['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist.]

I find the hidden object game a bit of a frustration. Here is a genre in which a great deal of effort goes into the framing story -- and, perhaps even more to the point, the games tend to advertise themselves on the basis of that story, in contrast with many sorts of casual games that advertise themselves on the basis of the mechanic.

We have hidden object games about expeditions to Mt. Everest, or assembling archaeological evidence from Egypt, or tracking killers in London. But in practice the interaction and the story usually have almost nothing to do with one another.

There's even a hidden object remake of The Count of Monte Cristo. An ambitious idea, and I couldn't resist trying it. It gets off to a fair start: there's thrilling if slightly cheesy music, a great sense of importance, and an illustrated summary of the opening portion of the book.

If you were going to pick a book to translate into an adventure game, The Count of Monte Cristo is a promising choice: it's a bit of a pot-boiler, but it has a hell of a premise, with lots of obvious, easy-to-share motivation for the protagonist. There's love, danger, money, intrigue, betrayal, imprisonment, a cameo appearance by Napoleon Bonaparte -- what's not to like?

This rendition somewhat flattens the original story (apparently the authors figured that "Chateau d'If" would be too strange to the American audience, so they translated it into the rather less evocative "Castle of Iff", which sounds neither plausible nor French). So it's not as good an opening as Dumas wrote, but even watery Dumas is rich by the standards of adventure game beginnings.

But then -- oh, then. Then we are given a screen showing an inscrutable clutter of items and told to pick "clues" out of it, the clues that will lead us to our betrayer. Clues such as a pineapple, a crumpled paper, or a wedge of cheese. Do this long enough, and the story moves forward just a little.

To some extent I'm handicapped as a critic by the fact that I fundamentally dislike this mechanic. In graphical adventure games, I'm always frustrated when the screen is visually hard to parse: I want to know what I'm looking at, and consider it a flaw if I don't. Having a game take that flaw and make it into a virtue, challenging me to detect where on the screen is a musket that has been placed just so as to blend in with the background and look like a flagpole -- well, that's just annoying.

You could argue that the effect is "realistic", since in real life it's sometimes hard to see things clearly, but that's a bit bogus -- in real life I can move my head, shift positions, get closer to objects. Some games are better about this than others: the best of them have brightly lit rooms with stylish, not-quite-photographic illustrations, which at least make it clear where one item ends and another begins.

The worst are muddled collages of edited photographs in which the scales of objects and the shadows cast never work quite right, and it is near impossible to see the boundaries between things. When that happens, I find the effect substantially more tedious and frustrating than a badly tuned time management game or a text adventure with a bad parser.

So that's my caveat: I am not a big fan of hidden object interaction. I get irritated and start to click at random, and then the game pops up a little message to tell me that I'm going to be penalized for this random clicking.

But leaving that aside, I also find The Count of Monte Cristo frustrating because the mechanic is such a bad form of interaction for the storytelling that is supposedly going on in the game. I would be a little more patient (I think) if the object searches were a little more relevant to the game's supposed narrative, but in the case of the Cristo game, we get to search for absurd things in various settings around Marseille.

(To give credit where due, the settings themselves are designed to be period French rooms -- but that doesn't quite excuse the fact that apparently one of the damning bits of evidence against the villain is, in fact, a pine cone.)

It's possible to do much better with the same basic concept. Agatha Christie - Peril at End House is a hidden object game based on Hercule Poirot. I have the sense that they took a lot of their cues from the David Suchet television series, because their Hercule looks shockingly like Suchet, and the theme music has a familiar jazzy-yet-suspenseful score.

The production values are excellent, and there's a clear sense of setting and period -- but that's not what I'm interested in here. Three things make this game much more effective than the game of The Count of Monte Cristo from a narrative-meets-interaction perspective.

First, there's a greater match between the interaction style and the content of the narrative. Dantes doesn't really spend most of his time scrutinizing furniture. His adventures are more about interpersonal manipulation. Trying to squeeze him into a hidden object game doesn't work so well. Poirot, though, is just the type to linger fastidiously over tiny details.

(Holmes even more so: it's no surprise there is also a line of Sherlock Holmes hidden object games.)

Second, the creators of Peril at End House have gone to some trouble to make the searches feel more relevant to the plot. Most of the items you find don't mean anything, but in each room there is usually one -- a letter, a footprint, a revealing receipt -- that contributes information toward the investigation. This makes a world of difference, because it makes these scenes feel more like real searches, and because it doesn't attempt to convince the player that useless side articles have any bearing on the plot.

Third, the mini-games slipped in between object searches are generally more apposite as well: fitting together jigsaw puzzles of torn-up evidence; connecting clues with the characters they relate to; solving a very simple encrypted safe combination; that sort of thing. They're not really very hard puzzles, but they have the effect of reinforcing the player's understanding of the story.

But ultimately, the reason this works as well as it does is that Agatha Christie's stories start out being very much like jigsaw puzzles, with pieces supplied one at a time and the reader invited to fit them together. Some other styles of mystery writing -- a Scott Turow thriller, say, or the psychologically dense mysteries of PD James or Elizabeth George, or even a late Sayers novel -- would not be nearly so open to translation to this format. It would seem trivializing to try.

The cynical explanation is that Christie's work is really more puzzle than story to start with, and that this is why it lends itself so well to conversion. I prefer to make a different observation: that successfully adapting existing narrative material to interactive media is sometimes about making a smart match between the reader's activity (in the original case) and the player's (in the resulting work).

Note I said "the reader's activity" there, not "the protagonist's". Lots of game versions of books try (with varying success) to give the player the starring role. But the player of Peril at End House doesn't really act like Hercule Poirot, or even like Poirot's sidekick Hastings.

He acts like the consumer of the mystery, someone who has to have all the important bits pointed out for him (as, for instance, in a list of objects to find and examine in each room), and whose main challenge is to keep track of what it all means. Some of the mini-games are essentially quizzes on whether the player understands the plot so far.

The Count of Monte Cristo game doesn't let me act like either Dantes or a reader of Dantes' story. It gives me Dumas' wonderful sweeping over-the-top premise, one that demands action of the protagonist and inspires impatient curiosity in the reader. And then it asks me to sit still and click on pine cones.

