Progress bars & load screens

Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! has a new installment up at Gamasutra. As always it's pretty great! I agree with a lot of the criticisms made. However, there is one in particular that caught my eye:

Giant Internet Explorer's little circle goes 'round and 'round, telling me nothing. Yet the tiny, free xScope browser for my Android phone includes a progress bar that shows me how much of the page has loaded. It's invaluable.

[...]Put in a progress bar that fills up, once, until the load process is complete. It doesn't have to be perfect; if you load 2 files and one of them is 10KB and one is 10MB, but you allocate half the bar to the first one and half the bar to the second, that's tolerable. We don't really care as long as we can see movement.

The "donut" of the spinning progress circle gets a lot of shit. I just feel compelled to mount a brief defense of it, since the justification makes sense to me. If I were designing a loading screen, I wouldn't want to draw ire for making an entirely justifiable decision.

First, let's look at IE vs xScope to understand how a donut and a progress bar serve slightly different uses. Internet Explorer is normally on a desktop machine, whereas xScope is a mobile browser. It's safe to say that in the author's case Internet Explorer is more likely to be hooked up to a high-speed internet connection, while  xScope is most likely on a 3G mobile connection. The differences between the two are important. If IE listed out every single element on a webpage and calculated how long each would load, it would probably spend more time on those calculations than actually acquiring the data through its fat pipe connection. On a mobile device, however, two things are important: You send out a mobile useragent, which often gets you a simplified version of webpages, and you have a laggy, slow, fairly unreliable connection. Less elements + higher chance something will hang = better reason to do the calculations to show what's left in the loading process.

Now let's look at the suggestion to fake progress bars with the naive approach of grouping files into buckets and just showing rough estimates progress. In this example, the two files differ by four [Three? - ed.] orders of magnitude. Let's be unrealistic for a second to illustrate a point and assume that it takes 1 second to load a 10KB file. So, you sit at the loading screen, and after 1 second of watching an empty progress bar it goes up by half. Very nice!

Now, let's take our naive loading algorithm and assume that it is linear with regards to file size. 1 second for a 10KB file means to load a 10MB file would take... Oh.

(1 second / 10 kb) * (1000 kb / 1 mb ) * (10 mb) = 1,000 seconds.

After waiting for 1 second to see the progress bar move, you are now waiting 16 minutes to see it move again, according to our naive algorithm. The point is not "this would take 16 minutes to load", the point is that files can easily differ by orders of magnitude, so tying progress to file size means your progress bar will have gaps with orders of magnitude. An experience with large time gaps calls the conclusion ("we can see movement") into question, since the majority of time the progress bar is not moving.

Furthermore, there is user research  on the subject of progress bars - ever watch something hit 99% complete and sit there for a while? It's annoying. Much more annoying than, say, waiting for something to go from 0% to 1%. If you want to do loading "right", you need a non-trivial algorithm to display this information to the user.

So now we have two pieces of data from our thought experiment. One is that a naive approach to progress bars is ineffective and doesn't always give the user an assurance that their box hasn't crashed. The other is that users prefer certain algorithms to displaying progress. This is becoming a complicated issue! If you look at documentation, even the MSDN page for progress bars is full of caveats about usage.

Sims2: Pets loading screen. Progress bar with caption:
"Scolding Splines for Reticulating" [Source]

The reason for the spinning donut is simple. It doesn't give the user information to guess a time to completion, so the user can't be frustrated by that last 1% on a loading bar or a fake progress bar that has no relationship to actual completion. Progress bars, in the context of a game, don't really provide useful information to the user. Showing files and categories loaded might be interesting to some, but The Sims shows complete nonsense to the user and no one I'm aware of has ever complained that "reticulating splines" or "Dividing by zero" is misleading - so how useful can accurate information be? The user, as No Twinkie! cedes, is only interested in making sure their console hasn't crashed. So what additional benefit does a progress bar provide over a spinning donut?

My point isn't that progress bars are always bad. My point is that for progress bars to be effective, they need to be carefully considered in context and implementation. It's not just a matter of hacking together the first thing you think of. It's possible to implement load bars properly, but it takes time and effort and risks aggravating your load times even further. All that time and effort spent will need to be revisited when assets are added or removed. Why not just show a spinning donut instead? Users are always going to be frustrated by load times. A donut is not "accurate", but your loading bar isn't going to be accurate either. If you're working on a game, wouldn't you like to fix 5 or 6 more bugs instead of hyper-optimizing something for no benefit?

Edited to correct minor typos, including "an assurance that their box has not crashed" and an off by one on the orders of magnitude involved. Oops.

Arkham City Map App

One of the interesting things about Arkham City is the $3 iPad app that lets you know where Riddler Trophies are. Collectibles are an interesting topic and there are a lot of great essays covering what makes for good and bad collectibles, but what’s interesting about Arkham City and the companion app is the gaping hole between games and their companion pieces.

