Greg Sanders

DnD thoughts: Can the game support all ranged parties without losing sophistication?

I think it is uncontroversial to say that melee combat is in many ways crucial to sophisticated DnD 4e combat. Shifts, attacks of opportunity, aiding another in combat, bull rushes, grabs, defenders (with the possible exception of swordmages), and to a lesser extent forced movement all provide an exciting mix of options for combat. Stealth and many classes do work well or even exclusively at range, but in many ways they work best in concert with melee allies.

This is of course a legitimate choice on 4e’s end. Dungeons and Dragons, as the name implies, is fantasy oriented. However, for those of us that like the system but prefer steampunk, pulp, modern, or sci-fi settings the melee orientation can be limiting. Dune and Lensmen both show that these settings can work in a melee oriented way, but it would be nice if that was an option, not a requirement.

So what would it take to get DnD as robust for a primarily ranged party as it is for a mixed or primarily melee party? First off, additional defender classes/alternate builds for existing ones), but this can’t just be about defenders, many of the melee options discussed above are viable for a range of classes. To really get there, I think cover-based fighting is the ranged equivalent of attacks of opportunity.

By this, I don’t mean cover as a technical term in DnD, I mean the general feel of cover based first person shooters and the like. Here’s a broad outline of what I’m thinking after the cut.

Updates: Persona 4 and exercise gaming

I’ve finally gotten a bit of free time and so have been playing more Persona 4.  I still really love that game, despite, or perhaps because, it manages to psych me out with some of the social choices and various quizzes.  Most of the answers could be easily googled, but I’m going with just the knowledge I have on hand and I’ve had an embarrassing wrong streak.  All the more so since I’m normally good at tests.  In some ways it gets the high school vibe down cold, it’s a lot more fun, but it still feels easy to screw up and embarrass yourself. 

I hope I didn’t deny myself a social connection by being a jerk to someone because I was confused about whose younger brother he was.  If I did, such is life, but it’s still embarrassing.  I’m actually a bit reminded of the first No One Lives Forever which rewarded you for taking the professional dialogue choice and not the one that just made you sound cool. 

I’ve been playing in combination with Wii Fit Plus.  While the free step mode doesn’t net that many calories, free running actually seems to have a similar burn rate as does EA Active Life.  We just picked up the add-on for Active Life, the creatively named More Exercises.  I’m not going to make the transition just yet, because the 30 day challenge isn’t offered in the sequel, instead it’s got a six week thing.  That’s fine, but after running into some initial trouble, my pride is on the line on getting through the challenge this time.  That said, I’m not that proud, I’m entirely willing to change the clock so that I don’t get burned get bumped to the next day for finishing at 12:05 AM.

Anyways, good weekend on the whole.  We’ve been working our way through Avatar Season 2 and have loved it.  The story gets steadily more into mini-arcs as time goes by while still retaining an episodic charm.  The only downside is that there’s only three seasons so we’re now more than half way through.

Ta-Nehisi Coates gets me excited about Dragon Age

I've been a bit meh on Bioware's new game Dragon Age despite being a big fan of the company.  I think there's two main drivers:

1. I'm basically sick of conventional western fantasy as a setting.
2. The marketing has been pretty low key so it hasn't caught my attention aside from some Penny Arcade comics.

I'm really enjoying Avatar: The Last Airbender right now, so I won't go so far as to say I've entirely soured on fantasy, but at this point I tend to see it as a net negative as a setting.  There's just so much that's either been done to death or is problematic.  I prefer settings that deal with issues that we are presently wrestling with or that are unfamiliar.  This is why I want to figure out ways to do more modern settings in DnD.  DnD does fantasy well and has some settings that do work for me such as Eberron, Planescape, maybe Spelljammers, our current tabletop game campaign settings.

Anyhow, Coates has one of the best communities for discussing my cultural interests that I've ever seen.  I tend to get along well with people that are drawn to his writing and he also puts in the work to maintain it.  If you want a place to talk about some of these issues, I really recommend it. I don't actually usually hang out on gaming site boards (with the exception of Brainy Gamer), but if you want to talk about the cultural aspects rather than the mechanical aspects I can't recommend his comment threads highly enough.

Anyways, here's the bit that got me excited about Dragon-Age:

As a fan of Bioware, I've been waiting on Dragon's Age for a long-time now, and it really doesn't disappoint. It reminds me a lot of Oblivion, but better. I think Oblivion offers more options, in terms of customizing, but the game was just too big for me. It felt really lonely, and combat felt non-intuitive. The thing about Dragon's Age is you can actually see people doing cool shit--like ripostes etc.

My one beef with the game is the gore--it's way too much.. But the gore actually makes the game look less mature. It makes it feel like it was built for twelve year olds who want to feel like their doing something forbidden...

Back on story, It felt right to play the descendants of slaves (What can I say? Even when I'm role-playing, I'm hood.), so I picked an elf. I don't want to say too much about the game, but the sequence where you have to storm the castle and save your betrothed is really intense. I'll have more to say as I get further in. But for right now, color me impressed.

Up from comments: Persona in 4e

My friend Todd Harper had raised an interesting point in comments a bit back, one that was reinforced when I listened to an old Brainy Gamer podcast that discussed Persona 3.  Michael Abbott was a big fan of Persona 3, I haven’t played it but I quite like the sequel, and mentioned how it’s choice to eschew realism was refreshing.  This makes me wonder if I’m showing a poverty of imagination to want to implement guns in 4e.  I still think it’s a worthwhile project to put a light amount of work into, but in some ways Todd’s idea is more interesting.  As a bit of background, in Persona 3 and 4 (and probably earlier games) each character has a “persona” that is attached to them and has a combat powers set.  The main character multiple personas, can get more from combat, and can fuse them to make more powerful personas.  That out of the way, here’s the comment:

Random thing that may or may not be to your taste: I know an idea I bounced around for a bit, and which other friends I know took and developed quite a bit more for their own use, was a modern game with a Persona theme. You simply used the basic classes and for the most part, your powers and class features were a function of the Persona you were using.

If you're fighting monsters instead of primarily other people, I think the MODERN = GUNS AKIMBO thing is a little less necessary; you can run in and swing your short sword at whatever all day if it's a shambling monstrosity with six legs and a face that's nothing but a set of giant Angelina Jolie lips.

Plus if you want to have someone like Jin from P3 (who used grenades), you can adapt alchemic items from stuff like Adventurer's Vault and either up the damage or tweak the effects.

You know, now that I think about it, there's another advantage here: in the current 4e game I was in, I started as a sorcerer but switched characters midway through (because with two other meleers, as a Dragonsorc all my powers were useless since they were constantly in the way). But if you have a character switch a Persona, they can effectively try a new class or build with a relatively plausible in-game explanation.

This makes sense to me.  I’d earlier commented to some friends that in some ways a main character in the Persona games was a meta-rpger with a stable of characters.  The question raised by such a proposal is how to handle skills.  In Persona the protagonists skills/attributes completely distinct from the combat power-sets.  Social links are used to build more powerful combat options, but that link also goes one way.  Some sort of dual-world system, a la Persona, may work well to both play off the combat strengths of DnD while at the same time having a less violence driven storyline.  The DnD approach would necessarily be different than the Persona console RPG approach, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t good ideas worth stealing.

Quick review: Wii Fit Plus, 2 steps forward, 1 back

Wii Fit Plus is priced as an expansion pack to Wii Fit.  It includes a few new yoga and strength building exercises plus a fair number of balance games, some of which provide some aerobic benefit.

In terms of unalloyed goods, here’s what you get:

1. Estimated calorie tracking.  They aren’t tracking your pulse, so this is really a guess, but it’s still good to know the comparative burn rates of various exercises.  
2. Good new exercises and games.  I’m oddly enamored with the one where you flap your arms to fly a giant chicken avatar.  The handling is very tricky, but there’s just a cool level of immersion there.
3. A night owl option under user options, so that if you weigh in at 12:01 am you aren’t chided for missing a day.
4. A quick test button, for when you want to weigh in and get going.

So what about the one step back?  I had high hopes for “My Wii Fit Plus,” which is basically designed for the power users.  First and foremost, it allows things to go faster by cutting out a lot of the end of exercise commentary and allowing for swift transitions between exercises. You can work off existing routines, create your own, work with a more in depth favorites list that also tracks what you’ve done most recently and what you do most rarely.

So what are the problems:

1. You can’t set the number of reps for strength building exercises, it will always be the minimum possible.  You can select the same exercise twice or three times in a row, which helps, but it would have been fairly trivial to offer some options there.  I’d be content with just setting a switch somewhere for “minimum reps” vs. “maximum reps.
2. While the standard routines mix in aerobic and balance games the custom does not allow for it.  Also the standard routines mostly seem kind of on the easy side.
3. There’s only one custom routine, which is just a bad idea as I’m told there’s minimal benefit for strength building on the same muscle group for two days in a row.

I still am glad to have it, but I’ll probably also check out some of the competitors.  I doubt they’ll match the polish on Wii Fit Plus, but I hope they’ll be more focused on giving power-users options to help them get an efficient work out.

Thinking about how to do DnD 4e in a more modern setting

I’ve been pondering how DnD 4e could work in settings like steampunk, westerns, modern, or sci-fi.  I tend to find those genres more interesting and have rather been liking our current pirate themed campaign.

I think a lot is doable with a few small addition, some hybrid classes, and a lot of changing flavor.

First off, most of these settings have guns.  To get them right, particularly as you get to modern and sci-fi, it probably makes sense to have them usable as both ranged weapons and implements.  However, I’d still probably want to keep the damage comparable to other weapons.

Second, giving defenders ranged options is tricky.  Sword mages have it, but the rest, even when hybrids, take a bit more thinking.  Melee characters are fine in more modern settings, but I think ranged options do make sense.  Part of the solution might be more powers that use ranged basics.  For flavor purpose, I’d call ranged marking “covering fire.”

Third, in part to allow for mixed ranged and melee combat, some modern settings involve being less tied to a particular weapon.  Going all out with a light sabre is fine in space opera, but with modern and sci-fi it probably makes sense to use the variant rules where you get extra hit and damage bonuses when leveling rather than from equipment.

