Mini-games... in MY MMO?

It's more likely than you think!

I've recently sat down and typed up a walkthrough on how I design mini-games for Stargate Worlds. Nothing earthshaking in it, but it was a fun article to write.

Link is here:

Movies, TV, and old C-64 games : Mini-game Design in Stargate Worlds, part one

Lessons from Kongregate

NOTE: As a Blogger noob, I didn't realize that recycling an old, unused post would retain the name, so while the URL for this posting is "puzzles-in-my-MMO" - it's actually about casual games. Sorry!

This is the start of a series I'll be doing on simple lessons from "simple" games. Kongregate is a well-known casual and amateur gaming hub which produces an amazingly polished variety of games using Flash. Created by Jim and Emily Greer, Kongregate is something of a "YouTube meets gaming."

As part of my current set of tasks to develop mini-games for Stargate Worlds, myself and the rest of our mini-game team have undertaken a fun survey of casual gaming to learn a little more about what Flash is good at modeling, and where it is weak. Along the way, I've taken some notes of various games as discussion points of success versus failure. In this series, I'll share one or two lessons from each game under discussion.

Game One: Particles (by Ragdollsoft)
Lesson A: Lack of feedback produces tension - sometimes.
Lesson B: Physics is one of Flash's strong points.

Particles is a relatively simple game that looks like a physics demo but has an addictive quality that comes from good music, clean animation, and - interestingly enough - a lack of feedback on the player's progress.

It is common to give the player some form of scoring feedback, no matter the game. Scoring is a means in which you give the player a sense of urgency and accomplishment while the game is still in play - with a glance to the score bar, the player has incentive to perform better. A game without a score is like playing poker with no money - it lacks tension and just becomes a mechanical exercise.

In Particles, the game deliberately hides the scoring until the very end, at which time it scores you with a letter grade and an amount of time played. By hiding the score, this game forces you to concentrate on the one rule of the game: avoid the (steadily increasing) red balls. A score interface would take the player out of the "emotional pit" of the game. Tension is thus increased - you know you are being graded, and the game will likely last under five minutes, so all attention turns to the action of the game itself. If the game were much longer than it is, and should the progression of adding more obstacles (balls) to the mix be slower, the game would likely fail, in my opinion.

Speaking of the action of the game, the utter speed in which the player can move their own ball, matched with the inelastic collisions of the red obstacle balls, produces some interesting and engaging physics effects. Watching for a group of balls to strike each other and slow down quickly became my strategy for the game - I would follow slow obstacle balls and use them as shields against more fast moving balls.

Simply put, object physics is fun, even if it smacks of unreality. Between my fire blaster and my energy blaster in City of Heroes, I choose energy every time because of the visceral joy of knockback, knockup, and throwing opponents around when you win. Other VWs should consider the investment to more robust physics - not only will the game feel less stiff (a common complaint of many MMOs), but it just might save on the animation budget as well.

Take home for creating virtual worlds: Tension is a difficult goal in any MMO or VW. Generally speaking, the most common method of creating and maintaining tension in the player is to build a box for the player(s), put them in it, and give them a puzzle to solve. Unfortunately, an MMO is both forgiving and unforgiving to players, in that it takes more time than in a casual game to recover from a poor decision, and adds the fact that the time scale of player investment in an MMO is such that any puzzle or tense situation pales in comparison with the many hours of non-tense gameplay.

Game Two: Doeo (by Raitendo)
Lesson: Collecting things is fun. Collecting things and watching the world change is more fun.

Doeo has a simple and slightly unsettling concept - pink Doeos appear in rapid succession, and your job is to simply mouseover them. Like Particles, there is a single axis of input and interaction, but in Doeo there is a payoff when Doeo are caught, and as the level progresses.

Doeo, in true Galaga fashion, appear in a preset pattern, and just like in Galaga if you catch them all before they settle in, you get a scoring bonus. Thus, this game triggers the part of our brains and personalities of "gotta catch 'em all." This, in and of itself, is fun, and the presentation of the alarming-looking Doeo makes this game a fun little production.

However, the real lesson is this - in addition to collecting Doeo and scoring big when you get them all, the Doeo are integrated into the landscape and world of the game itself - as they appear and disappear, buildings fall, mountains turn to valleys, flowers grow, and generally the world mutates before your eyes in an artistic pattern that is just as pleasing as the game itself.

Thus we come to:
Take home for creating virtual worlds: Doeo would be fun but somewhat flat if not for the artistic ebb and flow of the game world itself. Pushing this game from a simple collection sim to a work of beauty, Doeo succeeds on a much more visceral level. In VWs, players, I argue, are innately unsettled by the unchanging "theme park" nature of the game. Some MMOs, such as Guild Wars and LOTRO have endeavored to give the player the experience of living through an instanced event that shows a fundamental change in the game world. I heartily endorse this trend - but look forward to the day when such changes are programmatic and player-driven en masse in addition to being a story-telling device.

