices you make outside that part of the game. This is where things start to get interesting, because I don't believe that counterplay requires special dedicated "<a href="https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/card-preview/why-we-make-hate-cards-2017-09-08">hate cards</a>" (i.e., cards that are designed to counteract a specific strategy or deck). Counterplay can be designed directly into the game itself.<br />
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<h2>Counterplay With Skill</h2>A number of weeks back, I <a href="https://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2019/06/do-you-have-skills.html">wrote a post talking about skill in games</a>, and I think the idea of skill is very relevant to counterplay. I think that <strong>counterplay should be achieved through skill within the game</strong>. It requires more subtle design, and it requires an investment in the core mechanics of the game. So, what are the skills that we generally expect to be tested in a card game? What are the competencies that we look for?<br />
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<ul><ol>Understanding risk: knowing the odds of drawing different cards, and investing into the board state based on the odds of your draws</ol><ol>Finding synergies: understanding how discrete card abilities can work together with one another</ol><ol>Thinking ahead: predicting the possible plays available to our opponent, and not giving your opponent good windows to play their strongest cards</ol></ul><br />
To me, there's one skill that goes above and beyond all of these, however, and that's the skill of <b>commitment</b>. You need to know when to commit the resources at your disposal, and how strongly to commit them. Technically, this isn't very different from what happens in most games! On some level, strategic games can be boiled down to "figure out how and where to commit resources"...but I think card games tend to make it very explicit and central. It feels natural because we're used to getting things done by playing cards--a card is a resource that gets things done. In most card games, you look to your cards to figure out how well you're doing in the game, and in a lot of CCGs, particularly, the options in your hand are your biggest barometer of how well you're doing.<br />
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So what's commitment, and how can it provide for skillful play? In my mind, commitment relates to the potential options you have in a game. You can play cards at different times, for different purposes, in different board states. However, once a card is played, it can't be taken back, and choosing one option locks you out of choosing other options. So, <strong>commitment is when you collapse potential options into a choice that you can't take back</strong>, and that commitment has consequences. Once you've decided to drop your powerful card on the table, no takebacks, although you may question your decision heavily.<br />
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<h2>The Dance of Commitment</h2>Commitment is where the exchange between players happens. You commit a resource, your opponent commits a resource, and back and forth you go until one of you makes a mistake. One of you commits the wrong resource, or makes an assumption about your opponent that isn't accurate, and your opponent pounces. It's a juicy dynamic in competition, and it's the thing I love the most--so maybe I'm a little biased. Back to the original topic, how do you make commitment interesting? Personally, I think it has to do with how complex your commitment decisions are, because the simpler those decisions are, the harder it is to make mistakes, particularly subtle mistakes.<br />
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In <i>Hearthstone</i>, you get "mana" resources every turn, you can only play during your turn, and you play "minions" that stay in play on a single board, and "spells" that can affect the board or your deck of cards. Most of your decisions boil down to what turn to play cards on, and for many cards, the answer is "the first turn that you can", because you're trying to gain advantage on the board as much as possible. It's fairly one-dimensional, because the main important dimension is "timing", and on a given turn, there's very few instances where timing matters, with the exception of a few standout turns.<br />
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If you scale up to <i>Magic</i>, it's mostly the same, but with one important difference: now, you can interrupt your opponent's turn by playing an "instant", a special card that can be played out of turn. Suddenly, the "timing" dimension has become incredibly complicated and involved, and the windows where it's acceptable to play cards grow less obvious. Furthermore, there's a card type called "planeswalker" that works almost like a secondary "player" under your control: they don't (normally) affect the board like your creatures do, and they have health like you do. When a planeswalker is out on the board, that's an additional place to commit resources.<br />
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Back in boardgame land, it gets even more involved; even with a simpler game like <i>RISK</i>, the question of where to commit your armies can become incredibly complex very quickly, especially at the start of the game. Once you introduce some sort of map, commitment decisions become significantly more difficult!<br />
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And that's all core to the game. Once you figure out what the core "commitment" question of your game is, you can make sure it's interesting in a large number of situations, before you start making the unique rules on cards and other game elements. In a card game, the players are constantly trying to make the most efficient, decision-light game possible, so it's on the designer to make sure that you're not relying exclusively on the cards to have a game with interesting decisions--because then, the game becomes only as interesting as the cards you're lucky enough to draw.Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-33145890285822194332019-08-13T11:22:00.000-05:002019-08-13T11:22:03.815-05:00Loops, Journeys, and Single-Player GamingSo, I've been thinking lately about "loops" in gaming. Not in terms of <a href="https://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2015/03/five-commandments-of-intuitive-game.html#more">the "core loop" of a game</a>, but in another sense. I've been looking at my gameplay habits, thinking about what it means to "complete" a game, thinking about my large backlog of games that I own but haven't finished, and thinking about where the bulk of my playtime goes. I pour a lot of hours into multiplayer games. <em>A lot of hours.</em> Hundreds of hours. It's got me thinking about how I spend my time, and about what I get out of that time. So, I've been thinking lately about "loops" in gaming.<a name='more'></a><br />
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<h2>Getting in the Loop</h2>Loops are about what it means to "play through the game". You start things out, you go through ups and downs, and eventually you wrap things up. In a fantasy roleplaying game, the "loop" starts when you create a new character, keeps going as you level your character up, facing enemies and challenges, and ends when you defeat the final boss and get an ending to the game. In a puzzle game, the "loop" starts when you first open the game, and it ends when you finish the final puzzle before the ending. At this point, you have the opportunity to replay the game, because you've closed the loop. It's a clean narrative arc.<br />
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In a multiplayer game, a single "loop" is pretty short. In fact, a single match of a multiplayer game is a complete experience, so I'm counting it as a loop. In a single match, you have a starting point, some sort of buildup, one or more pivotal, dramatic moments and reversals of fortune, and a conclusion. They might look different for different games, but it's all there, the basic elements of a story. These loops take mere minutes, with an occasional game offering loops that approach or exceed a single hour in duration. In a game of <i>Overwatch</i>, a single loop can take 5 minutes! These loops are so short that you frequently feel like you want to immediately re-enter another loop, and some games helpfully facilitate this, e.g., how <i>Overwatch</i> helpfully automatically queues you into a follow-up game shortly after your current game concludes.<br />
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Here's the thing about short loops: when you play a lot of loops in a row, they start to blur together. Instead of remembering each one in careful detail, most people will extract highlights of each loop, and then fill in the rest. Because you've played the loop so many times, you have a feeling for how the game usually goes, sometimes down to the exact timings! It's a structure that you build around, because the better you understand the structure, the clearer the game is. In competition, it's an advantage to be able to chunk processes of the game, so that you aren't directly processing all of the data being thrown at you. So you blur the loops together, although sometimes you talk about those highlights later--but the more you play, the harder it is to remember just when those highlights happened. Try it sometime: spin up your favorite multiplayer game, get into it, play a bunch of rounds, and then write down the highlights you remember. How specific can you get? If there's a replay system, you can even try to see how right you got it.<br />
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<h2>Making the Journey</h2>Things are different in many single-player games. A loop might be 5 hours, 12 hours, or even a whopping <a href="https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=10270">51 hours for a basic playthrough of <i>The Witcher 3</i></a>, but all of these times are still usually long enough that you have to take more than one session of play to finish them. ...usually. Look, I'm going to count those 8-hour marathon sessions as ill-advised anomalies. And, while devotees of a long game might play it through three, four, five, or more times, it still takes time, and most people won't immediately rush to replay a game right after they beat it. All of these small differences add up to big differences. We don't experience these single-player games in the same way.<br />
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Whenever I beat a "long loop" game, I don't usually replay it. And even when I do, I wait before replaying the game. Each loop feels like a fresh experience, and I can pinpoint different beats, remembering the flow of the entire loop in high detail. It also feels like I <em>accomplished</em> something, because it was a complete arc that took a considerable amount of time. In a sense, I feel freed to go and play other things, although maybe that's just me. I think it's a feeling shared by many people, though--that sense of investment builds a sort of importance around the game. When you sink 15 hours into a game to finish the story, you feel like you've completed a journey, and you're done. You might never come back to it. If you're sinking 15 minutes into the arc of a game, that makes you want to play again.<br />
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A key difference between these "long loop" games and the shorter loops of multiplayer games is that "long loop" games are finite. You play it, you beat it, you move on, sometimes you revisit it. Multiplayer games are "endless": you keep playing it until you eventually get tired of it, but there's always a lack of finality. You don't really "beat" the game, ever. Of course, this is an incentive to keep playing the game, which (intentionally or not) serves the interests of the game company, since they can entice more people to buy the game or to invest in cosmetic content within the game. It's harder to get someone to do that for a game they'll play once and then put away. Looking at my own Steam library, out of the five games I've put the most time into, only two have a significant single-player mode (Stellaris and Civilization 5), and even those two are ones I've played multiplayer a large number of times. They're also procedurally-built games that are designed to be played over and over. You have to go all the way down to game #9 (Freedom Force) to find a "long loop" game that you can play through once and beat. Your own collection might look different (because I play a lot of multiplayer), but have a look anyhow, see where you invest your time.<br />
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<h2>What's Wrong With Loops?</h2>Like I said at the start of my post, I've been thinking about how I play games, and where most of my time goes. And the answer is, most of it's spent in short loops, experiences that repeat over and over and over again. They're engaging, but they're also time-filling experiences. I get a lot of momentary fun out of them, but playing yet another round of Mystery Heroes in Overwatch isn't really building anything. Instead of going on a journey, starting somewhere and ending somewhere else, it's more of a hamster wheel of entertainment. Which, in itself, isn't always bad, but I think it <em>is</em> a problem the more you lean into it. Getting stuck in a rut of momentary gameplay means that the games aren't satisfying much of a need for you, even while they take up your time. You're building a monotony of experience for yourself, and turning games into a way to burn time, instead of meaningfully engaging them.<br />
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However, it doesn't have to be that way, even with multiplayer games. You can still have a journey in a multiplayer game, one that forms a very long loop. Most multiplayer games have a competitive mode, and this is where the long loop begins to kick in. You find that all of those short loops are actually steps in a much longer journey--sometimes the journey of a lifetime. Through dedication, commitment, practice, and a conscious attention to effort, you can improve your skill in a game, accomplishing things you thought were impossible. However, while you'll naturally accrue small gains in skill over time, substantial growth requires intention and discipline. In order to get something out of that journey of self-improvement and competition, you have to be putting something in and engaging the game. Until that point, you're mostly just diverting yourself.<br />
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It's also worth keeping in mind that these journeys can be, well, <em>journeys</em> that last a very long time. They'll ask you to commit to them. If you're not up to it, there's nothing wrong with dropping a game for a while instead of committing it, especially because it'll free up time for you to pursue other journeys. Maybe journeys that you can knock out in 20 hours or less. At the end of the day, you can figure out for yourself what to do. Just consider the habits you have. Ask yourself why you do what you do. A little thinking never hurt anyone.Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-75715253012660725552019-07-26T17:00:00.000-05:002019-07-26T18:49:36.671-05:00Origins 2019 Recap: Roleplaying Games EditionWell, it's just about a full month later, but I'm finally getting the second half of my Origins 2019 recap online! While I got to demo a few boardgames, where the core of my time went was the <a href="https://www.indiegamesondemand.org">Games on Demand</a> room, where I played a potpourri of tabletop RPGs for hours. If you're unfamiliar with the event, it features a large number of GMs and facilitators who run various tabletop RPGs that they want to see played. Players sign up, show up for a slot, and pick a game off of a menu offered by the GMs. It's a great way to try out some games you've heard of, but never gotten to the table, and I took full advantage of that. From <i>Inception</i>-esque therapy to a zombie drama that felt straight out of <i>The Walking Dead</i>, here's the adventures I had at this Origins...<a name='more'></a><br />
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<h2>Thursday</h2><h3>One Child's Heart</h3><strong>Gamemaster:</strong> Camdon Wright<br />
<strong>Character:</strong> Dr. Sid Moran, therapist (he/him)<br />
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<i><a href="http://www.camdon.com/one-childs-heart/">One Child's Heart</a></i> was the one game I played on Thursday, as things began winding up. (This isn't counting the improv games that Karen Twelves and Jason Morningstar ran after the kickoff meeting on Wednesday night. Those were fun, too!) Ever since hearing about it, I'd been intrigued by the premise: a team of professionals using memory-entry technology to help troubled children recontextualize the memories at the root of their present trauma. And it was a very unique experience. The game mechanics on the player's end were fairly light and a bit chaotic, but where the game really shone through was in the structure of the session. We progressively stepped through memories across the child's timeline, and each memory unfolded a new detail about his issues and trauma, how themes and motifs appeared over time. <br />