Anyways, something to think about, if anyone has any ideas they want to share or critiques, please let me know.

Doctrine and the Zombie Wars

Pallab Ghosh of the BBC reports that researchers in Canada have done a mathematical model of a widespread zombie outbreak and evaluated possible counter-strategies.  Dan Drezner has done excellent work in postulating what various systemic international relations theories would predict about the outcome of such an undead crisis [Update: link fixed].  Inspired by his analysis, below is my attempt at providing an in character explanation of how advocates of different U.S. military doctrines would suggest we face the zombie peril.  This analysis is in good part a response to the work of premier writer on this topic, Max Brooks, with particularly attention paid to the excellent fictional social history World War Z. 

Conventional warfare: Some elements of conventional warfare have been widely derided even before facing a threat that can neither shocked nor awed.  Similarly, against zombies decapitation strikes are no longer in any sense a game-changing euphemism but are instead a constant operation requirement.  However, while weapons and munitions must be modified, the solution to a zombie outbreak falls is still a matter of properly applying force on a massive scale.  Proper use of the Weinberger-Powell doctrine would ensure that the zombie menace is met with overwhelming force rather than the sort of half measures that could get U.S. soldiers killed or worse zombified, 

It is the job of the military to secure borders and when going abroad clear territory of zombies and then implementing an exit strategy rather than getting sucked into a quagmire of nation building.  As a side note, while the A-10 and AC-130s may be the most useful platform against the zombie, it is vital that we restore funding to the F-22 to deter hostile nations from exploiting the outbreak and U.S. distraction to expand their territory.

Counter-Insurgency: Critics of COIN doctrine argue that zombies lack hearts and minds, they only possess brains that must be splattered.  However, this facile argument overlooks the fact that counter-insurgency has always understood that zombies; the ultimate irreconcilables, cannot be won over.  What conventional warfare advocates fail to understand is that zombies, much like violent extremism, cannot simply be cleared via overwhelming force. 

Vectors for reemergence will always be prevalent, the undead are nothing if not patient, and long-term defeat of ghouls requires the cooperation of local populations abroad or heaven-forbid at home.  If a local has seen the military apply indiscriminate force they will be unwilling to report if their neighbors, let alone friends or family, have shown signs of infection.  We may have to occupy failed states that have become persistent sources of zombies, but we will largely act in a supportive role by training and equipping local anti-zombie forces.   Ultimately, resources must be put towards putting skull-crushing boots on the ground although there is a also a role for national guard troops and civilian agencies rebuilding communities ravaged by the zombie plague.

Net-Centric Warfare: World War Z was pointedly skeptical about the use of technology deeming the Landwarrior system as good for little more than watching the death of comrades from their point of view.  The book’s faith in simple rifles, lines of soldiers, and even melee weapons overly romanticizes earlier periods of warfare.  Cutting edge technology is expensive, but in the event of a mass-casualty zombie outbreak, the lives of survivors are all the more precious. 

Ingenuity and invention can substitute for manpower by using sensors to detect precursors of outbreaks in populated areas or to keep an unblinking eye on wilderness, abandoned settlements, and even the oceans.  Anti-zombie squads can use unmanned ground vehicles to scout out urban areas and perhaps even to target ghouls remotely.  Unlike humans, robots cannot be added to the ranks of the enemy.  This technology can also save lives, infrared scopes can be used to differentiate between the heat signatures of living creatures and the undead.  Best of all, the against zombies net-centric systems of systems do not have to worry about enemy eavesdropping, cyber-terrorism, or anti-satellite strikes. 

Intervention-Skeptic: The flaw of all the above perspectives is that they view the military as the solution to a zombie outbreak.  The ultimate solution to a zombie outbreak is a cure or at a bare minimum a vaccine.  As we work to develop such a solution, our first priority must be securing the United States, although many suspect that the actual risk to developed nations is overstated in the first place.

Yes, some violence may be necessary, but there is a reason most military anti-zombie sorties result in disaster.  Taking the fight to the zombie ultimately only depletes our resources while adding to their ranks.  Even the less violent counter insurgency approach is delusional.  Do we honestly expect citizens of other countries to accept a U.S. soldier killing their mother, even if said ghoulish mother was craving brains a few moments earlier?  We are not capable of effectively developing other nations under peacetime conditions, how can we expect to do so during a zombie outbreak?

 

I wouldn’t spoil the actual doctrine used in WWZ, but it makes more sense than the above while and still is quite horrifying.  If you enjoyed this, or if you thought you might have enjoyed this were I a better writer, I’d strongly recommend the book.

Quick Wii Fit review

This was my 26th day of using it.  On the whole I’m pleased because it’s helped me get about a half hour of exercise a day.  I had achieved some similar effects via DDR which gave a bit more intensity I think but was largely limited to aerobic exercise.

Since the Wii Fit is fairly well known, I’ll skip the description aside from saying that its largely based on a balance board and occasionally supplemented with use of the wiimote.

The yoga and strength training exercises feel rather good, although in some cases getting a perfect score is far too easy or score doesn’t even apply at all.  This is a bit of a problem as the score is the a key support to telling if your form is right.  You do still get the onscreen instructor, which is really the main guide, but aside from avoiding the hokiness of some exercise videos it isn’t a huge advantage.

The aerobic exercises are fairly fun with a hip gyrating hula hoop game, a backdrop for running, and a rhythm game.  Some of these are designed to work by giving you cues through the wiimote speaker, which means you can watch TV or in my case play Persona 4 while doing the exercises.  Finally, the balance games are fun, but while they do help your reflexes and posture I’m not sure how beneficial they are relative to the other three categories.

Problems:

• There needs to be an option to do sequences, ideally with recommendations from the game based on weakness or parts of the body you want to focus on.  This is particularly an issue because you can easily spend a quarter to a third of your play-time going between options.  They seem to be implementing some form of this in the sequel, so that’s a good sign.  One obvious fix for the current version would be allowing navigation directly from one related exercises to another in the workout sets suggested by the game.
• On a related note I twisted my knee ‘running’ a few days ago.  They should really incorporate stretches as a suggested option for the longer exercise if a person hasn’t done any yoga yet that day.
• There’s a fair amount of repetition in fitness advice, instructor sayings, and the like.  This is the biggest problem in terms of music.  There’s only really one rhythm game song per version of the game.  In addition, it be nice if you could copy over a workout soundtrack or something, other sorts of game manage this.
• There should be way more unlockables.  They seem to have largely petered out by day 26.  I’m not sure what exactly they should offer, but just unlocking them would be something to aim for in addition to getting higher scores.  These could be available through mods holding purchasable downloads .  The motivation benefit might well be enough to get me to buy them, assuming what was unlocked was interesting in the slightest.
• Finally, the 'personality’ of the balance board can be a bit passive aggressive and sometime the scale disagrees with other digital house scales.  Instructors aren’t bad though.

On the whole I’m pretty happy and hopeful about most of these being addressed by the sequel.

Cork Arrival 2009-07-11

Hi there!  Once again, I steal my husband’s blog account to bring you more tales of interest!  (To me, at least.)

Our original plan was to meet up with a friend of mine who lives in Cork.  We were going to head to Cobh (pronounced “Cove”), departure point for many of those emigrating from Ireland due to the famine, and also the last port of call for the Titanic.  About half an hour before we were due to arrive, we get a text from my friend asking if we can change plans since the weather had gotten so horrible.  Sure enough, we looked out of the train window to see that the increasingly cloudy weather had turned into a driving rain.

Said rain kept on as we arrived in the city.  In a rare departure from using public transit, we took a cab from the train station to the hotel since we weren’t familiar at all with the bus routes and this was no weather to be walking around in.  I can safely say that it was one of the two worst weather events we encountered on the entire trip.  (The second would be some sporadic but heavy downpours to and from the Cliffs of Moher the next day.)

After checking in at the hotel, we rested up a bit, then headed down to the hotel lobby to meet up with my friend.  This would be our first face-to-face meeting, as we’d only ever communicated online before.  To my extremely pleasant surprise, another friend of ours who lives in the UK had come over to meet up as well.  Totally unexpected, and really great to meet her.  We then headed off for dinner at No. 5 Fenn’s Quay, which offered a nice selection of traditional Irish dishes.  Much geeky conversation was had (we all play the same MMO, and Greg has absorbed way too much from listening to me babble).  Afterwards we walked around for a bit, then headed back to the hotel so we could prepare for all the sights we were planning on seeing tomorrow.

Finished with DnD third edition

Just wrapped up my last game on Monday.  I greatly prefer the new edition so I handed off a good number of my remaining book immediately after that.  Bit of a shame to end on a total party kill, but such is life (or death in this case).

My main thought on ending is that DnD really needs a strategic level set of game mechanics.  Particularly as characters get more power they are going to do things that have far reaching implications.   This can apply for any role playing game.  The open world stories tend to allow a wide range of approaches and even variant storylines, but the impact on the world at large tends to be very localized.  Games with more linear plots often change the world in dramatic ways, but player choices matter little.  One exception is Suikoden 2 and to a lesser extent 1.  Those games had a strategic element that was influenced by which of the 108 characters were recruited.  The grand strategy was set in stone, but controlling the higher scale level was very satisfying.

More after the cut.

Question of the Day: Is windows solitaire a video game?

Stephen Totilo raises the question after having a friendly argument:

If someone claims to have not played video games since they were a kid — BUT this person has played solitaire on their computer recently — then, are they, in fact, wrong? I say they have played video games lately. The person on the other side of the argument tells me that computer solitaire doesn’t count as a video game.

I'm against Totilo on this one.  Sure as commenter Jake points out, computer solitaire does add a timer and scoring and such, but I think in its essence it is still a card game.  I'd qualify online poker and electronic Settlers of Catan as card and board games respectively rather than video games.  Chess against an AI I might consider a video game regardless of whether it was a physical or an electronic board.

The question is really what dividing lines are useful.  I do think the term video game has some meaning other than just a game on a computer/console.  The hard/casual gamer divide is overrated in my book, but I think there's a useful cultural line to be drawn between native games and clear unintigrated transplants.  Can there be hybrids?  Sure, although absent a critical mass of "Bridge plus" designers/players I'd probably just qualify the hybrids as occupying both camps.