[Emily Short is an interactive fiction author and part of the team behind Inform 7, a language for IF creation. She also maintains a blog on interactive fiction and related topics. She can be reached at emshort AT mindspring DOT com.]

Posted by Emily Short at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

[Over at sister 'online worlds' site Worlds In Motion, Mathew Kumar has been doing a sterling job expanding the Worlds In Motion Atlas, so we're going to highlight his work profiling the more GSW-friendly games featured - such as this classic alt.MMO!]

Here's an overview of Kingdom of Loathing, from Asymmetric Publications, a popular browser-based RPGs that features a multiplayer component, with in-game chat, clans, player-stores and more community aspects.

Name: The Kingdom of Loathing

Company: Asymmetric Publications

Established: February 2003

How it Works: Kingdom of Loathing is experienced on the web through html. It requires no installation and navigation and gameplay are accomplished via mouse and keyboard input.

Overview: In Kingdom of Loathing, players choose one of six classes and begin a largely single player adventure to gain levels, earn meat (the world's currency) and eventually rescue a king. Adventures are turn-based with a limited number of turns each day. Players can engage in Player vs. Player, join clans and sell items from stores when they reach the appropriate level, and those who pass a literacy test can take part in chat with other players.

Payment Method: Kingdom of Loathing is free to play, and earns revenue through donations (which grant players special in-game items) and merchandising.

Key Features:
- Browser RPG
- Player vs. Player combat
- In-game chat
- Clans
- User owned stores/economy

Kingdom of Loathing: In-Depth Tour

There have been a lot of things said and written about Kingdom of Loathing as a purely single-player experience already, so I'm not going to dwell on that too much. The initial things that are going to strike any player is that it's graphically incredibly simple (stick figure sketches) and it tries to be funny from the instant you start creating a character (you choose between classes including "Seal Clubber" and "Disco Bandit").

As I currently live in "the frigid Northlands" (Canada) I thought I'd play as a Seal Clubber, and began my quest, rationed at 40 "adventures" a day. The first thing any community minded player of Kingdom of Loathing must do is pass the test at the Altar of Literacy, which allows them the ability to take part in in-game chat. It's an amusing requirement (expecting knowledge of the use of "their", "they're" and "there") and has led to a community that is unusually well-spoken.

Once that's done (and after working with the "Toot Oriole" on Mt. Noob to learn how to play) the next thing to do is to join a clan, where the main multiplayer experience can be found. You can't join a clan until you are level 3 (which requires a few days adventuring) and once you've reached this level there are a bewildering range to choose from. I just chose at random, selecting the "Seven Lances" clan, and have no idea if I chose wisely or not.

The game has several artificial barriers of this sort -- for example, you can't own a player store until you reach level 9 (though you can sell items in the flea market) -- all of which require you quest in the "main" game for quite a while (a period of perhaps weeks, due to the limited number of adventures per day) and while this can seem restricting, a major part of play is taking part in your clan chat, which allows you to receive advice from other players (which tends to stop short of outright spoilers) beneficial "buffs" for your character (making combat easier, or leading to more item drops) amongst other benefits.

Another aspect of the community is player vs. player combat, playable by choosing to smash the "Magical Mystical Hippy Stone" that exists at your campsite. Combat takes the form of bizarre, in-direct statistic comparisons, and winners can take rank, stats, meat (the game's currency) and items from losers. I chose not to take part for fear of crippling my still new character completely.

I've been unable to access some community features, too. I haven't been able to contribute the required amount of meat to my clan's coffers to raise enough karma in order to take part in Hobopolis, one of the game's main multiplayer areas. Hobopolis is a dungeon in which clans can go on adventures together. However, similar to the content intended for clans in games such as World of Warcraft, this is almost solely for high level characters due to the difficulty. As a lowly level 6 "Malamute Basher" it'll be a while yet before I'm able to take part.

Kingdom of Loathing is a fairly unique game, particularly when it comes to its "massively multiplayer" content. Several multiplayer aspects of it are surprising -- a great example of this was the "grey plague", an in-game event in which players became diseased, leading their font to become unreadable. Players had to work together and quest to find the cure, which had to be used on other players.

There are many examples of this sort of thing, and it's a great way to explain the unusual way that Kingdom of Loathing fits the MMO concept without fitting the template at all.

Kingdom of Loathing: Conclusions

Kingdom of Loathing has an amazing community. Sure, it could be considered small -- there tend to only be a few thousand players on at any time -- but you only have to look at the incredible depth its spoiler-filled wiki goes to to see how into the game its players are. That's not to say they're closed off -- they're welcoming to "newbies" and most clans accept any and all players, but you do have to play by their rules. Which means using proper English (they don't make you pass a literacy test for nothing!) and taking part in the community in a positive manner.

If you want the "proper" Kingdom of Loathing experience you're best to forget that wiki I just linked (as the temptation to browse it will be just too much) and play through the game using the help of other players in chat. Kingdom of Loathing is a game full of surprisingly difficult (and obscure) puzzles to solve that are often explained in a rather roundabout fashion (the developers clearly love wordplay) so you're going to need the help.

Played like this, I'd almost be willing to argue that Kingdom of Loathing is about as "multiplayer" as any other online RPG -- after all, aren't all of these games about players working together to solve puzzles (sort of)?

And that doesn't take into account the absolutely incredible player-based economy that has been created in-world. I don't know how it compares to something like Eve Online (which we might look at in future) but the idea that there are players trading individual items worth millions of meat is mind-blowing. I don't entirely understand, for example, why the spices I received for killing goblin chefs are worth thousands of meat to other players while their resale value to NPCs is low (and other players could surely kill their own goblin chefs) but I guess I'm just not an economist.

When you look at aspects like that, Kingdom of Loathing isn't just a great game, but a really unique and interesting MMO. It does have its failings -- I think the interface is absolutely terrible, I don't find the stick figures that pleasant (even if it does feel like a Purple Ronnie MMO) and like many other RPGs it's completely bewildering to beginners (though the community can help with that.)

I wish I had reached a level where I was able to discuss Hobopolis, the multiplayer clan dungeons, but unfortunately the limited amount of adventures per day mean I haven't been able to get that far yet. I don't consider that a failing -- I rather like the idea that I can only play so long each day -- and have even wondered how such a system would work in a fully fledged MMORPG.