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It was highly directed even while we had freedom--the freedom wasn't in our ability to take action, but in our ability to find ways to connect with the child. While I didn't necessarily feel strongly connected to the therapist I was playing (although he took the time to comfort a fellow teammate who kept botching attempts to connect with the child), there were amazing moments of connection to the patient, as we toured their memories and came to an understanding of who they were. <em>That</em> was wondrous.<br />
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<h2>Friday</h2><h3>Swords Without Master</h3><strong>Gamemaster:</strong> Me!!<br />
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I ran <i><a href="https://www.worldswithoutmaster.com/swords-without-master">Swords Without Master</a></i> as my first slot of the day, and as always, it was an absolute blast. We had a bunch of different characters, including a beast-riding Rogue, a master of the winds, and a pirate captain! The story unfolded with a great elemental titan menacing the countryside, and it eventually led to a climactic confrontation against an evil wizard who raised the armies of the dead against the Rogues! In a particularly memorable moment, the pirate's companion was killed and then raised as a zombie later.<br />
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I love <i>Swords</i>. Every time, it seems to produce a magical story, and once people lean into the spirit of the game, they have an immense amount of fun, which I love seeing. All of the players were accustomed to more typical flows of play, and I loved exposing them to something new while also letting them craft epic battle scenes. (One of these days, I'll write up a post about how and why Swords works well for me...)<br />
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<h3>Dungeon World</h3><strong>Gamemaster:</strong> Also me!!<br />
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My second game for <i>Games on Demand</i> was a bit of a comfort pick, that being <i><a href="https://dungeon-world.com">Dungeon World</a></i>. I decided to write up my own scenario, a sort of reverse Indiana Jones where the party was being hired to retrieve precious relics that were stolen from the temple of a dead god. It was fun to write things up, and I think the players generally enjoyed it. I cooked up a bunch of questions that I cut out and laid out on strips of paper, asking each player to pick one to answer, just to tie them into the scenario. It went alright.<br />
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<i>Dungeon World</i>, it turns out, isn't really a game that clicks well with me, mostly because I like other PbtA games better, and I felt like it drew players who were more accustomed to D&D action. It was still fun, don't get me wrong, I just had a harder time coming up with interesting moves from the GM side, maybe because I have a limited view of the fantasy genre. I've played plenty of it, but I just like other games better.<br />
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<h3>Star-Crossed</h3><strong>Facilitators:</strong> Alex Roberts, Jenn Martin, Steve Segedy<br />
<strong>Character:</strong> Mig, farmworld girl in the big space city (she/her)<br />
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aaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAA okay so <a href="http://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2019/07/my-star-crossed-moments-at-origins-2019.html">I wrote a more substantial blog</a> talking about my experiences with <i><a href="https://bullypulpitgames.com/games/star-crossed/">Star-Crossed</a></i>, so I'll focus more on this specific session. I got to play a tough-as-nails space farmgirl who was hustling and bustling on a cosmopolitan space station when she fell in with a sly space smuggler. What an absolute joy, what an absolute nail-biter. I didn't want to go, he didn't want to stay, but when the blocks fell, our hearts couldn't resist, and we decided to make it work by finding a different space station as our home base.<br />
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<i>Star-Crossed</i> is my new One True Love in gaming. The mechanics are tightly-built, and there's all sorts of clever little bits that drive a growing intimacy between the characters. I found a great deal of giddy joy in finding excuses for my character to unintentionally initiate physical contact (SERIOUSLY THIS IS A GAME ABOUT FINDING WAYS TO BE PRECIOUSLY CUTE). I also found great glee in inserting awkward moments at all the "wrong" moments and cutting scenes short to leave the tension smoldering. Good freaking stuff. Five out of five arrow-impaled hearts.<br />
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<h2>Saturday</h2><h3>Under the Glare of a Vengeful Sky</h3><strong>Gamemaster:</strong> Todd Nicholas<br />
<strong>Character:</strong> Sylvia, young rebellious leader (she/her)<br />
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<i>Under the Glare of a Vengeful Sky</i> is a currently-in-development game from <a href="https://wheeltreepress.wordpress.com">Wheel Tree Press</a> about community-building after an ecological apocalypse. I totally didn't build "Chloe Price, but ten years older" as a character. I don't clearly remember much of the mechanics, other than a looming, slowly-filling cup of water that represented the potential for chaotic environmental devastation. That said, the story we told was still powerful; as I created my character, I was encouraged to mark down the things that defined Sylvia, to think about her history, and to imagine what had transpired since the initial beginning of the ecopocalypse.<br />
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The constraints of the setting were, to my mind, the most interesting part of the game, and the most powerful. Your characters have survived several years of this post-apocalypse, but they're still able to remember, vaguely, what life was like before it. That's a deeply interesting transition to play with, and I loved exploring that, thinking about how my character's past life merged with her present life. Things like her rising to responsibility as a young government leader, or her coping with reminders of the loss of her parents during flooding. I loved seeing my character wrestle with and come to grips with the trauma of total devastation, and she even underwent small bits of transformation.<br />
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<h3>Hearts of Wulin</h3><strong>Gamemaster:</strong> Lowell Francis<br />
<strong>Character:</strong> Perfect Mist, master of the Aspect of the Blind Spider (she/her)<br />
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I've been wanting to actually play <i><a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gauntlet/hearts-of-wulin">Hearts of Wulin</a></i> for quite a while, since I'd backed the Kickstarter! There was deep drama, dramatic martial arts confrontations, and a dark, tragic ending. I loved it. My wulin hero, Perfect Mist, specialized in a strange wire-based style focused around ensnaring her opponents, and she radiated a strange personality of precision and control, masking her desires and wishes. It was a fun concept to embody, and I loved the way the mechanics fed into it.<br />
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Honestly, this is a game that I wish I'd had the ability to explore over multiple sessions. In a single convention slot, it felt like we didn't have time to prod at and explore all of the relationships on my sheet, but I suppose that's to be expected. And I got to play off of my character's desired love (who wound up getting married off to a suitable husband by her father, leaving Perfect Mist to exact chilling revenge), so it worked out fairly well. What I enjoyed the most was twofold: the effective, colorful way of handling combat-as-aesthetics, and the "Inner Turmoil" move, which I actually wound up leaning on and calling for myself as a way to signal when my character was being pushed!<br />
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<h3>Zombie World</h3><strong>Gamemaster:</strong> Mark Diaz Truman<br />
<strong>Character:</strong> Madge, elderly scientist of zombieology (she/her)<br />
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Now, <i><a href="https://www.magpiegames.com/product/zombie-world-full-set/">Zombie World</a></i> is a game I've had loosely on my radar for a while, and I finally got a chance to play it! It. Was. Excellent. I played Madge, a woman in her 60s who'd taken up studying the undead in order to find a cure. When I botched my start-of-session move, my carefully-reinforced pen of zombie test subjects sprung a busted rivet, letting them out...right as the tension started ratcheting up on the farm we were staying at! The entire session started unraveling into chaos and confrontation like a tense season premiere for <i>The Walking Dead</i>, and it worked absolutely beautifully. We learned secrets about characters, different characters stepped up and took decisive action, and Madge laid down a brutal beatdown.<br />
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What surprised me the most was the fluid way that character dynamics worked. The Help/Hinder move seemed absolutely <em>central</em> in this game, and that same mechanic is tied directly into the secrecy mechanic of the game: the more of yourself you reveal, the easier it is to help <strong>or</strong> to hinder your actions. I played my cards really close to my chest, and wound up squeaking out of some tight situations. I also loved how the game interjected a plot element (the zombie pen) which created suspicion and mistrust even at the start of the session, as we built up relationships around it. Also, I love, love, <em>love</em> how the entire setup is based around cards, and how you just deal out random cards to people for character creation. Makes things fast, simple, and textured.<br />
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And as a bonus round, Mark chatted afterwards about MC techniques in <a href="https://rpggeek.com/rpgsystem/17185/powered-apocalypse">Powered by the Apocalypse</a> games, and how to aggressively frame scenes and make strong MC Moves that demand responses and snowball the situation. Absolutely fantastic, he <em>knows his stuff</em>, and my own <a href="https://www.magpiegames.com/masks/">Masks</a> game at home is already benefiting from it.Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-30575393046404583072019-07-10T11:57:00.000-05:002019-07-10T11:57:07.562-05:00My Star-Crossed Moments at Origins 2019The Sunday of <a href="https://www.originsgamefair.com">Origins 2019</a> was winding to a close, and I was making my way through the dealers' hall, seeing what was on sale. There I was, catching up with friends at the <a href="https://bullypulpitgames.com">Bully Pulpit</a> booth, seeing what the company had on offer. And there it was, one last copy of Alex Roberts' <a href="https://bullypulpitgames.com/games/star-crossed/">Star-Crossed</a>. The final copy, almost as if it were destined. I told myself that I wanted to make a sweep of the hall, that I wanted to be sure that there wasn't anything else I wanted to buy at Origins. I made my way through the rest of the hall, but it wasn't long before an unassailable feeling took root in me.<br />
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I knew. Not two minutes after walking away from the booth, I knew. There could be nothing else, there was nothing else. But to explain this, I'm going to have to back up a couple of days...<a name='more'></a><br />
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<h2>Love in the Space Station Fobolex</h2>It was the third <a href="https://www.indiegamesondemand.org">Games on Demand</a> slot, and there was an absolute bounty of good games that I wanted to play in. Of course, there could be only one. As games began filling up, one in particular was gathering a group: a massive event called "Space Station Fobolex". Here's what I knew: it was a bunch of parallel games of Star-Crossed, the game where you play out a relationship through a Jenga tower, based on the RPG <a href="https://dreadthegame.wordpress.com/about-dread-the-game/">Dread</a>. Also it took place on a space station? As I watched the group pile up, I finally made my decision and slipped out the door as they left. What transpired was a night to remember, and one of the most phenomenal game experiences of the entire convention.<br />
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I knew that the game involved a Jenga tower, because it was based on Dread, the horror RPG where your character dies if the tower falls when you try to make a pull. It was obvious to me that, therefore, when the tower fell in this game, the relationship fell apart, with both characters parting ways. Imagine my shock when Alex, pitching the game to the crowd, explained that when the tower falls, "THEY DO IT!" I was very confused, but still curious to see how this all fell together. So I sat down, I got a partner (through a pretty cool pairing process that would be too much of a tangent to discuss here), and we started on character creation, with demoers from Bully Pulpit on hand to walk us through the game as we went along.<br />
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We got nametag stickers with a huge variety of character concepts on them, but my partner and I shopped around and settled on some fairly vanilla ones: a smooth space grifter resupplying at a space station, and a tough farmgirl exploring the urban life aboard the very same space station. We started fleshing these characters out following a very simple outline of prompts, defining the attractive features of our characters (including one that we didn't realize, but that the other character found attractive!) and outlining the key reason why our characters couldn't be together. We decided that the grifter was commitment-averse, while the farmgirl was over-committed and constantly busy, wrapped up in enjoying cosmopolitan life. And then we began to fashion the story.<br />
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I was already intrigued by the setup we'd crafted, by the fact that two-thirds of my character's attractive features were actually defined by my partner, things she didn't realize were attractive. There was a give-and-take element there, a collaboration, and that broke the ice on this relationship dynamic and on the dynamic between the two of us. What I really didn't expect, though, was that a shockingly brilliant set of mechanics began to unfold itself as I read down the character sheet.<br />
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<h2>The Rules of Love</h2>There's this moment when I sit down and dig into a really good game (whether it's roleplaying or otherwise), where I'm overwhelmed by the sense that yes, it truly is a brilliant design. Not because I have low expectations of it, but because I never realized that <em>any</em> game was capable of being that well put-together. You'd think that it would stop surprising me at some point, but the epiphany always seems to come from a fresh angle. It's a sense of delightful discovery where I see what the implications of the rules are, and it all "clicks". Which is strangely apropos for a game about romance.<br />
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It starts with the basic mechanics: players take turns engaging in actions, back and forth. Some actions (doing something, adding a detail to the setting) don't have any specific costs, but other actions (specifically, <strong>revealing something</strong> about yourself or initiating <strong>physical contact</strong> between the characters) ask you to pull a block from the tower. This made sense: crossing the line into developing intimacy causes the tower to get less stable because the characters are getting closer to acting on their mutual attraction. So far, so good, it's a nice emulation. And then came a very simple twist that I didn't see coming: when you end the game, the epilogue depends on how many blocks you pulled. If you pulled a lot of blocks, the ending turns out happy for the couple, and the relationship persists! If you didn't pull a lot of blocks, the relationship fizzles out.<br />
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So, follow this logic.<br />
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<ol><li>To get a happier ending, you need to pull blocks</li>
<li>You can choose how much your character leans into intimacy</li>
<li>The more your character leans into intimacy, the more blocks you pull</li>
<li>The more blocks you pull, the harder it is to keep the tower stable (ending the game immediately)</li>
<li><strong>To get a happier ending, you have to play bold and risky</strong></li>