There are about 400 trophies scattered across Arkham City. In the game, you can either scan in existing trophies to record their location, or take out green-colored bad guys in order to wring the information from their mouths onto your map. However, location is not enough - each trophy might have a puzzle or a required gadget associated with it (Catwoman has her own set of trophies which only she can collect), and so the OFFICIAL Batman: Arkham City Map App (OB:ACMA?) gives you a touch-screen interface where you can tap the riddle and get a screenshot and some text purportedly containing the solution to the riddle. Of course, there are some complications.

Let’s say you’re like me, and you’re easily pressured into finishing the main plot, but along the way you manage to scoop up a healthy serving of easily-solved riddles and trophies. Ten hours in, you finish the main plot, and start looking at how many effing trophies there are. From the accumulated scans and interrogations, you have a pretty good idea on how to start up but every five to ten trophies you get stuck, or you can’t find the thing, or whatever. You could walk to the other room, get on your preferred search engine, and start searching for terms like “arkham city bowery riddler trophies” (hah! Good fucking luck finding the one you mean!), or you could try and find sites that give reasonable and complete solutions while cross-referencing that with other sites and their maps, or you can just spend the measly three extra dollars on a really good game with really good puzzles. So you do, and you open the app, and oh my god the entire map is covered with riddle icons.

There are a few ways to proceed. You can either try and eyeball the solution and the screenshot to see if you remember getting a particular trophy so you can mark it complete. This is risky - a lot of solutions are very similar, and locations are hard to discern, so you might get a false positive. Plus, it takes a long time (four hundred trophies, and about five seconds to click a riddle, look at it, and mark it done or not). Or, you can go back in time, start playing with the app in hand, and mark every. single. trophy. as you receive it. This means constantly dropping in and out of the game, double checking your location on the map, and going through that five-second process four hundred times--just spread out from minute 1, when you might care more about other things (like enjoying the new game you’re just getting used to). Or, you can try the pragmatic approach: interrogate a few thugs until you have a reasonably complete map, and just approximate your location against the OB:ACMA when you get stuck on a tough one. This is what I did. I am missing exactly two trophies.

There is a better way.

The Xbox Companion app for the phone will eventually allow you to control your console from your phone. This isn’t completely a new idea. It’s just a specialized form of remotely accessing a machine which has been around since basically forever, but for some reason this is the first big shot in the “three screens” war. The premise of “three screens” is that we have information we access in 3 ways: smartphones, televisions, computer monitors. Right now those three are fairly isolated from each other. Although it’s possible to have a media PC that outputs to a TV screen, or a smartphone app that remotes to your computer, it’s generally pretty rare and/or clunky.

What technical limitations prevent an iPad app from talking to an Xbox game to figure out what trophies you’ve already collected? Xbox games are free to talk to the Internet - Ubisoft already has a proof of concept for this, and Burnout: Paradise allows you to upload a PS3 save file to see what you’re missing. I can imagine it adds a fair amount of work to the game in development, but a read-only API doesn’t require much in terms of assets or voice work. Costs could be more or less recouped with official map apps that actually track your progress. It would keep people playing your games longer, blah blah blah, monetization strategy, synergistic transmedia experience, etc.

Of course, I’d like to take this one step further, right into Crystal Chronicles territory. How come me and my six poker buddies can’t sit in front of an Xbox and have the pot and buttons and community cards on the television while our pocket cards are sent to our smartphones? How come when “the” Age of Empires Online app is finally published to Windows Phone 7, it’s just a list of recipes I can make instead of a tool to let me craft those recipes during my bus commute?

There is wasted potential here. The technology exists, and I’m pretty sure there’s a market for it as well. It just hasn’t been touched - at all.

the chinese room

You are sitting in a room full of filing cabinets. The only egress is a single slit in the wall. Paper comes through the slit, but all the writing is in Chinese. However, there are English instructions for taking the piece of paper, sorting through the filing cabinets, and using the contents of the cabinets (also in Chinese) to respond to the question on the piece of paper in Chinese. You push it back out through the slit, to the person on the other side.

If the person on the other side has their question answered, does this mean you “understand” Chinese?

- A Paraphrase of the Chinese Room Argument posed by John Searle in Behavioral and Brain Science, 1980.

Via Critical Distance, this post on the death of the author in The Elder Scrolls V caught my attention. The argument boils down to this: Computers can’t generate emotionally compelling content, therefore automated content generation is a folly.

On the opposite side of things, Eric at TheGameCritique recently said:

“Enslaved is the game that finally made me think about abandoning single player games and their strictly authored narratives”

There’s a bit of dissonance in between the two opinions – on one hand, holding up human-generated content as worthy and neccessary, on the other the mounting frustration towards poorly-written single-player content that permeates the industry. Ignoring the moral/artistic point of view for a second, the capitalist reality of the videogame industry is that content is expensive to generate and the amount of demand for high-quality content is unknown (Multiplayer games tend not to have much content, but lots of fun mechanics. See also: Minecraft). That leaves a capitalist system with two options: re-evaluate your price points and margins and quality gates – finding the correct market position for great content vs mediocre content vs multiplayer content, which I suspect will leave high-quality writing out in the cold. Or work from the supply end - make content creation cheaper through technological advances.