Anyway, Kingdom of Loathing probably isn't the kind of game you'd plan to look at if you were trying to work out how to build a community in your MMO, but it only take a short time playing to realize such an assumption is dead wrong. Kingdom of Loathing might be more of a "game" than an "MMO" but as either, it easily outclasses many of the competition.

Useful Links:
Official explanation
Coldfront KOLWiki (Unofficial Kingdom of Loathing Wiki)
RadioKOL (Kingdom of Loathing Radio)

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The hive mind must bring you GameSetLinks, and it does so this time by revealing that Persona developer Atlus has also debuted an awesome new IP - that's right, it's a refrigerated UFO machine that dispenses ice cream (pictured, left!) Take that, Megaten fans!

Also wandering around here - lots of free games listed, why user-created may not always be the best, more Harmonix analysis, comparisons of console download services, and a little journalist mugging.

Tra la la:

Historical Studies of Digital Entertainment Media | How They Got Game
Ah, neat game academia folks (Lowood, Bittanti) booting up this new academic journal for next year: 'The theme for this first issue will be "Digital Games: Historical and Preservation Studies."'

...on pampers, programming & pitching manure: Player Created Content: Industry Created Glut
'I do worry, however, that many will fall by the wayside for lack of sufficient user-base to generate the content.'

365 days of free games | GamesRadar
The PC Gamer UK guys, including some RPS-ers, excel themselves.

Bringing Gaming (and Gamers) to Your Library: 100 Tips and Resources | OEDb
'When libraries offer gaming programs, there's often a very favorable response, but how do you go about getting started?'

The Story of Sega’s Oddest Game Ever | Edge Online
Aha, was talking about Segagaga the other day - here's the full skinny.

Juvenile Journalists - www.developmag.com
'Don’t pretend you’re making some sort of Suffragette protest when you’re simply throwing your toys out of the pram.'

Trends in Japan » UFO Catcher for ice cream hits Japan’s game centers
'ATLUS has developed the “Triple Catcher Ice”, THE state-of-the-art prize machine carrying the latest freezing technology'.

Poynter Online - Romenesko: 'Magazine ad sales fall 8.2% in the second quarter'
In the U.S. - tech ad spending down almost 20%, it says - shows why most game mags are in such dire straits. (Happily, Game Developer mag, in a non-consumer market, is doing just fine.)

Harmonix Music Systems | The A.V. Club
Second part of the Dahlen analysis we've mentioned before, great attention to detail here.

Developing for PS3 PlayStation Network (PSN): newretro.org
Good series from Alex Amsel - also see XBLA, WiiWare.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[In this editorial, originally printed in Game Developer magazine, editor-in-chief Brandon Sheffield reflects on the ever-increasingly bloated nature of game development, and wonders if there are better ways for developers to share their learning experiences.]

Consolidation scares the crap out of me, but it’s running rampant through our industry. Some of these companies seem to be getting so bloated that I wonder how they even operate.

It’s funny how it’s often the execs at large publishers who talk the most about making games more like movies, or at least more successful than them — and yet these are the very entities that are moving further and further away from the Hollywood studio system (which is composed mostly of freelance agents, production houses, and funding groups) and moving more toward a factory-style production model.

It’s a wonder to me that original or innovative games ever get through this system — at times it seems like it must have been some sort of grievous error of judgment on the part of somebody in the upper echelons, allowing a team to get paid to make what they want. After all, that’s how Ralph Baer wound up creating the first modern video games while researching for the military.

But of course, publishers fund big-budget games, and as the medium discovers itself, it strives to tackle more — more hours of gameplay, more sandbox options, more user-generated content, more graphical flourish and physics interaction.

These are certainly good things to an extent, but at this stage they are incredibly reliant on the money of large corporate entities, the largest of which are absorbing creative studios left and right (though on enlightened occasions, leaving the studios themselves alone, just taking a bit of the money and risk).

There are talented people in these publishers, but as we all know, being talented and being in charge don’t always go hand in hand. And when these structures get larger and more labyrinthine, it makes me wonder how long before we’re submitting game concepts to representative committees, like government entities.

They will then relay this information, complete with riders, to persons who consult with the people who have the money, who in turn speak with the people that “push the button,” as we represent our "constituents" whose tastes we barely even know. Or are we there already? Or alternately, am I being too pessimistic?

The fact is, you can make a good movie for $100,000 that can be shown in theaters — it's rare, but it's possible. Could you make a game for the same price that would make it onto store shelves?

You might be able to consider downloadable games as a corollary to direct-to-DVD movies. With movies of lower-budget, it's the luck of the draw and who you know that gets you in theatres or simply on a disc.

But in games, if you've got a small budget it's pretty unlikely that you're going to get any kind of traditional marketing or retail treatment. But DVD sales have overtaken box office sales, and so too will downloadable sales overtake retail. So perhaps the era of the indie is at hand?

Postmortems: The Best Policy

Part of the key to making great games - whether large or small - is to understand what you did wrong compared to your last game. So I've also been thinking — can there ever be such a thing as a truly honest public postmortem? I had a conversation with a designer friend recently, and we came to the conclusion that unless the game was made entirely by one person, probably not.

While you can say, “We changed scope too quickly,” you can’t say, “So-and-so screwed everything up and lost us lots of time because he’s a terrible manager.” The latter is likely a truer statement, but you’d never hear anyone say it outside of the office. And in the case where the people giving you the money are the problem, well what can you do?

At a certain point, one has to wonder — are we continually repeating the same mistakes, or are we just keeping it close to the vest? (And I use “we” for the sake of convenience — I’ve never written a postmortem myself.)

Certainly there can be interesting elements in these articles, such as information about genre or platform shifts, or innovative ways to deal with budgetary or time constraints. But in general, it seems these articles frequently tread over old ground, as the skeletons of the past come back to haunt us.

There’s still plenty to glean if you’re a fan of reading between the lines — most authors, like poker players, have a "tell," which at the very least informs you of when they clearly have a lot more they could say on a certain subject.

I don’t mean to say postmortems are useless — after all, we feature them on the cover of almost every issue of Game Developer magazine. But there might be better ways to structure this information, might there not?

