Darrell Hardy » DarrellHardy.com

A Tale of Two Viralities

Tadg Kelly recently talked about “The Two Viralities” on his site. He pointed out that true virality, evangelism, comes from players loving a game enough to talk about. The other, a “false virality,” is just obligation — if you want to play the game, you have to drag your friends into it too.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been on the receiving end of both types of virality in social games.

For about a week straight, my Twitter feed was hopping with people singing the praises of Panda Poet. They called it clever, fiendish, and addictive. (When did “addictive” turn into a virtue?) They didn’t need to do this. Panda Poet lets you invite your friends to play, but doesn’t require you to do so in order to progress. So when a link to the game floated across my desk, I took a risk and hit it, if only to see what the buzz was about. (Turns out the Twitter-folks knew what they were talking about. This game is good.)

Meanwhile, in Facebook land, the all-seeing ticker next to my page started telling me that my social-gaming friends were being pulled into a new game. I cringed, just a little bit, because I knew what was coming. Sure enough, I started getting invites from those friends for that game. Not because it was a great game that they thought I would like to play, but because they’d hit the limit of how much they could play without be forced to go viral.

I think there’s a couple lessons here: one obvious and one not-so obvious.

The Lesson Which is Obvious: Obligatory virality wears out its welcome. Back in the day, I’d click any invitation to any Facebook game. “Cool! My old high school buddy wants me to join his mafia! I like mafias! I vaguely remember this guy! Let’s play!” Today? I gaze suspiciously upon all such invites, and am not above asking the sender, “Is this game any good?”

The Not So Obvious Lesson: Good games that don’t require virality should still make it easy for a fan to go viral. I like Panda Poet. I want to spread it to my friends. (I’m doing so now.) But there’s no Facebook connect button, no Google+ “+1″ button, no easy way for me to shout to my various social networks, “Hey, this is a cool game!” Yes, you can invite friends via e-mail (and I have) but without the ability to broadcast your evangelism, the message might get lost.

Are there other lessons? Probably. And I’d love to have you share them with us below.

Demanding Madness

It’s been a while since I’ve done any shameless self-promotion here. That’s not due to any new-found shame in self-promotion, I assure you, but rather a general lack of items to promote. (Not that I’m not working on stuff, it’s just that most of it’s still under wraps.)

One item that has emerged, wet and blinking, from beneath the wraps of secrecy, is The Silver Tablet, a new adventure I designed for Fantasy Flight’s Cthulhu-themed Mansions of Madness horror boardgame. Here’s part of what I wrote about it for FFG’s website:

One of the things I love most about Mansions of Madness is how the clues and dangers of a single story can be combined in different ways to create entirely new adventures every time you play. (Yes, there are screams from the cellar, but are those the screams of a monster’s victims–like last time–or the final syllables of a summoning ritual performed in an alien language?) When given the opportunity to write a new story for Mansions of Madness, this was the aspect of the game I grabbed onto. I enjoyed the challenge of developing multiple adventures all with the same setup, whose differences were slowly revealed–like the horrible secrets of a Lovecraft story–over the course of play.

You can read the rest of my designer notes here, where you can also order a copy for yourself and six or seven of your closest friends. (See? Still shameless in my self-promotion.)

Geeksplosion in the Comic Shop

It’s been a while since I’ve hit my local comic shop. Between the long hours at work, the weekends rebuilding the house after the zombie attack, and the visits from out-of-town relatives, it’s actually been like two months. I’ve been out of the comic loop. So I was more than a little surprised to see not one, but two of my favorite old RPGs show up in comic book form.

Deadlands is a series of one-shots from Image Comics. I missed the first issue, but the second two are fun, well-illustrated, yarns of the Weird West that capture the essence of the setting without overloading the stories with exposition – something licensed comics are too often prone to do. When I saw the comics on the shelf, it sparked a distant memory.

“Oh yeah. I’d read something about this coming.”