Game Three: The Last Stand (by Con Artists)
Lesson: Fanatical attention to detail pays off.

The Last Stand is a fun little "fight off the zombie horde" game that succeeds in a strange direction. The gameplay is fun but lacking - the weapons need a balance pass, the zombies are varied but act in highly predictable ways, and most importantly, the bullet particles are a little buggy - causing you to shoot zombies across the screen when you were pointed diagonally at the head of a zombie munching on your barricade.

So why is this game such a winner? Well, zombies plus guns is an automatic win, but I think the subtle and fanatical attention to little details truly sets this game apart.

Most casual games have difficulty "lowering you into the pit" - introing a game, especially a casual one, is much harder than it looks. I liken the action to taking a picture frame and bringing it forward to your eyes - as the frame comes closer, your attention is naturally diverted from "far" to "near." Likewise with the outro of any game - you don't want to "game over" and kick the player out - you want to instead ease them quickly away from the picture frame, pulling away with a deliberate but steady pace to move the player's attention from "near" back to "far."

Last Stand, however, easily pulls you into the action, and sets a tone that never lets up in the entire game - everything about the interface between zombie waves and the resource management itself points back to the fiction of the game world. It's rare to see a player so eager to read a little post-it note between levels, but the messages therein show an almost movie-like descent from survivalism to hopelessness and back to grim resolve.

The survivors you collect are a resource to be used - they don't help too much in the zombie fight, but you can put them on the line to find more survivors, weapons, and repair your barricade. In the fight itself, they each look very distinct and act like they just stepped from a John Romero movie. I gave my survivors names, and actually chuckled when one would bite the dust in the process of recruiting their replacement.

The final feature of this game that truly highlights the attention to detail on the game world is the use of night/dawn/day as a level timer. In the heat of battle, I would watch for the lightening of the sky - just like I imagine my guy is doing while reloading the sawed-off shotgun. When the sun starts rising, I know it's mop up time, and I begin to relax, sharing that moment with my avatar in the bloody barricade.

Take home for creating virtual worlds: Players never beg for features like sunrise/sunset, or weather patterns, or in-game messaging that looks like it is scribbled on a post-it note, but each little piece of detail increases player immersion, and thus player retention.

Mudflation Cessation Conflation (Act Two: Death of a Thousand Fees)

In Act One of this discussion on reducing Mudflation, I discussed the concept of currency controls mixed with using "trash loot" to fund a player's activities (if you missed it, it's linked here: Mudflation Cessation Conflation (Act One: Currency Control).

In this Act, we'll discuss my thoughts on a "drive through toll" concept of playing an MMO.

As discussed previously, Mudflation occurs when the amount of buying power in the hands of the playerbase does not match an increase in the supply of goods and services in the game economy.

Unfortunately, the paradigm the industry has emphasized has been pouring cash and items onto players, but avoiding any systems that take things back from players.

So let me get this out of the way: it sucks when I have to pay for something. It sucks when I lose something. It sucks when games give me money, but also make me spend it.

That said, let's look at how we can remove cash and items, but keep the player from reacting so badly they do more than post angrily on some internet forum somewhere. We need to remove money from players (Act 3 is items...) and we need them to not cancel their accounts over it.

The player will never "enjoy" a system that drains cash or items out of the economy, but I believe that a major reason for this distaste is the obtrusiveness of such drains. Take repairs in WoW - this is a economy drain that is in-your-face, requires you to slacken your "fun" and in exchange gives you... nothing. Repairing equipment is a great example of how you can both make players hate an economy and give the players no real value for the money they spent.

WoW also possesses another economic drain that does have value to the player: the griffon system. As a time sink, it is quite effective at trading in-game cash for time spent on the griffon, but the most important part to consider is the fact that the service actually does succeed in trading cash for a valued service.

The evolution of 21st Century consumer spending has been overwhelmingly in favor of what I call the "drive through toll road" approach. Many consumers now have automatic deductions of their most common expenditures, and I would argue are less concerned about bills and less afraid to spend because of it.

MMOs that begin to match this paradigm will increase the drains on the economy, but not have as serious a backlash as developers currently fear. The vast majority of players do not want to have to do math - so let's take that pain from them with an automatic toll system.

An example:
Entering or exiting a city on foot/mount requires a toll. This toll is automatically deducted when a player enters or leaves the city. Since most "downtime" activities occur in the city, the player will need to enter this city often.

The tutorial for the game includes an explanation of the story reason why tolls are being extracted from players - the reasoning is pretty easy to sell, and really all we care about is making the game world's pay scheme seem like Disneyland - you pay to get in, then you can do what you want. After the tutorial, the game automagically extracts these tolls from the player - there is choice in the Options of the game to give a confirmation window, but this defaults to "off."