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That was the flash of brilliance. I suddenly saw, in one moment, the core tension of the game encapsulated. It was a game that pushed you to be risky, but it also visualized that risk for you, showing you an increasingly unsteady tower. And you don't have to push into that, but it'll lower the tension, and therefore lower the chance that the relationship stays. <em>In order for the relationship to stick, you have to invest in it through small moments of growing intimacy.</em> I do not have <em>words</em> for how cleverly multi-dimensional that is. It's true to life while also being dramatic and exciting, and the slow build-up of connection between the characters resonates more than anything.<br />
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As an added bonus? There's an extra little rule that your character can give a short line of dialogue. <em>If</em> you touch the tower while you're delivering the dialogue. That's right: every line of spoken dialogue between characters is fraught with the potential of knocking over the tower. Let me tell you, it's harrowing to hold the tower in your hand as you talk, and the fear of knocking it over drives you to keep dialogue short and sweet, or non-extant! In play, it led to scenes of meaningful looks, awkward silences, cuts to scenic details, anything to avoid that scary direct connection. <em>It was brilliant.</em><br />
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<h2>Tower of Terror</h2>Okay, but what's so scary about the tower falling, anyhow? That, I think, is the brilliant paradox at the core of <i>Star-Crossed</i>: we want the tower to fall, but we also <em>totally don't</em> want the tower to fall, at least not before it's time. But how does that make sense? How can we want these two contradictory things? On the surface, there's aspects of this that are easy to explain. For one, there's a psychological fear of failure--if the tower falls on our watch, it feels like we failed to keep it upright, because the game builds its action around "keep the tower up". There's the framing of pulls as costs: the game tells us that making a pull is paying a price, so we feel that making the tower unstable is a bad thing. There's the legitimate "fail state" in the game--if you haven't pushed the envelope enough, the relationship will fizzle after the couple gets together! All of that adds up to this nagging feeling that you need to play chicken and keep the tower up as long as possible. Some of that's pragmatic, some of it's psychological, but it all adds up.<br />
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And yet we want the tower to fall eventually! That's what we're rooting for, after all. In a sense, it seems like the fictional incentives are at odds with the mechanics! But...it's actually more complicated. Because romance isn't simple, especially not romantic DRAMA. When it comes to these stories, many viewers <em>want</em> to see the relationship drawn out instead of being immediately resolved! While I'd love to see more romance stories that focused on the long-term relationship, a huge appeal of romantic comedies/dramas is that tension of whether that perfectly mismatched couple will <em>actually stick together</em>. We want them to get together in the end...but we also don't want them to do it <em>yet</em>. We want to see the release of that pent-up romantic tension, but it's also so, so <em>delicious</em> to watch it build up, to see them get <em>so close</em> and then shy away, to get frustrated but also excited at the anticipation of them <em>finally figuring it out</em>. It's that paradox of "I want them to get together...but maybe not yet" that drives the energy of a romantic drama!<br />
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I also think there's a profound kernel of real-world truth in this as well. During <i>Star-Crossed</i>, the choice to push forwards, to risk the tower falling, is always in the hands of the players. You could hit a point where you back off, where you stop pushing for moves that make pulls, because you're scared of something flaring up and then fading away. You're scared of failing at the relationship, and there is a safety valve there. You can always walk away. The question "what if it doesn't work out?" can be scarier than the question "but what if it <em>does</em>?" And that, to me, was the genius of the design. Every time you take an action that brings you closer to the other character, you commit to taking that risk, to giving it a try, to taking a leap of faith, because, well, sometimes these things work out.<br />
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"What if it does?" is the scariest question, but it's also the question with the most power, and above all else, <i>Star-Crossed</i> is a beautiful encapsulation of that anxiety but also the relief when it turns out that everything's going to be okay.<br />
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<h2>The Game At the Booth</h2>So what happened, back at Origins? I turned back, thinking on all of this, back to the Bully Pulpit booth. One final copy. I thought of everything that the game had shown me, the sheer brilliance I had witnessed, the power of the romance I'd helped to shape. I thought of the way that we built the tower, pushing the envelope, the way that we spent scene after scene making impossible pulls from the tower, far beyond what anyone expected was possible. Everyone watching was on tenterhooks as they watched our story near its climax, and at the last possible moment, in the final scene, it fell. I thought on this, and I realized--there was no question about it. I'd fallen for this game, and I had to go back.<br />
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I turned, heading back through the hall, my pace picking up as I came within sight of it. Nothing else was on my mind, I'd made my decision. I counted the numbers of the exhibit hall until I got to the 900s row. I saw the booth, I saw the staff. And the game was nowhere in sight. By a delay of mere minutes, it had slipped out of my grasp, and I went on my way with a grim determination not to let the next opportunity pass me by. Which, in its own way, was rather fitting.<br />
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Myself and the game, perfectly <a href="https://bullypulpitgames.com/games/star-crossed/"><i>Star-Crossed</i></a>.Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-87335109700028236372019-06-26T09:02:00.002-05:002019-06-26T09:02:44.757-05:00Origins 2019 Recap: Boardgames EditionThis past weekend, I attended the one and only <a href="https://www.originsgamefair.com">Origins Game Fair</a> and had an absolute blast. It was the first Origins where I well and truly attended a slew of events, as compared with the time I went in 2014, attended a single RPG session at <i>Games on Demand</i>, and sorta browsed around the dealer hall before playing <i>Star Realms</i> with a couple of friends. I was absolutely floored by everything I got to try out, and that's even considering that (judging by other folks I'm hearing from) my "demoing things" record was much lighter than some dedicated enthusiasts' trails! So, let's have a look at what I checked out, now that I've had some time to digest! This post will be about the boardgames I played, and I'll have one up next week about the roleplaying games I played at <a href="https://www.indiegamesondemand.org"><i>Games on Demand</i></a>.<a name='more'></a><br />
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<h2>Wednesday</h2>While this was the "everyone's getting set up" day, I still headed over and got some demos in at one of the gaming halls. The dealers' Exhibit Hall was still setting up, but a few companies had booths set up outside of that. I played <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/276830/sanctum">Sanctum (prototype)</a>, <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/175324/fog-love">Fog of Love</a>, and <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/168230/supershow">The Supershow</a> for the first time ever.<br />
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<strong>Sanctum:</strong> Found this one just by browsing through CGE's massive demo booth. It's a board game inspired by the hack-and-loot gameplay of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_(series)"><i>Diablo</i> video game series</a>. Just like in those <i>Diablo 2</i> sessions you might have played at a LAN party, players race down a track, finding monsters to defeat for loot and portaling back to town to buy new gear and heal up. The most interesting mechanic here was that as you acquire XP, you gain new health and mana tokens that can be spent for various effects like manipulating dice and staving off hits. Overall, the core of the system was coherent and worked pretty well while also feeling pretty light. Everything had a clear, intuitive purpose, so the game didn't feel bogged down by mechanics, which is what I'd want to see in a <i>Diablo</i> game. The one thing I was missing was a hint of some of the higher-level abilities that characters gain access to, and the characters themselves didn't actually have any sort of unique abilities or talent trees, which would be awesome.<br />
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<strong>Fog of Love:</strong> I've heard so much about this game about romantic relationships, so I was happy to actually get to try it out. At its core, it's a cooperative game for two people with a possible traitor mechanic, and where it shines is in being a game about using partial information to deduce things about the other player, which merges perfectly with the theme of feeling your way through a relationship. Players take turns playing decision cards and simultaneously picking one of multiple options. You have certain goals which you're trying to make progress towards with your choices, and your partner is also trying to make progress towards their goals with their choices. If both of you pick the same choice, you get a bonus for being in synergy. In practice, this mechanic was perfect for embodying the feel of working together with a partner to sync up, and I enjoyed the feeling of figuring out which set of choices I could use to set my partner up with. Often, I could give them a list of choices that would predictably benefit me, based on what I had deduced that they wanted.<br />
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<strong>The Supershow:</strong> SRG Universe, the publisher for this game, went pretty all-out for this game inspired by professional wrestling! They had a huge booth, and adorned it with various WWE-esque paraphernalia, including a round bell and a small amount of costuming for the booth volunteers. Someone even had a fake championship belt, so, points for presentation. I was less impressed by the game. The core of the game is that both players are trying to play a sequence of cards--a lead, a follow-up, and a finisher. Each card is a type of move (grapple, strike, submission), which acts like a suit, and many cards act as <a href="https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Counter">counterspells</a> for one of those types of moves. So if I play a Strike, you might be able to play a Grapple that counters that Strike and then goes into play for me. Having cards from the various move types sometimes lets you activate bonuses on other cards. Pretty basic. Also, instead of alternating turns, both players roll a die that selects one of their character's skill values, and the high roller wins. So...you could theoretically go an entire game without being able to proactively play a card. On top of that, to win the game, you need to play a Finisher <em>and then</em> win a roll-off with your opponent. I wasn't really impressed, but hey, the booth seemed to be pretty popular, so I guess style counts for something.<br />
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<h2>Thursday</h2>This is where my convention experience turned mostly to the tabletop RPGs of <i>Games on Demand</i>, but I did swing by the CGE booth again, and tried out a solo game called <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/273779/under-falling-skies">Under Falling Skies</a>. It's a dice-placement game of deeply difficult choices, where you're trying to juggle priorities as an alien mothership descends upon Earth. Solo games are an area that I've explored a tiny bit, and this one absolutely delivered, because of one simple core mechanic: when you place a die on the player board, you get an effect with a power based on the value of the die. <em>However</em>, there's little alien spaceships swooping down on the city, and whenever you place a die, every spaceship in that column moves towards the city, one space for every pip on the die! So you're constantly playing a balancing game, juggling powerful effects with the movement of spaceships, trying to line up trickshots and manipulating spaceships into the firing zones of your defensive systems. There's a huge variety of "well, I could do this, but it has these effects" puzzling in this game, and I loved that.<br />
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<h2>Friday</h2>While this was also an intensely busy day at <i>Games on Demand</i>, I did have a little bit of time to try out <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/72321/networks">The Networks</a>, which I'd seen in a boardgame store before. The premise intrigued me, so when I saw it in a dealer hall, I jumped straight for it. As I expected, it feels just like a TV Tycoon computer game, but stripped down to not be overwhelming, without sacrificing the gameplay or the feel of the game. From my brief demo, I couldn't determine if it's a game that would hold up in continued play, but what I really did enjoy was the elegant procedure of the game, and the way that everything flowed around. Game components very naturally provided rules, and as cards for my shows progressed around my board (from active shows that declined in popularity to reruns to archived shows), I felt like I was part of a network television cycle. It reminded me that even though having meaningful choices is an important part of games, it's also good to make sure that the flow and play of the game is fun as well. Even if I'm just shuffling cards around, following the procedure of that card-shuffling and watching it unfold also brings a sort of joy into play.<br />
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<h2>Sunday</h2>While I didn't demo any boardgames on Saturday, I was fully free for a portion of time on Sunday, and so I hit a few more games on my way out of Origins. This day featured <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/237182/root">Root</a>, <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2165/pokemon-trading-card-game">the Pokémon TCG</a>, <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/232353/costume-party-assassins">Costume Party Assassins</a>, <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/271064/ascension-skulls-sails">Ascension: Skulls & Sails</a>, and <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/244115/shards-infinity">Shards of Infinity</a>, all brand-new to me. Yeah, even <i>Pokémon</i>!<br />
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<strong>Root:</strong> I have heard <em>so much</em> about this game, and I thoroughly enjoyed <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/170416/vast-crystal-caverns">Vast: the Crystal Caverns</a>, from the same company. There's interesting parallels between the two, most notably the asymmetric gameplay, where each faction has a fundamentally different approach to playing the game. I played the Cat Empire, which seems like it's a very straightforward 4X style of faction, with gameplay that reminded me a lot of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft_(video_game)">Starcraft</a>'s resource economy. Overall, the pieces of the game fit together fairly well, although the demo only took us through two turns. I saw some very interesting gameplay from the other factions (the Eyrie, the moles, and the crows; the latter two were factions from the new expansion), and can definitely confirm: there's all sorts of interesting stuff going on in this game. I'm unsure how it would turn out in the long run, and I've seen complaints that there's serious flaws in the game from a competitive standpoint, but it feels like a game that would be fun to play through, not to master, but to get the hang of the various factions and watch how they interplay.<br />
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<strong>Pokémon, the TCG:</strong> Yep. I've never played, but they had a demo booth open, I'd been curious all week, and it's a good idea to try different foundational games. It's far from my first rodeo when it comes to CCGs, and knowing its longstanding reputation, I was curious to see what it did. I went in expecting something of a Magic clone, but it was <em>immensely</em> different. The mana system worked differently, the creature combat worked differently, the victory conditions were different, the importance of card advantage was different, and all of it had deep, deep implications for the gameplay. I loved the evolution system, despite it introducing an element of draw dependence, because my little 'mons gained more depth than a typical CCG creature (similar to the characters in Decipher's <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2603/lord-rings-trading-card-game">Lord of the Rings TCG</a> and how they normally gained piles of equipment and conditions), and evolving them into more powerful forms just felt <em>cool</em>. I might even drop in and see if I can make it to a pre-release event sometime.<br />