Of course, automated creation of creative content taps into something larger, as the “death of the author” post captures. There is a long-standing debate about what artificial intelligence is capable of – “soft” AI, which holds that a computer program can never equal a human brain in creative power, vs “hard”* AI, which holds that a computer program is technically capable of mimicking a human brain, but it’s just a question of understanding the brain better, and building faster, more dynamic hardware and software to match human processing power. How you feel about “hard” vs “soft” AI reflects how you view the human brain: is it a mystical and unknowable complexity? or is the human brain just another form of hardware, albeit an extremely complex one with at least 100 billion neurons (in this metaphor, the neuron is best understood as an independent processor core), and at least 60 trillion connections in the form of electrical signaling paths and hormones.

* or sometimes “Strong AI”, since attaching ‘hard’ to scientific concepts is indelibly linked to the colloquial ‘hard’ vs ‘soft’ skillsets, where things that are presented as dominated by women in our society such as communication skills are labelled ‘soft’ ie ‘easy’ and thus are undervalued. plus every time I see the word “hard” I mentally insert the word “cock” after it, because I am 6 and penis jokes are hilarious

On top of the hardware challenges, the philosophical question posed by the Chinese Room thought experiment is this: Even if we have a perfect algorithm (in this case, the instructions for using the filing cabinet), does the computer executing the algorithm (the person sitting inside the room) ever demonstrate “understanding”? Or is executor merely a soulless automaton following the instructions printed on the page? The argument is 30 years old now, and in some ways the debate is still burning – although the consensus seems to be that the experiment hinges on the definition of “understanding”. If human “understanding” is simply the result of a biochemical algorithm wired into our brains, why is it impossible that a computer can share that same algorithm (complexity of implementation aside – this is, after all, a thought experiment)?

We can rephrase this for relevance: If human creativity is simply the result of a biochemical algorithm wired into our brains, why is it impossible for a computer algorithm  to also demonstrate creativity? You can rail against “template-based storytelling” all you want, but – what story isn’t template based? From Hero With a Thousand Faces to the modern Hollywood 3-act movie, from genre cliches to Mad Libs, you have to work fucking hard to find a story that doesn’t fit into some template. It’s not grounds for disqualification!

The question of  procedural creativity isn’t just a highfalutin’ academic exercise. It’s literally the goal of Dwarf Fortress – dynamic stories that emerge naturally from the game mechanics. Is it completely 100% there yet? No. Are people still able to find compelling stories in it? Why don’t you look at these beautiful illustrated stories about people’s encounters with the game, and tell me. Tell me a computer system isn’t able to hack a quick-and-dirty interface with the human brain, allow our imagination to fill in the gaps, and result in a beautiful, logical progression of events that “tell” a compelling story.

Also? we have an algorithm for dynamically creating rich, meaningful stories on the fly. It’s called improvisational theatre! Sure it hinges on human trust and some bits that aren’t necessary mathematical in nature. You can’t plug it into a computer and hit “run”. But we understand the nature of storytelling, what makes a story competent, what elements are just good and worth repeating. It’s hard as hell to pull off – I’ve done only 1 or 2 successful “harold” long-form improv stories after a year of rigorous training, and the process nearly destroyed everyone involved – but it’s possible. And quite honestly, if you pull it off, it’s beautiful and haunting and as John Candy put it, “oh my GOD this is better than sex”.

Plus automation is being used for other forms of generation: game design, Mario levels, Starcraft AI, etc. This is the end goal of AI research, finding common tasks and hacking computer routines to automate them. And the human brain is primed to accept input  – I don’t literally think my cat understands much besides ‘food’ and ‘getting rubbings’, but that doesn’t stop me from projecting human qualities on to her – the need for attention, a specific and unique personality, agency that goes beyond instinct. Similarly, humans see faces where there are none, and look for explanations where there are none. The brain is suspectible to hacks, in other words. Our brains are pattern-matching machines, and we draw connections even when those connections are not created by a system with “understanding” or “creativity”.

So long story short: automated content generation is definitely possible assuming you’re a Strong AI proponent (which, again, most computer scientists are. while the brain’s specific algorithms are not known to any significant degree, the general mechanisms are well understood and able to be modeled by a formal system). Automated content generation probably can be pretty good – not right now, but at some point into the future. It might be good enough to trick people into thinking it’s hand-crafted. However, Elder Scrolls 5 will almost certainly fail at this task and the game will be as boring and aimless as the past 4 games. Hey-o!