If the player has no currency, then they can trade items in their inventory for access, and if they do not possess any unequipped objects, then they have to perform a trivial task (such as "deliver this payment voucher to the Captain of the Guard").

Now, we build this up - put in plenty of these drive-thru tolls, and we develop a sinking system that hits players during ordinary gameplay, but isn't obtrusive - and more importantly - is matched to a service they are opting for.

Further examples of drive-through tolls:
- a griffon-like transit system, but you don't have to opt-in to pay, you just get on the bird, and the coin is deducted automatically.
- material components for spells
- ammunition
- zone borders
- enhancement of items
- mail (oh wait, this already happens)
- auction houses (oh wait, this also already happens...)

This sort of scheme works only if you take the curse of coin sinking off of things like "repair" and instead transfer them into a more invisible system.

Really, is there any difference between paying for repairing armor, and paying to enter a city?

In a game world where currency is in lower supply than usual, it can have two potential practical uses - one is for big purchases, and the other is for the utterly mundane. If you keep the supply of coin low, you tend to make players afraid to spend it on items, especially if you extract tiny tolls. This is not a bad thing - let tolls and drive-through costs soak up (and recycle!) the vast majority of the currency, since you're trying to soak it out of the player's coffers anyway.

What about buying items and spending money on the things you want? We'll discuss this in Act III: Recycling the Good Stuff.

It has come to my attention... (0-P GTAIV review)

... that not all of you have witnessed the fooken foury that is Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, and his Zero Punctuation series.

So in the interests of keeping the public informed whilst simultaneously scaring children, here is his GTAIV review in all it's breathless glory.



Think of the accountants. Please.

From GamePolitics: FTC finds it hard to buy M-rated games after all.

GamePolitics has posted a breaking news article about the latest FTC report on the ease of purchasing violent video games if you are a minor. Their underaged shoppers were apparently only able to purchase M-rated video games on average 20% of the time, as opposed to a 35% average for R-rated movies. You can read the article hence: BREAKING - FTC Study Shows Massive Improvement in Video Game Rating Enforcement

As a former educator (and current volunteer educator), I am overjoyed. The issue has never been the fact of the rating system, but the enforcement. As this is largely a voluntary effort, the burden lay on the sellers (no matter how much we say "parents are to blame!") to enforce the rating in order to give it legitimacy.

The fact that violent content affects children on a temporary basis is not in dispute with me. I've watched popular violent movies turn a normally peaceful playground into a line of kids needing minor first aid due to everyone "pretending to be Aragorn" or whatnot. If a parent took their child to go see a violent movie - or purchased for them a violent game - then right on, I'm not standing in their way (I took my toddler son with me when I watched Fellowship of the Ring - he fell asleep about 10 minutes in). If a parent is putting trust in a rating system to perform as advertised, then I say it's our duty as an industry to not pay lip service to this.

In the end, the video game industry is facing a lot of the societal pressures that movies did in its early days - that industry was pushing the bounds of good taste and propriety, and the general public was uneasy with this. The early adopters and free-thinkers lashed back at having to restrict movies, but in the end a working system appeared that allowed our society to give a large degree of freedom to the art. Thus it shall be with gaming, I think. As the initial generation of gamers become parents and decision-makers, and as the next generation grows up with games taking as large a role in their cultural upbringing as movies, a lot of these issues will become part of the background of life.

The first steps, however, are the hardest - as long as our industry keeps a fair rating system in place and helps enforce it, we have nothing to worry about.

Now I Twitter... ho ho ho

A few of you have noticed I added a twitter sidebar to the right side of this blog.

I've seen twitter used in three main ways:

- "Today I ate chicken marsala. The sauce was too spicy, and the chicken was dry. It reminded me of the scene in Poltergeist."

- "The Dow is up 314 points. I recommend you drop some cash into UNA, unless you are tapped out in currencies."

- "The fires are advancing up the ridge. According to the scanner, if you are on 1st or 7th street, your property may be in trouble."

All three are valid. I openly admit that I will be in the first group, though my nature probably will make me want to try my hand at industry wonkery as well.

I promise I won't ever do this though: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/

Mudflation Cessation Conflation (Act One: Currency Control)

NOTE: I have made a couple edits here based on a note from a good friend about an unintended tone I took at one point in the piece. My apologies. :)

Mudflation, the natural progression in a persistent world from rarity and low buying power to rarity with high buying power is considered by many to be an uncurable disease and a sign of a normal MMO economy. Money supplies are most commonly cited as the irritant for the mudflated economy in most games, but the reality is the lack of connection between money supply and goods and services in an MMO economy.

The fixes have always been fairly straightforward – they are some of the basic principles of economics. Here I will discuss a threefold plan for curbing mudflation: limiting the influx of currency (or currency-like objects), modeling more required purchases, and eliminating superfluous currency and goods.