Is multiplayer the key to engaging serious games?

Last was week the Games for Change festival where designers of serious games got together to discuss their nascent industry. One regular topic for discussion at such gathering is whether serious games need to be fun and what fun even means. Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer summarizes the discussion:

Perhaps games, and the audience for games, would be better served by design that emphasizes values beyond fun, but it’s clearly a difficult assignment. A notable undercurrent at this year’s festival was a sense that the current crop of games for change aren’t reaching their intended audiences. Most of these games are perceived by players as preachy, and even their developers admit they often fail to match the engaging gameplay offered by commercial games.

He also casts doubt on the idea that a new generation that grew up on games would be more inclined to take games seriously given his experience with some freshmen regarding his class on video games. That said, Abbott found hope in the increasing awareness of the value of connections with commercial developers. From my experience with documentary films, I do think production values definitely matter. This doesn’t mean that serious games should be high budget, that’s impractical, but they should have a professional look.

On the fun breakdown, I’m inclined to think engaging is a better word. To find an audience beyond the equivalent of textbooks and corporate training videos people have to want to play serious games.

Making serious games engaging gets to the mention of multiplayer in my title. Economics and political science both heavily involve themselves in game theory with the classic example being the prisoner’s dilemma. The mechanics there are not particularly impressive, cooperate or betray, but I recall little grumbling when people paired up to experiment with it. I think that’s because the challenge and competition of playing with another person can up the engagement value substantially. This could even be faked I suspect, but probably only for one-off games.

Blog roll addition: Hathor Legacy

Hathor legacy is a cultural criticism site with the tagline “in search of good female characters.”  They recently revamped things by consolidating their multiple feeds into a single one (they also have a LJ feed), so this seemed like a good time to link.  The design of the core site doesn’t excite me, the text is a little big and you need to read more to get the details on any post.  However, that’s not an issue with the feeds, so I don’t really care.

My favorite discussion has been one by guest author Audra on Laura Roslin, the female President in Battlestar Gallactica.  The write-up does a good job of both addressing her strengths and acknowledging that she does make a fair number of iffy decisions.  The discussion went off topic some, but added more analysis and kept the things interesting well after the initial post.

A second post I enjoyed was one I disagreed with put up by Kris Ligman.  She thought Portal did more to advance female protagonists than Mirror’s Edge because the latter’s marketing was really driven by its main character.  Loving both games, I disagreed, as did other commenters, but while the discussion was a bit harsh on Kris I think she handled herself well and updated her views as new info came to light.  Potential for good discussion really is key in my view to a good criticism site.  Another fun series by the same author is a salutary set of pieces on the women of Metal Gear Solid.

The site was started by Jennifer Kesler who both gets a nice mix of writers and wades into comments as a moderator when appropriate, which is key to getting the commenting community that I enjoy.

Indiana Jones and the Residents of Evil

Resident Evil 5 (RE5) rightly garnered some controversy for setting a zombie-like game in Africa with a white protagonist.  Emphasis on “like” because the original trailer left out many of the safeties of the zombie genre.  The protagonist wasn’t defending home turn, the ‘zombies’ were intelligent enough to communicate, and they looked like normal, albeit furious, people.  These safeties were already off when RE4 came out, but the pseudo-Transylvania with Spanish speakers setting lacked any context and thus avoided controversy.  In part as a response to the controversy the situation improved through the inclusion of an AI-controlled African sidekick playable in co-op and made the bad guys look more alien via bloodshot eyes and post-decapitation tentacles.  These changes underline the importance of the initial protests, if not for a reaction to the trailer they may never have been made.  At this point, for the record, I’ve played about a quarter to a third of Resident Evil 4 and the demo of RE5.

So where does Indy come in?  He gets a mention in N’Gai Croal’s the column in the June issue of Edge Magazine.  It’s supposed to be out now, but my local Borders just had the May one.  So in this case I’m turning to Stephen Totilo for the preview which quotes Croal:

And as Takeuchi went on to explain that the enemies with the grass skirts and spears were seeking to defend the ruins from intruders and that he'd been inspired by Indiana Jones movies, I felt like I once again understood where he'd been coming from. That a two-to-three-week trip to unspecified African countries and looking at a number of movies set in Africa alongside pop-cultural inspirations like the Indiana Jones series simply hadn't been enough to sufficiently educate him or the team about he legacy of the imagery that they were tapping in to and, as a result, they'd lost control of their message. That's my take on it, of course; I doubt that the man who sat across from me and thoughtfully answered all of my questions would agree.

If Takeuchi had used Indy as inspiration, he rather severely messed up the execution. Put simply, Indy doesn’t slaughter natives.  In Raiders of the Lost Arc and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull he flees mobs but doesn’t engage them.  He does kill at times one-on-one, including a swordsman while he’s wielding a gun, but those examples have nothing to do with the madness of crowds that Takeuchi is trying to invoke.

Arguably, the most relevant analogy might be the Thuggee cult members in Temple of Doom that are mind controlled via the Blood of Kali.  The Brits do open up on them, but ultimately they’re captured and not massacred (the first minute of this video is from the actual film).  Notably the Brits are fairly pompous in the piece and its the natives who Jones take delivery on the treasury.  Another contender for the most apt scene are the tomb guards in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  However, in that case Indy’s group gets by them with the film’s artifacts, it’s the Soviets who perpetrate a massacre.

I don’t claim the Indy films are perfect by any means, but Indy generally treated the locals respectfully and was favorably contrasted to characters that didn’t.  I don’t know how this issue was treated in all the Indy games, but that’s not what Takeuchi is talking about in terms of inspiration.

The problem seems to be that zombie films, guerrilla war flicks, pulp, and real far-flung locations were all raided for visuals and set pieces without any consideration for the moral content of the sources or of the result. The Resident Evil series was never really known for deep thinking or making sense, so this isn’t really a huge surprise (as compared to the Metal Gear series which still often doesn’t make sense but is quite philosophical about it).  The closer this approach comes towards real world settings the more likely problems are to occur.

In short, I’d be rather hesitant about this director making any story or genre innovations without adult supervision.  Not that he doesn’t have a right to make what he wants, but without that input the ‘innovative’ product is going to reflect badly on him and his publishers.  The original controversy wasn’t overblown, it provided the needed supervision because neither Capcom U.S. nor anyone more knowledgeable in the lower ranks seemed to have spoken up prior to the trailer. 

Review: Gamer Symphony Orchestra (Univ. of Md College Park)

Thanks to a heads up by my friend Matt, I went to the Gamer Symphony Orchestra’s spring show this afternoon.  They hit a lot of the staples (Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, Halo) but notably had a pre-encore finale with a medley from Katamari Damacy which made me quite happy.

The show was free, as are their recordings. I may well do a song by song discussion when they put up MP3s or video for this concert.  They’ve definitely got some talented people, but they’re also quite open about being a club that’s happy to take inexperienced people.  As a result, I did definitely notice some slips, and I’m no pro.  This didn’t prevent me from enjoying the concert and I would be willing to buy a CD (they weren’t available, presumably for licensing reasoning).

The arrangements they did were fairly original.  For example, their Metal Gear medley had a jazzy version of the theme from three.  I don’t think I’d pick that as my mainstay version, but it was a fun change of pace with the caveat that I’m not sure what a Bond audio reference was doing in there.  Similarly, I’m rather fond of the way they played around with Still Alive (although that’s a version from a prior concert, possibly with a different lead).

On the whole I enjoyed it and will gladly catch future shows, particularly in UMCP’s lovely Clarisse Smith Art Center.  If the presence of some less polished musicians is going to bother you, then probably not for you.  These days you can get a show with fully professional orchestras, but I think their choices of music and arrangements benefit from intimate knowledge and enthusiasm for the material.  Thus aside from being a terrific value, they also do pieces that I think tend not to be done even at the game orchestral concerts.

Blog roll maintenance: Games Journalists

A few game journalists have been moving around lately.  Stephen Totilo is moving to Kotaku and also will be maintaining his own personal gaming blog.  I’m going to keep around MTV Multiplayer for now, although it’s on hiatus, because I’ve grown to like Tracey John’s commentary.  I guess I’ll link to Totilo’s personal blog for now.

N’Gai Croal has left Newsweek to go into consulting.  He doesn’t have a personal website up yet to my knowledge but he does have a tumblr blog.  I wish him the best of luck advising designers, if they listen to him at all I’ll have more fun with their games.

Finally Patrick Klepek was another good commenter on MTV Multiplayer and I don’t think he’s yet found a new home.  He’ll make my blog roll when he does, until then fans can follow him over at his twitter account eXxy.  I’ve got my own twitter account with my usual creativity in naming things: http://twitter.com/gregorysanders.  It’s entirely public, but not particularly exciting unless you want vaguely daily updates on my life as well as notifications when I’ve got new posts up.

Also, I finally beat the boss in world 3 of Henry Hatworth.  It required improved tactics on my part as well as replaying an old world to get money to buy an upgrade.  That done, I’m still enjoying it on the whole, but even with puzzle game add-ons, Mega-man style platformers really aren’t my strong point.

Review: Locke’s Quest (DS game)

Locke’s quest is a tower defense game.  It’s a fairly common genre for web games, but I hadn’t actually played one previously.  That said, I always enjoyed trying to fortify my bases in real-time strategy games, despite the fact that in most that’s not actually a particularly effective tactic.

The game itself pits your character, Locke, against wave upon wave of clockwork enemies.  The build and combat modes are split.  There’s typically two to three minutes to first set up your base, a few minutes of attacks, and then the cycle repeats with a bit less time for maintenance.  Survive a number of days and you then go on to a new map, with conditions sometimes changing mid-map. I’m not normally a big fan of time limits, but in this case they kept things moving nicely.  Interestingly, time is the only real sunk cost in the game.  You have to repair/replace towers damaged in the combat phase, but you can sell off anything you built at full value.  During the combat phase Locke can spend his time on a mix of repairing your walls and turrets and attacking the enemy.  There’s multiple types of attacks and each has its own little mini-game, although I tended to use the acid attack in most any circumstances.