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<strong>Costume Party Assassins:</strong> During college, I played a fascinating little game called <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameversion/321669/english-fourth-edition">Top Secret Spies</a>, where all of the characters in the game were controlled communally by the players--but each player secretly had the identity of one of the characters. You tried to maneuver your character into positions that would help you win, while also moving other characters so that you didn't give up your identity to the other players. <i>Costume Party Assassins</i> is built around the same premise, but instead of maneuvering for points, it's a free-for-all death battle between assassins at a costume party, knocking off characters and narrowing down the field. The rules are fairly simple, I gambled and checkmated my character by losing a die roll, and I think it could be a fun, light game. I'm a little concerned about how light the game is, and how there's not a lot of actionable information going on, but I can see a game with lots of players being really fun, albeit having a bit of a stale endgame once most of the characters have been killed off.<br />
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<strong>Ascension: Skulls & Sails:</strong> I've played plenty of <i>Ascension</i> sets in my day, but there were some unusual tweaks that caught my eye here. There's a board, with ships that you sail around it! These ships let you stockpile a resource called "Crew", which you can use to purchase cards or defeat monsters next to your ship. Instead of a row of cards in the center, the cards are arranged around the sides of a track, and having that extra resource at hand lets you amp up the power of your deck quicker, if you plan ahead and move your ship accordingly. I can't say if it would be fresh enough to overcome some of my gripes with Ascension, and it looks like Mechana's constructs are <em>yet again</em> mega-powerful, but the Lifebound faction seems to have gotten a lot more potent, and playing off of the board does let the designers introduce some new mechanics to the set. Novel, not sure if it has staying power.<br />
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<strong>Shards of Infinity:</strong> More than anything, this game reminded me of <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/147020/star-realms">Star Realms</a>. You're whacking at your opponent's life total, there's four factions with different approaches, there's attackable cards you can play with ongoing effects, and you acquire cards from a central row. However, it feels a lot more polished and differentiated, with a couple of elements that actually add some depth to the game. In this game, each player gets an actual character with two possible unique abilities that will eventually go into their deck. This character can "level up", and when you hit a certain level, you put one of those abilities into your discard pile, and they are <em>potent</em>. You also start with a couple of cards in your deck that get more powerful as you level up, and when your character hits the maximum level, one of those cards gives you infinite damage, acting as a game-winning card. What's neat is that A: this gives you another resource to balance, besides just attack and healing (which are really two sides of the same coin), and B: there's a secondary win condition. I'm deeply interested in this game, and given how inexpensive it is, I may have to snag it for myself!Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-47646121629003142862019-06-04T16:00:00.000-05:002019-06-04T16:00:00.340-05:00Do You Have the Skills?"<em>ALL SKILL</em>" promises the tagline of a high-octane shooter, but what does that even mean? Gamers love to talk about "skill", and which games test it. Unfortunately, what exactly they define as "skill" is one of the murkiest aspects of game discussion, and miscommunications about these definitions sit at the root of heated debates about the evolution of games, particularly when it comes to difficulty and accessibility. What is skill, and how can you think more clearly about the role that skill plays in games?<a name='more'></a><br />
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<h2>What Are Skills?</h2>The Merriam-Webster Dictionary has <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/skill">two interesting definitions of skill</a> for our perusal. They both show us key parts of the skill discourse in gaming, but in different ways.<br />
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<ol><li>the ability to use one's knowledge effectively and readily in execution or performance</li>
<li>dexterity or coordination especially in the execution of learned physical tasks</li>
</ol><br />
The first definition talks about the conversion of knowledge into execution. In the context of a game, this is mostly about effectively making good decisions based on the knowledge that you have, and it's about making those decisions in a timely fashion. These decisions are usually difficult; after all, Sid Meier famously said that "a good game is a series of interesting choices", and choices can't be interesting if they're easy! So, a skilled player is more adept at making those choices, whereas an unskilled player will often be overwhelmed by the game knowledge required and/or the art of converting game knowledge into game actions. Often, games feature several cause-and-effect chains which connect in unpredictable ways, and puzzling out how everything works together is part of learning the game.<br />
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The second definition exposes a small weakness of that Sid Meier definition: <strong>not all games are about decisions</strong>. <em>Guitar Hero</em> and <em>Dance Dance Revolution</em> don't have many decisions, and while there could be some strategic consideration involved in the game of Tag, it usually comes down to a contest of athletics. Whether these sorts of games deserve a different category or not, the second definition clearly applies here: "dexterity or coordination". This appears in games like first-person shooters and fighting games, along with the rhythm games mentioned already. Reflexes and precise movements are examples of the second definition of "skill".<br />
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I suggest my own working definition for "skill", which is <strong>"learned competence in a field"</strong>. It's competence, you have to learn it, and it has a specialized field. You can have cake-baking skill, reaction skill, strategic skill, and all sorts of other skills. <em>The Ludite</em> wrote <a href="https://theludite.com/2016/12/06/how-hard-more-like-hard-how-a-response-to-the-meta/">an interesting article a few years ago</a> that talked about the different types of skills that games test, and it's well worth a read.<br />
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<h2>Skill and Ego</h2>Acquiring skill implies some level of mastery. You gain skill by learning, and that learning brings you to a more powerful understanding of the thing you're learning. It turns out that when people learn, and when they get mastery, they're proud of that mastery. This means that players relish the opportunity to show off that skill, because it makes them feel good to display their mastery. What this adds up to is a simple fact: <strong>the concept of skill, and how games incorporate it, is a deeply emotional topic of discussion</strong>. This also means that discussions surrounding it are often fraught with tension. Games are extolled and derided for the skill they reward, or the lack thereof, and it can even be the prime selling point for a game!<br />
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This emotionality also means that <strong>skill-testing helps to build an emotional connection with the player</strong>. Through the culmination of several activities, repeated over and over until the player is able to succeed at them, the game layers momentary frustrations and excitement into a deeper bond with the player. There's also a stronger motive at play when it comes to skill-testing: it gives players the chance to prove their worth by learning the game and overcoming obstacles. When you conquer an obstacle, you feel your own sense of value increase because of the accomplishment, and that's a particular type of powerful emotional reaction. For a moment, you become a hero in your own internal story.<br />
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There's plenty that could be addressed about the intensity of those obstacles and the pacing of players attempting to overcome them, but at the end of the day, that's the most fundamental truth: games focused on skill are about putting obstacles in front of players. They're tests, and once players pass those tests, they feel proud and heroic in some way.<br />
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<h2>What to Test?</h2>Since skills are one of the primary emotional connections that many players have with a game, you have to carefully choose what kinds of skills you want players to cultivate. This is an area where expectations hang over the entire topic. Name a genre, and you'll find that its most devoted players frequently expect a specific set of skills. Many MOBA players expect <a href="http://www.team-dignitas.net/articles/blogs/League-of-Legends/1816/League-of-Legends-Orb-Walking">orbwalking</a>, fighting game players expect <a href="https://streetfighter.fandom.com/wiki/Inputs">precise joystick motions</a> like the "quarter circle", the "half circle", the "shoryuken" motion, and "charge motions", first-person shooter players look for tricks like <a href="https://wiki.sourceruns.org/wiki/Bunnyhopping">bunny-hopping</a> and <a href="https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/Rocket_Jump">rocket-jumping</a>, Magic players expect risk management and deckbuilding (along with intensive number-crunching), and so on. Discuss the idea of removing these from a game of that genre, and you'll generally meet strong opposition from die-hard fans. They're identifying marks of the genre, to them.<br />
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I think this points to the foundational role of specific skill-testing in game design: because skill-testing is about emotional connection, the skills you choose to test create the palette for your audience, and they anchor your player. "Oh, it's one of <em>these</em> games." The genre you place a game in creates expectations, and the skills you test reinforce those expectations. For example, when I play the board game <i>Pandemic</i>, I'll usually step in and remove the rule that requires players to keep their cards secret. Since players are always explicitly allowed to talk about their cards, the rule turns into a test of players' memorization skill, which interferes with my expectations for <i>Pandemic</i> as a strategic game built around making decisions based on known information. However, this isn't the same as the idea that genres are ironclad and incapable of change! Sure, you might look at fighting-game players who throw a fit at a game that removes quarter circle and dragon punch motions, because it's "not a real fighter", and conclude that you just shouldn't change some things. On the other hand, you might decide that you're going to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1K_7Fup7n0">test rhythm game skills in a roguelike game</a> and create a smash hit!<br />
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And everyone has preferences. I prefer my shooters and fighting games to be more focused on tactical decisions over mechanical skill, which pushes me away from technical games in the genre (i.e., most of them) and towards games that reward awareness of the game and in-the-moment decision making (e.g., <a href="https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/">Overwatch</a> or <a href="http://www.fantasystrike.com">Fantasy Strike</a>. To me, having to also accumulate mechanical skill puts barriers in front of my ability to play the actual game, extending my tutorial to a lengthy period of time. That said, I'm not the only audience out there, and I know, for example, that there's players out there who won't even bother with the multiplayer of a fighting game, choosing instead to focus on combo modes and single-player arcade modes. Know who you're designing for, and let that inform the choice of the skills you want to test. Don't be afraid to change something that seems fundamental to the genre, but know why you're doing it and who you're trying to get the attention of.<br />
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Most importantly, don't think of games as "high skill" versus "low skill", because the issue is so, so much more complicated than that. When you talk about games in that way, you flatten the discourse and stifle not only your own understanding, but the understanding of others. This is a philosophy I'll come back to again and again: <strong>put careful thought into your discussion</strong> and avoid flippant perspectives. And that, in itself, is a very useful skill.Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-68506095649148580422019-02-05T18:00:00.000-06:002019-05-24T20:06:21.620-05:00Puzzled: the Design of Conundrums and PuzzlesI've been thinking about puzzles lately. It's partly because I recently finished participating in this year's <a href="http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/">MIT Mystery Hunt</a>, partly because I'm working on puzzles for the <a href="https://galacticpuzzlehunt.com">Galactic Puzzle Hunt</a>, and I've been pondering the unique experience that puzzles provide, compared to tabletop RPGs and boardgames. There's an interesting satisfaction that comes from puzzles, but it can also be at odds with some of the ways that we engage in other types of play.<a name='more'></a><br />
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<h2>The Process of Puzzling</h2>I unpacked a bit of what solving a puzzle is like <a href="https://twitter.com/curubethion/status/1087378661920124936">on my Twitter account</a>, but I'll requote it here for convenience.<br />
<blockquote><i>Picture that you receive enigmatic advice from a wizard, who is attempting to guide you to a great treasure. But she refuses to tell it to you straight, because that would ruin the game. Because it is a game, and a trial. She sends you a list of names, with no instruction. You furrow your brow and peruse them in confusion, until you realize that these are all the first names of great skalds who headlined the kingdom's Yule Fest! Great Scott! You fill in the last names of the skalds, and then you're stymied again, until you glance at the way that the final letters of each name seem to be very deliberately arranged..."Berrec" ends with a C, "Donnal" ends with an L...C-L-Y-M-S-T...my word, the Caves of Clymst! That's it! And there's a moment of immense satisfaction there, because you glimpsed the train of thought that the wizard was trying to lead you on, and you went from confusion to complete understanding. And that's what a puzzle hunt is. A whole bunch of those. It's a trial, and a game.</i></blockquote>That all probably sounds a bit opaque and ornery, so let me break it down a bit. In a puzzle hunt, you're solving puzzles where the instructions themselves are somewhat cryptic. All that you know is that there's an expected format for your answer, and that everything in the puzzle was done with intention. From there, you're trying to discern the intention of the puzzler. However, and this is the real trick of a puzzle, these are never simple affairs, and many of these puzzles involve going through multiple steps of pattern recognition and data identification. In all honesty, it just doesn't seem fair, and that's because puzzle writers don't play fair.<br />
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They're playing to lose.<br />
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When you solve a puzzle, what you're really doing is following a trail that was laid down very carefully by the author. Every stage of a puzzle is carefully crafted to lead you directly to the next stage; there's usually a really obvious first step, which you then have to interpret once you have all the data at hand, usually leading to an "aha" moment, which then leads to some further work, eventually yielding the answer. There's sometimes multiple levels of the "aha" moment. For example, check out a puzzle from the MIT Mystery Hunt, <a href="http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2019/puzzle/ore_aft.html">Ore Aft</a>. It takes a bit of time to puzzle through, so they've also <a href="http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2019/solution/ore_aft.html">provided a walkthrough of the solution</a>. Every major step of the puzzle is self-contained to a degree, and you hit a point of not knowing what the next step is, until you have an epiphany that gives you enough understanding to advance.<br />