The reason few, if any, of these have been truly explored in the MMO space is the “pain” of requiring a player to engage in a living economy outweighs the fun-factor of playing in the gamespace. Additional to this is the prevailing notion among the game design community that modeling and guiding the economy is “too hard” for the payoff it would give to the playerbase.

I’d like to posit that a lot of the ills of a mature MMO economy can be fairly easily corrected, and the “pain” of playing in a living gamespace is offset by the creativity of a dedicated design staff who leverages these behaviors – behaviors that players do naturally anyway as they try to succeed in the rapidly inflating economy.

A good place to look is the real world - a place that has seen ample instances of poor economic planning and behavior. Start with observing conquering empires. Players in a persistent world are much like Mongol raiders or Roman soldiers - they produce nothing, take greatly out of proportion to their needs, and amass wealth with few outlets. Even the endgame of a player in an MMO matches that of a conquering empire - with no outlet for wealth, having achieved the pinnacle of power, there exists nothing for the player to do but leave the scene.

How does this relate to an MMO? Part of the answer is in providing luxuries and services that befit that of a senior member of the game space. For instance, some money sinks that fall into this category include:
-> Purchased Titles
-> Clothing and Finery (such as glows, etc.)
-> Houses, Homes, Bases, and Guildhalls
-> User Services

The challenge with these is they indeed serve as a drain on the economy, but they are created and presented in such a way that the player pays for them at the beginning, and rarely needs to maintain them. In such cases where maintenance is required, the maintenance is considered onerous to the player and does not take into account leaving the game for extended periods of time. These luxuries thus become part of the pain, and not part of the solution.

So what is the solution? Well, what I suggest in this series isn't a magic bullet, but I certainly think we can look to these "Mongol Warrior Syndrome" solutions for inspiration.

Limiting the influx of currency

The belief has always been that you have to keep adding an infinite amount of money into the virtual economy, for as long as the players demand it. This is certainly how things have always been done, and the result is inflation and the beginnings of the players creating their own grey markets of alternative currencies.

The potential exists, however, to somewhat cleanly leverage the players' alternative currency and put an interesting lock on some aspects of inflation with the institution of currency limits.

By limiting the amount of currency in the system, you create a scarcity of buying power, which encourages player barter and trade. You can also choose to infuse currency in any content update if you miscalculate the initial run of currency.

By doing this, and requiring players to engage in "government" services using only currency, you can flex your players' buying power in many interesting ways.

For instance, suppose you had a currency limit of 10 frobnars per player on the server, to a limit of 100 players (if you want more "realistic" numbers, simply add some zeroes!). This means your 100 players will be paying and playing in a currency pool of 1000 frobnars. Soon, the frobnar becomes quite a bit more valuable, and all but requires your players to explore alternative currencies for barter and trade.

If the design of the game includes automated bartering systems with certain classes of NPCs, then it appears that the NPCs are part of the grey market of the alternative economy, and you can drain off useless items and goods while retaining good currency health.

An example of an automated bartering system is this: Suppose players can gather boar bacon in the course of their murderous adventures. When the economy is young, these boar bacons will be salable for currency - perhaps straight to the governing body of the game. The time quickly comes, however, where all the currency is "out" in the world, and the government no longer wishes to pay rare coins for bacon.

The player, however, knows that bacon is in and of itself a commodity with value, and takes it to the ingame armorsmith the next time he needs his armor repaired. Instead of just handing over 5 frobnars (which reinjects them into the economy elsewhere!), the player can choose to hand over a stack of bacon instead.

Now, multiply this by all "loot" items in your world, and you can see something interesting arise - players no longer have to "run the triangle:"

- Go out into the world. Murder stuff. Take their loots.
- Go back to town. Walk up to the store and convert their loots into gold.
- Buy potions and repairs and the like with gold.

Now, it becomes a simpler economy on the surface:

- Go out into the world. Hunt and gather. Take the loots.
- Go back to town and trade loots for potions and repairs. Save the gold for starting guilds and the like.

The value of loot in "frobnar equivalents" is a simple scalar that can (and should!) be adjusted by metrics gathered each patch cycle. By scheduling out loots into categories, players can be taught to gather in ways that leverage their barterable goods quickly and cleanly.

In Act Two, we will discuss adding many more things for you to WANT to buy as a means of slowing and limiting Mudflation.

It's Not Groundhog Day...

But it's time to look for my shadow.

Short of putting up inspiring Pierre Teilhard de Chardin quotes (and thus making Transhumanists everywhere sigh with happiness), I have not been updating this blog.

The main reason is simply this - when you're looking for a job, it's not the best idea to post your opinions on various subjects on the internet. Now, I don't believe I have anything truly controversial to say, but it's always better to let your work speak for you rather than random opinions you've posted in a blog or forum somewhere.