The building involves laying out auto-firing towers, cheaper walls to surround and directly strengthen them, traps that only last a round, and buffing segment that add special abilities to the towers.  The traps might actually be a little cheap when it come to balance, I found them a highly affordable and effective option even on early, easier, day.  One other interesting variant, you can pick building materials which makes each tower and wall stronger but also more expensive.  I was often flush enough with resources that I didn’t need the cheaper options, but I do think it added something to the game.

The core game play is a fun and thanks to good map design and mid-map scenario change it stays varied and interesting.  There is a good mix of clockwork baddies, although some with special abilities, like invisibility or flying, only show up on certain maps which makes countermeasures very hit or miss.  I’d have preferred less gimmicky baddies and defenses and instead having them be more like the burrowers who influence design tactics but don’t require special equipment.  The AI is fairly dumb.  It will exploit holes in your defenses, but only if the holes are fairly close to its default path.  This is mitigated some by pulling in enemies from multiple start points who have different paths.  When the holes are exploited though, it’s rather scary as all your defenses are weaker from the sides and back.  Also a bit annoying is that using walls that are pre-built in the map are indestructible but don’t increase the defensive value of your towers like walls you build do.  This sometimes results in building walls in front of the pre-builts on the map, which mostly bugs me because it’s just inelegant.  I’d accept if they existing features were destroyable so long as I could fully exploit them.

The story ha some interesting twists, I liked the supporting characters even though the protagonist sometimes did not.  That said, I found the ending unsatisfying and pseudo-profound.   It involves a fairly common error, endings should not involve that much discussion of the mechanics of souls in your particular universe.  Speculative theology, unlike science fiction, tends not to be well thought out or insightful into the human condition. The supporting mini-games, one involving you controlling a tower, one ‘design’ screen where you used parts to copy a picture of your next turret, were cute though not hugely exciting.  The design game made me wish I could actually customize my turrets, but there is a good mix in the game so that’s not a huge problem.  Although I haven’t used it yet, one great addition is that once you beat the game, you can replay any of the levels at will. 

On the whole, this is a fun game about making tradeoffs with time and resources.  The multiple wave structure allows for fixing early mistakes or building on good ideas.  There’s often a satisfying feeling of desperation near the end of a later wave as you frantically work to get your defenses to hold.  There’s some complaints that the game lets you carry over too many resources, that’s probably true, although they give you the map minimum in replay so it’s less of a problem for the hard core.  I’d say the main missing element to the game play is an incentive to defend more than just the ‘source wells’ the clockwork enemies are trying to get to.  Sometimes you have allies, and if they’re outside your walls, they’re probably toast.  They aren’t that useful on the inside, but they do help if your defenses are overrun.  However, that incentive is mostly present in earlier levels.  There can be advantages in plugging up enemy entry points or setting up secondary front, but on the whole the time efficient thing to do is just to build the best towers out of the best materials in a limited space.  More tradeoffs here would add to game play depth in my view.

Finally, I’d pick up a sequel, but it would also be interesting to see the premise played with.  In some ways, responding to natural disasters, floods in particular, seem to be highly relevant to this kind of game play. But what really might rock would be a zombie variant.  In that case, require allies to man the fortifications and to give the supporting bonuses.  If a turret goes down you don’t just have a breach, they’ve got another zombie.  Trying to save as many people as possible and needing those people to man your fortifications would add the strategic depth I was talking about before.

Source: Impulse buy.  I think I heard about it first from MTV Multiplayer and Stephen Totilo

Classic Gaming: [Chrono Trigger]

[Chrono Trigger] is a Japanese RPG produced by the company that created the Final Fantasy series.  It's widely beloved for good reason and is now available for the Nintendo DS.  If you like classic JRPGs and haven't played it, definitely pick it up.  Since it's so widely praised, I'll focus on those elements that I think would bear repeating in other games.

First off, there's a time travel plot.  I think time travel is a rather useful trope for games even if it's overplayed most everywhere else.  While the story is linear, albiet with side quests, it's still very satisfying to see the long term consequences of your actions.  That sort of reward typically only comes in at the end of RPGs, if at all.  I was particularly pleased that side quests allowed the PCs to bring peaceful relations between humans and various 'monsterous' races (although there's no real precense of people of color as frogs don't count).  Another benefit is that the big bad comes into view relatively early in the game and can be fought at any time without losing a sense of menace.  The system is an old style save/load, sadly no Prince of Persia or Braid style time tricks, but I think that tends to be another advantage of time travel related plotlines.

Second, the combat is relatively interesting for a JRPG.  There's combos available between most all of your party members which makes party selection more interesting and meaningful.  They also incorporate the map to an extent, there's attacks that travel in lines and in circular bursts.  This isn't a highly meaningful mechanic, but it encourages actually paying attention to what your enemies are doing.  The boss battles tend to require some tactical finesse and while sometimes overlong are highly varied.  This isn't to say that the combat is terrific, but it's a good deal better than I expect from classic JRPGs.

The main character, Chrono, is a classic cypher lead, but I definitely liked the other party members.  Particularly of note is Lucca, a mad scientist who despite being female is actually a bit unbalanced because she lacks healing abilities.  However, I do recommend sticking with her if you like her, as she can do ridiculous damage by the end.

As a side note, Stephen Totillo recently had a piece where he praised a feature Chrono Trigger and to a greater extent the Final Fantasy series could really use: fastforwarded special attacks.  The crazy graphics of special attacks is part of the fun of these games, but invariably they get old fast.  Skipping them is sometimes an option but that seems like a waste really.  Fast forwarding could be a nice middle ground.

In any event, I've actually played a fairly silly time travel card game [called Chrononauts by Looney Labs, maker of Fluxx; thanks Matt!].  It involved setting up a timestream with interrelated events.  For example assassinating Hitler had definite implications for WWII. However, some ways of changing the time stream had a mix of good and bad consequences.  I'd be interested to see a game like that, unlike Chronotrigger where most of the changes you make are reliably for the better.  It coudl be fun to see the impact of your intervation on the world at large, ideally with a great range of options that could interact in a rule base rather than a scripted manner.  Time travel wouldn't necessarily be required, but it would let you to see the full consequences quickly and even to rethink actions.  In any event, many games suffer from endings that are primarily determined by the final choice the player makes and not everything leading up to it.  The more consequences that emerge pre-ending, the less the risk of this problem.

Origin: Borrowed from Fiancee

[Update: The title is two words: Chrono Trigger and not Chronotrigger.] 

Social games: Emotions as status effects

So how could a characters emotion be best expressed in a roleplaying game?  Normally this is just a matter for acting or storytelling.  For some point buy systems, characters might pick up phobias or love-interests to protect, but even then things are often kept fairly mechanics light.  That’s fine for a certain style of game, but trying to manipulate other peoples emotions is ultimately part of the tactics of social conflict.

Reading over Mike Mearls’ blog, he had an post on adding some flavor to NPCs:

I've been thinking of doing something similar for my NPCs in 4e. Sure, they'll have the typical spells and tricks to make them daunting enemies, but I'd also like to insert a few powers that are a mechanical expression of the NPC's personality and role in the campaign, built along with quotes or other material to go along with the attack…

I like the idea of these "scripts" because they make a fight different. Sometimes, the tactically smart play for an NPC is boring and flavorless. If every NPC fights as well as the DM can run them, you lose a lot of what makes an NPC unique. Ideally, the players think of the fight in terms of the NPC's personality ("That dwarf was crazy! He ran across a pool of acid to get to Baldar.") rather than in terms of powers ("That dwarf had a nasty sneak attack abililty.")

The specific examples he gave were all rather combat oriented but got into confidence, love, anger, and hatred.  Mearls was talking about special powers to emulate these feelings, but in some ways they could work just like being slowed, blinded, or stunned.  This isn’t to say that powers couldn’t key off emotional statuses, barbarian rage is a classic fantasy trope and could fit well with such a system.

The first question I’m pondering is whether emotional statuses should be fairly neutral or negative?  Hatred might give you penalties when attacking someone other than your rival, but should there be a bonus for hitting the rival?  Anger might make you more prone to leave yourself open and thus give a defensive penalty, but does it make your combat or social attacks more biting?  I’m prone to think a mix of advantages and disadvantages is best, but that makes the states more complicated.

Here I think I’d like to do more research.  Social mechanics should ultimately be a bit more real than combat mechanics.  It’s an area where most of us have more real life experience, so it’s easier to get it wrong.

The inherent morality of gamers

So, many games let you play as a good guy or a bad guy. What do people prefer? Morality systems tend to be encourage fairly ridiculous extremes, but that doesn’t make the question uninteresting.  Stephen Totilo interviewed Brian Fleming who heads the studio that produced Infamous:

He’d heard this from Peter Molyneux, the outspoken head of Lionhead Studios, who said that players of the Xbox series “Fable,” tended to steer their characters toward the side of angels. Technically, they could have made their characters evil and gained just as many benefits. But Molyneux said players ultimately preferred to complete their adventure as a good person.

“I thought he was lying,” Fleming told me during a demo of “Infamous” last week in San Francisco. Then Fleming saw a survey, which indicated that gamers want to save the world, that as little as 20% of players of games like these finish evil…

Play-testing of “Infamous” has indicated to Fleming that many gamers don’t want to flip-flop their moral standing. “People blindly steer hard in one direction,” he said. I suggested that they did this in order to maximize their skills in the game’s good superpowers or evil superpowers. To balance that, he said, out-of-character actions in the game will net players double the standard experience points for the other moral path. A bad guy who does some good gets more credit than a good guy who just does more good. Such is life?

I like doubling the experience points for exceptions, but on the whole I generally think encouraging extremes makes for uninteresting morality.  If it’s a Star Wars game, I can see the logic, but I’ve always found the Dark Side/Light Side dynamic to hold fairly little insight into human nature.  Similarly, I really don’t have time these days to play through games twice so that aspect doesn’t appeal to me either.

I’d be happy to theorize about how to better have morality systems add depth, but I think the best way to start is to go where the players are.  Sure off the ridiculously bad options, but most of the effort should go towards the good side.  Apparently Infamous does offer variety on each side, although that part didn’t really show in the trailer.