But when I saw the Kult comic from Dark Horse, it sparked nothing but confusion and wonder.

“No. Not Kult. Not the ultra-dark, Hellraiser-esque, kabbalistic horror RPG setting from the 1990s…”

But it was. It is. And while it’s a strange place for that property to show up, it actually makes sense. Kult is, after all, owned by Paradox, the same company that owns the rights to Conan and Solomon Kane, which are published in comic form by Dark Horse. Could this be the beginning of a resurrection of that beloved* property?

(*Beloved by me and four other people – hardly a fantastic fan base.)

Probably not. But the comic’s a decent read, and if you’re one of the other four fans of the RPG, I recommend checking it out.

Lemme tell ya about my character

Yes, yes, we all know I’m crazy about player stories in games. They increase engagement, virality, and other social gaming buzzwords I’m not going to bother listing here. But I’ve been thinking about tabletop RPGs this week and how, even more than video games, they are all about player stories.

After an RPG session, what do you have? Achievements on your account? A high score on a leaderboard? A sackful of virtual coins to spend on virtual gear? Nope. You can’t even go back and play it again. All you have is your story. And even if you played through a pre-gen module, it’s still a unique, personal story that only you and the others at the table can tell.

It was these stories that got me in RPGs in the first place. As a kid in grade school and middle school, I had a friend who was big into D&D and Marvel Superheroes. He’d come to school with these amazing tales of his adventures: how he fought a dragon, or beat up a bad guy by throwing a car into his face. Awesome! It was these stories that made me want to play.

Today, countless RPG players are doing the same thing on hundreds of blogs and message boards across the Internet. Sometimes it’s a brief anecdote. Sometimes, it’s a full “actual play” record of a game. And now with services such as Obsidian Portal, it’s easier than ever to share full accounts of whole campaigns and browse the stories of other players. I’ve spent hours reading through other peoples’ game write-ups, and you know what? For almost every one of them… I wanted to play that game.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Stories are powerful selling tools. Let’s use these tools to sell the games we love.

Winners Without Losers, Games Without End

A few weeks ago, I wrote of the glory and beauty of victory conditions and how, if your game doesn’t have them, it’s not really a game: it’s a toy.

I wrote it. I believed. And I still believe it. And yet today, I want to look at games without true victory conditions that are nevertheless considered by many (including myself) to be true games.

The Obligatory List of Examples

Tabletop RPGs are the ultimate examples of these games. For decades, the idea that these games “have no losers and cannot be won” has been part of the whole RPG ethos. (It’s also part of what makes them hard to explain to Aunt June, who still thinks they’re a gateway to satanism. “A lack of victory conditions is the devil’s playground!”) You can complete your adventure, or your character can die trying, but the game is never over.

MMORPGs follow the same philosophy. You might get your character to max level (“I win?”) but the game goes on.

The Sims, anyone? More than RPGs, these games have been accused of being toys rather than proper games, but I think they stand up to that accusation as well as World of Warcraft does, for reasons I’ll get into below.

Minecraft has also been accused of toyhood not only for its lack of end game, but its lack of any directed game play at all. At least The Sims gives the player some direction via its characters’ aspirations. In Minecraft, the most direction you get is, “Try not to get blown up or eaten.”

Many Facebook games have no obvious victory conditions. You harvest your crop, feed your fish, collect your rent — but at what point do you win? Even in this new wave of strategy games, there is no true winning or losing, just the constant struggle. (There are exceptions, of course: Bejewelled Blitz and its brethren, trivia games, and other short-session puzzles and arcade games that can be won or lost in 60 seconds. No one’s challenging their game-hood.)

So are these not games? They’re commonly thought of as such, but without victory conditions, are we all just fooling ourselves?

No

No, they’re all games. They even have victory conditions. But unlike “normal” games (especially those played on the tabletop with boards, cards, and dice), they don’t have game-ending victory conditions.

