metagame

Not too many people get rich playing games. Well, except for real gamblers with poker (shout-out to David Williams). Maybe some with M:tG. And of course I guess game developers turn a living out of playing games. Some of them get rich over it, or at least seem to. Oh, nevermind anyone can do it:

New York, NY – May 5, 2010 – 2K Sports announced today that 24-year-old Wade McGilberry of Semmes, Alabama has won an unprecedented cash prize in the amount of $1,000,000 by being the first person to throw a verified perfect game in Major League Baseball® 2K10, the latest iteration of the popular Major League Baseball® 2K series.

Personally, I prefer The Show franchise. But I think this was great marketing for 2K. Congratulations, Wade.

From the land of venture capitalists looking to cash on the latest entertainment fad (social network games , as opposed to last year’s virtual worlds), we get this garbage from Fortune magazine:

With more than 235 million monthly users, Zynga rules the nascent world of free online games played via social networks like Facebook. Real purchases of virtual goods, like tractor fuel in Zynga’s hit game FarmVille, generate over 90% of the company’s revenue, posing a real threat to the gaming businesses of industry giants like Microsoft and Sony [emphasis added], whose consoles depend on players paying cash for games upfront.

A real threat to MS and Sony? Get real. The only threat Zynga poses is to stupid VC people who throw their money down the black holes of me-too imitators. I don’t doubt that Sony and Microsoft would like a piece of that money pie (and they have it, hello Xbox Live and PSN), but social network games threaten the core gaming business? Come on. The economic recovery has already seen core gaming sales recover. And though Farmville’s success will out-profit Modern Warfare 2, over time, let’s not forget how lucrative the hits in AAA development can be:

The game, whose sales surpassed $401 million in the first 24 hours of release, was the fastest-selling entertainment product day-one, says Guinness, which had previously held Grand Theft Auto IV as the record-holder.

What minuscule  segment of the audience do you think plays FB games and also core games? Based on my facebook spam, it’s all housewives and casual gamers that play these games. Sure, it’s more money coming into in the games industry, but what does this have to do with sales of the next Call of Duty or God of War? Nothing. Nothing at all.

Leigh Alexander says it nicer: The News Of Console Gaming’s Death Has Been Greatly Exaggerated.

In the beginning, there was the quarter. The business model of the arcade inspired games that were designed to vacuum up the most quarters per hour.  Simple economics and self-interest of the gamemaker: Keep the player entertained, but also keep him dropping the quarters into a slot as often as possible. The “virtual death drive” became a driving influence. So we ended up with high difficulty and a set number of lives. It’s not like we had another way to play our video games – not yet anyway. So Donkey Kong’s average length of play was just a few minutes.

Death is Imminent

Why did I enjoy that game? I really have no idea. Almost no multiplayer (hey, leaderboards matter) and not much sense of achievement. A platformer full of raw punishment for any deviation from perfection. Back then, my parents likely wished I didn’t waste so much time and money in the damn thing. But somehow the family finances survived. The investment might even be considered to have paid off, in the fullness of time.

Anyway, unless you’re one of the tiny number of people making or porting coin-up games, your revenue doesn’t dribble in with every two bits fed into a slot. Today, we don’t have any financial incentive to kill our players. In the abstract, a player wants an enjoyable experience for his or her fifty or sixty bucks, and death can only disturb that. Even if we take it for granted, it’s the most obvious break in the connection between player and character. And yet… our games rely on conflict. And thus most obvious form of conflict: fighting. So, death, death everywhere. I wonder just how many avatars my failures have sent tumbling down to the virtual underworld. It has to number in the tens of thousands, at least.

Now, I know there are some good reasons why we slaughter our virtual player personas. One, habit. Two, the fundamental logic of combat-focused games. More meaningfully, we need an instrument to measure failure, and to allow for game difficulty. Players want a challenge, or else they will become bored (FarmVille notwithstanding, apparently). Death is simple and easy to understand, and so death is our default penalty for failure.

It doesn’t have to be. Historically, games don’t simulate death. Consider: sports and sport games don’t. Card games don’t. Strategy and puzzle games don’t. These are the real origins of what we call games, even if we can’t ask their designers any questions, if we could even identify who they were. Losing just meant losing: someone else got more points, or got to the finish line before you. “You” didn’t die. We can track the prevalence of death in games to the relatively recent phenomena of controlling a virtual character.  We’ve developed this habit in less than thirty years, since Space Invaders, etc. (Senet is over five thousand years old by comparison.)  Logically enough, I think the simulation of death in games can be traced to the widest permutation of the term “roleplaying” – any situation during which the player becomes embodied.