That said, I'm now ensconced in chilly Mesa, Arizona, inflicting design on Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment.

What impresses me in my discussions with various folks in my search for a new position is how differently every company seems to approach the concept of "What is a designer?" Especially as a systems designer, there's not a lot of agreement out there about what you actually do on a day to day basis.

Some random facts about Mesa, from my observations in my first 3 weeks here:
1) It rained for three days when I moved here. Everything flooded, including small random patches of flat dirt.
2) Mesa is the 38th largest city in the USA. Mesa is the 1st loudest city in terms of bird noise. Every morning at dawn and every evening at dusk approximately 10^6 great-tailed grackles raise a racket that is more felt as a pressure on your ears than heard. I would be surprised if anyone in this city owns an alarm for waking up.
3) You would think city planners, given a broad, featureless, and flat valley would do some cool things with a city. I know in SimCity flat means lots of options in designing a city. We need to get the city planners of Mesa some copies of SimCity 4. Not SimCity: Societies, though - I don't want a city full of monks and monestaries next to sleep tubes.
4) Deserts really do have the best sunsets in the world.

5) Hotels are nice. Two weeks in a hotel... well, just look at my picture up there.

Some random game industry observations to start out the year:

1) If you feel compelled to put your name on a box, you may want to make sure of the quality of the product inside (not to point at you, Tabula Rasa, but, well... yeah.)
2) The more colons in your product name, the more the game shall fail.
3) If you work in the game reviewing industry, speak with your marketing department before having an opinion on a game.
4) Games for pacifists or played as a pacifist are on the rise. Good games for pacifists, however...
5) Now all we need is an MMO set in a paleolithic era.

Double Green Flash Tuesday

Note: I'll be getting back to Game Design related posts soon. Lots of interesting sky-oriented things happened recently (fire sunrises, the comet, green flashes), so I feel compelled to write a little something about one of them. You know, for my grandkids.

So I saw the green flash today. Twice.

I like to walk the beach around sunset to try and catch the green flash - it's a fairly rare event requiring the right angle of sunset, sky conditions, and human attention. This thing is rare enough that in my two years in San Diego, I've only caught six (counting today's two). Some people try to hunt them down and never see one, so I feel pretty lucky to have gotten to see so many.

That being said, those who see this phenomenon will likely wonder how I managed to snag two views of the event in the same sunset (either that or already know the trick). The trick is to squat down right when the sun is about two-thirds set. As the green flash occurs in the squatting position, stand up abruptly and you will see it happen again a second later. Essentially I saw a deep jade flash, stood up to see regular sun, then a brilliant emerald flash hit me.

Having acheived this bit of skill and agility, my next goal is to see an extended green flash - if you stand up from the squat slow enough and time it well enough, you can get one very long (three to four second) eyeful of green sun.

While I was out there, I pondered a couple things I may write about - one is a social game for group loot that involves 19 shares of loot being divided up amongst the party, and the other a comparison of mandatory daily rituals in real life and in virtual worlds.

Until again, and make sure you go out tonight and check out the comet!

A Sky Full of Smoke

I know some of you out there are concerned about how I'm surviving the massive "Firestorm 2007" (media's name for the durn thing). I'm fine, weathering the thing up in L.A. My home is just fine as well - it is west and north of the main fire and evacuation areas.

Up in North Hollywood where I'm hanging out the sky was a sulfurous yellow - all the light had this creepy jaundice shade applied to it. L.A. is not a very pretty city to start with, so this definitely was not an improvement.

The fires started for me on Sunday, when the Malibu fire broke out - I was up in L.A. then as well visiting a friend, and the sky filled with smoke. Since I had a doc appointment early Monday morning, I drove back south to the homestead. I was sort of bummed to miss the Orionids this weekend, but I saw a great one on the drive home Sunday night - just north of Anaheim, the sky was very smoky, my car was being pushed around by the high winds, and the light pollution was all around, and yet the thing lit up the night and traversed the entire sky, oscillating from white to green and back.

By the time I woke up for my appointment on Monday morning, I had plenty of people telling me about the fires everywhere, so I took care of the doc and started the traditional media blast. After a while, I decided to go climb the nearby Cerro de la Calavera to go look at the smoke from the Fallbrook fire to the north and the San Marcos fire just over the hills to my south.

Luckily the San Marcos fire was fully contained - the ecological reserve next to my house was really dry and quite overgrown with brush. I actually had a stray thought that I shouldn't knock any rocks together for fear of making a spark and burning the whole place down.

After a while, I decided to head back up to my friends' in L.A. - not because of a real fear of my house burning down, but a desire to get away from the smoke.

So that's the story - yet more drama in the skies of California. Amusingly, the day before the fires broke out, I had wondered what it would take to close the schools down since it doesn't snow here. Now I know - fire makes SoCal's snow days.