Win or lose, the game goes on.

Within a game, there are smaller “game units,” which I’ll call “sessions.” In an RPG, a session might be an adventure into a dungeon. In an MMO, it’s a quest or quest-chain. In a Facebook game, it could also be a quest, or it might be simply the gameplay you have until you run out of game energy.

Each session has its victory conditions: Kill the dragon. Reach level 10. Get that magic shiny horse.

A session can also be defined by its victory conditions. This is especially true if the player can set his own victory conditions. In The Sims, for example, if you want to build an expansion to your sims’ house, all the game play leading up to that point could be considered its own session. Ditto for Minecraft. Whether your goal is to build a castle, craft a suit of armor, or fully explore a new cave system, all the play leading you towards that goal is its own session.

A game session continues until you achieve victory. You kill the dragon, get the mount, build that expansion, or explore every inch of a Minecraft cave.

You’ve done it! You’ve won the session!

But the game goes on.

And on and on and on…

I stand by my original statement: Games need victory conditions to be more than a toy.

But achieving those conditions need not end the game. It only ends the session. And there’s always another session right around the corner.

If you have any thoughts or questions – or a better term for “session” – I’d love to hear them in the comments.

World of Conflict

How can something be utterly fascinating and yet boring? When there’s no drama, no suspense; when there’s no conflict.

I’ve seen my share of nature documentaries. (“Look, kids! Lemurs!”) I’ve yet to see one that’s just a recitation of facts and figure, presented in conjunction with supporting images on the screen. (“The lemur is found on three continents. It can kill with its eyes. It eats the following insects: ants, beetles, cockroaches…”)

Instead, it’s always a story. It’s always the same story (baby animal survives predators and other hardships to grow into an adult and have its own adorable animal babies), but it’s a story all the same.

Most importantly, it’s a story with conflict:

Lemur versus cannibal siblings!
Lemur versus hard winter!
Lemur versus potential mates who just need some time to find themselves, thanks anyway for trying!
Lemur versus lemur-eating pterodactyls!

My point is this: Facts without conflict can engage you on an abstract, intellectual level. But inject some drama into those facts, and now they engage you on the visceral, emotional level as well.

Without conflict, you know. With conflict, you care.

This matters a lot when it comes to world-building.

Whether for fiction or games, if you’re building a new world, that world should engage the audience on an emotional level. You’re not just describing the setting, you’re selling it. If you want the audience to buy into your world for an extended period of time, you need them to care about it. There needs to be conflict.

I’m preaching to myself here, folks.

I love world-building. I enjoy putting twists on familiar tropes, piecing together the elements in a way that makes logical sense yet is something we haven’t seen before. (“The elves live in a vast network of underground caves that they carved out with their own acidic saliva! Now I’ll write up a dozen elven rituals based around acid spit!”)

But too often, when I’m done, what I have is fascinating, but boring. Guided by my words, the reader could fit in very well with the acid elves (for example)… but he wouldn’t want to. Because there’s no conflict. Because the world is boring.

And that, brothers and sisters, is why we have second drafts.

Now the elves are split into factions, and squabble over acid-spit religious differences. They compete for space and food in the caverns with the acid-dwarves, who claim the underground as their ancestral right. A sub-group of elves is born without acid glands and prefer to live on the surface. They’re rejected as traitors by most but secretly worshiped by others.

Now it might be exciting to hang out with these guys. Now I want to roll up an acid-elf character, or read about the adventures of an acid-elf zealot. Now there’s drama.

Now it’s not boring any more.

Have tips to make world-building more exciting? Share them in the comments, and we’ll all be a bit wiser.

Think of the Children!

A lot of ink has been spilled, both virtual and physical, over the recent Supreme Court ruling on video games. Specifically, the court overturned the California law that would make it illegal to sell violent video games to minors. That ink has been spilled by better writers than I, but I’d like to take this chance to drop a few more dribbles for readers who don’t keep up with such news. (Waves to the family.)