AC: Brotherhood & Project Legacy

Look yes I know, the whole Assassin’s Creed future-plot setup is kind of silly. The “aliens gave us the Apple of Eden” crypto-Truth bullshit is just embarrassing. The Borgia family, though… They had history. Not a codex entry, not an expository cutscene, not a hundred NPCs saying “oh look the Citadel is big and important, look how big and important it is [it is big and important]”, but actual literal history. Yeah okay you probably won’t see the PBS documentary explaining that the Borgia killed Ezio’s uncle or whatever – but that doesn’t undercut the sheer menace of your love interest being held in the Papal prison, or the hilariously overwrought bacchanalia of the collapsing church in the fifteenth century. So if the future-plot seems weak, it’s mostly in contrast to the incredibly strong feeling of historical significance you get from exploring Ezio’s memories.

The historical background also plays off AC’s other core strength contained within the titular Creed: “Nothing is true / everything is permitted”. A lot of the bad guys in the game are bad, sure – plotters, betrayers, incest…ualizers?, and, uh… hypocrites. But you’re a fucking remorseless serial murderer. The future-plot gets a little weaker here, because you don’t really witness Templars acting evil – you just get told over and over how evil they are. But the historical context gives you a lot more motivation in the past-plot – fuck yeah I want to pounce on some Crusaders from above in Jerusalem. Shit just feels right. Hell yes I want to stealthily take out corrupt Church officials at their own orgy. Dudes painted children in gold, like across their entire bodies, until the kids just up and died from the poisonous effects. Future-plot “Templar agents” are launching “a satellite” and use “cell phone radar” to track me? Sure. Whatever. Can I get back to infiltrating the Vatican so I can murder the Pope?

Yes the plot is all an elaborate conspiracy theory - but the actors have emotion, and reasons, and justifications. unlike The Collectors or The Reapers or The Sith or The Darkspawn, who are a threat because of numbers or magic plot-powers you never get to witness, the Borgia aren’t a threat to the world. they’re an annoyance. You don’t act out of some abortive sense of duty – you act out of revenge, and then convenience, and then just because the dude is a incestuous prick who went from tears to full-throated rage when his uncle cut off his funds (god, I love hearing Cesare’s voice break with anger and grief and fear as he demands money and recognition). The writing emphasizes these are all people, who have motivation, who need to react and compete against each other and not just you.  if we as gamers are starting  to push back against the idea that ludonarrative dissonance is a necessary condition of gameplay*, it’s because we’re starting to see that the player character doesn’t always have to be at the center of each and every drama. the player character can just as easily be a bit character hanging off a ledge watching this unfold. it’s no less engrossing that way, and a wonderful change of pace.**

*Not actually a part of the original ludonarrative dissonance critique, but it’s certainly been interpreted to be a necessary part of a game.

** and actually AC is a little weird if you’re talking about ludonarrative because the core of the game is actually a stated simulation via the Animus. So if you try to do something against the narrative – say, kill a civilian – the Animus says “hey, Ezio didn’t do that originally, be careful or you’ll get desync’d and have to start over”. So the entire past-plot exists in the context of reliving memories and if you deviate from that path (by dying, by failing missions, etc) there’s this very neat corrective system that says “oh that’s not how it happened”. essentially you have this additional layer of abstraction to mitigate the player’s natural impulses to fuck around with the rules of the open world against the desires of the story. Is another layer of indirection the only way to counter LND? …time will tell!

=-=-=-=-=-

Of course, it’s a love-hate relationship with this franchise. Ubisoft, for all its brilliance in game design, still has some serious software design issues – the map is a pain in the ass when you need to see elevation clearly, there’s no way of knowing you need to turn in feathers,  and the assassin missions are more of a chore to organize than anything else (Why are missions organized by region – a useless abstraction with no consequence – when I always want to see missions organized by difficulty?).

There’s a bit of irony here, actually. I’ve seen a few complaints about the “Facebook” nature of the assassin missions. Yet the review didn’t mention there is an actual Facebook game, probably because the facebook game has terrible design. I’ll concede that gameplay mechanics in a Facebook game are historically not very rich, but the interface design is required to be top-notch in order to make success a possibility. Ubisoft’s bungling of the Facebook game is almost entirely because they seem reluctant to engage with actual software design. [For example: unbearably slow loads, not being able to differentiate between different collectables, not being able to see all the requirements a mission has before entering the mission, the hellish and nearly-impossible and undocumented process of linking your uPlay to your Facebook profile to your actual instance of AC:Brotherhood – with exception of the last, all problems that have been long solved by Zynga &c.] And so Project Legacy’s failings mirror Brotherhood’s failings. The feature list is there, but the implementation is senseless, which speaks to a to lack in playtesting/QA.

The worst part about Project Legacy is the brush with greatness. If I could actually organize the accused “facebook-style” assassination missions through Legacy instead of doling out a measly 75 exp every 4 hours, I would have spent a lot more time and care on it. As it stands, I played through a few rounds and promptly forgot about it. It’s a mediocre tie-in, but the richness of interaction is possible – we have a facebook game sending data to an Xbox game*! In near-real time! The next step is being able to play a continuous game session regardless if you’re on a computer, xbox, or (probably Windows 7) phone, where each platform uses its strengths to create a rich, living, interactive environment that you can pick up whenever you need to scratch the itch.