Most players haven’t gone aboard the death train that you (likely reader) and I accept. Truly popular games – stuff on the web, on Facebook, the Sims, etc. – don’t really involve player death. And certainly doesn’t simulate it. As much as I love Modern Warfare, Battlefield, and Splinter Cell, given the opportunity to think about it, I’d like to find a way out of the death trap. Many games of the day no longer bother to explain death and respawning. The player’s character dies from too much damage, and we restart him at a prior checkpoint. It’s a game, and we’re so used to the mechanic that the designer doesn’t deign to explain the logic of reincarnation or time travel.

Speaking of which, another option is to adopt a mechanic to “avert” death. In Sands of Time, our protagonist announces “that’s not how that happened”, and instead of suffering a mortal wound, we rewind back in time. Similarly, in the more recent Prince of Persia, Elika intervenes when failure would result in the hero’s demise. There’s no gameplay difference in either case between that and killing the player and respawning, but instead of complicating or disturbing my relationship to the game and its characters, the system behind those two games reinforces my connection. Planescape: Torment, Assassin’s Creed, and Bioshock have their own answers to evade the reaper, though they weren’t without complication.

The impossible design challenge would be to take a core player experience -  a “realistic” shooter, most obviously – and then turn around the game’s failure system to remove death from the equation. The obvious thing is to hack the system with magic, imaginary worlds, simulations within simulations, or other tricks. And I think we’ll continue to do so, to take away the sting of the player’s failure. Hopefully, without annoying the player so much that he hates the innovation so much that he’d rather resort to a fast reload to checkpoint, logic be damned. Stepping outside that box would probably mean ditching a health-based model completely. Stealth games do that, but not that many of our action genre games step outside of health as a core feature.

Neither Boethius nor I have an unambiguous conclusion, much less a prescription. The closest I’ll come is: Don’t take death for granted. Just because it’s the default failure condition of the day, doesn’t mean it has to be.

One thing I didn’t mention a couple weeks ago when talking about what game designers can do better with difficulty is: let the player adjust his game difficulty after he plays. Why should we presume as game designers that our definition of “medium” or “normal” is the same one that the player is ready for. Even the short clips of descriptions (“you play lots of shooters”) don’t add up to the experience the player will have. Maybe your player wants to start off on easy, and then turn up the knob as he gets used to things. Or maybe he sets for “hard” and then realizes he wants to step down. Maybe the balance of one of your levels, or one of your boss fights, is a little dubious. Or maybe the player just wants to mess around for an hour.

The player has paid you money to play the game. Let him pick what difficulty he wants, when he wants. If this is so hard to alter dynamically, let him restart at the last checkpoint with the settings he or she wants.

A lot of design decisions from the original God of War have survived. The "You Have Died" screen is one. Another is the fact that you can't change the difficulty post-start, except by means of the most insulting means possible. Why?

I don’t have much to say about GDC this year. Wrap-ups at gamasutra can do a better job of what all was there. GDC seemed dominated by two themes:

1. Naughty Dog takes everyone to school. That’s what one of my coworkers called it. Really, I didn’t mind, though, they had a lot of detailed talks that really let you behind the curtain of how they do things. Very practical advice.
2. OMG! Social games! Facebook, and Farmville, make a lot of money. But Heather should be the one saying anything on this subject.

Personally, I was spending much of my time working with our recruiting department to screen potential candidates. (PS: We’re hiring).

I like success. It's like cake. But I can't learn anything from cake. I can learn from the stack of broken crates, though, and the other failures.

Painful lessons seem to be the ones that teach the most, whatever the subject. Pain provides motivation to find a path that leads to success. I remember the first time I waved a bat as a baseball sailed on by. It was an ugly swing. And my coach let me hear it, in front of all my friends. In fact, my coach would say my swing never was pretty. But his public hazing did make me work hard at improving it.

When it comes to video games, difficulty will always be a charged issue. Pressure comes from all sides: to appeal to a wide audience, to appeal to the hardcore, to appeal to casual player. Whatever those classifications mean in the real world (maybe nothing), game difficulty is something everyone has an opinion about.

I don’t pretend to know how hard you should make your game. Recently, though, I’ve come to think that as game designers, we should be playing with our dials turned up.