Semi-Review: Portal

Allow me to jump on the bandwagon of those who absolutely love Portal. Competition was fierce among my cohorts to see who would first learn the secrets of the cake!

Spoiler: It is moist and delicious.

The near universal adulation this game has gotten definitely has given me some food for thought. I made a quick list of those things that made the game so damn fun, and realized many were basic game design principles.

Understand: When you take the time to design a game right, your game is fun. I swear that needs to be painted on the wall of game development studios.

For instance, the learning curve on Portal was extremely forgiving. Every new concept is telegraphed earlier. I only identified one situation in which there wasn't a precedent to a puzzle (getting into the vent after the rocket room). Learning curve is an often forgotten aspect - teach your player to play, and he will play!

Another feature that should be held up as a great example of a well-designed game was the presentation of clear, unambiguous goals. Your motivation is clear, integrated into the gameplay, and entertaining.

Interaction with the environment was flashy and relevant. If you could see it, you could interact with it in some way. Hidden activities promoted exploration and experimentation.

The story was smart and ironic. The story was also the premiere aspect that has gotten players to love the game as much as they have - without the story, the game would have been a whimsical and forgotten physics mod. With the story of GLaDOS and Chell you are engaged and interested in the next room. As far as the "story versus gameplay" debate is concerned, I think Portal will be held up as an example of the importance of good storytelling for a long time.

In addition to the quality of the story was the ease of entry to and exit from the story. The new player as well as the experienced player of the world and genre were able to quickly find their feet in the game world. If you missed one of GLaDOS' monologues, you didn't miss out on the story, as the story was reinforced by gameplay and vice versa.

Finally, and in my opinion significantly, the recovery from failure and error was extremely fast. This is such a deadly (haha) topic in game design, and, to me, a no-brainer. Making people suffer for mistakes by locking them out in time or game space is pointless and discourages the player from enjoying the game.

Kill the player, show him his mistake, and then get him back in there as close to the mistake as you can, so the player can triumph on the next try. While jumping puzzles are one of the great evils of the universe, Portal mitigates this evil well by generous save points right before you are presented with a challenge.

All in all, Portal will likely be remembered with one of the best reviews you can give a game: "it's too short." Well done Valve.

I am still looking for someone who didn't like it to come forward and tell me why - I'm seriously interested what the game's flaws may be.

Until then, I'll listen to the clever end credits song again.

The Middle Way

Fun times over at TerraNova, with their response to this article by The Age about the ethics of designing games.

In the course of the discussion, the usual is said - the pellet pushers say that playing a concretely structured game to grind experience is just what some players want. The free-thinkers believe that only providing sandboxes gives people ethical and pure entertainment.

Not quite, says I. I'd like to take one piece of the discussion and put forth my own, middle-of-the-road assertion.

What brings someone to WoW? Say one is an accountant, and just spent 8 hours in an office doing whatever it is accountants do with spreadsheets. One comes home, and doesn't want to be faced with a tinker-toy set and have to build their own fun. One wants to do the gaming equivalent of watching TV - something directed, set, and easily followed.

There is of course the other side - the frustrated creator who wants to sculpt worlds and tell stories but is stuck shoveling snow for 8 hours. They want a Second Life-like experience. Creating spaces, forming social structures, manipulating their world.

I suspect, however, that these are something of the edges of a normal curve. The creative types who want the boundless freedoms of Second Life are relatively rare - this is known. But I also believe that the "video game TV watcher" is not truly the majority of the players you see. WoW appeals - but many of the players there yearn for a little more. They want to tweak. They want to explore. They just don't want to do it in a vacuum.

Let's use a Lego analogy here. Second Life is like a box of Legos. You can make anything you want from them, but you need to provide the impetus and creative force to make it. WoW is like a pre-built Lego toy that is glued together - you get to play with it as the creators specify, and little more.

What about a middle way? Give the players Legos. Have some of them pre-built, and have a menu of ways to build the remaining pieces into an entertaining whole that is thematically and functionally similar to the pre-fabs you provided.

I'm talking about building a clockwork world that runs on its own rules and provides structure and theme to the players, but give the players many of the keys to the kingdom, and then provide them set goals to achieve within the world.

For instance. Let the players names things. Let the players modify what monsters they fight through their actions. Let the player alter the terrain. This forest? Through hard work, let's make it farmland. Now that we've done that, let's build a village next to it. It prospers? Watch the NPCs move in, and the village grow into a town! This citadel of hobgoblins? Let's make it a monastery where you can train in hand-to-hand combat by driving the bad guys out and attracting the monks to live there.