 

*This connection is through a third-party connection service, uPlay, which like EA’s 3rd party server service is a huge pain in the ass that everyone hates having to deal with (forcing users to create yet another account with yet another password is such a terrible idea). I suspect that the 3rd party service is probably a necessary condition for arbitrary data connections & persistence since xbl does not explicitly provide that service, although obviously I have no idea if this is true or not. 

=-=-

a few more notes on brotherhood since I love this series obsessively: I’m holding out hope the 3rd game will take place in World War I. Great setting, and, you know – it was triggered by an assassination. I’ll take any non-American historical turmoil, though – French Revolution? The Bolsheviks Revolution? The Boxer Rebellion? All great settings that have been completely untouched by games (except for some dense historical sims).

The ending was the LEAST bullshit ending in an AC game – previously the PoE bullshit came out of nowhere for a ridiculous and unintentionally campy boss fight in the first game, and in the second game the fisticuffs with the Pope leading to space alien creation myth bullshit was just too much – the Truth video was even worse. In Brotherhood, at least dialogue in the credits made returning to the animus complete creepy in a way that nicely mirrors how freaked out I am by the bleeding effect (Which, by the way, completely justifies the entire animus future-plot setup. The first time it happened I actually freaked out and instinctually tried to fight ghost-guards).

The Cristina missions were lovely. Perfect, even. The romance was real – more real than awkwardly seducing a crewmate in Mass Effect – the tension & pathos were affecting, and I love love love that it was triggered by standing next to a very certain type of woman. I love that the explanation was that these were repressed memories. I love that they were completely straightfoward – a lot of side missions feel the need to include lots of worthless combat for no reason, but here it was clean and fast.

The Truth was a fucking copout this time. At least last time we got something. This time we got an abstract “puzzle” lair and a short, nonsensical conversation. The puzzles were worse, too – especially when it named Justice Roberts as a templar because of the Citizens United case. It’s the laziest sort of critique, and violates a key tenet of conspiracy theories – never make a falsifiable assertion.

high stakes

I want to talk about some of the successes and failures of Fable 3, both from an interface design perspective and a game design perspective. Since this post got long enough, right now I’ll focus on the interface choices and next time I’ll look at the game itself. Before that can happen, we need to establish a few baselines.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Let’s say you’re in Microsoft’s position. You’re facing severe competition from the Wii. Even the Playstation3 has some degree of motion control. What’s to be done?

You can’t just mimic the Wii. First, you’ll never catch up to the wild success of Wii Sports. Second, you can’t fragment the controller tech you already spent years training developers and users on, by introducing a whole new schema. Finally, mimicry is already Sony’s game with the Move. You have to differentiate yourself, you have to take it to the next level. Motion control? Fuck that, body control. Regardless of how it works out, whether the technology has merit - it’s objectively the only business decision you can justify.

Now imagine you’re trying to redesign the RPG,  a genre famous for its menus upon menus. EA tried it with Mass Effect 2– removing the loot for which the genre is known, streamlining the entire process down to a few skill points and rarely-changing weapons loadouts. ME2’s fatal flaw, though, was trading poorly-organized information for virtually no information (just try and tell me how you were supposed  to realize one weapon was ‘better’ than another in the loadout screen).

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I think that if your mission is to redesign the RPG, something Molyneux has long held as a goal, you don’t have a lot of choices but to try something big, and bold, and something that will more likely than not fail. It’s not “innovation” if it’s not a risk!

I think Corvus is largely correct that Fable 3’s design decisions were influenced by the up-and-coming Kinect (The press-and-hold-ring gesture is a dead giveaway when you compare it to the hold-your-hand-ring on the Kinect Hub).  The other part of this puzzle is the “natural UI” movement (Bill Braxton of Microsoft Research describes it in practice here – it’s something more easily explained in video than text, by definition). Kinect is, of course, one part of this movement. Fable 3 is also attempting to be part of this movement above and beyond some rumored Kinect integration.

Of course, there are plenty of criticisms to make w/r/t the design choices. Again, Corvus is correct that menus are largely remapped to 3d space. I don’t think this is an incorrect decision – the speed with which you can get to the sanctuary screen, and the d-pad shortcuts prevent this from being an undue burden. Seeing your wardrobe choices organized on mannequins is certainly better than seeing “Left Auroran Men’s Glove, Right Auroran Men’s Glove, Auroran Men’s Pants (Red)” on a menu screen (I haven’t played Fable 2 – I have no idea how it handled this situation).  The singular flaw in implementation is limiting how much shit you can see and interact with at a time.