If we can get to the stage where postmortems enable everyone to better understand the game development process, then perhaps some more autonomy will be given - even at higher levels - to game creators to break out of the rigidity discussed in the first part of this editorial.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Vox Populi, a somewhat unexpected new development for GameSetWatch, is a new bi-weekly column discussing things we've heard - and things you've told us - about video games today, and video games in the future.]

Well, there was a first Vox Populi column, and shortly thereafter - there was a second. Which is this. As per usual, feel free to contribute - or if you don't care for that, just read and appreciate.

- You may know that Metal Gear Solid supremo Hideo Kojima is a bit of a fan of the Ubisoft Montreal-created Assassin's Creed. After all, there's an Altair costume in Metal Gear Solid 4, for starters. And now, Vox Populi has learned that Kojima has been visiting Ubisoft Montreal's offices this week. Friendly chat, or something more substantial? Make up your own mind.

- The edgy renaissance of EA Redwood Shores, currently in process with the distinctly adult Dead Space, seems to be continuing, according to job postings seen by Vox Populi. They discuss "a new M-rated action-adventure" in the early stages of production for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 - with "an Oscar-nominated writer" on board with plans to expand to turn the IP into a massive multi-media franchise. Maybe M is the new E for the EA Games label?

- Do you like Tinker-ing around? Apparently, our favorite Xbox 360 creators do, too, since Vox Populi has discovered a mysterious trademark registration for 'Tinker' by Microsoft - citing intention for use in relation with "game software for use on computers." And nope, Vox Populi has no idea what this is - anyone? Bueller?

- So far, you might know Electronic Arts' Montreal studio for cute Wii games like Boogie or distinctly grungier action games such as Army Of Two. But would you be surprised to know that the developer is also working on a new racing game for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360? That's what Vox Populi has heard - expect more details on it soon.

- So, about all this Halo MMO farrago. Vox Populi may have seen some glimpses of the much-hyped title, and has worked out the following. Firstly, the title was not in development at Bungie. Secondly, it - or at least, the version Vox Populi has seen - is no longer in development. And thirdly, you may be hearing more about the aforementioned defunct version soon.

[DISCLAIMER: Vox Populi is the voice of the people. Literally. So it lives on what it hears. Please send it information. It endeavors to ensure that the information in this entertaining missive is correct, but, citing an excellent, similar column in another medium: "All stories are sourced from well-connected individuals. But I urge you to use your judgment and remember, context is everything."]

Posted by Vox Populi at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Welcome to the GameSetWatch Comic' is, once again, a weekly comic by Jonathan "Persona" Kim about the continuing adventures of our society, cultural postdialectic theory, and video games.]

Returning to a previously explored subject (Ash from Pokemon's awkward social situations) has brought fruit once more for a colorful Mr. Persona, we see, as he explores the post-watershed years for the master of monsters:

[Jonathan "Persona" Kim is a character animation student at the California Institute of the Arts. When not continuing Pokeoffice stories, he continues the Mecha Fetus revolution on the Mecha Fetus Visublog.]

Posted by persona at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Good Lord, I _still_ have GameSetLinks left over from last weekend? What a terrible embarrassment. Fortunately, most of them are obscure enough that you won't mind, dear GSW reader - starting with a Chinese documentary criticizing World Of Warcraft.

Also in here - (the pictured) Mike Patton interviewed on his video game voice work, the return of The Yes Men, the epidemic of 'bloom' in the game biz, how much the FragDolls actually get paid, and lots more.

Eu reek ah:

EastSouthWestNorth: Daily Brief Comments July 11-20, 2008
With vids/translations - [Chinese TV station 'CCTV showed a series of programs titled 'Battling Internet Demons' that targeted the online game 'World of Warcraft' for its addictiveness and the required treatments by experts.' - Via Kaiju Shakedown.

Invading copyright is just a game for The Times - currybetdotnet
Space Invaders clone on the newspaper's website with a really silly disclaimer - via ExtCir.

Mike Patton Interview | The A.V. Club
Great Gus Mastrapa piece talking about Patton's video game voiceover work.

Water Cooler Games - Yes Men Exhibition
'While the group's work is not necessarily game-related, some may remember their spoofing of a serious games conference in the UK two years ago.' Indeed, compete awesome. We'll see what they do this time.

Versus CluClu Land: Jazz and American Game Design
'These two differing approaches to game design point to a creative tension in many of the best recent games that is like the conflict described in Gioia's assessment of Jazz history.'

Player statistics return with a vengeance - The Steam Review
'Steam’s player statistics were taken down the other week, to a small amount of wailing and teeth gnashing in the forums. Now they’re back, and better than ever.'

Bloom Disasters - The Quixotic Engineer
'To properly illustrate my concern about the proliferation of bloom, I’d like to show you some examples of bloom gone wrong.'

King of Diamonds | OXM ONLINE
Hey, Krispy Kreme knows the Xbox Live Diamond card!

ProPublica Announces More Staff Additions; Newsroom Will Include Seven Pulitzer Winners
The concept of 'a non-profit newsroom producing journalism in the public interest' is a wonderful one - esp. when investigation-oriented.

Wanted: Female gamer, must take no prisoners | Technology | Los Angeles Times
The FragDolls get paid $15,000 to $30,000 a year for the part-time gig? Interesting. $300 a day for E3.

Why Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" theory might be all wrong. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine
'It's true that we're now buying more obscure movies and music than ever before. But we're merely nibbling on these niches.' V. important for games, too - via Bittanti. Also notable for mentioning Twelve, which is high-concept/needed in games.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[The Game Anthopologist is about gaming communities. This week, Michael Walbridge explores the Culdcept Saga community and its struggles to survive and grow.]

If a game is beloved by its players, but doesn’t have the desired support from the developer or those who control the only networks you can play it on, what happens to the community? If it’s a game on Xbox LIVE, it dies, and you can only play by scouring the Internet for a partner and scheduling a match or co-op.

Most games on LIVE manage to find a replacement: another sports, FPS, or LIVE Arcade game to migrate to. But a few games are so unique that there is no PC equivalent and no foreseeable replacement for the nomadic community designate as the next oasis.

But there is an exception, a species we could put on the endangered list: Culdcept Saga, a game so unique and intensely loved by its few supporters that the community is going to extra effort to prevent its death.