I’ve seen a couple headlines on this story that suggested the Court has no problem with kids playing overly-violent video games, or that it’s wrong to try and control what kids play. That’s not the case.

What the Supreme Court said with its ruling is that video games get the same First Amendment protections enjoyed by books and films. The government (in this, the state of California) can’t arbitrarily decided that this media is its own category, some misbegotten half-breed consumer product that needs to be regulated like tobacco or alcohol.

It said, in essence, that video games are art.

Not all art is suitable for children. Some art will offend. But it’s all protected as free speech.

Sorry, Californian parents. You can’t count on the government and Walmart clerks to do your job for you. It’s up to you to monitor what your kids are playing and — this is hard, I know — tell them “no” when you don’t approve.

Here’s a handy guide: Every video game has a rating on its packaging, from E (for everyone, the gaming equivalent to a “G” movie) to AO (adults only, same as “X,” and no, they don’t make many of these). Look at the ratings on the games in your house. Do you want your kids playing that? If not, don’t let them.

I’m not being snarky, by the way. I’m serious. As both a parent and guy who makes games, it’s important to me that parents be part of their kids’ entertainment choices.

Are you the parents of a gamer? What are you thoughts?

The D&D Code

Last night, I rolled up my first Dungeons and Dragons character in over a decade. I never played third edition (not sure how that happened), and haven’t made a character for second edition since… Well, maybe it was one of Bobo’s games in Bloomington, in which I was playing a vampire-hunting Ranger. (My memories of those times are hazy, but rose-colored, and feature using a ballista a shoot a message bearer at 100 yards.)

Okay, I didn’t “roll” anything. My friend Steve walked me through the character creation process on his laptop, using WotC’s online character tool. No dice – not even virtual ones – were rolled. With the software taking us step-by-step through the process, and Steve explaining some of the more technical details of the mechanics (“Shift means you can move without provoking opportunity actions.”) it was relatively painless.

I was a little surprised to see that most of my character sheet was filled with character powers. You get powers for leveling up (it’s a 6th level character), powers for feats, powers for equipment. But then I remembered: Third edition was the same way. (No, I never played it, but I read a lot of it.) Classes were always giving you special abilities as you leveled up. A class was pretty much *defined* by the abilities it gave you.

Come to think of it, wasn’t second ed like that too? Lots of unique special abilities, divided up by class? (Seriously, I don’t remember. Wasn’t it like that?)

So the big difference is that the powers are now codified to heck and back. All timing questions are answered. All interaction questions are answered. And all the powers’ core systems work the same as the core systems of the game. (One of my biggest pet peeves with early D&D editions is abilities with unique systems. Grrrr.)

Codification seems to be a good thing. So why does it bother me somewhere in my old-school gamer gut?

I don’t know. But I’m sure I’ll still have fun, so long as I don’t stop to analyze every little thing with my game-designer monocle on. (Mental note: Leave the monocle at home.)

Skies? Falling. Expectations? Rising.

My wife and I were in the movie theater when a commercial (I’m sorry, I mean “exclusive preview”) for TNT’s new show, Falling Skies, came on. It’s about post-apocalyptic survivors fighting a guerrilla war against the invading aliens that all but wiped out humanity. I whispered to my wife, “This could only appeal more to me if it also had Batman.”

I love a good alien invasion story. I love post-apocalyptic settings. I love rag-tag bands of rebels fighting against an overwhelming force. Falling Skies promised all of that (though not Batman) and, in last night’s premiere, followed through on that promise with a delivery of action, drama, and better-than-average special effects.

Oh, it’s no Battlestar Galactica or Firefly. But it could get there. It’s already started touching some of the same philosophical issues as BSG, such as the division of civilians and military in the time of war, and I expect there will be plenty more before they’re done.

I’ll be watching it again next week. And if you like this sort of thing, I’d recommend that you check it out too.

