January » 2011 » DarrellHardy.com

Splattered Like a Bug on Monday’s Windshield

I’m still reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower books.

No, not again. For the first time.

This is the project I started oh… (checks the blog archives, can’t find the entry) let’s say a year ago. These books are big, each one longer than the last. And there are dozens of them (I think. I’ll have to double-check that number.) I’m up to The Wolves of the Calla, and I’m enjoying it as much as the others. I appreciate how King creates and uses the local dialect; I find myself wanting to use “ya ken” for “you know” and “do ya?” for “okay?”

One of the themes of the series is Fate. The characters are very aware of the role fate (called “ka”) plays in their lives. It pushes problems – and solutions – across their paths. It drives them to do what they might otherwise consider unwise. They go with their guts, trusting that those unconscious instincts are more in touch with fate than they are. If they get a feeling that they should, say, whittle a key out of a certain tree branch, they go with it, and hope that fate thrusts a key-shaped hole into their lives.

Not that the characters are every truly confident in fate. Even as they turn their lives over to this unseen, ever-driving force, they are constantly wondering if they are doing the right thing. And even when they do accept their fates, they aren’t sure if they can do what fate requires of them. Failure is always possible.

It’s heady stuff. And it’s been leading me to ponder how use these themes in game mechanics. How would I create a system that gives the players the same sense of discovering their true paths?

I’m still pondering. If I come up with anything useful, I’ll share with the class. If you have any ideas, please share them. I’d love to see someone else’s take on the material.

Fiction, Pulp and Otherwise

Amber’s back! Okay, she’s only been gone since last Friday, but if you’ve been waiting with bated to breath to find out what happens next in her rousing tale of swords and sorcery, you can breath now. This week’s installment is here, and it features furry, fangy creatures with a taste, it would seem, for human flesh.

I’d like to take a moment to pass along the online fiction I’ve been reading this week. Once you’ve feasted your eyes on Amber’s latest episode, I’d encourage check out these folks for dessert:

Wil Hindmarch’s Wired Tales - This is just awesome. Each month, Wil writes and publishes short stories inspired by the previous month’s issue of WIRED magazine. The first issue is out (it’s free), and it’s a guaranteed good read, and pleasing to the eye to boot.
Derwin Mak’s The Shephard’s Blessing – This is the latest in a string (chain?) of “chain stories” spearheaded by Michael Stackpole. By pure coincidence (given this week’s musings), it’s a story of Lovecraftian colonial America.
Bryan Young’s The Whiskey Doctor – When he’s not making movies or writing comics, Bryan’s working on short stories, like this one. No pulp here, but solid storytelling and sense of place.

Games, Stories, and Freedom

Earlier this week, I mentioned the upcoming sandbox MMO Salem, and that I found the idea of such a beast rather appealing. Not just because I like the idea of wearing hats with buckles and ganking noobs in a Lovecraftian colonial America, but because of the game’s story potential.

“My, what a vague and somewhat pretentious statement,” you say. “What ever do you mean?”

I’d be glad to tell you. But first, we’ll need some theory… and a sub-head.

Games Help Create Stories

Yes, yes, games can tell stories (I’m looking at you, Half-Life, Mass Effect, Bioshock, and a line of JRPGs that goes around the block), but I’m talking about creating stories.

Games help create stories by giving their players experiences. Players then turn those experiences into stories that they can share with others after the fact.

If you move in the same geeky circles I do, you’ve probably heard more than your share of these stories. A couple years ago, it was criminal antics in GTA. Last year, it was stories about crazy stunts in Just Cause 2. And the new hotness, Minecraft, has inspired several people to tell the stories of their adventures. (Come back and hit the links; they’re all quite entertaining.)

The key point here is that games don’t create these stories by themselves. By giving the player experiences, they help the player create the stories. The story is created at the point where the player meets the game.

The Best Stories Come from Unique Experiences

As a general rule, I prefer to hear stories I haven’t heard before. Sure, I’ll re-read the Game of Thrones books now and then, but what I really want to read is the next book in the series (before George R. R. Martin pulls a Robert Jordan and rudely dies with work unfinished).

I don’t think I’m alone in this. You don’t watch a movie with someone, then turn around and relate the plot to him or her. You don’t tell an anecdote to someone who was there to see it happen.

“Oh, man, you should have seen me at the Christmas party! It was awesome!”