How did I get there? When playing Mass Effect 2, I started with a medium setting (“Veteran”), and played through the game rather happily and easily. I predictably found that I was playing the game for its story content, not for its gameplay. Shooting just filled the time until the next cinematic or dialogue moment. I wasn’t enjoying it especially, and I certainly wasn’t learning anything from it. Enemies could be defeated with just about any weapon, tactic, or character ability, and I could engage them head on, ignoring the cover mechanic and succeed. Of course, when you can defeat your foes any way you want to, the decision of how to win becomes empty of meaning. Empty of lessons to learn.

After finishing the game, I started a second playthrough. This was my “evil bitch” experience, and wow, is the female Shepherd a superior voice actress. This time, I set the difficulty to its highest setting — “Insanity.” And in terms of the moment-to-moment, I discovered a whole new game. Enemies, even stock ones, posed a major threat. My allies needed to be managed and controlled lest they die — repeatedly. In order to survive myself, I had to find weaknesses in my opponents or vulnerabilities in the level design. Each combat formed a battle combining ally management, refresh management, and a search for anything that could give me an edge. Some of these elements (vulnerability to ammo types or to certain powers) were intended by the game designers. Some (an inability to deal with player traps in pathing) were not. My tactics bordered on exploits. In any event, I learned what my character could do, what each AI was capable of, and how I could win in different encounters. In short, I knew the game far better than I did before.

The question of “is that an exploit or a good tactic?” is a good one, especially in online games where your play can affect others. I remember early days of MMO play, when we wondered if reverse kiting, sending tells to determine spawns, or FD-camping monsters represented an exploit. EverQuest supported lots of unforeseen play, as a result of the game’s steep difficulty curve. Soloing in specific stood out as ridiculously hard. Players had to find a way to avoid the hard combat math the game’s designers had forged: they had to find a way not to get hit. Without finding gaps in the system or the vulnerabilities of the AI, the player couldn’t succeed on his own. Back then, of course, the game’s harsh penalties of failure and death didn’t stick out like the sore thumbs they would today.

More recently, on a dare I took to playing Darksiders on its hardest setting, appropriately named Apocalyptic. Twenty-odd hours later, more than three thousand gallons of blood has been spilled beneath my blade and scythe (according to this). And because I played the game at such an unforgiving level, the average hit from a demon shed half of my characters health. Learning the game’s rhythms, the pace of when to attack and when to evade, was the difference between life and death.

Losing fifty percent of your character hit points with a single blow sounds painful, doesn’t it? What I found though, was thanks to the mild penalties (fast reloads, frequent checkpoints), I relished the challenge. More importantly, I came to know what defense I had to employ against each AI type, who to kill first in group encounters, and when in each encounter I needed to fire off my panic and powerup buttons.

I’m not sure that “hard is the new good” when it comes to player experience – certainly not for all games or all players. But for game designers, I think it’s invaluable. If you want to play a game at its most pure — not for the story, not even for a good time — tune the difficulty up. Make yourself defeat the game where the margin for error is razor thin. You may learn something.

About six months ago, I suggested we should check back later and see how DDO’s experiment with free-to-play has gone. The answer, according to Turbine’s current executive this week, is pretty well:

The response from players to DDO Unlimited has been nothing short of phenomenal. We’ve known all along how great this game is and by implementing an innovative new model that put the players in charge of how they pay and play DDO Unlimited, we’ve successfully expanded our reach and injected new energy into the game.  Without a doubt, DDO Unlimited is a hit!

Equally important, of course, is the five-fold increase in revenue. Mild critical acclaim doesn’t hurt, but the bottom line drives development for Turbine as much as any other company. From what I hear, the newfold success has allowed for a mild increase in support and in future plans for the franchise.

It’s worth wondering why the free play structure appears to have worked so well with this product. I considered in my last post how both D&D players and MMO players include a great deal of highly price sensitive players. I still think that’s true. Giving those players a chance to try something new– without the $50 buy-in, even without the $15 monthly fee–is a good idea. I wish I had managed to convince the former regime in Westwood that DDO needed a different business model back in 2005. Because there are millions of lapsed D&D players out there, created by more than thirty years of the property. And now there are also millions of lapsed Warcraft players, and MMO players generally willing to consider something new. Give those people an easy opportunity, and some of the will stick around and put money in your pocket.

If you’re making a new MMO these days (even if you have a killer IP and a killer reputation like our corporate friends down in Austin), I encourage giving extra consideration to support a get-in-the-action experience. Include a demo or sample that can lead to subscription or other investment.

Imagine this scene. Here I was on the 43 bus. Several Lucasfolk reside somewhere between Haight and Cole Valley, and so running into friends on the ride home is common. Tonight, we formed a design conference, with five designers happening to board at the same time.