A history: Culdcept Saga was released in February of this year and is a sequel to the cult classic Culcept, released in December of 2003 for the PS2. It combines strategy, cards, and dice rolls on a board and has puzzling game design choices, such as the revealing of each player’s hand when his turn comes.

The game is not built with the Xbox 360’s abilities in mind: it is fairly limited graphic-wise - or at least, not that different from what you see on a PlayStation 2 - and this is the main reason that at release, it only cost 40 dollars. It still has an “Only on Xbox 360” logo on the top, despite not being the system’s proudest game (unless, of course, you play it).

Reviews were highly mixed. Most games have a general consensus, but not here: Metacritic scores have a wide range, and in the February 2008 Game Informer, where the reviews come with a “second opinion” mini-review, the two scores were 7 and 8.5 (they usually come within half a point of each other).

Unlike most other games on LIVE, Culdcept Saga has no option to just look at all the available matches; you must set lots of criteria before looking. Matches usually last more than an hour, and often more than two.

Because of this, most players who play are in game; anyone who is new won’t know what the commonly accepted settings for a match are, will see no one in the lobby and assume no one plays and most will likely leave before it starts.

And if you disconnect…well, that's a major problem in waiting. Any other game would tolerate this, but 90 minutes can be ruined by a disconnection.

I did mention commonly accepted settings though; where they come from is a small community that has managed to keep the game afloat. Thinking of how competitive the game is and how deck builds were commonly discussed in game, I did a search and found a community fansite named….CuldceptSaga.com. The domain of the game's name wasn’t even reserved by Namco Bandai!

I was late to the scene, but I discovered it had enough of a presence that a couple of Namco Bandai representatives actually answered some questions for this site. I discovered many people visit and read it, and that it’s really the only forum with much of a presence or following.

An alternate GamerTag had been made just to get people access to a list of players who play (you can see friends of your friend), but alas, software limitations struck again: a person can only have 100 friends, and it was quickly maxed out. A second one was made. There was even a small league, all of which was contained in a single thread.

I found out that the host of the site is AWOL, to the most literal use of the term. He doesn’t respond to emails. The forum has no way to message other members. No changes or posts occurred in months and no one else has access. I sensed panic amongst the readers and quickly realized what they already knew: if CuldceptSaga.com goes down, so might the community and so might the opportunity for new players to discover a place to find people to play with.

I saw that one of the posters, Andym4n, was foremost in voicing these concerns. He also is the only person I could find who had one of the most impossible Xbox LIVE achievements: win 100 matches against online (there is also one to win 200, which no one has). I sent him a message on LIVE giving him my email address and asking if we could talk.

True to my suspicion, all the activity is at CuldceptSaga.com. He also said lots of people are still playing. “There’s usually a match or two available,” he told me. He manages to play five matches a week. Sometimes he has to wait, but he doesn’t mind, as he’ll edit books during the wait.

“A few of us at CuldceptSaga.com offered our services as co-admins/moderators; the admin chose three of us, but it's been a month since he last e-mailed and we have no admin access as yet,” he said. “I have a feeling CuldceptSaga.com might just vanish someday.”

“That's the feeling I got too, and I've barely been there,” I told him. “What would happen if it were to just disappear?”

“I'd have to speed up my plan! I'm in the process of creating the go-to Culdcept site.
CuldceptCentral.com if you're curious.”

“Looks like I picked the right guy to talk to,” I said.

He must have nodded. “I just hope CuldceptSaga.com lives long enough to get my site fairly well known, or people will scatter if it goes down.”

According to Andym4n, Culdcept Saga still has an intact community. He says the second season of the league has more than doubled the participants of the first, and that the community is growing more tight-knit, which has advantages and disadvantages.

The scene here is different: it’s almost a PC type of crowd who happens to be using a console. “I will say this: it has by far the friendliest online community of any game I've ever played. It's intelligent, fun conversation. You know why, right? In CS, if you talk smack, your opponents stop focusing on beating each other and gang up on you.”

And so it is that the people, not just the game and Xbox Live, make Culdcept Saga the closest digital version of what it’s like to get people to play a complex board game at your dinner table: difficult, but worth the effort.

Posted by Mike Walbridge at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Time to catch up on what's been happening on Gamasutra and other Think Services sites so far this week - and there's some notably diverse features up there, from Mick West on fluid dynamics through an interview with Q's Reo Yonaga that is particularly GSW-eclectic - and has Tim Rogers question-asking cameos, blimey.

Also in here - more goodness from GameFest, some choice GameCareerGuide.com tidbits, and news of Bruce Sterling keynoting our own Austin GDC event, for some futuristic fun in the Texas sun. Here's the full line-up:

Gamasutra Features

Q's Hidden Genius: Reo Yonaga Speaks
"Although Rez creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi is the public face of Q Entertainment, designer Reo Yonaga is a vital collaborator on titles such as Lumines [& Ninety-Nine Nights, pictured!] - and Gamasutra has the first major Western interview with the vibrant developer."

Practical Fluid Dynamics: Part 2
"Following up his popular recent article, Neversoft co-founder Mick West explains the technical details - including source code - of creating dynamic fluid systems such as smoke for video games."

Towards More Meaningful Games: A Multidisciplinary Approach
"In this thought-provoking design piece, writer Sande Chen (The Witcher) takes a look at how to ratchet up emotional intensity - through narrative design, visuals, and music - to create more meaningful games."

Gamasutra News Originals

EA's Beaver Talks Dead Space's M-Rated Quandary
"Talking to Gamasutra, producer Chuck Beaver has been discussing Electronic Arts' decision to go M-rated with sci-fi horror title Dead Space, explaining: "When we pitched the game, we had to figure out a way that we weren't just going to be a tiny niche market - torture porn" - also discussing the game's HUD-less, cutscene-less approach."

Microsoft's Heutchy Details Social Interaction With Xbox Live Party
"At Microsoft's ongoing GameFest, Xbox platform engineer Eric Heutchy gave more insight into the Xbox 360's forthcoming Xbox Live Party features, the newly expanded group chat/gaming initiative to be included in its next dashboard update -- full breakdown within."

NetDevil's Brown On Learning From Mistakes For Jumpgate Evolution
"Colorado's MMO specialist NetDevil has a fascinating history of late, with its canceled Auto Assault, the signing of LEGO Universe, and now the compactly developed Jumpgate Evolution, being made with a staff of just thirteen. In this Gamasutra interview, co-founder Scott Brown talks about that title and the company at large."