“Yeah. I was there.”

“I climbed up on top of the piano, man. And I had this long extension cord –”

“I know. I saw.”

“And I whipped it up around the chandelier, and –”

“And you tried to swing like Tarzan but pulled the lights out of the ceiling and we had to call an ambulance. Then you died. We were sad — I know this story because I lived it!”

Likewise, in videogames, if your experience playing the game is the same as mine, I don’t want to hear your story. And I don’t want to tell you my story, since you already know how it ends.

“But when you get to the end of the course –”

“There’s no cake! Only fire! I know. I played it!”

That’s why the best stories come from unique experiences. I’ll tell you about the epic rise and fall of my Minecraft kingdom because my experience in that game is different from yours. I’ll tell you how I jumped off an airplane in Just Cause 2 and used a rocket launcher to destroy the target’s car from mid-air because again, my experience is different (and awesome!).

Games that Provide Unique Experiences Help Create the Best Stories

If games help create stories, and the best stories are those born out of unique experiences, then it stands to reason that games that give you unique experiences help create the best stories.

Minecraft is an example that I’ve already mined to death (can you dig it?). And I’ve also mentioned Just Cause 2 and the GTA series. But I’ve glossed over a whole category of videogames that is stuffed to overflowing with story-creating moments: PvP games.

Starcraft 2 is a current example. I haven’t played the game yet, but almost feel like I have based on the war-stories I’ve heard from the people who have. Ditto for League of Legends. And some of the best MMORPG stories I’ve heard are from players engaged in a bit of the old player-on-player violence. (One of my friends on Facebook regularly posts logs and screenshots of his genocidal crusade against the dwarves of Darkfall. That is some entertaining story right there.)

What do these games have in common?

The first batch could broadly be described as “sandbox” games. You’re given an objective (in Minecraft, you don’t even get that, beyond the ever-popular “don’t die”), some tools, and the freedom to pursue that objective however you see fit.

The second batch isn’t commonly considered “sandbox” (Starcraft isn’t exactly open world), but again, you’re given an objective (“defeat enemies”), some tools (units or character abilities), and the freedom to pursue that objective however you see fit.

The first thing these games have in common is player freedom.

You can go where you want. You can create your own strategies. You can make your own tactical decisions. You can try something crazy that just might work — or might result in you dying, on fire, at the bottom of a pit while skeletons shoot arrows at you.

The second thing they have in common is a world that can consistently surprise you.

I’m not talking about monsters that jump out of closets in a horror-shooter. I mean a world that does its own thing — spawning monsters, driving cars, sniping at you, etc. — that you can’t predict but can interact with (even if just by killing it with fire).

In a single-player sandbox game, the surprising world is somewhat the point of the game, and if you’re clever, it can become another tool for you use in your quest for victory. In a PvP game, the other player provides the surprising world. Yes, I just teleported my factory into your base. Surprise!

Player freedom is good, but when you mix it with the unpredictable challenges of a surprising world, you get truly unique experiences.

From these examples, then, I think it would be fair to say that

Games that provide freedom and surprise also provide unique experiences.

All of which leads to my final point:

Games that Provide Freedom and Surprise Help Create the Best Stories

Or, to put it in math terms: Freedom + Surprise = Unique Experience = Story

So what did I mean about Salem‘s story potential?

I meant that, from the description, the game will provide player freedom and surprises from both the world and the other players. This leads to many unique experiences, which means it has the potential to help create some really awesome stories.

So What’s the Point?

Good question. Am I arguing that all videogames should be PvP and/or sandboxes? Absolutely not.

I’m just pointing that one of the many things games can do is help create stories. Some games are better at this than others. And if you want your game to be one of them, freedom and surprise make a couple of great additions to your toolkit.

Salem MMO Weighs Less Than a Duck

What’s this? Hmm…
Salem MMO = Minecraft + Colonial America + Lovecraft + Permadeath.
Okay. You have my attention.
The video interview from PC Gamer has all the details, but there’s a good overview of the project at Worlds in Motion:

Publisher Paradox Interactive announced Salem (tentative title), an upcoming free-to-play MMORPG that will feature Minecraft-like sandbox elements and permanent death for characters, releasing this year.
…As its tentative title suggests, Salem is set in colonial New England, or at least a fictional fantasy version of the region inspired by gothic authors like H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. Gamers will be able to use craft items, help build settlements, and learn magic (witchcraft being one of two primary paths) in Salem’s player-driven world.