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These are very, very deliberately-crafted steps.<br />
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<h2>The Railroad of Delights</h2>The design of puzzles reminds me of something found in tabletop RPGs: the stigma of the railroading game-master. In a "railroaded" RPG, players have no actual option of choice during the game. Whatever actions they take, they encounter the same obstacles, the same plot developments, the same ending. And, while I strongly chafe at this sort of setup, there is one legitimate reason for it: this setup allows the game-master to very finely craft an experience for the players. And <em>that</em> is the core ethos of puzzle design. It's a railroad of delights, as you try and follow the trail that the puzzle author has laid out for you, to the point where accidentally short-circuiting it dampens the joy of solving (although it's very helpful if you're trying to solve competitively vs other teams, <em>ce la vie</em>).<br />
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My thesis is this: <em>if there is more than one way you can solve a puzzle, and more than one solution for the puzzle, it is no longer a puzzle but a problem</em>. Puzzles aren't written to be solved in any way but the designed method, because that's part of what makes them fun. You're trying not just to figure out the answer, but to figure out how the whole thing was set up. You're trying to get into the head of the puzzle author, and see what they're trying to get you to see. The fun of the puzzle isn't in creatively inventing new ways to locate the solution, it's in being creative enough to fill in the blanks. Puzzles are written with what I'd call "cognitive gaps". The instructions are all there, but there's a lot of implication going on. Puzzles don't tell you what to do, they nudge you, and how successfully they handle that nudging determines how successful the puzzle is.<br />
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<h2>The Game Design of Puzzles</h2>The trick of managing cognitive gaps is something I'm wrestling with as I work on puzzles for the Galactic Puzzle Hunt; you need to gauge how much difficulty someone will have crossing those gaps. Will they be so obvious that the puzzle is mostly a matter of checking off boxes? Will they be so obtuse that solvers will hit a wall and give up on the puzzle, or be pushed into using brute-force approaches? This is the game of the puzzle, and it reminds me of a similar problem in general game design, where designers are constantly playing leapfrog against the players learning their games. Raph Koster, in his work <em>A Theory of Fun for Game Design</em>, says the following about it: "Phrased another way, <em>the destiny of games is to become boring, not to be fun</em>."<br />
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Puzzles are similar, but they're also different, because puzzles are trying to carefully lead players to that destiny of being "solved" and boring, while games stand as obstacles, with no clear answer. A game designer presents players with a problem, and a variety of options with which to solve that problem. A puzzle designer presents players with an obscured path, designed so that information is slowly fed to them, one piece at a time. And yet, in the end, both of them are attempting to reach the same final state; they're trying to teach the solver, or the player, something. <br />
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Once that lesson is learned, the puzzle, the game, is done.Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-87968524215505621832017-07-22T10:00:00.000-05:002017-07-22T10:00:27.334-05:00The Puzzle Design of Life is Strange<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRSmjprwapuqlJ5ilEx3cGIVEkQZejthYsKqCzL2gn43KQSOhJ6aoxSLKr7Ll5g_EcBoEeVjR6Mh5L1l9MmA_WLMX3u4AGK-OhM38f14vPCBUGHdY1MxmJyE0PBu1zzgWJpW49t-apMKY/s1600/MaxSelfies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRSmjprwapuqlJ5ilEx3cGIVEkQZejthYsKqCzL2gn43KQSOhJ6aoxSLKr7Ll5g_EcBoEeVjR6Mh5L1l9MmA_WLMX3u4AGK-OhM38f14vPCBUGHdY1MxmJyE0PBu1zzgWJpW49t-apMKY/s320/MaxSelfies.jpg" width="320" height="180" data-original-width="800" data-original-height="450" /></a></div><br />
It seems odd to talk about <i>Life is Strange</i> in light of its puzzles, since it's so heavily-focused on telling a powerful story, but the puzzles contained in this game were built as part of a cohesive whole. When looking at a game, it's good to remember that every part of that game was put there with some sort of intention--so what was the intention behind the various puzzle sequences in this game? I want to look at a few different types of puzzles found in <i>Life is Strange</i> and explore just how they connect to its story, and what they attempt to achieve.<br />
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<b>NOTE:</b> this post will use example scenes from multiple episodes of <i>Life is Strange</i> in order to provide clear and specific examples for its points. I highly recommend that you play the game before reading this, but have avoided plot spoilers.<br />
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<h2>What Puzzles Do</h2>In any game, <b>puzzles promote engagement</b>, and that's no different for <i>Life is Strange</i>. Unlike in puzzle games, though, the focus of this game isn't on "solving" anything, it's on progressing through the story and making choices. On the surface, puzzles seem like they'd get in the way of that. Aren't you supposed to be getting your players to the big choices, so that you can invest them in the story? Wouldn't putting puzzles in front of the player just distract from the main point of the game? It does make a good amount of sense. However, the closer you look at the puzzles in <i>Life is Strange</i>, the more you realize that they're something different--they're a glue that holds the game together.<br />
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For the sake of this blog post, a "puzzle" is a game activity where you have an objective and have to use the tools at your disposal to "solve" the situation, typically by performing specific tasks in a particular order. The puzzles in this game fall into three types that sometimes blend and overlap:<br />
<ul><li><b>Object-based puzzles</b>, where you find and use objects in the environment to accomplish goals</li>
<li><b>Dialogue puzzles</b>, where you talk to people and use different dialogue choices to advance the plot or obtain information</li>
<li><b>Rewind puzzles</b>, where you use the main character's time-rewinding power to achieve goals and take actions that would not normally be possible in the game</li>
</ul><br />
While each of these types of puzzles shares the common goal of drawing the player into the game, each one does that in a slightly different way.<br />
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<h2>Object Puzzles</h2>These puzzles are a common staple in point-and-click adventure games, and tend to follow a simple formula: acquire objects within the environment, then use them on other parts of the environment. Essentially, it uses parts of the game world as keys which unlock doors, which you have to open in order to make progress. <i>Life is Strange</i> isn't nearly as challenging or complicated as adventure games can get, though; there's no way to "combine" objects in your inventory with one another, and the object puzzles in the game tend to be very linear, completed within a small selection of locations. This contrasts strongly with adventure games, where you often need to go back and forth between different locations in order to solve puzzles, and can often be trying to solve more than one puzzle at once. In fact, it can sometimes be hard to distinguish the object puzzles from simple "fetch quests".<br />
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One of the typical object puzzles in <i>Life is Strange</i> is the point in Episode 3 where you're attempting to hack into David Madsen's computer via the time-honored trope of figuring out his password by finding clues nearby. You go around the room looking for objects that might hint at his computer's password. Some are very obvious, and naturally they're wrong. You have to specifically look inside his car, which is currently in the garage, to find the password--but it's not put in a place that you'll look for at first. That means you're probably going to interact with a few other things before you find the key object. <br />
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That's the real key behind <i>Life is Strange</i>'s object puzzles: they're a way of getting you to interact with the world. Because each of the objects gives you a snippet of Max's impression when you choose to take the "Look" action with it, the game uses them as character development and worldbuilding simultaneously. They set the scene, tell you about the other characters in the game, and tell you about the protagonist's inner life at the same time--and that's why it's important that the puzzles encourage you to continuously explore it, giving you a nudge to get back into it.<br />
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What's also interesting is that these puzzles sometimes have more than one possible outcome. A later sequence in the same garage lets you try to figure out a combination lock that hides something...or you can just choose to find a nearby crowbar and break the lock. It's an interesting implicit decision--you can spend time and energy to achieve essentially the same result, but the path that you take is up to you. (This one's interesting, because the code was hidden in the previous episode of play--so it's a bit of an easter egg for players who were observant and had a good memory.)<br />
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<h2>Dialogue Puzzles</h2>While interaction with the environment forms the bulk of <i>Life is Strange</i>'s gameplay, the most significant moments come through dialogue. While object puzzles are a way to interact with the sandbox of the world, dialogue puzzles are more like a minefield. While Max is able to rewind after reaching a "bad end", you still have to tread carefully to ultimately succeed. The "dialogue puzzles" in this game remind me heavily of visual novels: you have several branching options to choose from, with different choices leading to other choices, and there's at least a "bad ending" and a "good ending", usually along with more neutral endings. What's really interesting is that visual novels also have a "rewind" mechanic of sorts: they support heavy use of save states, promoting a playstyle where you save at every key decision point so that you don't have to replay the entire game when you hit a bad ending.<br />
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The best example of a dialogue puzzle is the Episode 4 confrontation with the drug-dealing Frank at his trailer. There's an obvious "bad end" (you get attacked by his dog), several "neutral ends" (you get the information you wanted, but Frank gets threatened and shot, making him an enemy), and a "good end" (you manage to work with Frank to get the information you need, and nobody gets hurt). Several decisions swing you towards one end or another, and you're even able to leverage a bit of information you may or may not have picked up from a prior episode, depending on your choices. There's also choices that open up if, for example, you've reached a "bad end", since Max is now forewarned about things that can happen. You're able to rewind back through the conversation when you reach one end, and you can theoretically brute-force it for the best possible end, but if you don't want to tediously do-over, you'll need to hone your sense of empathy instead, understanding which responses are likely to end poorly.<br />
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Developing that empathy is the most important aspect of dialogue puzzles: they encourage you to think about the ramifications of certain dialogue options, and to get into the head of the character you're talking with. Being able to safely explore different options (since you can always rewind) also gives you an outlet to explore different facets of characters, and to see what happens when you push different buttons. It builds the impression that these characters are people, which is essential for any story. They become believable and more real as you interact with them in dialogue, and that's what dialogue puzzles push you to do.<br />
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Since these puzzles also often have more than one possible outcome, they can give you the same decision point as object-based puzzles, but the stakes are somewhat different. Here, the decision is whether you're going to rewind, spending time and effort to explore more conversation options. That, in turn, lets you choose to connect more directly with characters, learning more about them, or continue on, leaving the conversation largely unexplored. The decision space gives you the opportunity to engage with characters out of your own free will, which is highly important.<br />
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<h2>Time-Rewind Puzzles</h2>As you might expect, the signature puzzles in <i>Life is Strange</i> revolve around Max's time-rewinding power. Early in the game, you're given very specific rules: when Max rewinds, it reverses everything around her, but doesn't change anything about her (including items she's acquired or her position in the world). These rules allow the developers to build some clever (although simple) puzzles surrounding her power. You're able to use time-rewinding to do things that you wouldn't be capable of doing normally, and each puzzle is carefully designed so that it emphasizes the limits of your power while also giving you a moment of epiphany. Time-rewind puzzles are always necessary in order to progress the story, and you're unable to accomplish them without using your rewind. They also incorporate elements of the prior two puzzles. Dialogue and objects are the two main ways you interact with the world, and each one has a unique interaction with time-rewinding: when you rewind after learning certain things, you can incorporate them into your conversation as new options, and when you rewind after picking up an item, you retain the item in your inventory.<br />
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I'm loath to give away the solutions to later puzzles (the Episode 4 puzzle in the barn was a personal favorite), but an early time-rewind puzzle in Episode 1 requires Max to make her way up a hill towards a lighthouse--while a storm is throwing debris in her path. The epiphany you stumble into is that when you rewind, you can make progress through an area <i>before</i> the debris falls down and blocks your way forward. Rewind and walk through, and then when it comes crashing down, you're on the other side, able to progress forward. It's the first big showcase of your power--you're not just doing the classic "rewind time and avert the outcome you just saw", you're making lateral use of the power.<br />
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If this were a puzzle game, you'd be presented with numerous opportunities to use time-rewinding in massively weird and creative ways. You'd also be playing <i>Braid</i>. In <i>Life is Strange</i>, the puzzles are considerably simpler--they're not meant to challenge you, just to get you thinking about the implications of your power. They're a form of immersion, helping you to connect with the main character and getting you to think about the world from the perspective of someone with power over it. They also let you indulge a power fantasy in the game, which proves to be satisfying. You start to feel just how having that much power can change someone, and this begins to flow into the narrative themes that the game wants to emphasize.<br />
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There's also one way to handle these puzzles, and only one way. You're supposed to find the intentional path--and this highlights the fact that they're setpieces, cinematic scenes that grant you limited power. Allowing more latitude to players might have promoted the amount of freedom they felt, especially in light of the choice allowed in other areas. The restriction very tightly focuses these puzzles, though. You're pointed towards thinking of time-rewinding in very particular ways, and each puzzle teaches you a little bit about what it's like to have this power. Also interestingly, the game starts introducing time-rewind puzzles that include false choices: options that don't work. This helps to answer questions like "why didn't Max just rewind and do X?" in a satisfying way. More pragmatically, trying to account for multiple branching ways to solve a time-rewind puzzle was probably significantly more development work than the company was able to commit to.<br />