Other Neat Stuff

Educational Feature: Iterative Design
"Experienced game designers throw around the word ‘iterate’ like it’s an old football, but students and industry newcomers might not know what a heavily loaded word it can be, so Vicarious Visions designer Brandon Van Slyke demystifies the word in the latest GameCareerGuide.com feature."

2008 Austin GDC Reveals Bruce Sterling Keynote
"The 2008 Austin Game Developers Conference has revealed noted SF author and futurist Bruce Sterling as the keynote for the Writing Track at the September 15th-17th conference, giving a speech named: 'Computer Entertainment 35 Years from Today'."

GameCareerGuide.com's Game Design Challenge: Player Aid
"The Game Design Challenge is a weekly exercise in becoming a game developer, asking you to look at games in a new way. This week's challenge is: Design a player aid for the board game Risk."

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Browsing recent feedback on GameSetWatch often uncovers some gems - such as a new comment from Craig Sams on a January 2007 GSW post about Namco arcade machine obscurities.

Sams specifically posted about Prop Cycle, Namco's 2005 dedicated arcade machine which had the player pedaling a bicycle to collect balloons in a vibrant fantasy world in which you must "...Master the Art of Flying and become the Savior of Solitar." No, really. He noted:

"Propcycle is an example of a brilliant concept that failed in the execution. It cost too much for a person to learn how to fly, navigate, remember the routes and the balloon locations, so most people who tried it quickly ran out of money and looked elsewhere for a game with a gentler learning curve.

Once you got good at it (as I did) then you could play a 4-level game with 3 free replays if you hit a certain target score. So the arcade operators saw the triallists disappearing and experts like me sitting there playing for 40 minutes for £1 ($2). So the machines went out.

I bought 2 - one sits in my exercise studio next to my Pilates Reformer and one's in storage if I even need a new motherboard or spare parts. My top scores are in the 19125 to 19750 range, probably the highest in the world. It's the best exercise as every second is worth 50 points, so you pedal like fury to get all the balloons in the minimum time.

I think I could fly a plane in World War 1 now, I've gotten very adept at realistic flying at lowish speeds."

But what's particularly interesting is Mr. Sams' homepage, which reveals of the businessman: "In partnership with my wife Josephine Fairley I founded Green & Black's Organic Chocolate in 1991, an award-winning organic and fair trade confectionery brand whose Maya Gold chocolate was the first product to carry the Fairtrade Mark."

So there you go - successful gourmet chocolate eco-entrepreneurs swear by awesome old Namco cycling-based arcade machines as exercise fodder. Maybe it's time for Namco to do a Wii conversion of this, complete with exercise bike add-on? That would be completely, epochally awesome.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[In this analysis piece, designer Daniel Cook looks at Nintendo's Wii Fit to examine and break down the critera that skills - such as exercising or balancing - need to have in order to be turned into video games, suggesting a blossoming of games as we discover those opportunities.]

Recently, my amazing wife picked up a copy of Wii Fit. No, this is not a review.

For the past year, my wife has been dealing with a rather serious, debilitating illness. One side effect is considerable and undesirable weight loss. On the positive side, she has enjoyed shopping for a new wardrobe to match her more petite frame. On the less positive side, many stores no longer carry clothes that are small enough to fit.

So when the Wii Fit first booted up and cheerily prompted her to set a goal, she decided to try to get her BMI back up to the "normal level." Every day or so, she's been exercising, weighing herself and doing yoga. So far she has found the game to be convenient and highly motivational tool for helping her to track her weight.

We've had other exercise equipment around the house before, as well as gym memberships, yoga classes, etc. None of them has been as motivating as a simple set of exercises wrapped in a system of game-like rewards. My wife's experience with Wii Fit speaks volumes about games potential to turn an often mundane activity into entertainment that is delightful, exploratory and highly meaningful.

Thinking Beyond Scales

Yet, who would have ever thought that weighing yourself could be turned into a game? Miyamoto did, but then again he is widely considered to be an uber genius. The skeptical observer might imagine that successful cross-over games like Wii Fit are one-in-a-million success stories. Suppose it works for Wii Fit, but nothing else.

However, if the lessons of Wii Fit were broadly applicable, entire industries could be transformed. Games are a competitive advantage that can turn a commodity scale into one of the hottest consumer products of the year. In highly competitive markets, that is the sort of product design super power that lets innovative companies walk away with market share.

As I contemplate my wife's success with the Wii Fit, I'm struck by a multi-billion dollar question: What other activities can you turn into a game?

Almost Anything

First, though there is no doubt that Miyamoto is a genius, what he does is reproducible by mere mortals. He is able to apply his game design skill (or at least his greenlighting abilities) to non-traditional games like Wii Fit because he understands game design at a very atomic level.

Here is another way of looking at it. A craftsman builds tables the same way he was taught by his father and his grandfather can only build tables. But someone trained in mechanical engineering can use the fundamentals to build chairs, bridges, cars or even cathedrals.

Similarly, by understanding the fundamental science behind traditional games, you can apply the theoretical tools of game design to transform wildly divergent activities into games. I've written about some of this in the past with essays on skill atoms.

It turns out that most learnable skills can be turned into a game. However, there are constraints. A skill must meet the following criteria before it can be turned into a game:

1. Decomposable into simpler skills
2. Skills can be nested
3. Skills can be arranged in a smooth learning curve
4. Skills are measurable
5. Performance can be rewarded
6. Skills are locally useful.

Let's look at these one by one.

1. Decomposable into simpler skills
Complex learnable skills can be broken down into sets of easily acquired core skills. Players can only learn so much at once and overly complex skills overwhelm all but the most persistent players. By breaking skills up into digestible chunks, you are now able to apply many of the basic techniques of game design.

In Wii Fit, the complex activity of "becoming fit" is broken down into skills associated with using the board, testing balance, endurance activities and more.

2. Skills can be nested
Complex skills should build upon and reuse earlier skills. Advanced skills are best taught by the extension of existing skills, not introducing new metaphors.

Game design is built around the idea of core mechanics, skills that are exercised over and over again throughout the game experience. If you can't find a set of basic reusable skills that can be incorporated as the foundational elements of more complex skills, players will deem the activity shallow and lose interest.