Yes, there’s a good chance this might turn into unplayable gank-fest — especially as a F2P game. And it might very well be vapor (it’s due out in the next 12 months, but they’ve got no visuals to show us?). But still the very idea of the game warms the MMO cockles of my heart for all the obvious reasons… and a few others that will be worth their own blog post, maybe later this week.

Friday’s Child is Amber

Last Friday, I introduced Amber, a pulp sword-and-sorcery heroine who hunts bounties for money – a bounty hunter, if you will. This Friday, we pick up the story with part 2, in which Amber’s bounty turns out to be more popular than she had anticipated. And when you’re a wanted man, “popular” isn’t such a good thing to be.

Game Prototyping Toolkit: A Handy Checklist

The best way I’ve found to design a good game is to design as many bad games as you can, as quickly as you can.

The key to this process is rapid physical prototyping, in which you grab some prototype bits, write up the rules, and actually make the game.

Even if the game you’re making is destined for the video screen, I encourage you to make a physical version all the same. While testing, when you realize you forgot (or badly screwed up) some core rule of the game, you just jot that rule down and keep going. But if you have to stop and reprogram it… Well, then the prototyping just got a lot less rapid. (And if you’re not doing your own programming, you’ve not only lost time, but you’ve annoyed your coder. Don’t annoy your coders, kids. Nothing good can come of it.)

“Fine!” you say. “You’ve convinced me I need a physical prototype. Are you going to give me a list of things I should have on hand to make such a thing?”

“Yes!” I say. “And here it is:”

Basic Office Supplies: You know, the usual scissors, glue, pencils, markers, fish heads, tape, can opener, and bottle of aspirin you’ll find for a nickel apiece at Target when September rolls around. If you’re doing a ton of cutting, you might want to consider one of those “slip and chop off a finger” paper-cutters. They’ll save you a ton of time, until you spend the night in the emergency room.
Dice: Six-siders, of course. But you should have at least one set of polyhedral (i.e., “Dungeons and Dragons”) dice with more or fewer sides. An ominous black twenty-sider might not be necessary for your design, but it makes a great mascot.
Cards: Regular playing cards are cheap and have numbers on them you might find useful. But old cards from trading card games work great too, and (if you’re like me) you probably already have boxes of the things gathering dust in the basement, sullenly refusing to increase in value.
Card Sleeves: Oh, you could paste your new card fronts onto dozens or hundreds of old TCG cards… or you could just slip them into card sleeves, saving yourself hours of work and a few sticky fingers. Make sure you get multiple colors, so you can differentiate between decks. (“The green cards are the Suffering Deck, the blue ones are the Joy deck.”)
Cereal Boxes: Yes, cereal boxes. These make great cardboard tokens. Thicker than index cards, yet thin enough to cut with scissors, these boxes are my go-to standard whenever I need chits.
Glass Beads: You know those little tubes of glass tokens you see in the hobby game store? The ones next to the Magic and Yugioh cards? Don’t buy those. Instead, head to the dollar store where you can buy glass beads by the pound. Get ‘em in as many colors as you can find. (The craft store probably has them if the dollar store doesn’t, but check the house of cheap first.)
More Dice: While you’re at the dollar store, check the toy aisle. If you’re lucky, they’ll have cheap six-sided dice, five or six of them in each pack, often in different colors. Grab a handful. You’ll thank me later.
Poker Chips: Hey, what’s this next to the dice in the dollar store? Why, it’s a box of a hundred plastic poker chips. You’ll want some of those too. They’re great for random tokens, and you can mark ‘em up with Sharpies to create custom pieces.
Other Pawns and Tokens: Is there a bag of plastic spiders in the toy aisle? How about a bucket of army men? Those are awesome game tokens! So are little wooden cylinders and cubes you can find at the craft store.
Boards: Not all games need boards, which is nice, since prototyping boards can be a pain. I find the easiest way to mock up a board is to pick up a cruddy old board game from the thrift store and paper over the its graphics with my own. The resulting board lies flat (unlike some hand-crafted monstrosity made from cardboard) and I get a sick thrill from using a “My Happy Pony Sunshine Day” board to prototype “Deathblood Doom Rangers.”
Boards Part Two: Or maybe you want a roll of paper with a grid printed on it? Try Gaming Paper — it’s cheap, disposable, and made with 64% AWESOME. Just seeing it makes me want to design some sort of tactical grid-based game. Hmmm…

Got all that? Good! Now go make some games!