This all moves on two axes:

1) Magnitude of change (turning an evil citadel into a friendly monastery)
2) Change in kind - making something into something else (making forest into farmland)

The more of a change to a single aspect of a world, the more consensus must be reached. This is a frequent stumbling point in implementation, however. Consensus need not (and I believe should not) be overt, but the result of a quiet tally of the actions of the players. Asking players to vote for something is a dangerous and demoralizing proposition.

Tallying the activity they normally engage in, however, is excellent. If your players in an area are bloody-minded murderers, then the world will change to accommodate and reward that behavior. If your players are peaceful industrialists, then the challenges thrown their way will reflect that.

Let's find this middle way - not a theme park world where the experience is always exactly the same every time (and has been branded unethical by some), and not a sandbox with nothing but tools but no direction to strive for.

Making Mining More Meaningful (or at least more challenging)

Let's talk placer mining versus shaft mining. I think both belong in virtual worlds that include the act of extracting resources.

What we have now in our VWs is analogous to placer mining - you go to a likely spot, and the material is ready for you, no muss - no fuss. There's no "game" to it - simply an expenditure of time at both the front-end (finding and traveling to the node) and the back-end (harvesting the node). You can, of course (with training), mitigate the front-end by learning where the nodes will always spawn.

In addition to being crushingly boring, it also carries the toxic touch of unreality - with a little imagination you can jazz up the act of mining into something a little more challenging, and something that has the feel (I really need to find a better word for this) of prospecting.

First off, let's get placer mining out of the way. Historically, an area without human intervention will have many tons of raw ores simply sitting on the ground (especially in riverbeds). The longer people live in a place, the more the placers are collected, requiring a movement to shaft mining (or pit mining, we'll explain in a moment).

This is essentially what most games do, except they suffer from two critical flaws: placement is not dependent on natural analogy, and there is no decrease in the amount of material available when you whack on it. Both of these add an unreality to a potentially challenging and fun aspect to an VW - limited resources!

Wait a minute, you say to yourself, isn't this a great way to jump start an in-game economy? Have a finite amount of relatively easy-to-access nodes that players can consume in the oh-so-heady early days of a virtual world? Talk about injecting materials into an economy that needs goods right away!

And here's the beauty - since the placers are finite, players will consume them - and then explore for more in the wilderness around the settled areas. Now we're connecting tourism and exploration with that tired old process of harvesting!

Hey, you exclaim, what happens when the placers are gone? False expectations! Economic collapse!

No, I say, not yet. You see, once you have pulled the resources off the ground, you need to go into the ground after them. Now we're talking geology, shaft mining, and allowing players to affect a landscape!

Ah, you say, here's is where you leave the standard node-based geology of most virtual worlds and actually suggest something new!

You see, when you want to mine for minerals, you generally start out by looking for a completely different type of rock. For instance, if you want to mine for gold, one thing you may search for is a quartz reef. These showy structures generally dive into the ground with only a slight tell on the surface - digging around it will show you its trend and allow you to start a shaft to get the quartz (quartz frequently has a number of native metals caught up in it - most famously gold).

Let's let the players do just that - have a limited number of quartz reefs in the game world, and allow players to find them. Digging into them slowly forms a tunnel - say every hundred thousand units of material dragged from the mine advances the tunnel 5 meters - this is your tweakable number to control the flow of resources into the world.

Now you have players deforming the landscape in their lust for gold - they are using an associated material, obvious to the naked eye (the quartz veins), to direct their progress. Finally, they are mining away in concert with other miners to advance the excavation. There will be fits and starts as they dig tunnels off in the wrong directions when they misjudge the reef. Also, you can have all sorts of buried treasure off the reef's path to encourage exploratory digging. Put in a hidden dungeon entrance that must be reached via mining!

And so we get to the fun of allowing your player to truly mess with your well-balanced ecosystem - pit mines. The pit mine is a truly destructive beast. With a lot of effort, your players can put a truly disgusting hole in the ground and ensure nothing much can live there. Connect it with a magic system, making evil magics flow from thence, or allow players to create subterranean zoos in their pits.

A new dimension to any virtual world is introduced with limited deformation of the terrain and the introduction of a simpler mining game and a more deep (pardon the pun) one.

And I didn't even get into ore processing...

Toward a Virtual Ecology - part 2

This is the second part of "Toward a Virtual Ecology." You can read the first part here.

If you are going to have a virtual ecology - what I call a clockwork world - you first need to determine how the human residents of the world are going to interact with their environment. There are three ways to think of player interaction in this case:

• Gathering/Stealing
• Tourism/Trespassing
• Killing/Vandalism

Think of your classic MMO. There is a clockwork nature to the world that was created by the developer. A player entering into these spaces generally kills the creatures in the space (vandalism of the 'pristine' state), takes things from it (gathering), and hopefully will look around a little, what Lisa Boleyn calls "travel" (and I call tourism).