Predictably enough, we soon found ourselves talking about our work, engine, and tools. Then, games. Things we’re playing, from pen and paper D&D (“What do you think of 4th?”) to recent releases (“Do you think Bioshock’s closed story needed a sequel?”). All well and good, an enjoyable way to pass the half hour.

Except one crazy thing. On our half-full bus, a pair of fellow passengers joined our conversation. At first this was amusing. Then annoying. Finally, surprising. For while designers we have a handle on deconstructing games, the comments from these random acquaintances, well, they were sharp and on point. I for one had never considered that parallels between Mass Effect 2 and the Dirty Dozen…

And this isn’t even GDC week yet.

P.S.: This morning on the ride in, a pair of teenage kids were talking about Modern Warfare, XBox gamer points, and whether the skateboards they bought for their avatars were worth it. This time I joined in the conversation. Hopefully I didn’t sound too old or lame, but hey, now we’ve exchanged gamertags. Life is weird in this city.

Loved Bioshock. Enjoying Bioshock 2, a few hours in. Congratulations to friends up at 2K Marin, for the successful launch. May the sound of cash registers ring out for them.So why am I writing here? One design element I’ve found in my first few hours warrants questioning.

Remember the respawn system of Bioshock?

Death in the Bioshock series is just a teleport. You respawn with the same package of weapons and ammo you had at the moment of your death, plus a minimum amount of health and mana (“Eve”). The world state is preserved.

As players soon observed, in the original Bioshock this allowed you to progress by bashing through content repeatedly without any attempt at skill or self-preservation. Do some damage, die, respawn, repeat. Boss enemies fell down through this method like everything else. This seems silly, and the creative director of Bioshock 2 took steps:

But the main criticism that we derived from the first game was the Vita-thrashing exploit, which was — because there were ammo-less weapons in the game and because there were consensual boss fights in the game — the idea of just using an ammo-less weapon and playing Lemmings over and over again until the cliff just disappears. [It was] was degenerate in many many ways… It was fun for no one. So now the Little Sisters will heal the Big Daddies a percentage of their health if you don’t take them out. So you do have to invest in their demise.

Problem to solution, right? If only things were so simple.

Here’s the thing: Bioshock 2 has hard content locks – blood gates – that require defeating a certain enemy or waves of enemies. It’s impossible to progress in the game without killing these enemies. And as the creative director said, if the Big Daddy kills you on the first try (or you die defending the Little Sister as she’s harvesting Adam, etc.), you’re going to have to have to start the fight all over again. The Bid Daddy heals, and the progress bar on defending your Little Sister is reset.

See the problem?  With a relatively stingy ammo drop rate from enemies  in the game (why is that by the way? this game is a shooter, and ammo should be plentiful), after you die, you re-start an encounter with fewer health packs, fewer eve packs, and less ammo. And you failed the first time, so good luck! It seems likely you’ll fail again. Really, the game should make things a little easier the second time, not harder. In the worst case,the player may re-start a major fight with no ammo at all. Then what? Congratulations, we’ve arrived at a degenerate state: it is well nigh impossible for the player to progress. I hope the last autosave wasn’t that far back…

The prescription? In the next game, dump the vita chambers. Use checkpoints that save your full character state, and let the player try again with a starting package at least as good as the one he just failed with. For this game, a patch that forces autosaves before every content gate — and bigger ammo drops from random respawned splicers — wouldn’t seem to be a bad step.

Story is where an RPG should shine – even a hybrid RPG like this one. The RPG player demonstrates a willingness to take things at a slower pace, to invest himself into character and story, and to relish the narrative.

So let’s look at the Mass Effect 2′s plot [Spoilers!]:

1. Hero is killed by aliens, then resurrected.
2. Hero finds out the aliens are snatching humans.
3. Hero investigates derelict alien ship to find out how to get to aliens.
4. Hero finds out that aliens are boiling humans down to organic soup to make an evil giant. Hero kills evil giant.

That’s the story that takes 20+ hours to deliver? Seriously, we have a volume of content equal to ten feature films, with less plot than something directed by Michael Bay. This is a story that takes (conservative estimate) 100,000 lines of dialogue to tell! Even just in terms of pure cinematic sequences, I hazard that Mass Effect is close to a feature film in length. Why is there so little actual content there?

For fairness, let’s boil down a similar story – another second part of a trilogy:

1. Hero is wounded by a monster, then rescued.
2. Enemies attack the home of our hero and his friends. They escape.
3. Hero goes through training montage.
4. Hero’s friends are captured. Hero’s best friend is frozen in carbonite.
5. Hero rescues his friends. Hero finds out the leader of the enemies is his father.