Great interview on game design

There's a terrific interview on game design for DnD up on the Wizards of the Coast website.  At a few point it discusses how a single role could kill a character at full health, either because a monster got a critical hit or because of a failed saving throw.  They largely have done away with that in 4e, much to my pleasure.  As the piece acknowledges, that's appropriate for some systems.  I don't doubt many old school DnD players prefer that.  Their right certainly.  It certainly happens in real life, but for me it just isn't that fun. 

There's also a good discussion about the nerfing of wizards in an attempt to implement the principle "all classes must rock."  This is a nigh universal system, although the Buffy system in some ways incorporates inequality in character abilities.  The way it does it is to give some really good bonuses and abilities that can be used rarely as well as powers to force plot twists.  I don't think Buffy is quite there yet though.  Rare bonuses are effectively just a different power setup that's more oriented towards dailies than at-wills to use 4e terminology.  Going a bit off the ideas of my friend Matt L., it's really about sharing storytelling responsibility.  For something like Buffy to really work, I think you need to get more into the theory of having half-players half-game masters.  The half-storytellers also should probably have a range of different options, from controlling specific NPCs to influencing world building.

A final interesting point from the article is a peek at design ideas 4e abandoned.  I'm paraphrasing a bit in the descriptions where I think elaboration is useful.

• Power Keywords: Classify powers by key words and allow variable access to key words.
• Powers Every Level.
• Condition Tracks: Consistently requiring lesser conditions on the way to nastier ones.
• A Weird Damage System: Difficult to summarize.
• Too Many Renewable Powers, Not Enough Attrition.
• Multiple Power Acquisition Schemes.
• The 'Traveller-style' Character Generation System: Difficult to summarize.

I love these discussions because it both provides good ideas that might work for different systems and notes tricky ideas that perhaps should be avoided.

Google Documents Experiment

This is a bit of a follow-up to some of the gaming stuff I was doing last month. No real new information here, but I'm trying out some formatting tricks for use in the future. If it doesn't work for you or you have any thoughts, feel free to comment.

Random gaming thoughts

Inspired by this Yglesias post:

Dave Weigel has a neat piece on the “going Galt” fad currently reverberating through the loony-bin known as the conservative movement.

With all this Atlas Shrugged talked going around, Bioshock 2 is really going to be incredibly topical.  Here's hoping they can exploit it properly.

Sweet little lies

Last Sunday there was a fascinating article on lying in the WPost (not to be confused with the not so fascinating lying in an op-ed column).  It was prompted by the new series "Lie to Me" based on the professional work of Paul Ekman.  Sounds like a fun series, but I think I may check out his books first.  The article draws on his work as well as several other field experts. 

The main argument of the article is that we're bad at detecting lies.  Only about 1% of people are truth wizards and great at doing it.  They have to be able to live with uncertainty. Even those good at spotting lies tend only to be capable of doing it in a professional capacity.  We theoretically could get good at detecting lies in our personal life, but it would mean abandoning trust and it's not really worth it.

So, for the fun stuff, here's the unconscious tells:

• Smiling often means you're hiding your emotions.
• Emblems, e.g. giving a thumbs up, can be useful but only if you can notice it mid-gesture and not the final results.
• Illustrations, e.g. talking with your hands, tends to decrease when you're lying as you're more actively controlling your gestures.
• Manipulations, e.g. biting your nails, are not a good way of detecting lies but are widely thought to be the most obvious tells.
• Leaning forward, nodding, speaking at the same speed and volume as the person you're talking too tends to inspire trust.

There's more including neuroscience. It's worth reading the whole thing.

I think I may study some of these articles before I try fooling with social mechanics for RPGs.  Realism is an unattainable and ultimately unwise goal.  However, social mechanics should at least evoke how these things actually work.  Alternately, one can make a system based on evoking how they tend to work in film and such.  However, I do believe in learning via gaming, so may as well get it right.

RPG Mechanics Workshop: Target Numbers, Take 2

After Mecha kindly pointed out that the numbers that I was assuming were play-tested had changed substantially after release. As a result, the numbers I used earlier today were quite off.

Here's my second take:

In fourth edition DnD (DnD 4e) the basic mechanic is to take a d20 and roll while hoping to roll equal or higher than the target number (TN). The standard target numbers are 5 for an easy difficulty roll, 10 for a medium difficulty roll and 15 for a hard roll. If the roll deals with something your character is good at, you'll have a bonus. For the purposes of this exercise, those bonuses range from -1 (no skill and you're below human average at the stat) to +8 (you've done everything possible to boost that number).

The above paragraph is an over simplification. It doesn't deal with the level "treadmill." As characters get more powerful, their challenges get more difficult. This is meant to keep things from getting boring. I factored out the treadmill to deriving the 5, 10, and 15 values mentioned above.    The base numbers are available in the DMG errata in the section under the header page 42.

After deriving what good target numbers for a uniform distribution d20 system, I had to figure out the equivalents in a normal distribution 2d6 system.  The match-ups aren’t perfect.  In a uniform distribution, if the target number increases by one, the probability of success goes down by a constant amount.  This is because every number is equally likely to be rolled.  That isn’t true for a normal distribution because with 2d6 there’s six ways to roll a 7 but only one way to roll a 2.  

Even with two different distributions, the curves match up reasonably well. 

• The DnD 4e D20 range from –1 to +8 translate to +0 to +4 in 2d6
• Easy 5/medium 10/hard 15 translates to a TN of 6, 8, and 10, respectively.
• There’s one key difference between easy rolls and medium/hard rolls in the DnD 4e table.  The medium/hard rolls  rise at at a rate of +2 / 3 levels.  The easy rolls rise at a rate of +1.5 / 3 levels.
• This means that the game assumes the characters are not specializing in the skills they’ll be using to make easy rolls.  This seems like a sensible trick, and I’ll steal it for Besm 3e’s benchmarks.
• I’m still pondering what to do with static targets a la DnD 4e defense values.  I’m thinking I’ll go with 7, so between medium and hard.  I haven’t made my mind up on that yet.

This all gets more complicated once I factor in tier-based expected minimums.  However, that can wait for another week.

RPG mechanics workshop: Target number math

[UPDATE: Forgot to check the errata.  Apparently the numbers have been seriously adjusted downwards and now adjust for stat boosts.  Taking this one down for now until I get the new numbers up.  I’ll leave it up after the break for the record.]

Resident Evil 5: Follow-up failure

Downloaded the RE5 Demo and so far my main impression has been that I agree with Patrick Klepek that I don’t like the controls at all. (As a side note, I was sad to learn that Klepek was leaving the MTV Multiplayer blog, sounds like budget cuts.  I’ll miss his writing and hope to follow him elsewhere.   Here’s his twitter feed for any other fans out there.)

So far I’ve died a several times on the marketplace scenario and had the game crash twice.  Not the most auspicious beginning.    Part of the problem is probably that I don’t really know the RE4 controls, so I’m starting from scratch here.

I’d remembered to download the demo because the controversy around the game is flaring again.  I do like Coates rejection of the “it’s just a game” defense.  If games can’t handle critiques they don’t merit respect.  Having already critiqued the trailer, I’m withholding further judgment until I can get through the bloody demo.  That said, I do think the addition of the Sheva Alomar character certainly does help some.  It’d help more if both she were playable in single player mode, though at least she is available in co-op.  I do love the rise of co-op gaming even though I don’t tend to have guests over to play shooters with.

That said, even if things are better, I don’t buy that it means the original complaints were overblown.  I stand by my critique of the trailer for one.  For the defense, here’s a L.A. Times article that quotes Karen Dyer, the actress that played Alomar:

"When the clip came out, Sheva wasn't in it because she hadn't been created yet. Once people get to hear the whole story and meet Sheva, I think they'll see that there's nothing racist about it. In the game, she gets together with Chris Redfield to try to help her people. I think it's a balanced portrayal" of black people.

I hope she’s right, but even if she is, the fact that her character wasn’t created yet when the protest broke out shows the utility of complaining.  They may well have planned a local guide character anyways, but the criticism was early enough to have the potential to influence those decisions.  Raising warning flags gives developers the chance to correct course earlier in the design process.  The idea isn’t to score points, it’s to make a positive change.

RPG Mechanics Workshop: Core [mechanics]

So here’s the Mecha quote from last week:

'Let's make a secondary [conflict] system that is about half as intricate as the main one, that you cannot possibly even hold your ground for a millisecond against someone trained in it.'

This describes a common mistake in game design.  Designing a secondary system is easier than incorporating new ideas into the core system.  However, that just passes on to gamemasters and players the puzzle of how to make them work together.  There are a variety of ways to avoid this problem: sit out some fights, pick up abilities to cancel the system, become an expert yourself, or introduce wholesale immunities to the system. Most of these approaches either force everyone to deal with the system or minimize its impact (nerf') it.  In either case, the objective is increasing variety fails.  Sitting out is a simpler option, but it comes at the cost of fun and should be avoided whenever possible.

The real problem here is defensive and not offensive.  For abilities not emphasizing conflict, lacking expertise isn’t a problem because non-experts will stay away from those abilities.  Similarly on the offensive, a sword fighter need not worry if they are inept with an axe.  The problem is defensive because a characters weaknesses will intentionally be targeted.  Teamwork abilities can help with these problems, but should not be so demanding that the weak character is effectively sitting out the conflict or that the defender' doesn’t have a role other than protecting the weak character.

Thus I suggest the solution is that defensive systems should all overlap.  Each characters should have strong points and weak points, but there should be a minimum standard for non-extraordinary weak points.  This applies to combat but also any other situation where characters face consequences for failure and cannot necessarily rely on their strong points.

Happily, both DnD 4e and Besm 3e make real strides over their predecessors on these issues.  I’ll discuss Besm 3e after the cut.

Role playing game mechanics workshop

The main tabletop RPG I play is Dungeons and Dragons.  Currently I’m in a 3.5 edition campaign, though I’ll be jumping over to fourth edition as soon as that’s done.  I do this because I find the mechanics themselves fun, in terms of setting and play style it isn’t really a natural match for me.  I credit my enjoyment of the game to the hard work of the designers and tests, it didn’t happen like that by accident. 