The Five Stages of a Creeper Attack

Stage 1: Denial

No. Not a creeper. Not here. Not now.

No! Not my life-sized replica of Jabba’s palace, complete with custom Carbonite Han and Slave Leia.

Stage 2: Anger

Okay, then. It’s on! You come into my house and threaten to blow up my stuff? I’ve got a bow here with a dozen arrows, each lovingly inscribed with your name, Mr. Creeper.

Stage 3: Bargaining

Out of arrows? And you’re… You’re still coming. That’s… that’s okay. You can have me. Just… Just don’t do anything rash, okay? It’s me you want. That’s right, follow me… we’ll leave Jabba’s palace and find some place nice and quite for you to blow up and kill me… Just a little further…

Stage 4: Depression

And… there you go. Of course. You took out the rancor too. If I’d made a fat, shirtless rancor-keeper, he’d be crying. Oh, wait – he’d be blown up along with the rest of Jabba’s throne room. I’ll never be able to rebuild it just how it was. And even if I could, why bother? It’ll just bring more creepers. What’s the point? I’ll never build again!

Stage 5: Acceptance

Fine. Okay. You win, creepers. You win. This is your land. I’m the stranger here; I get that. And if I want to settle this place and reshape it in my own image, I have to make certain concessions. I must swallow my pride and compromise.

I’m switching to “peaceful” mode.

Introducing Amber

There’s just something about a woman with a sword.

Maybe it’s Freudian. Maybe it’s the juxtaposition of beauty and danger. Maybe it’s the twist on the more traditional man-with-sword image that gives me a grin and whispers in my ear, “This is gonna be so cool!” like some sugared-up 13 year-old rolling his first D&D character.

Today, that woman is Amber. Her first adventure, Amber and Stone, starts here, with the introduction of an unremarkable, balding man with two secrets — one he knows, and one he’s about to discover. I’ll be releasing new installments of Amber and Stone for the next few weeks. (Don’t worry; it’s short.) After that? Who knows. I think Amber’s got a lot of story potential in her.

She is, after all, a woman with a sword.

Change is Good

In the quiet midnight hours between finishing this year’s NaNo novel and… well, now… I was visited, as is the tradition, by three ghosts.

The first ghost showed me pictures of his grandkids. I pretended to be interested. Then he told me, “Writers need to blog – you need a platform - you need to blog two or three times a week.”

“I blog,” I said, perhaps a bit defensively. “And I’m on Facebook. Twitter, too. I have a platform.”

But the ghost shook his head.

“Your platform is a weak, spindly thing, incapable of supporting your weighty hopes and dreams. Its main plank is your blog, and I’m sorry to say, that plank is lacking.”

I tried to explain that I’d been too busy to blog properly, what the holidays and writing a novel and all.

“Oh, sure,” the ghost agreed. “That, and Minecraft.”

I hung my head.

His job done, the first ghost vanished in a puff of Old Spice, leaving me pondering what additional content I use to prop up my platform. While I was thinking of new stories to tell, a second ghost appeared. She wore glasses that made her look like a chameleon.

“Blog readers don’t want to read fiction,” she said. “Fiction is too long.”

“But the stuff on my blog’s only a thousand words,” I protested.

“Too long,” she said again. “What they want is to be informed more than entertained. Look at these writers. They’ve got whole communities spring up around their websites.”

I looked at the tabs in her GhostBrowser and saw she was right. These writers definitely had their platforms all figured out. But they weren’t blogging their stories, or even about their stories. They were blogging about writing itself.

“Writers blog about how to write?” I asked. The second ghost nodded, a thin smile under her glasses.

“I can’t do that,” I said. “I don’t have any extra insights into the craft worth sharing. Besides, I don’t want to do that. I love writing, but I don’t get excited about how to do it, just the doing it.”

“Then I’m afraid your author’s platform will collapse,” she said, using the same tone of voice as the Emperor when he informed Luke that the space station was, in fact, quite operational.

The second ghost faded, leaving only her giant glasses, which at last vanished with a soft pop.