In Wii Fit, the act of balancing while following rote exercises is used repeatedly throughout. It is an activity that is easy to learn, hard to master and contributes nicely to a wide range more advanced activities.

3. Skills can be arranged in a smooth learning curve
There is a smooth ramp from learning easier skills to learning more complex skills. Initial skills should take only seconds since they leverage existing skills. Afterwards, learning activities should build in complexity until they take minutes, then hours. If the initial learning ramp takes too long, players will be confused or bored and stop playing.

In Wii Fit, you can learn to use the board in seconds. Just step on it. However, more advanced games are slowly introduced until must spend hours of your time to unlock that last activity.

4. Skills are measurable
The game can detect when a skill is used correctly or incorrectly. Without this the game cannot provide timely feedback that pushes the player in the right direction.

The fact that Wii Fit is a giant sensor is perhaps to be expected. Within limits, it knows exactly what you are doing and when you doing something incorrectly. This is a dramatic difference from most exercise equipment or a workout video.

5. Performance is rewardable
The game can provide the player with a timely feedback and rewards. If the game provides feedback too late or in a manner that is disconnected from the original action, the player won’t learn.

Unlike traditional exercise equipment, Wii Fit judges your performance. It lets you know when you are doing poorly and it praises you when you are doing well. It is not a passive tool, but one that seeks to mold you. This is how games work and is an integral part of their success as a teaching tool.

6. Skills are locally useful
The skill can be exercised in a useful manner by the player in a variety of meaningful local contexts. If the skill isn’t useful, the behavior will extinguish.

Local utility is a tricky concept for many, especially those trained to think in terms of filling measurable customer needs. It basically means that the player finds an activity useful in the short term within the local context of the game. Grabbing a coin in Wii Fit may accomplish absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of the player's week. However, it does let the player unlock a new exercise. So for the moment, the player considers frantically gathering coins to be a completely utilitarian activity.

Skills that are eliminated by these constraints
What skills are eliminated by these constraints? Surprisingly few.

The biggest sticking point often ends up deciding how to measure complex skills. With Wii Fit, they needed to engineer an entirely new device. It is not uncommon to invest substantial amounts of effort just gathering the right data so that you can reward the proper skills accurately and in timely manner.

Machines alone have a limited understanding of many cultural human activities. In these situations, you need to build your games to use other human beings as measurement instruments. The rating techniques of sites like Hot or Not or Amazon.com are widely applicable.

The other constraints end up being easily worked around with a little bit of thought and prototyping to find what works.

Conclusion

When I look at our list of six constraints, it is obvious to me that there are a plethora of skills that are just waiting to be turned into games. Games like Wii Fit or Brain Training may seem exceptional strokes of genius, but in reality they are merely the tiny tip of an immense iceberg. Almost any human skill, be it physical, cultural, political or economic can be turned into a game that enlightens and enables.

As more leisure games emerge that mediate and accelerate the acquisition of skills, there is going to be a economic incentive to spread the science and craft of game design far beyond our tiny game industry. Game design is not just about games. It is a transformational new product development technique that can turn historically commoditized activities into economic blockbusters.

This morning, my wife came back from her morning Wii Fit session and proudly announced to me that she just worked her way back to her normal weight range. She is still on the light side and this odd little game was by no means the only source of her success. But it had its place as a tool that measured, encouraged and rewarded progress. As such it was worth every single penny.

When I look at Wii Fit and I hear the delight in my wife's voice, it is apparent that game design is again breaking out into the broader market. Obviously it isn't happening quite in the way many have predicted.

The harbinger of game's ascendancy to all aspects of the modern life is not some piece of evocative art or Citizen Kane-a-like. Instead, our future appears in the form of a glorified bathroom scale. Still, if we can improve people's lives with a bathroom scale, just imagine how games can transform the rest of our world.

[Daniel Cook writes regularly on design, the business of games and product development techniques at Lostgarden.com. He has previously worked with Epic Games, Anark and Microsoft.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Andrew Doull is an IT manager from New Zealand who spent the last 5 and a half years working in the United Kingdom. He's just emigrated to Sydney, Australia, and spends his free time developing Unangband, a rogue-like game, and blogging at Ascii Dreams. He writes an irregular column for GameSetWatch.]

Why as gamers do we undervalue fun? This is the flipside of the search for Citizen Kane: we associate fun with juvenilia instead of serious purpose, childhood dreams instead of adult aspirations, the clumsy, awkward-limbed gracelessness of youth that we stand apart from in later years.

Ironically, as game players and critics, we are the best position to write about how fun is important in our world. But instead we are somehow embarrassed by this, as if fun is not the highest achievement we should strive for.

Danc of LostGarden.com points out that 'Games... are all about learning skills'. That is, games can have a direct impact on who you are as a person. This is an unqualified given for this medium.

For art and literature, there's been a centuries-long debate about this exact notion: that art can improve who you are as a person was resoundingly answered in the negative, post 1945. The humanist theory of art, arising out of the Romantic movement, was that if you were exposed and uplifted by sufficiently powerful and influential works of art, you would become a more profound and moral human being - not someone capable of genocide.

This is not to say that gamers cannot be bad people. But game playing has immediate and measurable effects in a way that viewing art does not. The Brain Training-s and Cooking Mama-s promise to be gaming's path to the mainstream, resulting in a low level, incremental approach where individuals improve their daily life skills as opposed to the critically acclaimed magnum opus that game critics crave.

As far as the gaming hardcore is concerned, homemakers raising virtual pets are at the opposite spectrum of fun, but both kinds of gamers are still experiencing fun nonetheless.

Will gaming end up just being a better-thy-self opiate for the masses, a kind of Television 2.0, where Tyler Durden's declaration that self-improvement is masturbation replacing a middling amount of gamer masturbation with a middle class of gaming self-improvement?

It is a sad fact that the world cannot support 6.6 billion revolutionaries. So we will always need an opiate for some people. And as far as opiates go, gaming is a mostly inoffensive one. It contributes to bad posture and a sedentary lifestyle (if you ignore the Dance Dance Revolutions of gaming), while saving the livers, lungs and septums that other popular method of distraction put at risk.