“Natural UI” doesn’t mean “literally the same motions you would make in real life”, it means “using a metaphor the user is familiar with to make things more convenient”. A wardrobe for clothes is perfect! A weapons rack is perfect! Limiting your entire interaction with a weapons rack to “look at each weapon one-by-one”? Not only is it a pain in the ass, but it ignores the entire purpose of going to the weapons rack – to compare things you own side-by-side. To quickly see what progress you’re making on your upgrades. To check out new items at a glance and look at all the cool shit you own at once. That’s a lot of information you need to see, which the interface isn’t providing for. For all that screen space available, you can’t see two or three-level displays stacked on top of each other? You can’t compare two weapons side by side? Regardless of high aspirations, that’s poor design.

Games are software

One of the pleasant surprises of PAX was the strength of the panels. The talks I attended ranged from academic studies of games to women’s position in the field to the impact of Farmville on the industry. All of them were lively, engaging and nuanced talks that proved the industry was capable of developing and nurturing mature and critical thought in the industry. On top of all that, the show floor was lively – by ignoring the big-budget gameplay demos, I was able to talk to several gamedevs face-to-face about their games, what platforms they were publishing on, why, and etc etc etc. (And yet I still missed Jonathan Blow’s new game! Which, considering the sloppy blowjob I’d love to give to him, is probably for the best.)

ANYWAY. There were so many things going on I can’t help but point you towards Brainy Gamer's last 3 podcasts, which covered the con from the POV of press, enthusiast, and producers. I will restrain myself and only recap the one panel I thought will have the most impact in days to come.

World of Farmcraft: Social, Massive-Multiplayer, and Casual gaming.

One of the amusing things about PAX was the thread of capitalism strung throughout. There {was a time / is an audience} that {would have / currently} gnashes its teeth and self-flagellates on re: wrt: $$$ in games. All the panels briefly alluded to industry / money / profit blithely, an obvious fact that needed no rhetoric of contrition.  This panel’s moderator went the furthest of them all, saying the core difference between casual, MMO and social games was the underlying monetization strategy.

I chose to attend this panel partially because I’m interested in the future of social & casual gaming – they’ve been HUGE movers & shakers in terms of raw profit and audience numbers, which seems to catch in most gamer’s throats. The second reason I attended was because I was sure the Q&A session would reveal some wonderful truths about the mindset of the PAX attendee. I was not disappointed. WITNESS the first 3 “questions”:

* “So, my boyfriend thinks Skinnerville – I mean farmville, isn’t a real game”. Response: “He’s obviously never had an entire crop whither on him”.

* “Farmville is for fucking retards”.  Response from the Zynga rep (who works on Mafia wars): “Well, about 50 million people disagree with you”, which I thought was a pretty classy way to disarm the question.

* “Farmville isn’t making people into real gamers”, spat out with as much venom as one can manage. The response was another vague platitude, but I couldn’t help linking it to the discussion here. I take up the banner in the comments – it leads to an interesting discussion on gender.

People are drawing up the battle lines on Farmville. Lord knows I can’t abide anyone telling me it’s “not a game” or “not worth discussing”, and will launch into a month-long crusade against Farmville haters on the slightest provocation – and I don’t even play Farmville.

It’s idiotic for us to ignore social gaming. It’s idiotic for us to dismiss what is clearly a huge shift in business because it doesn’t align with our interests. Farmville, on its own, may not be the most fun game in the world. Zynga might be a company composed entirely of genetic clones of the leeches that killed George Washington, leeches that have invented time travel and come to 2010 in order to suck life from as many Americans as possible.  The sheer number of Farmville palette-swaps might be overwhelming to the point of revulsion. And yet, last night, instead of writing this post, I went onto City of Wonder and spent hours re-organized my city’s structure while blasting my friends with wall posts begging for help in constructing Stonehenge.

Farmville, on its face, might be simple. Yet that’s no reason why games can’t take the base formula and improve on it, to create a civ-light experience or whatever your genre-boner  demands.  Dismissing Farmville is no different from dismissing Bejeweled – and now Popcap’s past success seems like a eerie precursor to the App Store.

=-=-=-=-

There’s a huge demand, obviously, for games as software. Not games as complicated, triple-A titles you line up in front of Gamestop for. Not games as glorified tech demos.  Not even games as 60-hour epics. Games as pieces of software that work, reliably, simply, with no setup, and no install process. Games that have strong design ethos, that do what the players expect, and that don’t have complicated inventory management screens.

Because, fuck you, games have terrible design choices. Starcraft 2 requires you to be logged into Battle.Net? Go fuck yourself. Your game requires me to download an .exe, find it, extract it, run the installer, click 6 times, wait for 10 minutes, and then hunt down a shortcut and play it? Go fuck yourself. Your game lets me cancel out of the character creation screen without saving my changes, and with no warning? Go fuck yourself. To switch weapons I have to hit left bumper + d-pad? To transform I have to hit right bumper + left trigger + A? You don’t let me save in between boss fights? You don’t even have an autosave?  Design choices like that would get me fired at work. In the games industry, it’s barely even commented on.