Clarity by Design

Sit down, son. It’s time we had a talk about where video games come from. You see, when a designer loves a game idea very much (or is paid a sufficient amount of money – that’s a talk for another time), he encapsulates that idea in what’s known a game design document, or GDD.

The purpose of a GDD is to serve as a single, concrete reference for the game. Ideally, each person who’s working on the game would be assigned his own personal copy of the game designer, who’s kept on a leash and fed Twinkies, in order to explain every element of the game as it comes up. But since we don’t have that kind of cloning technology yet (and some states have outlawed Twinkie-slaves), those people have to rely on the GDD instead.

The key to writing a good GDD is clarity. The enemies of clarity are ambiguity, tequila, and a compound audience.

Ambiguity

Never assume the reader knows what you’re talking about. You know the old saying, “If you assume, you waste everyone’s time and will likely get throat-punched by your producer.”

Sure, when I wrote, “The player chooses the red monkey,” I knew I meant that the player selects the “Simian Gladiators” from the drop-down menu, then scrolls through the options until he finds the red monkey, selects it, and then clicks the button marked, “MONKEY FIGHT!” — but the poor programmer tasked with coding the thing might have his own ideas about how it’s supposed to work. Maybe they’re good ideas. Maybe they lead directly to the creation of SkyNet. Do you want to leave that sort of thing to chance? Of course not.

Define everything. List each step in the process. And if you value your non-throat-punched state, make sure you never confuse your definitions.

Tequila

You might think that drinking leads to clarity, but that’s just the booze talking, and it does not have your best interests at heart. It is, in fact, a poison. It’s trying to kill you. Even worse, it’s trying to get you punched in the throat and fired. Save the drinking for when you’re working on your novel — that’s when it turns you into a freaking literary genius.

Compound Audience

Know your audience. If you’re writing a GDD as part of a pitch for the executives considering which investment for third quarter will pay off better — your game or a new Lexus — you’d better write that thing aimed squarely at their coal-black hearts. Focus on why it’s an awesome game with huge profit potential.

Or if you’re writing for a licensor, describe how the game celebrates and embraces the property, while celebrating and embracing expanded markets with deeper pockets. And if you’re writing for programmers, you can skip the squishy “This part of the game is awesome!” bits and jump straight into the technical nitty-gritty.

The problem comes in when you have multiple audiences. Yes, it’s a technical document for the programmers, but the artists need some love too. So do the licensors, and execs who still can’t get that Lexus off their minds. Trying to serve all these masters, as Tadhg Kelly points out, results in an “amorphous, unwieldy and poorly written document.” So what to do?

I recommend sidebars. Maybe they’re literal sidebars if your software supports it; maybe they’re just asides scattered throughout the main text. Maybe they’re even their own files, if you’re following the “lots of tiny files instead one giant file” GDD philosophy.

For example, if you’re writing about the different classes of monkeys and the types weapons they can carry, you may include a sidebar for the artist with weapon references and suggestions on how to make the monkeys visually distinct from one another. Another sidebar might be pointed at the marketing guys, detailing how the inclusion of monkeys has been shown to add 10 percent to any game’s Metacritic score. You might even include a sidebar for future designers (including yourself, since your memory is only so long) explaining how and why you chose these monkeys and weapons.

The benefit of sidebars is that it compartmentalized the information. An artist looking for monkey-gun reference doesn’t have to read through a whole Berlin wall of text; he can skim for art sidebars. And the exec who doesn’t care about the technical specifications can just read the part that tells him how awesome the game is, and how when it’s done he’ll be able to buy two Lexi.

To this end, consider color-coding the sidebars too. It’s even easier to skim for what’s relevant if you have an additional visual cue.

Of course, these are just my thoughts from my experiences. If you have your own tips on GDD clarity, I’d love to hear them!

The Obligatory List of Examples

No

And on and on and on…

Ambiguity

Tequila

Compound Audience

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