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<h2>What Do Puzzles Accomplish?</h2>There's a common thread running through these puzzles: <b>they draw you into the world</b>. Each type of puzzle covers a different aspect of how Max interacts with the world around her--she affects objects, talks with people, and rewinds time. Puzzles require focus in the game, so they filter your understanding of the world into those three "buckets". Anything that you spend time on will draw your attention more strongly, and all of these puzzles reflect back onto the world in some way, whether you're exploring it, understanding its inhabitants, or exerting your power over it. The intent of the designers is to give you something to do so that you're engaging the world. When you engage it, you become attached to it. When you become attached to it, your emotional investment kicks in when things happen to that world. It's fundamentally why you start <i>caring</i> about the game in a unique way. The writing can make you care about the characters, but it's these game mechanics that make you care about the world you've entered.<br />
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In <i>Life is Strange</i>, some of this works better than other bits. The <b>object puzzles</b> in particular can feel a bit kludged-in, and it's a fair complaint that some of the later episodes have scenes that devolve into "fetch quests", where you have to go somewhere, get an item, and come back. The <b>dialogue puzzles</b> work considerably better, because that's where your character interaction is, and because they offer the widest possible spectrum of outcomes. Not only does this let them feel more natural, but it also makes them feel more impactful, because of the way your choices develop the results. The <b>time-rewind puzzles</b> don't do as much to connect me with the world of the game, but they accomplish something different: I feel <i>awesome</i>, because I get to play with a power like that. They also push me towards a specific way of interacting with the world--I start to think of it as something that can be manipulated as I see fit, which underscores a significant but subtle part of Max's emerging character.<br />
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The puzzles of this game are crucial to building up the connection that you make with the game, and ultimately they do work, even if some of them are clumsy. They're the setup to the intense emotional payoff of <i>Life is Strange</i>, and if they had fallen flat, the game wouldn't have worked. When you want to see what makes a game work, start with its primary activity, the thing that the players engage the most. While background information, descriptive text, cinematic clips, and even voice-acting can help you enter into a game's world, it's the primary activity that truly pulls the player in. Build that right, and the rest will follow in the game.Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-7461896351603913432017-07-03T18:58:00.003-05:002024-02-12T16:33:30.474-06:00Life is Strange: Butterflies in the Vortex<img alt="Life is Strange Max" class="size-full wp-image-9178 aligncenter" height="450" src="https://thecatholicgeeks.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/maxchloeroom.jpg" width="800" /><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"Do your powers include mind reading? Or did you just rewind because I tried to steal the cozy chair?"</i></blockquote>
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Some of you might remember my <a href="https://thecatholicgeeks.com/2016/05/10/a-zombie-game-with-brains-the-walking-dead-season-1/"><i>Walking Dead</i></a> review, where I talked quite glowingly about Telltale Games' feels trip masquerading as interactive adventure with zombies. This time, I'm covering something that's basically the same, sans zombies and plus the Pacific Northwest. Also, sort-of time travel. Is it as good as <i>The Walking Dead</i>? Is it, dare I say, better? Find out what <a href="https://www.lifeisstrange.com/en-us/games/life-is-strange"><i>Life is Strange</i></a> has in store for you...<br />
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<i>This review will be <b>spoiler-free</b>, containing no plot details beyond the basic premise that I mentioned above.</i><br />
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<i>Note: I originally <a href="https://thecatholicgeeks.com/2017/07/03/life-is-strange-butterflies-in-the-vortex/">posted this review</a> on <b>The Catholic Geeks</b>, but intend to follow up on it more in-depth here.</i><br />
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<h2>
What Sets <i>Life is Strange</i> Apart</h2>
Like <i>The Walking Dead</i>, <i>Life is Strange</i> is a combination of three genres, melding them into a cohesive experience intended to engage you powerfully and personally:<br />
<ul>
<li><b>Adventure games</b>: you interact with the environment, able to inspect a large number of objects in each scene and interact with most of the characters present. In order to progress through each scene, you often have to do certain things, and there's sometimes multiple options you have in a given scene, although some of them are hidden and require some exploration.</li>
<li><b>Visual novels</b>: you progress through the game by making choices during dialogue, and choices you make earlier in the game can ripple out and have effects later on. Traditionally, visual novels also feature multiple endings, including one canonical "true ending" that you have to go through an immense amount of effort to unlock.</li>
<li><b>Cinematic games</b>: games designed to have evocative, immersive narratives, trying to meld gameplay with thematic play, often via "quick time events" that link in-game actions abstractly to pressing specific keys in a particular sequence (kinda like Simon Says).</li>
</ul>
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While <i>The Walking Dead</i> leaned heavily on the "cinematic games" element, even including a simplified form of quick time events, <i>Life is Strange</i> moves solidly into the "adventure game" category, while still keeping the cinematic atmosphere, even prominently using camera angles and music during key scenes. There's also a considerably larger emphasis on choice here, with more visible consequences.<br />
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This focus on choice correlates interestingly with a core game mechanic: rewinding time, a power which the main character mysteriously acquires very early in the game's first act (of five). Whenever you make a choice in the game, you can almost always rewind previous to that choice and then make another choice instead. This probably sounds like it undermines the purpose of the choice entirely, but in practice, I found it to do the opposite. Since I was able to see immediate consequences of my choices, it encouraged me to experiment, and it also added more weight when I finally committed to a big decision, since I knew what was coming. Also, the power can only rewind so far (you can't go back after leaving a scene in the game), and some choices have consequences far into the future, so there's still an element of suspense, especially when you've made a choice and <i>don't</i> immediately see consequences.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>To all of you</i><br />
<i>American girls, it's sad to</i><br />
<i>Imagine a world without you</i><br />
<i>American girls I'd like to</i><br />
<i>Be part of the world around you</i><br />
<i>Driving a car by the seaside</i><br />
<i>Watching the world from the bright side, yeah</i></div>
</blockquote>
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<h2>
Snapshotting the Protagonist</h2>
Moreso than any game I've played, <i>Life is Strange </i>aims to pull you deeply into the mind and heart of its protagonist, who is anything but a blank slate protagonist. She might start out as a somewhat meek and impressionable wallflower, but the game takes full advantage of its adventure game heritage to build a portrait of promising young photographer Max Caulfield, giving you more and more context for the choices you make.<br />
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Max is a student at the prestigious Blackwell Academy in Arcadia Bay, her childhood town. Then she runs right into a mystery/drama story, with stakes both personal and large-scale, topped with a layer of cryptic symbols and messages. There's a lot of old personal history that underlies the plot, interwoven through the present-day drama largely through in-game artifacts. Since this is an adventure game, the primary activity of the game is finding and interacting with objects, which are helpfully highlighted with a circle and a name when you get close enough. Focusing on an object shows ways that Max can interact with it, always including the adventure game staple "Look", which gets you a little bit of Max commentary on the object. Not only do you get this for all the important objects in the scene, but there's also several objects that exist just to help you get a clearer picture of Max's viewpoint. She doesn't just observe things--she reacts to them, and that reaction captures her frame of mind in a way that wouldn't work in another medium.<br />
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Going beyond that, the game uses the clever conceit of a personal journal as a "pause screen" (a functional use) that doubles as a peek into the protagonist. If you want to spend your time exploring, you can read a page-by-page recap of the story from Max's perspective (quite useful if you've forgotten some things that happened the last time you played), check her text messaging with different characters (delivering a unique style of narrative on top of the more traditional dialogue), and read through her writeups on the other main characters (which sadly stay static throughout the game, but are a good resource for grounding you in the supporting cast). I enjoyed this touch, because it feels real and also gives background information, but only when you feel like exploring it, instead of trying to frontload all of this background into you, which usually means you'll forget it anyway.<br />
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This is also the only game I've played that has a built-in soliloquy mechanic. Sometimes, you'll encounter an object in the game that only has one interaction: "Sit". When you do this, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrULSbvhjNw">Max sits down</a>, and the music switches to something calming and introspective as the camera pans around the scene. Then, Max starts thinking about everything that's been going on recently, processing the story and letting us in on the moment. It's a really cool way to connect with the character, and the game doesn't stop the "moment of calm" until you decide to get up, which means that it also works well as a way to relieve some of the tension that's built up, if you need to.<br />
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<img alt="Life is Strange Consequences Butterfly" class="size-full wp-image-9249 aligncenter" height="281" src="https://thecatholicgeeks.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/lisconsequences.jpg" width="500" /></div>
<h2>
Making Hard Choices</h2>
The core of <i>Life is Strange</i> is the choices you make throughout the game. Sometimes, they're small, almost incidental, like many of the choices you can make during dialogue, which shape the tone of the conversation but don't usually have long-lasting impact. Other times, a choice will have fairly significant consequences for Max or (usually) other characters. Every so often, the game pulls out all the stops, and gives you a massive, dramatic choice, blurring out the scene to focus on two options (which tend to be polarized). These choices are the highlight of the story, often with very far-reaching results that you won't be able to see immediately.<br />
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Here is where the game melds most closely with its visual novel ancestry. One peculiar phenomenon in visual novels is the robust save-state mechanics that often appear. This has to do with the way your choices impact the narrative: achieving specific endings in the game often requires precise combinations of choices made together. Along with the fact that visual novels track completion percentage, this means that players frequently attempt to go through all of the possible options in a visual novel. Since it would be tedious to replay the whole game, players can instead use a large number of save slots to "freeze" the game at critical decision points, making one decision and then later coming back and making the other decision in a following playthrough.<br />
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In <i>Life is Strange</i>, being able to rewind back through decision points accomplishes most of this, although you're not able to backtrack after a significant amount of time. It still asks for commitment, but you can at least explore your options when you make a choice. What's interesting is how the game uses this to reflect back on Max's power and her character. If you start to change how you're making choices based on people's reactions to them, are you really just using your power to manipulate their actions? How far is too far? It's an intentionally understated question that creeps beneath the surface of the game, setting the stage for the final powerful choice in the game.<br />
<br /><h2>My Final Take</h2>
<i>Life is Strange</i> is a potent examination of choice, leaning on all the consequences that can stem from your actions. It uses the mechanic of rewinding time (along with side themes of photography as a way to snapshot the past) to underscore its key themes, while also drawing you into a world filled with characters who have hopes, fears, and motivations.<br />
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It's certainly not perfect. Lip-sync is sometimes off or even missing in some scenes (during one pivotal scene in the fifth episode, there's a large amount of time where Max's lips aren't animated to move at all), which can be distracting. Some of the conversations have a really clunky flow since they're moving from choice to choice, and a character's reply will sometimes feel very tonally disjointed from what you just said. Some of the dialogue also feels a little stilted, although it is at least partially based off of teen dialect in the Pacific Northwest, which is a cool touch.<br />
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I found that, despite its awkward, almost teenaged, flaws, <i>Life is Strange</i> pulls you into an emotionally-compelling story, showing you the struggle of a young, vulnerable heart to make sense of the world. It's often melancholy, sometimes funny, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes intense, and it all builds to a powerful finale. As the ending cutscene played, I sat back, still not sure if I had chosen wisely. I made my call, and knew I had to live with it. I don't think Max was the only one whose heart grew during that journey.<br />
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<i><a href="https://www.lifeisstrange.com/en-us/games/life-is-strange">Life is Strange</a></i> is available for a plethora of systems (PC, XBox 360, XBox One, PS3, PS4), although if you're getting it for PC, double-check those system requirements. It's not designed to be playable on just any system.<br />
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<b>Content Advisory:</b> frequent coarse language; scenes of blood and violence; scenes of emotional abuse; threatened sexual assault<br />
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<i>P.S. If you're reading this before July 5th, 2017, the game is currently on sale for <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/sub/56692/">$5 at Steam</a>!</i>Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-89256239013931024492015-05-11T10:00:00.000-05:002015-05-11T10:00:00.832-05:00Game Stories: Complexity or Depth?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/search/label/game%20stories" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPJvyVRTP9FnQFIw70u8hyTCD2RMxj3-Lc6FX0ZYVfReRQxSncKHT2ET6xxg__-cNXma2cDtGipt4FQdyNbXzJ_omY37c9Ku6eGzg_yyfAD1PQ6YNj1eUXWVmVoeI4buf4G2PiewSsZLM/s320/gears.jpg" /></a></div><br />
So! Last week, I went on a bit about how <a href="http://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/2015/04/game-stories-why-rpgs-need-game.html">I want to see more mechanically-involved RPGs</a>. I'd like to talk a bit this week about what that can mean, because there's a lot of RPGs out there which try to satisfy this criteria by being complex. Complexity, however, often has nothing to do with depth, as many tabletop gamers should know already. But let me give you an example firsthand...<a name='more'></a><br />
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So the best way to give an example is to make one myself! Here's the story: let's say I'm designing this game called <i>Awesome Fantasy Adventures</i>, and my goal is to make it have more mechanical depth than your regular old "roll a die and something happens" game that you find a lot of times. There's two different ways I could approach this: the complex way and the actually-deep way. Spoilers: the complex way doesn't give much depth. Surprise! I'm going to outline how the rules for each one work, and talk a bit about the effect that each ruleset has on the game.<br />
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<b>The Complex Way</b><br />