So, I’ve been thinking a bit about how I’d do a game with fun mechanics as well a setting and play style that I would enjoy.  For this experiment, I’m going to be working with BESM third edition. 

Why Besm 3e?

1. I’ve played and enjoyed its prior incarnations.
2. It handles the setting and play style thing fairly well.
3. I already own it.
4. I have spent some time thinking into how to fix it.  

For these posts, I’ll discuss general principles in the main text but save the Besm 3e specific stuff for after the cut.  I’m not going to get as mechanics heavy as say this set of fixes to one prior edition but I do draw inspiration from that work.  If anyone else is interested, let me know and I’ll be happy to have your input in more than just comments.

First post later this week, inspired by this quote by my friend Mecha who writes at geeks.rate(food) which review Omaha area restaurants:

'Let's make a secondary combat system that is about half as intricate as the main one, that you cannot possibly even hold your ground for a millisecond against someone trained in it.'

Race and DnD: Responding to the medievalist defense

Last week James Edward Raggi IV over at Lamentations of the Flame Princess listed my old post on Race and Dnd among a few he was responding to.  Not sure if he puts me in the “thought provoking” or “thought suppressing” category. He’s an old school first edition grognard (war-gamer) type whereas I am quite pleased with the newest edition, but there are enough similarities that some aspects of his defense to hold over.  His post is a long one and I don’t particularly agree with much of what he says, but he anticipates common critiques which makes his points easy to engage.

To start with, he argues against racism in the real world.  There aren’t real differences between the races, so acting as a racist just doesn’t make sense.

In a fictional world, that often isn’t the case. Humans are different than elves are different than dwarves are different than orcs, and objectively so. Good and Evil exist as objective forces, and certain races are predisposed to a certain moral outlook. This does not mean that authoring, playing, or accepting this as objective fictional fact means endorsing or accepting this as truth in real-world ethnicities or that it's at all related to how the real world works.

This single paragraph gets to my problem.  Objective fictional facts are fine in the mechanics of the game or in non-normative aspects of the game.  Super powers and floating cities are part of the fun.  But I think incorrect objective fictional facts regarding morality are problematic.  At best the player simply ignores them, at worst it negatively effects our outlook.  Long version after the cut.

Can an economist help balance an MMO?

Game balance is an eternal challenge in MMOs.  Inevitably some abilities or jobs will be higher performing than the alternatives.  Much as a banker who didn’t make risky loans might lose market share, a healer without the most efficient cure spell may have a harder time finding a party.  This can encourage a boring homogeneity and make the game less fun for those more interested in non-optimal abilities.

What MMO programmers do to help with this problem is ‘nerf’ the highly effective or ‘broken’ abilities.  Sometimes these broken abilities are a result of bad design decisions and other times players have just found clever ways to use them.  Similarly, players are always responsible for coming up with a reasonable effective character build, even in a well balanced decisions not all choices can or should have equal outcomes.  Making all possible designs equally effective would require making limiting variability and making things boring.

Regardless, balancing is hard work and requires a lot of information gathering.  It’s also controversial and can easily result in overcompensating in the other direction.  One way to smooth out this process could be a market inspired by the price of ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ at Preservation Hall.  Saints is heinously over requested so they charge more to play it. 

In a game, the program could automatically survey to determine the most popular abilities on each server.  Then the numerical properties: damage, healing, likelihood of success could be adjusted from a 15% penalty to a 15% bonus based on popularity.  This would automatically reduce the effectiveness of ‘broken’ abilities while giving less popular abilities a new chance at life.  This information should be shared with the players although the pace and magnitude of updates should not be so drastic as to result in regular rebuilds.

Of course this raises the question, what if an ability is popular because it’s fun to use rather than particularly effective?  Well that’s where you still need the designers.  If an ability still isn’t popular with a 15% boost after a few months, then perhaps it should be dropped.  Similarly if an ability stays popular despite the 15% penalty then it could be split into two variants that both try to capture the core appeal of the ability.  Designer skill will still be required here, that can’t happen automatically, but when it’s a matter of numerical effectiveness and not fun than economics can help.

Update after running past friends: Note that this won’t end whining about gaming.  It’s just a way to move from occasional dramatic changes to more regular smaller ones.  Also had some interesting discussion of implementation that improved on a few of my starting ideas, but I’ll save those for comments as they’re kinda technical.

Photo by jasonrowland.org used under a Creative Commons license.

Why are you punishing me Phoenix Wright? [Retracted]

Retraction: See bottom

I’m a bit annoyed with lawyer adventure/puzzle game Phoenix Wright at the moment because I’m stuck at the end of a case.  The actual puzzle itself isn’t that hard, but it’s a change from the games usual mechanic of presenting evidence during cross examination that shows a contradiction.  That’s not really the problem, the problem is that I’m not allowed to make a mistake, if I do I have to do over the whole chapter which takes about ten minutes.

There’s probably something obvious I’m not seeing, I’m okay with that.  Some trial and error is okay when I’m not seeing the logical thing to do.  What bugs me is the ten minutes.  That’s sadistic.  I’ve perfected my handling of the rest of the chapter.  There’s nothing I can do to get higher “health” or score.  It’s just rote repetition.  I’m okay with the odd do or die moment, they haven’t bothered me in prior games.  However, that might be more a matter of luck than anything else.

In this case, I think to something that was said by N’Gai Croal and one of the Penny Arcade guys, letting the player know they’ve failed can really be failure enough.  Having to just continue from the relevant bit of testimony after showing the ‘Guilty’ verdict would do just fine.  I’m not going to resort to the walkthrough just yet, but that’s just because I’ve got a girlfriend that’s already beat the case so I can just get a clue from her.  But in the future, my time is too valuable for this.

That said, the series is a lot of fun on the whole, crazy linear to be sure, but it’s evidence based inventory system allows for better logic puzzles than the classic adventure gaming setup.

Update: Huh, so apparently the game actually has a save suspend system that you can use repeatedly between chapters.  In most games of this type, it automatically kills the save when you reload, so I never really paid much attention to it.  The DS has a lovely amount of battery life, so it’s just as simple to hibernate it rather than save.  An autosave feature would still be nice, but with the option to save and the forewarning, this is more of an absent valuable feature than sadism.

Update 2: The fiancé tells me that in the GBA version, the suspend save didn’t auto-delete your saves when you restarted from suspending.  So my complaint would have held for the original games and someone else had the same idea and made the fix.  My thanks to whomever that person was.

No place like Home

The Playstation 3 just debuted a new social networking based interface.  Basically think second life, avatars wandering around, private rooms, but instead of hordes of customizability you get integration with arcade games and tools for co-op.  Penny Arcade tour it apart for things like pointless scarcity, apparently the bowling lanes fill up and there’s lines for arcade games, not to mention loading screens.

Part of the problem is technology, but as the third panel in the comic wants, there’s a real problem with unwanted attention and personal space.  As the MTV News crew found, females get a constant and obnoxious level of attention.  More from Tracey John:

Wanting to bust a move myself, I left my avatar doing “The Robot” and went to the (real-life) kitchen to grab a snack.

But when I returned, I had some unusual encounters…

Still doing “The Robot,” I had four male avatars dancing around me. One asked where I was from; others said, “hey baby!!!” and “i like your ***s” (censored by PlayStation, but you can guess what that meant). Another asked “will u marry me?” All this without me having said a word to anyone. I had also received three friend requests from players that were not immediately present…

From what I’ve heard there’s a certain amount of this in the background of most MMOs.  Trouble here is that it’s consistent enough to move to the foreground.  This could be because it’s just starting out or could be the demographics of the PS3 Home community are just different.  Anyways, sounds like they need to do some combination of safe spaces and a complaint system.

Race and DnD, how problematic?

Ta-Nehisi Coates linked to a piece on race and DnD by Chris Van Dyke.  As a side note, I think the comments on Coates blog are the most interesting of the bunch.

Anyhow.  Here’s my take.  First, he scores a lot of points against first and second edition.  I won’t complain that he has done much on fourth, it’s less than a year old, but third edition has been out for a decade.  The current company, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) does play up the legacy, so some such shots are fair enough.  But to critique where the game normally is today, you’ve at least got to talk about 3rd edition.  But enough concern trolling, I think there’s three or so key points that strike true and are worth addressing:

• Few PCs of color in illustrations.
• Racial stats
• Sub-human intelligent races

This is fairly geeky and long, so I’ll put the rest under the cut.  Also may come back later to look at some of these issues in MMORPGs, but this post is already too long.  [Update: It came up in the comments on the original piece so I should put in a plug for Stephen Erikson’s  series which starts with Gardens of the Moon.  Among other things, he effectively subverts the whole skin-color morality thing while building a compelling world that actually feels rather different than Tolkien.  Sadly a lot of the American cover art is generic, British/Canadian versions are better.]

Schooled by Commenters: Mecha on Mirror’s Edge review

A friend of mine made a rather thoughtful comment on my post yesterday.  Probably worth being a post in its own right, but that’s a different technical matter.

It isn't as if we don't have history on this. There are many games which are singled out as 'innovative' in the past (10+ years ago?) but were extremely to ridiculously imperfect. But some people found them fun, stepped past their imperfections, used them to inspire greater stuff in the future. Would it not be beneficial to future criticism, future game development, if we were capable of making that clear?…

People complain about how nobody's being 'good innovative' AND set the bar for 'good innovative' as 'better than most games out there on base, and then having to do something completely new and succeed with it in any way'

I’m not too bothered by the reviews because I could look at them and go, okay, they implemented it well, good enough for me.  That said, if you only look at the numbers or scores, which a lot of people do, then the game gets screwed.  It may be the reviewers job to rail against that, but reviewers should also live in the real world.  I don’t think rewarding 12/10 points in some category makes sense, but if they seriously innovate something than it’s worth perhaps doubling the weighting on that 10 to make sure it gets up to the point where people will consider buying the dang game.