Let me turn this MMO space of a valley of ordinary animals into a virtual ecology (this sort of virtual ecology works just fine for a blood vessel filled with harvestable leucocytes, or a shattered space station ecology, or whatnot just as well). I'm not going to defend the reasoning behind this in this article - let's accept this very basic model for now to get to the player interaction.

Running in the background of this biome is a climatic calculation and the "sub-model" calculations - is the weather bad or good? Is the land productive? From thence we can build our ecological chain:

• energy input (analogous to the sun/weather/climate)
• productivity (analogous to the sub-model biological activity such as insect life, small plants, etc.)
• modeled herbivores (likely no more than 2 species per biome)
• modeled carnivores/omnivores (likely no more than 2 species per biome)
• modeled top carnivore/omnivore
• decomposition (the energy drain of the system)

How this chain works is each step in the chain removes some of the energy, and spawns a lifeform or life-mimicking effect. Unlike real-life ecology, the virtual ecology consumes the entire energy budget on each step with no loss.

For example:

• 100 units of energy enter the system through "the sun and weather" each day.

• Productivity is set to some multiplier (1.1)

• modeled herbivore1 (bunny) = A bunny arbitrarily costs 20 units, so let's have 3 bunnies be spawned during one day (energy budgets have a random factor built in, so it is not always true that 60 units will go to this herbivore).

• modeled herbivore2 (deer) = Consumes the other 50 units of energy in this example. A deer costs 40 units, so 1 deer is spawned which carries 50 units - or else the 10 units goes to pay the decomposers below.

• modeled carnivore1 (wolf) = A wolf spawns from the wolf den when 60 free units of energy become available. A wolf must consume an animal worth 20 units of energy to consume any. It can consume a single animal per day. If it does not consume 20 units of energy in two days, it dies and feeds the decomposers.

• modeled carnivore2 (cougar) = A cougar spawns from the cougar den when 100 free units of energy become available. A cougar must consume an animal worth 30 units of energy to consume any. It can consume two animals per day. If it does not consume 30 units of energy in two days, it dies.

• top omnivore (bear) = Bears migrate to an area when 300 free units of energy are in play, and include excess productivity in this calculation. They must consume 30 units of energy to consume any. They can consume one animal per day. If it does not consume 30 units of energy in two day (during summer game months), it dies. It can consume productivity to survive as well (ignored for this discussion).

• decomposers = These drain up to 110 energy per day. If a dead animal that is not being consumed (say a player kills a wolf that had just killed a rabbit) is present, then it decomposes, crediting the decomposer drain. Any excess is taken from the next budget cycle. Dead carnivores and omnivores feed this drain as well.

Setting an arbitrary number for energy input determines in large part the "speed" in which your virtual ecology will move. Setting an equivalent number for your decomposer drain puts the system into balance.

Virtual Ecology Law of Energy: The amount of energy entering the system is dependent on the amount of energy existing in the system.

Your decomposition speed is the brake on endless introduction of energy to the system.

At this point I'm going to circle around and connect this law to the beginning of the article. If you allow this model to run, it will rapidly reach a steady-state and reach what I call the "flywheel" stage. At the flywheel stage, the system is going to keep humming indefinitely.

Enter the player.

The player is important! But let's look at the player from the standpoint of the denizen of this biome. He's a vandal, a tourist, and a thief. He's going to kill animals, decreasing the energy in the system. He's a tourist, causing ripples of disruption wherever he goes. And most importantly for this model... he's a thief. He's going to come in and loot and harvest and steal energy from the system.

This is where this simple model of a virtual ecology starts to shine. Energy input is unchanged. Unless you grant the player the power to snuff out the sun or alter the weather, energy has been splashing against the biome all this time, thrown away due to the area being in a flywheel state. Productivity may be altered (for instance, you can have players' harvesting affect the multiplier for the area) but it's still there.

Now there are gaps in the system, however. If herbivores are knocked out, more will be born. If the damage isn't too great, your predators will not starve before the new bunnies and deer come into play. If the predators are knocked out, then there will be an explosion of herbivores for a short time until the predators come back into play. These are basic ecology principles that most players grok on a subconscious level.

Your biome bounces back. In so doing, it behaves as a natural system, with boom/bust based on player interaction and players being in a position to damage and even shut down the system - for a time.

This system is the very basics of a virtual ecology. Adding migration rules from adjacent biomes puts in new dynamics that allow players who are in tune with the natural balance to follow species and help or hinder their growth.

With such a system in place, you eliminate the "theme park" nature of most virtual spaces. Instead, you have a virtual ecology that a player can explore, exploit, and modify.

Create gameplay around this ecology - allow players to assess the energy input, modify it, increase or decrease the productivity. Allow your players the ability to make a Garden of Eden or a lifeless hell-hole.

Let players take responsibility for the virtual world, and see how they shine - and how they destroy.