The only reason we accept such terrible, convoluted, impossible, horrible design choices is because we all lived through the evolution of games. We adapted to it, and now we perpetuate it. Now that Farmville has reduced us back to a mouse move + click, we’ve got nothing.

=-=-=-=-=-

I loooove agile development. This post talks about how using metrics creates better social game software (although not necessarily better games)

=-=-=-=-=-

The worst panel I attended at PAX was “The Future of the PC”. It consistented of a bunch of 40-year old men crowing that 3d and multimonitor setups (IE an $8000 rig) were the future. That Apple and the app store was a threat to Sony and Nintendo, but not the PC. They dismissed gamers who only own laptops (I am one such person). One panelist literally said the keyboard + mouse combo was the perfect control scheme, and “I’d like to see someone snipe with a controller”  - apparently he had never heard of Halo? I walked out at that point.  It was obvious they were not reacting to disruptions and threats coming in. I think the attitude of ignoring threats and changing landscapes is very closely tied to the attitude that dismisses/ignores/pities social games & social gamers.

worlds

floating from one game to another is a little bit too easy. i spend my time attacking one game, exploring it to its conclusion, then before i remember to reflect, another game pops into the disc tray. the previous game’s universe collapses into a .sav – the next one expands onto the hard drive.

i finished Prototype about a month ago. I didn’t hear much about it besides the fact that it was based on the Incredible Hulk game where you could drop-kick tanks, so I snatched it up for $20. The plot was as sparse or as intricate as I wanted it to be – I could glide from story mission to story mission, I could only play challenges testing my ability to mow down 100 Infected in 30 seconds, or I could stalk the city for people who knew about the plague settling on NYC. It was actually very reminiscent of Assassin’s Creed –  surprisingly faithful to its real-world setting, intricate conspiracy theories to explore or ignore, interesting ways to move around the city. GTA, as a comparison within the genre of open-world games, was never very good at either of those issues – salient plot points are either doled out meticulously by story missions or not at all, transportation is either conventional and pedestrian (can cars be pedestrian?) or unforgivingly sparse. Gliding from Times Square to the top of the Chrysler Building, hijacking a miltary helicopter in midair and taking out several tanks before bailing above ‘Whichcraft, while whipping scientists out of the crowd and consuming their memories doesn’t compare to “running over a bunch of pedestrians in a car and then ramming into other cars until my car sets on fire and explodes” in my book.

I also concluded my experience with Resonance of Fate – not as in “completed”, but “had one of my party members removed for a mission in a game whose central mechanic is that all your party members need to work together”. it’s a fun game, i will probably pick it up again in a month or so after my indignation subsides. like random battles (also in this game!) or escort missions (the mission right before this), removing a party member is a sacred RPG trope dating all the way back to FF1, whose existence is a crutch for gamedevs to lean on when they run out of ideas. Resonance of Fate seemed to work fairly hard to shed Squenix cliches, giving us a battle system without menus, characters with reasonable hair, no MP system with fire/ice/water/air/life/death spells. It’s unfortunate that despite the vastly different mechanics, RoF ended up with the same old tropes – simply because the genre has a history of that trope.

Starcraft, though. Jesus.

Part of the reason I posted a partial history of online gaming was because the PC was once, unquestionably, dominant. Around the time of the Playstation and N64 (and even the Dreamcast, PS2 and GameCube), some enthusiasts were tolling the death knell for the PC. but there were 2 factors working in the PCs favor: (1) online connectivity, which was horribly implemented or outright ignored by everyone except the dreamcast (lol) (2) PC hardware was still expanding rapidly since the heat wall of Moore’s Law hadn’t yet been hit. The chart below shows how dramatic this wall is – you still don’t see CPUs hitting more than 3gHz without dramatic cooling aparatusususussim (I don’t care what the plural of “apparatus” is)

 

And if you correlate with the previous timeline, you can see 2005 is the beginning of the end – Xbox Live launches a popular online gaming service, getting it completely right to the point where Microsoft can charge a monthly fee and get customers for it.

ANYWAY.

STARCRAFT.

StarCraft is the penultimate PC game – something that requires delicate controls only a PC can provide, a multiplayer component that can’t be played split-screen, and a deep, thoughtful, immaculately balanced player-versus-player matchup that only Blizzard can provide and mantain. Add in a dedicated community using public tools to create entirely new genres – Tower Defense? Started as a StarCraft custom map. Defense of the Ancients games? Started as a Warcraft3 custom map. Farmville? Started as a – okay, that’s a lie (But for the record, Farmville inherits heavily from browser-based MMORPGS created before “social networking” – or even “Web 2.0” – was ever a thing).