“Blog readers don’t necessarily want writing tips,” said a voice from the shadows. Ghost number three, I presumed. “They just want to learn things, and read your unique voice.”

“I can give ‘em unique voice all day,” I said to the shadows. “But if I’m not blathering about writing, what else is there? I’m not blogging about what I had for lunch. I have some standards.”

“You have interests… passions… other than writing,” whispered the voice. “You are more than just a writer.”

“Well, yeah. There’s the whole game design thing.”

“Do that.”

I thought about it. The ghost was right. I had enough half-baked theories of game design to keep the old blog-tank at least half-full.

“Okay,” I said. “But I’m still posting fiction, too.”

“Suit yourself,” said the voice, already fading to echoes. “But don’t blame me if no one reads it…”

App Store Apocalypse

Tadhg Kelly recently posted a piece called “The Mac App Store and the PC Gamepocalypse.”

In his post, Kelly says that because Apple has integrated its popular App Store into its Mac OS, PC games will have to respond. Specifically, Microsoft will have to integrate its own app store to compete, and game publishers on that store will have to adjust their pricing to compete with not only Mac apps, but each other — which will give rise to a new wave of lower-priced, micro-transaction-monetized games that will wash away traditional $50+ “box” titles.

One of the points he brings up, and I want to expand upon, is that the App Store is integrated into the operating system. That is, rather than an external service (like Steam), the games are right there for you to purchase and download. You don’t have to go looking for the service, or be computer-savvy enough to set it up properly — it’s all just a couple clicks from your desktop, conveniently bundled into the Windows OS you already know how to use.

“Integration” doesn’t mean (as some commenters on the article suggested) that the service bundles your games, tracks your friends, etc. It means that’s already part of your operating system. And yes, that is huge!

But is it the end of PC gaming as we know it? It is really, for true this time, we mean it now, the oft-announced death-knell of PC games?

Of course not.

Meet Steve

Let’s look at a hypothetical “big box” PC gamer. Let’s call him Steve. He buys two or three AAA titles a year: Medal of Call of BioCraft, etc. He plays these games 1-3 hours at a time, several times a week. (Steve dreams of 6-hour marathon sessions like he did back in college, but he’s got a family now, and suspects he doesn’t have the same gaming stamina he did when he was 23.)

According to Tadhg Kelly, Steve will abandon these games when something cheaper comes along. But something cheaper has already come along. To name a few:

A near-infinite number of (mostly good) Flash games on Kongregate, Newgrounds, and a bunch of other sites I’m not going to look up for this example.
High-quality free-to-play shooters (mostly from Korea) which cost nothing but a little bit of your soul.
To say nothing of the swell of AAA MMOs rising from the subscription sea, warbling their siren call, “Free to play! Ten cents for a health potion!”

Will Steve sample the wares of Microsoft’s hypothetical app store? Sure. Especially if they’re cheap or free. But he won’t abandon what he considers his “real” games to play these little gems exclusively.

But Judy will.

Meet Judy

Let’s meet Steve’s wife, Judy. She’s got a PC (one of Steve’s hand-me-downs) that she uses for e-mail and Facebook and managing the family finances because Steve is just useless when it comes to such things (how hard is it to keep your receipt from the ATM, really?!).

Judy’s not a PC gamer. Oh, she’ll play Solitaire and Minesweeper since it’s already on that button labeled “games” on the menu. And she’s played some match-three game that showed up on her Yahoo homepage. (It installed new buttons on her IE toolbar, but she ignores them.) But she doesn’t identify herself as a gamer. And she certainly won’t seek out games to buy, either online or in the store.

Enter the app store. Now, when Judy clicks “games” to find Solitaire, she’s presented with a wide range of attractive, fun-looking games for sale. None of them are expensive. Many are free. And they’re all just a click away. No worries about where to install or what drivers to update. She just clicks, and it works. And now “Angry Birds PC Deluxe!” has joined Solitaire as one of her top-played games.

Will Judy start buying and playing Steve-style “big” games? Probably not. Those are for gamers. She’s not one of those people. She just plays a couple games on her PC.

My Point – and a Footnote

My point? I don’t think a PC app store will destroy traditional PC game publishing, but will create a new market of non-gamers. And that’s A Good Thing.

Of course, all this hypothesizing relies on Microsoft introducing an app store to Windows and not screwing it up. Games for Windows Live, anyone?

Yeah. That’s what I thought.