Serious successful innovation should be rewarded by sales.  Mecha’s absolutely right, most of the classics were flawed in similar ways.  More conventional games are just as flawed, but they are flawed in ways we expect them to be flawed.  I mean I sometimes hear discussion about how polished the JRPG model is.  I don’t buy that in the slightest.  Has there ever been two final fantasies in a row where they kept all the good stuff from the previous game?  And to be fair, let’s limit that to all the good stuff that doesn’t conflict with innovation in the new game.  I don’t think so, instead we just expect some level of flaws there.  For example bad gunplay in a game about running.  Big whoop, trying throwing away the gun more.  An innovative game will often screw up some basics because being Blizzard or Valve is really effing hard.

From what I’ve read, Mirror’s Edge did what I wanted and thus deserves my $60.  I’d already been planning to get around and buy it.  I think it’s completely fair to play some role in instructing the developers, but that only works if they get a sequel, reviewers should also instruct the game-buyers enough to make sure they get that sequel.

Promotional image used above see http://www.mirrorsedge.com/ for more.

Are reviewers too tough on innovative games?

Also, since Croal was so kind as to link to my thinking, it’s only fair if I direct you to his latest Big Idea column, one I eagerly awaited since he’s recently been on vacation.  He cites three writers arguing that the gaming press can be too tough on control issues and mechanics in exciting an innovative new games.  By comparison film reviewers were more forgiving and often championed weird new styles that often sacrificed technical proficiency.

First off, since I rather liked the demo, I should throw in his critique of Mirror’s Edge.  It’s fairly widely repeated. I think I’ll still get it, but buyer beware.

From where we sit, the core mechanics of Mirror's Edge--the locomotion, or movement, of the main character--are exceedingly well implemented. The same is true for the twinning of the player and the camera. The shooting mechanics, however, are shockingly mediocre for a studio whose history and expertise lie in first-person shooters. As for the hand-to-hand combat, it's certainly well-animated and pleasing to the eye. Yet it's also both perfunctory and unforgiving, which means that it's somewhat satisfying when you get it right and thoroughly irritating when you get it wrong.

His larger point is that while innovation should be rewarded in reviews, it already is, and the concentration on mechanics is completely fair.  “We see games with our hands. In other words, not only do mechanics matter .. but mechanics are also improvable.”

I do think graphics classically are given too much emphasis, often to the detriment of the rest of the game.  But I agree that mechanics are different.  They are the core of the game.  Admittedly, I do think some independent film styles screwed with the fundamentals of film, but also film is a much more mature medium.  When bad mechanics happen people often don’t seem to realize the rules they’re breaking.

Also, bizarrely, from what I’ve read in Mirror’s Edge the mechanics sometimes undermine the innovation:

As Penny Arcade's Tycho put it, "The main problem is that I love what they've done with the art and with the style of play, but when they start hounding me with these snipers and S.W.A.T. motherf---ers it quickly becomes a game I don't want. I guess the idea is to make it more exciting, but I was already having fun."

In this case, the criticism should help future innovators who need to stand up to people demanding traditional elements.  From what I’ve heard, Assassin’s Creed had the exact same problem with lots of combat at the end implemented via an inferior combat system.  Heck, again chiding the genuine masterpiece Beyond Good and Evil, why the heck was there no stealth options for the final boss fight?  Thief pulled it off.

Anyhow, one other thought for any Mirror’s Edge sequels.  Everyone seems to agree that the game gets more fun on repeated play-throughs, the real problem is the trial and error while needing to move fast at the start.  This seems like a great reason to implement a more open world design that makes repeated use of some settings, letting you learn them and then go through them again under harsher circumstances.  Ideally later on there wouldn’t just be cops to get in your way, but level design training wheels removed.    That said, I don’t think Faith picks up new moves throughout the game, so it’s harder to make repeated features of the same area interesting.

Greetings Level Up readers!

Hello to anyone coming from the link from Newsweek’s thoughtful game journalist N’Gai Croal.  Here’s my games entries and here’s the feed sign-up if you’re inclined to stick around.

I’ll post some more game stuff in the near future.  One idea that’s been ruminating in my head for a while is how to improve the mechanical implementation of dialog.  Adventure games just encourage exhausting all options, although some games like Pheonix Wright make you choose wisely what possibilities to raise.  RPGs such as the Fallout series, most Bioware games, and Black Isle classics like Planescape Tourment provided rich dialogues trees but also make copious demands on writers.  The Monkey Island series famously incorporated insult sword-fighting, but that particular rhyming mechanic probably won’t be applicable in most cases.  I think the path to more game-like dialog might take cues from symbolic logic and from the L5R tabletop RPG series.  Come back later to see how.

Gaming and the results of failure

Here’s another story as part of a follow-up to my last post.  N’Gai Croal linked to an interesting article on the valuthe of epic failure in games.  Told the story of a guy who accidentally blew up his own jeep in the newest Far Cry and then had to walk back through the Savanna to the nearest safe house.  He argued that some of his most memorable gaming experiences came from failing and dealing with the consequences rather than reloading.

That sounds good to me.  Manically fighting for your life can be much more interesting than a smooth well played run.  That said, failure leading to slow treks can also cause immense frustration.  The writer at Groping the Elephant mentions some Thief runs, and I’ve got to say Beyond Good and Evil was often more fun than Thief because it was a bit easier to recover from botching your stealth.  I don’t mind running in fear or having a somewhat prolonged journey to recover from a mistake.  However, after that trip I don’t want to be back at square one, I want to have achieved the objective albeit in a round-about way.  If it’s just resetting the puzzle, I’d like that to happen quickly.

One recent example I’m rather pleased with is the demo of Left 4 Dead.  It’s a survival horror game with four characters (some mix of AIs and players) facing off against zombie hordes.  It has an “AI director” that mixes up when large numbers of zombies and special zombies come after you.  In addition to keeping levels fresh, the ‘director’ also eases up a bit on you when your having trouble.  This didn’t really come into play as much until I hit the highest difficulty level and after a couple tries couldn’t get past the second stage.  Normally that would frustrate me some, but by holding back some with the hordes it made my troubled runs longer and gave me a decent shot at victory, albeit with lower odds than if I’d been doing better in the first place. 

By comparison, chiding Beyond Good and Evil this time, that game had a multistage boss fight that took me many tries to get through.  On those tries where I messed up early I just let myself die and tried again from the check point.  There was no real reason to go on as I knew I didn’t have enough health items left to have a chance at victory.

[Update: Greetings to any that came from Level Up.  I’ve just put up a response to N’Gai Croal’s latest big idea piece that I hope you’ll find interesting.]

Exploration versus Consequences in gaming

Patrick Klepek has an interesting interview with Greg Zeschuk of Bioware on consequence in gaming.  “Everything is very low impact and there’s no real negative result that can occur. We’re going to start bringing that back but in a rational way, a way that doesn’t punish the player — but puts them on the spot.”  Essentially he wants to encourage players to make a choice and stick with it, rather than explore all the options.  And, since he’ll be running a Knights of the Old Republic Star Wars MMO, he’ll actually be able to do that.

Stephen Totilo discusses this conundrum in the context of the newest Spiderman where you can choose to be red suit or black suit Spidey.  Totilo had a tough time making the choice, as he didn’t want to miss out on interesting extremes:

With a game like “Fable II” I can handle being given these life-path choices. I know enough about the differences between using magic or swinging hammers to know what I prefer. I can sense what the ramifications will be if I decide to be a family man or a robber or a combination of the two. But given the choice to be a Dark Jedi or a Light Jedi… I just get spun around in confusion.

Do the developers really expect me to choose? Are they just signaling that they want me to play the game again, the opposite way?

I think the key principle here is to not waste the player’s time.  If a game is made to be played through twice to really get the full content it should probably be relatively short or have a new game plus mode that accelerates later playthroughs. 

If instead the developer wants to us to pick a path and stick to it, then the consequences of choices, particularly choices that influence mechanics, should be quite clear what the implications will be.  Letting the player try experiment some with different options can be a good way of doing this.

That said, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with secondary consequences, both good and bad, flowing from the choice.  But they should be just that, secondary and with a logical if not necessarily easily predictable consequence of the choice.  Alternately it could be the less directly related cumulative impact of several smaller choices, so long as there’s some foreshadowing and an opportunity to change paths if you don’t like where you’re headed.

I think successful consequences can lead to regret, but it should be the kind of regret shared between the player and the character.  Missing out on the ‘interesting extremes’ as Totilo mentions is not how you want to do things, although with some universes like Star Wars it’s probably fairly inevitable.  I think Patrick Klepek’s regret after choosing who to kill in GTA4 is a much more successful example of a regretted and one that deepened rather than weakened identification with the story.

Review: Mirror’s Edge Demo

Mirror’s Edge combines a compelling core gameplay mechanic with a great setting.  It has a lot of potential, but seems rather difficult to execute.  Happily, based on the demo, they seem to have pulled it off.

The game is based on parkour, also related to free running, basically a highly acrobatic form of urban navigation.  It was notably featured in Casino Royale in the superior chase scene at the start of the movie.

 

Mirror’s Edge is a 3d game where unlike most FPSes you actually see your character’s body.  When she grabs a ledge, her hands shoot out, when she slides you see her legs in front of you.  The setup is that you’re a runner delivering data by rooftop in a city where every other means of transfer is monitored.  I’m told it’s also one of my favorite types of action/adventures, one where you don’t have to kill anyone although it is an option.

The control scheme is pretty intuitive, with shoulder buttons used to jump and duck.  Mouse and keyboard is usually thought of as the ideal control scheme for shooters, but for this type of gameplay dual control sticks and shoulder buttons may be preferable. The move up button also lets you grab ledges, which makes many of the jumps much more forgiving than they might otherwise be.  Once I mastered that I could do a run through without dying from a mistimed jump.  No real penalty to dying aside from watching from Faith’s eyes as she plummets to her doom.  You just start up not that far from where you died.

Anyhow, won’t really be able to judge if the plot and fairly unique protagonist live up to their potential, but the demo is enough to convince me to buy the game when I have the funds available.

The combat system is pretty simple, you can do disarms if you time it right, and the one conventional attack button is context sensitive based on whether you’re running, ducking, etc.  Also it makes me want to actually take one of the DC courses.  I always played around with lower key versions of having fun with obstacles in my way.  That said, even I ever go for it, I think I’ll limit myself to street level as we haven’t yet developed quick save / quick load technology.