<i>Awesome Fantasy Adventures</i> is a game about fantasy adventurers doing awesome stuff. But I don't want the rules to be simplistic or straightforward, so I have some great ideas on how to make them mechanically-involved and otherwise interesting! Check it out!<br />
<ul><li>Characters have five main attributes: Strength, Intellect, Speed, Awareness, and Willpower. Attributes are rated from 1-15, and lower attributes are better.</li>
<li>Characters have seven different skills: Fighting, Magic, Trapfinding, Dungeoneering, Athletics, Sneaking, and Camping. Skills are rated from 1-5.</li>
<li>When you are in a situation where things don't clearly resolve, roll a d20 and try to roll higher than your appropriate attribute. If you have a skill, roll a number of d6es equal to your rank in the skill and add the highest one to your attribute roll.</li>
<li>Whenever you roll a 1 on a d6, subtract it from your attribute roll.</li>
<li>If you roll high enough on your attribute roll, you do what you were trying to do. Otherwise, you don't do that and something bad happens.</li>
</ul><br />
Obviously, a full game would have more rules, but let's break down what's going on here. If you boil it down to its simplest mechanics, this is really a fancy way of saying "roll a die, get a high number". In other words, not terribly different from a basic roll-and-move game. You roll a die, things happen. I know it might look a little different than that, but commit this to memory: <b>some mechanics are just aesthetics</b>. The different probabilities that different types of die-rolling are just ways to make a mechanic feel different from another. They don't really constitute new mechanics or even interesting mechanics. At the end of the day, this ruleset would be a bunch of rules that add absolutely nothing to the depth of the game...and that's just the core mechanic!<br />
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<b>The Deep Way</b><br />
So what could we do instead? The way you add depth in a game is by giving players meaningful choices. Also, it's a good idea to make the individual mechanics in a game relatively straightforward. So, with that in mind, here's <i>Awesome Fantasy Adventures 2.0</i>.<br />
<ul><li>The game uses a 52-card deck (with two Jokers) for its mechanics. Each player has a hand of four cards when the game begins. The GM has a hand of eight cards.</li>
<li>If your character does something risky, dangerous, or ill-advised like sneaking up on a dragon, walking through a trap-filled hall, or haggling with a merchant, the GM will tell you what Fate you're about to suffer, and play a card facedown from their hand. At this point, you have options.<br />
<ul><li>You can <b>accept your Fate</b> and take the GM's card into your hand. The consequences come to pass as the GM told.</li>
<li>You can <b>defy your Fate</b> and force the GM to play the card. Then, you must try to beat the rank of the card with your cards from hand. If you can't beat it, you manage to avoid the Fate set out by the GM, but still take a significant consequence in the process. If you can beat it, you get off scot-free and do what you were going to do with no consequence.</li>
<li>If you have no cards in hand, you cannot defy your Fate.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>You can play more than one card if their suit matches the sort of action you're currently taking: Hearts is for situations relying on your charm and will, Spades is for situations relying on your martial prowess and physical force, Clubs is for situations relying on your strength and coordination, and Diamonds is for situations relying on your lore.</li>
<li>Face cards beat any number of non-face cards, and are otherwise ranked as J -> Q -> K -> A. To beat a face card, you must play a higher face card. Alternatively, you can play a matching face card that's appropriately-suited to the task.</li>
<li>If you play a Joker to <b>defy your Fate</b>, you not only succeed but succeed magnificently, getting a reward well beyond what you should have been able to get. This is special, and doesn't happen often.</li>
<li>If the GM plays a Joker against you when you're <b>defying your Fate</b>, you suffer a disastrous failure, a crushing and humiliating defeat that you couldn't have seen coming.</li>
<li>If both sides play a Joker, this is the sort of cataclysmic happening that sees Fates aligning for the most improbable of outcomes. Both the player and the GM should collaborate on some freakish and bizarre turn of fortune that is neither good nor ill for the player.</li>
<li>Any player may call for a rest, if the adventurers aren't under immediate threat. In this case, everyone draws back up to four cards (and does nothing if they have four or more) and the GM draws eight additional cards.</li>
</ul><br />
Here, I introduced a very simple mechanic: hand management. Now, you have some control over your options, and the GM has some control over their options, and there's an interesting decision space to make each time you try something risky. Do you take the hit this time, preparing for when things get worse, or do you expend your resources now in an attempt to avoid bad things? The suits add another interesting layer to your hand's value: do you spend an off-suit card on a task because it's high-value, or save it for a later task that it's properly-suited for?<br />
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This is obviously just the start of a game, but if you compare this with the earlier game, I think you can see how they'll radically change the focus of play. In the first one, the only decisions you make are "is this task reasonably easy, considering my attributes and skills?", and the biggest decision you make is what sorts of things to do. And in a properly-specialized group, that's almost never a decision. In the second one, you're constantly making decisions about what to do--and you could add another layer to this by, for instance, giving certain characters an affinity for one suit or the other, or giving them special abilities that trigger off of straights or pairs or other card functions. None of those abilities override the core choices of the central mechanic, however.<br />
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Another interesting thing to note is that, although there's more rules in the second one, I feel that they make more intuitive sense. The only special rules are for face cards and Jokers, which people already recognize as special in some way. <i>Of course</i> you'd have a special rule for a Joker, it's a really unique and outstanding card. It's little rules like that which come together to make a satisfying and engaging layer of gameplay.Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-90690156957829230272015-04-27T10:00:00.000-05:002015-04-27T10:00:04.217-05:00Game Stories: Why RPGs Need Game Designers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://boardgamegeek.com/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6nGh1QKMNGx-teHUB93ddnzfMpzIzFHr6J8Hiw5wzO_wEItqCPJ8-ZtqKYjlID0OXpyBpQCORLtQtE4_QOfIN9cDfEt5v4xbyfJc5I60usHR4rS-QTmcAKmmzOOGecf6l2CijAySzeLY/s320/boardgames.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
I <i>love</i> boardgames. Interestingly, my involvement in boardgames increased dramatically shortly after my involvement in the tabletop roleplaying hobby; this was around 2011, as the second wave of new and popular boardgames started sweeping over America and Wil Wheaton's <i>Tabletop</i> had its genesis. Because I got into boardgaming and RPGs at around the same time, I start thinking about how they relate to one another, and what benefits tabletop RPGs can reap from studying other tabletop gaming...<a name='more'></a><br />
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If you're not really familiar with the current state of boardgaming, check out <a href="http://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame">BoardGameGeek's ranked list</a>, which speaks to the games that a lot of the gaming community is keen on. You could also check out <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7atuZxmT956cWFGxqSyRdn6GWhBxiAwE">the YouTube series <i>Tabletop</i></a> to get an idea for what sorts of things are going on in gaming. Don't worry, I'll still be here when you get back.<br />
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<b>Narrative and Games: the Common Ground</b><br />
You might have noticed that <a href="http://ludicrusgaming.blogspot.com/search/label/game%20stories">I've written a few posts about narrative in board games</a>. I really care about this, because I've seen some brilliant stuff advanced by boardgaming, and yet it seldom seems to trickle back into the RPG sphere. This is doubly unfortunate because whatever boardgaming's doing, it seems to be <i>working well</i>. I want to see some of that magic take a more central role in the RPG world. It's not for every game, but I think there's some lessons to be learned.<br />
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So what is the common ground here? Well, in RPGs and in (most) board games, there's a desire to wed an interesting narrative with some sort of engaging gameplay. Boardgaming tends to err on the side of the engaging gameplay, while RPGs tend to err on the side of narrative, and both sometimes err so far that they largely exclude the other aspect. I think that this is often a mistake, however. Narrative and mechanics can work together in harmony, and they can often reinforce one another and bring out bits of the other that wouldn't normally arise. I've got a whole bunch of blog posts discussing how that works.<br />
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<b>The State of the RPGs</b><br />
I'll be upfront: <b>I think there's a massive lack of innovation on the mechanical side of RPGs</b>. Even in the indie RPG crowd, the innovation has focused more on the social dynamics of storytelling, introducing structures for roleplaying and analyzing the sort of group dynamics that form around collaborative storytelling. While structures are a sort of mechanic, I find them to be rather simple and fundamental sorts of mechanics. They're Layer 0. We've spent a long time on Layer 0, and I think more and more games need to build on that. Most RPGs now try to create narrative by explicitly tying narrative to very simplistic mechanics, things like Fate's compels or the milestone XP of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. And that's great, but I think we can do better.<br />
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See, boardgames have been approaching this same problem, but from the other end: they have great mechanics, but don't always know how to successfully tie them to a narrative. Still, I feel as though boardgaming as an industry is far bigger, far more profitable, and therefore farther along when it comes to solving these problems. Some people in the RPG hobby think that RPGs should stick to "what they do best", but I feel that roleplaying games stand to learn a lot of lessons from observing how boardgaming does things. In board games, there's mechanics which subtly mold your behavior in ways you don't heavily think about. There's elegant decisions that wrap up a bunch of narrative dimensions because of how the mechanics interact. There's straightforward structures that interact in complex ways; lots to wrap your head around.<br />
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<b>RPGs To Look To</b><br />
I've been couching some of my terms here, and that's because I do think there's some roleplaying games that explore really interesting mechanical design space, the sorts of things I'd expect to see in board games. I'll call a few of them out, because I believe in highlighting things that do good.<br />
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<ul><li><a href="http://liwanagpress.com/dog-eat-dog/"><b>Dog Eat Dog</b></a> uses a token economy that would be right at home in a euro-style boardgame. Players trade tokens as they do things, and when you run out of tokens, the game drastically changes. The tokens are a flexible mechanical element that winds up carrying a lot of narrative weight, because it's a system that tracks the influence of a colonizing outside force.</li>
<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Heroic_Roleplaying"><b>Marvel Heroic Roleplaying</b></a> introduces a really interesting concept: a "Doom Pool" which fuels the GM's actions. Otherwise, the GM is limited. This pool gets manipulated through in-game actions, and can be spent in various ways, so it actually becomes a living tactical element of the game.</li>
<li><a href="http://mythenderrpg.com/"><b>Mythender</b></a> is a crunchy combat-heavy game that uses a ton of interlocking mechanical structures to impress some very heavy themes on the game. It shows instead of telling you that your character is becoming corrupted by mythic power. It puts choices in your hands and makes you party to their consequences. It's exactly the sort of game that I'd love to see more of.</li>
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<b>Looking Forward</b><br />
Not every RPG should take heavy cues from boardgaming. There's a lot of space to be explored when it comes to the dynamics between characters. Still, I would encourage every aspiring game designer to make a habit of studying non-roleplaying games. Understand how they bring narrative into the mechanics, and observe how the choices you make in the game are created by the rules. See how the limitations of a boardgame shape the story that emerges from it, and how these types of games still allow players to express themselves. Broaden your experiences, and your designs will be richer for it.<br />
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And so will the experiences of the people who play your games.Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-41158858242685796022015-04-20T11:02:00.000-05:002015-04-20T11:02:00.350-05:00I Made a Thing: Schism Song Alpha<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.supergiantgames.com/games/bastion/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDJi9Ot7wN8LLD3FDOfXybO8w4l96gNTdJ4BPWtCkDeACjRiJ429sWzewYNcbu8ctsLuB2fDuwP_JpMDrxR9oyQe_HAsdAqSvNLRGN1glg67H9CAeQtYyJ6Sd7Tx163xDhVqIoKKNWgJk/s320/bastion.jpg" /></a></div><br />
So, this time around, I've got something new for all of you: a game that I'm slowly starting to polish up. It's inspired by the likes of <i>Bastion</i>, with a dash of <i>Apocalypse World</i>, and it's been through a lot of mental revisions already! Someday maybe I'll break out into the story of how radically this initial alpha has changed from my initial conception of the game.<br />
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And this is what I've wrought! MWAHAHA! Um, er. So what I'd love you to do is to read it, have a look at it, and try it out. Let me know what sorts of speed bumps you find in the game, stuff that really needs clearing up, or ways that it falls short of its goal, which is to pull together a vibrant story. The structure of the game is heavily inspired by the concept of music jams, and I'm interested to see how well that translated.<br />
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And though I'm short on time these days, I'm open to running a session with people over Google Hangouts.<br />
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<a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/mq2pe8x4sgcdlgg/SchismSongCoreAlpha_v1.pdf?dl=0"><b>Schism Song Core: Alpha v0.1</b></a>Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-35237486118429437832015-04-10T12:35:00.000-05:002015-04-10T12:35:00.293-05:00Review: Mythic Mortals<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://schirduans.com/david/my-creations/mythic-mortals" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr2NM7WUUMrwjJZ_-dUTG3aQHUWcSFVs99-cBhw_cZKy0wQ0wa3lEqYCpi0GOAbJ5t1o7c2PlYGvvdyZFQ5ruqM23OoqFH6Q7GQNKwkPNijctuez8C_ECS2lnN298bbWLRx74Hb4uXYos/s320/MMCover811.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Who doesn't want to take the battle to titanic foes, wielding super-awesome powers in cool action scenes? I know I do, and that's exactly the itch that <a href="http://schirduans.com/david/my-creations/mythic-mortals">Mythic Mortals</a> aims to scratch. You play as humans imbued with the spark of ancient gods' power, fighting back when the Ancients come back to reclaim the world. (There's a little more to the story than that, but I'm condensing.) The game's goals are to give players a fun, vibrant, action-packed experience that's also very straightforward to learn and play.<br />
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<i>I received a review copy of this game for the purposes of this post.</i><a name='more'></a><br />
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<b>Technical Specifications</b><br />
Let's start out with what sort of game it is, to begin with. Mythic Mortals starts with "5-minute read-aloud rules" that act as a tutorial for the players, and they quickly set out the mechanics of the game. In Mythic Mortals, you use a personal deck of playing cards to set your initial combat stats, then cycle through them during the fight. The cards go on a playmat that's specific to your character; this helps a lot, and reminds me of <a href="http://www.ryanmacklin.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/rashid_mythender.gif">Mythender's character sheet</a>, in how it facilitates the tracking of a lot of interrelated information. <br />