Now that’s a story. And that story has a villain we remember.

It’s Not Personal
The villains of Mass Effect 2? Faceless, anonymous evil. Unknowable menaces. They show up every 50,000 years and kill everyone. They’re like a natural disaster, and just as impersonal. Guess what, guys, villains without faces make terrible opponents. We have to see the villain (and ideally, understand him) before we can get emotionally invested. Before we hate. The Reapers kill plenty of humans, but their goals remain unintelligible. The best villains make their enmity personal, and so the story becomes personal too.

Come to think of it, this story never ended well either.

The funny thing is, Bioware’s writers know this. They knew it in Knights of the Old Republic, during which we discover the primary villains are you… and the sidekicks who betrayed you. They knew it in Mass Effect 1. Remember Saren? The player interacted with that villain repeatedly, and when we weren’t arguing with Saren, we watched cinematics of the evil bastard doing terrible things. Remember also how much we focused on Shepherd becoming the first human Spectre – an accomplishment personal to you. The development staff in Edmonton hasn’t forgotten how to tell a good story in Mass Effect 2. There are good stories, really good stories, embedded in the game: stories of betrayal, loss, and revenge. Stories of self-discovery.

That’s true of every character’s story except for one: yours. You’d think that the player’s story is the one that would matter most, right? Regrettably, the player has been reduced to playing generic action hero fighting generic alien bad guys. The story equivalent of Space Invaders.

And what’s worse? The material to make a personal story is there in the narrative. The aliens killed you! Sure, it would have been better if the possessor/lead villain had appeared to do you in himself. But as it is, Shepard is returned to life before we can blink, and all too quickly the whole thing is forgotten. Your character doesn’t seem to care that he died, and the enemy doesn’t care or even acknowledge that he killed you. If no one in the game cares, why should we? Our character spends more time arguing with sidekicks about why they resurrected him. Really, why was Shepard killed at all? Was this all a marketing stunt?

By the way, the whole alien Harbinger boss employing a possession is a great mechanic, if underused. I love the idea of beating up the master villain repeatedly, though I wish he had more lines of dialogue than “I will hurt you.” The designers appear to be saving the Big Bad for the third in the trilogy, but why not script up a threatening conversation with a possessed Collector? I could kill the creature afterward, feel good about myself, and still know that the war is far from over.

These are cool sidekicks. I wish my story was as good as theirs.

It’s Not You, It’s Me
I’ve circled around this point here and in the last post, but the fundamental failure of Mass Effect is that the game isn’t about the main character and the story isn’t about him either. In terms of polish, effort, and sheer gameplay hours, the game is all about the sidekicks. Recruiting each of the sidekicks, and completing their loyalty missions, composes the bulk of the game’s content. Imagine instead if that effort was expended on dealing with your character, in making your choices and your decisions matter, and producing branching content that actually branched as a result of your actions and conversations. I think I’d like to play that game.

It’s another point worth making: twelve sidekicks and five allies? Really? I know the designers want to encourage replayability, and having over a hundred (12 x 11) different possibilities of sidekicks to bring along would seem to further that cause. And yet not really. A big cast doesn’t mean anything other than a whole lot of characters I won’t spend much time with. There are great little payoffs in each of their stories, but I wonder if we couldn’t go deeper instead of wider. I’d rather have fewer sidekicks, but develop them more. Maybe their side stories could be interwoven and tangled instead of forming totally independent narratives. Couldn’t Mordin have something to do with the Warlord’s genetic program? Maybe Jack was on Samara’s or Garrus’s target list. Why not tie together Tali’s and Legion’s story and advance the story of the geth to some resolution?

We love this genre of game because it offers meaningful choices. Or at least appears to. Embrace that. As far as replayability goes, make this game one in which the player decisions are the most important thing. Make  branching content that affects not just how you get someplace in a linear story (a always leads to b, regardless of how much of a saint or bastard you are along the way). Change what actually happens during gameplay (a could lead to b, c, or d). I know that branching content is expensive, but the bandwidth appears to be there. The focus is just on other characters. The usual argument against branching content is that you’re making a bunch of content that a high percentage of the audience won’t see. I don’t think that argument applies to Mass Effect 2.

The only way your story can really change in Mass Effect? As best I can tell, your choices in doing loyalty missions and assigning roles to sidekicks in the final level can determine if sidekicks die. That’s it. Your little story though, is steadfastly linear, all the way through. Your choices can’t affect you, or any outcome we see during this game – but don’t worry! They promise it will in the next!