Battleground polling

This bit of awesome via Ezra Klein:

This is really surprisingly professional. Not sure how big the sample size was, but I’m rather amused by the polling results at the end. Interviewer had a good dry sense of humor.

Warm is good

Fiance pointed me to this article in the Baltimore Sun on the connection between feeling warm and how you judge other people:

To their surprise, they found that people who held a cup of hot coffee for 10 to 25 seconds warmed to a perfect stranger. Holding a cup of iced coffee had the opposite effect.

If you want to make a good impression, advised study author Lawrence E. Williams, a University of Colorado at Boulder assistant professor of marketing, a fresh cup of coffee "may bias the situation in your favor."

Interesting. Also I think this hypothesis was anticipated a few years agoby the Grand Theft Auto series.

Quick game designing note

From a Transformers game preview by Jason Cipriano article over at MTVs multiplayer blog:

Much like “Advance Wars” the combat is turn-based, but there is a slight twist. At the end of each turn the player has the option to transform. This adds another level of defensive strategy to the game; encouraging the player to take into consideration whether they are likely to be attacked or not. I was told the designers did this to really encourage as much transforming as possible.

I just thought this was noteworthy because often designers don’t seem to get this. If using an ability either takes an entire turn, requires in depth menu access, or has a time penalty in a real time game, players are going to be less likely to use it.

I’ve been thinking about this since Rondo of Swords makes this mistake with its skill system. If for some reason, your character is stuck in place for a turn it can be useful, but otherwise it really seems like a distraction. This isn’t crippling for the game by any means, it’s just a waste of designer effort.

Anyways, it’s a cell phone game for Nokia, so I almost certainly won’t be getting it, but I always like to see good design decisions.

Summer 2008 Movie Quotes

Brilliant quotes from Francesco Marciuliano. Read the whole thing, but here’s a few samples.

"She broke my heart. First with her cruelty and then with her broadsword."

"And thanks to Wal-Mart’s low prices and great selection we’ll all be armed in time for the invasion!"

"Do you want to see the youth center close down forever? Or do you want to join us and help raise the necessary funds by producing the best low-budget, highly lucrative porn films for the direct-to-video market ever?!"

The last one on the page is also one of my favorites, but I won’t repost it in an attempt to make you actually go to the page.

DnD 4th edition out

Yesterday I went out and participated in DnD game day and had a fairly good time, although embarrassingly my character dropped unconscious in the final fight before breaking out his best abilities. Anyhow I also picked up the players handbook for the newest edition.

I’m rather pleased with this new version of the game. Basically the current owners, Wizards of the Coast, did a good job of systematically analyzing gameplay and finding ways both to simplify the rules and to spread the fun around. Part of it is that I think that much of their market is now adult gamers like me that want to play but don’t want to be forced to spend lots of out of game time prepping. That said, the options for customization and obsession are still there, which is important.

Anyways, this sort of thing goes to show the power of market share when that market is reasonably visible to corporations. If a group is a potential source of income (or support in politics) then they’ll find some products tailored to them. In a diverse economy or political sphere this doesn’t always going to have to be a zero-sum game. Reaching certain thresholds gets you some level of power and respect, even if it doesn’t mean you’ll win in terms of binary questions where you disagree with the majority.

Classic Game Review: Ico

My friend Matt had been kind enough to lend me Ico, a PS2 exploration/puzzler, and I played through it last week. The game was an early short classic for the system that really showed its graphical possibility. It still looks pretty good now, not cutting edge by any means but easy on the eyes. Essentially the main limitations are that the castle design itself is rather block, but that works fairly well for a castle.

Anyways the core conceit of the game is that the hero is helping a companion through the castle. So basically each room needs to be solved twice, first explored using the protagonist’s abilities and then finding a way to bring you princess companion along. On the whole this works pretty well and while the princess can be hapless I think it was effective at bonding you with her.

The actual storyline is a straightforward lovely fairy tale. For a detailed rundown check out Peter Eliot’s annotation. The game is certainly no great step forward for gender politics. I think it might be possible to use this setup and even keep the male lead and princess while having the female be more capable rather than mystically powered.

Anyhow, the game is only 10 hours or so. Well worth borrowing or renting if you can find it and enjoy exploration/puzzlers.

[Update: As Lira mentioned in Livejournal comments, I forgot to mention the main weakness of the game.  The combat is tedious.  In many cases the bad guys can simply be outrun, which works better.  But if you can't out run them you have to just hit them with a stick a few too many times in a way that mostly wastes time rather than adds challenge.]

Screenshot from Ico via Clover’s single webpage version of Peter Eliot’s annotation

And sometimes I don't really see it

Via ZeroOmegaZX at Evil Avatar, "Yahtzee" of Zero Punctuation is being criticized by Loot Ninja, for a comment Yahtzee made in his latest post.

This episode had me smiling all around and I enjoyed the topic of reviews until he began to speak about people only being able to afford one console, he states that this is what creates fanboys, which I guess makes some sense. He loses me at the very end of his video monologue when he refers to “being white enough to afford all of the consoles”, I have to say this comment really sat with me badly and shone an ugly light on an otherwise great episode.

I can only hope that Yahtzee had some kind of temporary lapse in judgement or his statement is not translating well, because to me this statement screams racist. We joke about a lot of things, but never racist remarks, to say that luckily he is “white enough to afford all of the consoles” is a slap in the face to any non-white person that plays video games or listens to his show.

Video is available in the post. First off, I should say that this does seem like a reasonable and measured post to me. The writer will probably end up the subject of a lot of highly critical vehement disagreement, and that’s a shame. That said, I don’t really see it in this case. I think Yahtzee’s more making a crack about the economics of racial inequality. Having more money isn’t the same as having earned more money. I took it as a shorthand for "I’m white, so I have more economic privilege."

Zero Punctuation does pointedly skirt controversy by often being fairly insulting and actively "edgy." I do think some of his jokes about homosexuality tend to at very least skirt the line, although I think he’s getting better on that. On the other hand, his discussion of "Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune" gave him some credit for noting that the game seemed to be all about killing people of color.

So, make of it what you will. Loot Ninja certainly has every right to be bothered by the statement. But since I do watch Zero Punctuation, saw this in Evil Avatar, and have blogged before about the intersection of race and games, I figured it is worth noting for better or worse that I don’t always see it. Best of luck against the hordes Loot Ninja.

Games out to destroy the world

Via Kamalot on Evil Avatar (who is apparently a fellow Silver Springer. Huh)

Xenogears Staff are being reunited! Not to bring us another Xenogears game, but to bring about the destruction of the world in the aptly-named World Destruction for Nintendo DS. The fantasy RPG focuses on the player’s quest to usher in the end of the world, instead of the rather cliched, notion of trying to save it.

I’ve regularly railed against Final Fantasy: Tactics Advance because you’re out destroy the world (because it’s a stunted dream world) but you’re still basically a generic hero. So you don’t get many of the classic heroism benefits nor do you achieve villain cool. Not sure World Destruction will work, but at least they seem to realize what kind of game they’re making, which is more than you can say for the FF:TA team.

Best way to top off a prolonged stretch of writing? Saving the universe

So after a long hard slog this week at work I finished up at a reasonable hour today and went home and beat Mass Effect.

I was quite pleased with the final sequence and ending. One structural problem I’ll note though is that as your journal makes clear, most of the game is a race against time. So I always felt weird gallivanting around on sub-quests and only did them in systems I was visiting for plot reasons anyway. That said, this is a common RPG problem.

In the end, I’m highly satisfied with the game. Mechanic wise, the ending was much more fun than the ending of Bioshock because you could gun down a mix of grunts and mid-bosses you’d come to respect.

One disappointment, I’d heard that you could use reputation to actually purchase stuff (like dialog options or something). Turns out that doesn’t seem to be true. Might let you buy skill in the dialog abilities, but the relationship wasn’t really made clear and I think it’d be a bit more fun if it had an impact more often than when you leveled. Also, they consistently highlight the charm/intimidate option, which takes much of the tactics out of dialog trees.

That said, I was still content with many of the paragon/renegade choices. A fair number of them involve dog kicking, but you can also just be a renegade by being greedy or insubordinate, which is cool. Similarly, the hacking mini-game was not as cool as Bioshock’s. It was basically Simon. That said, it was much faster than Bioshock’s and thus at times less annoying. There may be a balance achievable here.

On the themes, in Mass Effect humanity is a rising power. By and large other races use us and treat us fairly shabbily, although weaker races get a bit resentful because our power still accords us some respect. Many of the choices involve whether you’re out for humanity or see humanity as party of a larger group of organic creatures. One thing the game could really use is some sort of running tally of humanities fortunes. There’s a lot of plot clues as to the impacts of your actions, but I’m thinking something more quantitative. That’d make the cost of some noble choices much more clear.

Greg is exhuasted blogging

Turns out I’m not as young as I used to be. Managed to take too much caffeine last night so a part-nighter became an all-nighter but without the productivity benefits of an all-nighter.

Anyways, here’s a cute post from Stephen Totilo:

I was recently IMing with my good friend Justin McElroy of Joystiq.com fame. It turns out that Justin and I share a similar lament. We believe that one of the most exciting parts of a super-hero’s life — the moment he or she needs to duck away from civilian friends and make the costume change into a hero — is woefully underrepresented in video games.

In fact, in some super-hero games, it’s not present at all.

Is there a level in a Superman game in which I have to figure out how to discreetly get Clark Kent out of the Perry White’s office so that I can rescue the crashing airplane that only my super-hearing can detect?

The risk with that sort of thing is that it gets implemented as a one level gimmick with a weak control scheme. To do it right, you’d have to combine it with a game where you actually regularly played as the "normal" persona. I’m thinking it might work best in a Superman or Spiderman game where the character actually does some investigating as a reporter/photographer. Maybe that can let them scout areas where going in a superhero would lead to instant combat. Batman doesn’t do that much investigation as Bruce Wayne and really you can only do so many "Gotham’s finest gather" levels.

On a vaguely related note, many are asking why the Democratic super-delegates are taking so dang long to get their act together and commit. My theory? Every time two supers meet for the first time they have to have a fight. That slows things down a lot.