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From there, the game uses a 2d6 roll-under system: you roll two six-sided dice, and try to roll lower than the card in a specific slot. Each slot is used for different rolls, such as damaging an enemy, doing something cool with your powers, or defending against an attack. As you fight on, you have to discard cards from your character's playmat and replace them, just to keep your volatile magical power in check. If you let it go for too long, you experience an Overload, being forced to swap out all of your cards! So, your different stats will often be fluctuating in their strength, and you'll have to discard some stats in order to preserve other stats.<br />
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<b>General Gameplay</b><br />
While I haven't been able to try the game out yet, I can give my impressions on how the combat fits together, plus an overview of what you wind up doing on a given turn. Let's break down the three main actions you can take: <b>Attack</b>, <b>Mythos Ability</b>, and <b>Sprint</b>. They do very different things, and what I'm going to be focusing on is how interesting each option is in combat.<br />
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The simplest one is Sprint: it's a positioning move. You change your position by one range relative to the enemy; the three ranges are Melee, Shout, and Sight (quite intuitively defined and easy to adjucate). Your powers are only effective in certain ranges, so positioning can matter, especially if your weapon card gets swapped out. (I can't tell if the rules say anywhere whether the Ancients are limited to attacking a certain range. The positioning rules could use a bit more comprehensive detailing here.) It's not a colorful move, but it will wind up being useful in some circumstances, mostly when you need to get in range for your new weapon to be effective.<br />
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Attacking is the next-most straightforward action: you deal damage according to the card in your Damage slot if you successfully make an attack roll. Pretty simple, and it's how you win. This also means you have an incentive to keep a high-value card in both your Damage and Accuracy slots. The more damage you can deal, the quicker the fight ends. So, attacking is the start point of combat. Also, the cards you slot into Accuracy and Defense will combine to affect the attacks you make.<br />
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Finally, we have the Mythos Ability action. These are the "special tricks", and they typically involve either dealing damage or restoring damage...but they also often set up for other moves or gain side benefits. I'm not sure that using Mythos Abilities is superior to the power combinations you can use between Accuracy and Defense, but keeping a high card in Mythos would work out fairly well, and let you quickly cycle other cards.<br />
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The most important part of the combat phase is outlined <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/j4mh37xhwipivon/Mythic%20Mortals%20Playmats%20-%202.7.pdf?dl=0">in the official player mats</a>, which you can peruse for yourself. I'm fairly sure that there's some imbalance in the playmats, in that many of them have superior options, but since you'll continually be cycling cards, you won't reliably have access to any grouping of options.<br />
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<b>Character Development</b><br />
Creating a character starts with a straightforward seed: "play as yourself". This skips past a lot of hurdles in the game, and is a pretty good tool for jumping into the action. If you eventually don't feel like playing yourself in a future game, you could always create a new character from scratch, although a newcomer to RPGs might not realize everything that new character creation entails. The game itself doesn't go into detail about that aspect. From there, you pick one of the four playmats, which are essentially character classes: Brute, Hunter, Brewer, and Sneak. (The Brewer in particular seems like an odd choice, with this number of archetypes, but would fit in better if there were more archetypes, I think.) Each mat gives you different abilities for slotting cards of particular suits in Mythos, Accuracy, Damage, and Defense.<br />
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The playmat also contains the sole personality element of the mechanical side: the Flaw. Each playmat is prone to one of four Flaws, depending on the suit of the card slotted in Damage. Your flaw is a mechanical limiter but also a temporary personality trait that somewhat defines you. It's important to note that your Flaw will probably fluctuate as you discard and change the card you put in the Damage slot. I like that idea, though, because it ties a particular set of character traits to a specific playmat, keeping them within a particular theme.<br />
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From there on out, character development is up to you, but since the game is an action-fest, it probably shouldn't be too terribly heavy anyway. The advice in the GM section leans heavily on the GM's knowledge of the players in real life, suggesting things like having the monsters attack a beloved meet-up place. You also get some character development by the way of the events which happen in the game--I've experienced this in Mythender, for example. Though, I'll note that this game does lack one thing that's critical to the character-centric play in Mythender: you don't get the opportunity to attempt to humanize your Mythender, which acts as a strong contrast to the intense superpowered gameplay. I think I'd like to see a bit more of that in Mythic Mortals.<br />
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<b>Other Bits</b><br />
After the very straightforward player-facing rules comes a lot of small paragraphs with GM advice. There's some really good (though short) pieces of advice here, and I rather wish I'd been able to see more of them fleshed out. They're good starting points, though, and they really do help to bring some texture to the game. All of it's about creating a particular tone in the game, one that'll mesh with the superpowered action. I really like bits like the encouragement to prompting: for instance, when a player uses an ability, the GM section suggests to ask them what it looks like.<br />
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That said, there's some stuff I'm not so fond of: suggestions that start to undermine the mechanical element of the game, for example. I'm a big fan of mechanics leading to meaningful choices in the game, but the GM section talks about handing out mechanical rewards for clever in-game thinking, which I feel does make the card-slotting choices a little less significant. There's also talk of a campaign mode where you start with only the 13 cards of one suit, then gain more cards as loot...but it doesn't say anything besides "hand them out randomly", which I feel is a missed opportunity--I'd rather give some guidelines for letting players customize their own decks.<br />
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One thing I do really like in the last bits of the rules is just how many examples the game gives. I'm the sort of person who learns well from examples, so I love that the game shows me lots of different powers that I can use with my monsters, giving me a framework for "what sorts of things can I make this monster do?"<br />
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<b>Summing Up</b><br />
There's a lot of rough edges in the game, and I'd love to see it expanded more, but it's a great novel take on action gameplay, and there's a lot of cool evocative stuff, especially on the players' playsheets. The choices on your playsheet are compelling, and the card-slotting mechanic is easily the strongest point of the game. It's well worth checking out, especially at the price point it comes at.<br />
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<i>You can get Mythic Mortals <a href="http://schirduans.com/david/my-creations/mythic-mortals">from this site</a>, name your own price (suggested price is $5.00).</i>Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8425524614794584711.post-19779470835141261192015-04-06T10:30:00.000-05:002015-04-09T10:00:44.167-05:00Streamlining Rules With PandanteThis Monday, we're going to do something a little different! As the <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sirlin/pandante-light-and-dark">Pandante Second Edition Kickstarter</a> winds to a close this Friday, I'd like to use it as a platform for talking about how designers streamline rules. If you don't know much about <i>Pandante</i>, <a href="http://www.sirlin.net/articles/designing-pandante">here's a good overview post</a> that not only talks about the basics of the game, but also about some of the design decisions that went into it. Then, come back here and read up on how the game changed. (I'll also summarize how the old rules worked, if you really don't feel like learning about panda gambling.)<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sirlin/pandante-light-and-dark/description" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1RU9vGlhETgjRjfpFemKuH5HRS_qov6jRcICJl90oaOKD-IVFPZK3IA3rS1dvbST2BOnpV5JQm2GGyCguHmiCY29j-RQdkLWkhHm8PABtbxAsphhLqIR3b0_E3tKHK9uwpbf7U0ExNrs/s320/PandanteBoard.jpg" /></a></div><a name='more'></a><br />
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So, let's get started. You can pull up a link to the rules changes <a href="http://static1.squarespace.com/static/50f14d35e4b0d70ab5fc4f24/t/54f00a89e4b086c417462b8f/1425017481862/pandante_rules_changes.pdf">here</a>, to get an idea of what sorts of things altered. I'll only be touching on a few of these, but I'll talk about the general philosophy behind that sort of rules change, and how you can apply the same mindset when you're working on your own designs!<br />
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<b>Cutting Breakfast: putting rules on a diet</b><br />
The first change I'd like to discuss is the removal of the "breakfast" rule. In the first edition of the game, every turn (except for the first turn), players could ante up some chips (outside of the normal ante) in order to get rid of their hand and draw a new hand. If you had won the previous hand, breakfasting was mandatory. In the revised rules, there is no breakfast rule; instead, you always draw a new hand every turn, and you ante more chips at the start of a round. So why the change?<br />
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In practice, game designer David Sirlin found that there was a lot of rules complication being added for very little effect. The only option that breakfast gave the players was the ability to keep a hand that had lost previously: maybe it wasn't good enough to win the last hand, but it might be good enough to win this hand. Most of the time, though, using the breakfast rule to get a new hand was a better option anyway. When weighing that against the fact that the breakfast rule had a couple weird exceptions ("no breakfast on hand one" and "the winner of a hand always has to take breakfast"), Sirlin opted to fold the rule into the normal flow of play, and remove the option.<br />
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This points to a very powerful (and, arguably, fundamental) principle of streamlining a game's rules: if players get a choice that doesn't meaningfully impact gameplay very much, it's often best to remove the choice or else make it more meaningful to gameplay. If you're working to economize a game, err on the side of removing the choice. You can often use that freed-up design space to augment another choice in your game. <b>Look for choices that don't benefit strategy, and make them non-choices.</b><br />
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<b>Free Abilities: focusing the game</b><br />
The next change that will draw a lot of attention has to do with the abilities that players could use. In the first version of the game, there were six main abilities, and each one was tied to one of the six colors of cards in the game. After the third round of betting, you got to use up to two abilities, corresponding to the colors of the cards in your hand--but you could also lie about the abilities you had. In the new version, the bluffing element gets taken out; you can use up to two abilities, from a list of six abilities, and they can be whatever you want. That's a pretty big alteration!<br />
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Ultimately, this happened as a way to focus the bluffing element on one place: bluffing about how good your hand is. The core mechanic of the game is betting about which hand you have, and then daring the other players to call your bluff. When there's two things to bluff about, the game loses a bit of focus. And, although you could probably play some amount of mindgaming because the abilities you claim aren't in line with the hand that you're claiming (e.g., claiming a flush when you claim two abilities that don't match anything in the community cards), it's only something which impacts a small number of cases. And, on a practical level, there was no non-awkward way to show that you weren't bluffing about an ability, because you had to reveal the card's color without revealing the card.<br />
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When two parts of a game wind up being very similar (i.e., a round of bluffing about special abilities followed by a round of bluffing about your hand), it's often best to carefully examine if you really need both of them for your game to be complete. Often, it's better to cut one out so that gamers can focus on the other one, because having two game elements that don't really bolster one another is a design decision which weakens the game. <b>Be economical with the mechanisms of your game, and try to focus them on a single objective if you can.</b><br />
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<b>The Panda Coin: increasing practical usability</b><br />
The last revision in this post is a very particular reward that got changed in the game. In the original game, David wanted to give players who won a hand by bluffing some reason to reveal that, so he introduced an award. If you won a hand by lying about your cards, you got to take one of six Panda Lords from the center of the table. Each Panda Lord had a unique ability that you could then use in future hands. In the revision, the reward changes: instead of taking a Panda Lord, you get the Golden Panda Coin, which you can spend as an ability to draw five cards and then discard five cards. That's a huge change! Why did it change?<br />
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This time, it comes back to the experience of game players; while letting players choose a Panda Lord was well and good, all of the Panda Lords have a bit of text that you need to read over to understand how they work. Since winning a hand by bluffing isn't necessarily a common choice, inexperienced (and sometimes not-so-inexperienced!) players only really wind up reading the cards after they win a hand by lying. Since there's six cards to choose from, and you have to read them and think about how they work, it can often be really hard to figure out what choice to make, especially because each Panda Lord drastically changes your playstyle. Instead, giving out the same award, with a very straightforward ability, was a good way to reward players and move along to the next round.<br />
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Be on the lookout, during playtests, for parts of the game that players have a hard time with, for whatever reason. Maybe it's complex abilities that don't get frequently invoked, which are consequently hard to understand and evaluate. Maybe it's confusing interactions between abilities at different timings. If players at the table start hesitating because of some reason or another, find out why. <b>Get rid of confusing elements that slow down gameplay.</b><br />
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<b>One Last Roundup</b><br />
Hopefully you had fun with this look at the revision of an amusing and entertaining game about lying pandas. I think that finding ways to streamline a game into a more accessible experience also benefits game strategy, because it gets rid of busywork and lets you jump right into the "hard decisions" area, which is the point of strategy anyhow. If you're interested in <i>Pandante</i>, <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sirlin/pandante-light-and-dark">the new Kickstarter</a> lets you get in on the game's latest and greatest version, and if you own a prior version, there's an "upgrade pack" that also includes some new goodies from the edition. Swing by, ask about #LyingPandas, you know the drill.Andy Haugehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11367057078787561828noreply@blogger.com0