I chose the word “conclusion” extremely carefully in the first paragraph of this endlessly massive post. StarCraft is so finely tuned that, like many of the finest FPS’ (which are, of course, the flagship of digital graphics, smart twists on old formulas, and online play in the gaming world), its appeal seems nearly endless, impossible to conclude. Yes, you can “finish” the single-player campaign, but like Half-Life, single player is barely the beginning. StarCraft’s multiplayer world is so rich it has developed its own language. Learning the language, improving your play, watching players comment on their games and share knowledge – I won’t get tired of this anytime soon.

history lessons

1996 - (Indpt) QSpy first launches to make it easier for gamers to find Quake (an early FPS) servers for online play. As it expands to matchmaking for other games, it is acquired by investors and renamed GameSpy.

1997 – (Blizzard) Battle.Net is launched, making it easy for people to play Diablo (an action game) online with complete strangers, and friends. Hacking abounds, but it’s a small price to pay for a centralized server system.

1998 - (Valve) Half-Life is launched. It’s the first first-person shooter to attempt an immersive story without taking control away from the player at any point. It is backed by an extremely easy-to-modify engine.

(Blizzard) StarCraft (a strategy game inheriting from Blizzard’s previous WarCraft titles) launches, using battle.net for online match-making. A huge “pro-gamer” competitive scene launches a year later

1999 – (Indpt) 2 college students who cut their teeth on Quake mods release a mod for Half-Life called Counter Strike. It becomes insanely popular, and the go-to competitive game in the FPS genre.

2002 – (Valve) Steam, a content distribution & matchmaking tool  is packaged with the new version of Counter-Strike, ensuring up to 300,000 new users.

2002 - (Microsoft) Xbox Live is launched with the original Xbox, and brags a unified friends list, a single user identity regardless of game, and basic voice chat . Although Ventrillo also launched in this timeframe and eventually became extremely popular on the PC, a single identity becomes the most flexible and powerful tool Microsoft offers. At this time, Microsoft’s Xbox is the only console with such a powerful online presence. It is also the only platform requiring users to pay for online services.

2004 - (Valve) Half-Life 2 is released and requires a Steam account to activate. Although technical issues bring the authentication system to its knees, Valve sticks with it.

(Microsoft) Xbox Live Arcade is announced, a digital distribution service for the Xbox.

2005 - (Valve) Steam has its first 3rd-party software ready for distribution.

(Microsoft) The Xbox 360 launches. Xbox Live Arcade is re-launched, now integrated into the 360’s interface.

2006 - (Microsoft) Games for Windows is announced, an effort coinciding with the launch of Windows Vista to make it easier for customers to identify and install games suited for their computer.

2007 - (Valve) Major publishers begin to publish their content through Steam. Almost all major PC releases are now found on Steam’s digital distribution network.

(Microsoft) Games for Windows adds a “Live” onto the end of its name, signifying its entrance into the online world. However, it keeps the Xbox’s pricing structure, which pushed users towards titles with free online play (which is basically “every other title in existence”). Adaptation is still low, and isn’t helped by Vista’s abject failure.

2008 (Microsoft) – Late to the game, and struggling heavily in the PC market, Microsoft makes Games for Windows Live free to play online.

2009 (Microsoft) – The 360 gets digital distribution for new release games, on top of its ever-growing online catalog of Arcade and Indie games. Games for Windows Live finally brings digital distribution to the PC, except for the fact that Steam beat it to the punch years ago.

=-=-=-=-=-=

The evolution is incredible. In 10 years we went from the first matchmaking tool to a nearly complete digital ecosystem. Microsoft made incredible pushes on the Xbox, and completely neglected to show the PC any love at all – leaving the gap open for Valve to completely dominate the scene.

chrome & games

I’m dicking around with Google’s Chrome browser. It’s the only browser that renders Legends Of Zork at anything approaching playable speeds. But it doesn’t have Firefox’s handy “top 10 websites” dropdown from the awesome bar, which I’ve ingrained into my surfing habits instead of using bookmarks. Although there’s an adblock plugin, the Something Awful Forums plugin doesn’t have mouse gestures to navigate the forums. I am a huge jackoff for using mouse gestures linked to a specific forum, I know.

Why am I playing Legends of Zork? Because the gamestop clerk gave me a free card that said “register with this code and get a sweet avatar and the chance to win $6k once you hit level 5”. And then they hit you with “double your chances to win the money by hitting level 15”. The game itself isn’t bad – the enemy names are a bit heavy on the “random” element (Not charming since Dwarf Fortress decimated any other game’s claim to randomness by randomly generating an entire world with unique climate and geology plus 1000 years of civilization, history, and religion to go with it). There’s a sense of humor, executed with varying degrees of success. Essentially it’s a Vampire Wars / Mafia Wars / facebook action-point-based RPG. You can even spend real money to get advantages in-game.

I’m also playing Resonance of Fate, a game with a battle system so complicated it needs its own extensive guide. Fun. I’ll probably write more once I’ve finished.

Same for Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, a DS game where you collect and breed demons like they were pokemon, except this series has been around for much longer and it’s a lot darker. I’m stuck in the second dungeons – the game is known for its punishing difficulty.