If the occasional street robbery and thuggish Xbox-related homicide brings gaming into disrepute, these acts are only a pale shadow compared to the brutalities inflicted to bring harder stuff from Columbia's cocoa or Afghanistan's poppy fields to the American main street. (A notable exception may be the increase of misery in the Congo caused by the rise in demand for thallium for manufacture of the PS2). Even gaming addiction, while potentially pulling apart relationships, does not inflict financial misery on the scale of gambling.

But we will not win arguments about the positive influence of gaming by arguing 'games are less bad than drugs'. A historical perspective on gaming shows Dungeons & Dragons survived a similar cultural outcry in the early 80s, and there is an established tradition of fêting excellence in mankind’s longest surviving games: Chess and Go.

Game theory, while only an adjunct to game playing, helped navigate the treacherous waters of confliction resolution during the Cold War, with the balance of power and stratagem of Mutually Assured Destruction, and modern military exercises are games all but in name. South Korea on the surface is the modern gamer’s paradise, with arenas full of cheering onlookers celebrating success in Starcraft.

Fear of fun is defined in part by the view of gamer as someone living in an extended adolescence. The child-men of their 30s and 40s, living in their mother’s basement, pale skin coloured only by an PlayStation tan, are still very much part of a culture of gaming, but these kinds of men have always had their obsessions, be they beetle collections or Beatles collections.

What has changed, to an extent, is the framework around them – with online gaming levelling the playing field of the socially recluse, and casual gaming, and especially the success of Nintendo’s DS and Wii platforms, widening the pool of potential game players. Fun becomes a guilty pastime, with solitaire windows minimizing the moment the boss walks by, and the Westernized and especially Americanized view of success creating a culture of neurosis around pleasure (Those long holidaying Europeans have always had their social(ist) board games).

Why do we feel that gaming is wasting time, when no one disputes Bobby Fischer’s legacy? The Cyberathlete Professional League would disagree with the assessment that fun is frivolous – and even if you are no athlete you can always argue you are training your hand eye coordination, practising your hand brake turns, golf swing, or even ability to move your mouse around the screen (The best argument for why your IT department should never remove that Minesweeper preinstall).

And if fun is not clinical enough a description for the range of emotions you feel, you can celebrate your fiero or understand your opponent’s yomi or commiserate the fun to be had at a forfeit at your expense.

Distributed intelligence points a way forward that elevates human understanding through play. From image recognition, to Free Rice, to intuition about folding proteins, harnessing the power of fun for collective gain promises to allow gaming to help solve hard problems in science. Equally, human gaming skills have forced artificial intelligence to update the ante, showing us the deep understanding required to play the simplest seeming of games. While computers can now play at Grand Master level in chess and poker, no algorithm can yet match a middle rank Go player. We just need to be sure we don’t fall into the trap of Fermi’s Paradox – playing games instead of exploring the universe.

Gaming is the crest of the current wave of the intergenerational culture wars, and this wave will abate only when this gaming generation takes political office, heads media and business, and defines the standards our children will rebel against. This cultural battlefield is in part defined by the hypocrisy of defining 'fun being had by other (young) people is bad' - and I would hope we would carry the juvenilia of gaming, the perpetually young at heart onwards to bring an end to this cycle of young vs. old.

Humanity as a species is defined by our neotenous physiology - that is our extended period of youth and delayed onset of adulthood, and it would be a shame to miss this opportunity in a medium that encourages a flexible and adaptive mentality instead of a steady ossification into old age. The secret of longevity, of course, is staying young.

Posted by andrewd at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Still catching up on those darn GameSetLinks from the weekend, and this time, it's headed up by Daniel Cook's impassioned defense of Soul Bubbles, a title mentioned more than once on GSW that's rapidly becoming a cult hit, at least in terms of buzz.

Also in here somewhere - stories of failed game startups, PlayStation 3 Linux ports of neat indie games being mysteriously halted, Emily Short plays iPhone games, Kyle Orland on finishing games and reviewing them, and quite a few more.

To the sky:

Lost Garden: Soul Bubbles: A classic game ill treated by expert reviewers
The bigger point - game reviews don't work for some games. 'Expert reviewers' is an oxymoron - it's about experiences.

GameSpot News: 'PressSpotting: Are You Done With That Game?'
Well, we are now!

Diary of a Failed Startup: Postmortem
A game-related start-up that didn't work - honest feedback. (Via Psychochild.)

Cave Story for PS3 Linux is cancelled « Peter Mackay’s projects and development diary
Time for rumors, hmm?

E3 - brave new worlds? The three most interesting games at the show | Games | guardian.co.uk
Some good picks here, including MadWorld.

iPhone adventures - The Gameshelf
Looking at 'Adventure' for the iPhone, heh.

The videogames that will never see the light of day | Technology | The Guardian
Fergus McGovern is talking about Resident Evil for Game Boy Color.

Aqua Forest review « Emily Short’s Interactive Fiction
'The iPhone’s Aqua Forest game is another of those inventive rarities that could only exist on this platform.'

A Tree Falling in the Forest: What's the Point: E3 Wrap Up Edition
'Twenty minutes later someone opened the door. With the exception of a half full outdoor garbage can, the room was completely empty.'

HMBG Foundation's ArtSpark Festival has an Indie Games Showcase, August 11th, Austin
Also see this Facebook event - not making it that easy to track, but worth keeping a note of!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[My esteemed colleague Mr. Christian Nutt was kind enough to wander up to Microsoft's GameFest, where they actually seem to have made almost as many big announcements as E3, and here's some great dev-specific intel on avatars for the Xbox 360.]

Talking Microsoft's GameFest event in Seattle, the company's Cameron Egbert and Dan Kroymann have been discussing the creator of avatars for the Xbox 360, revealing lots of new details on the practicality of developers implementing avatars within their games.

Egbert, a software development engineer for XNA Developer Connection, started by showing his existing GamerCard for Xbox 360 and saying: "It doesn't say much about me".

The he showed a 3D avatar, as being implemented on Xbox 360 later this year, and noted: "This is me. I made him earlier in the week", going onto explain: "Avatars are a new identity for gamers. Somewhat like a gamercard, these can be used to replace the gamer picture if the user chooses."

"It gives them an online presence they did not have before without Xbox Live. It is ubiquitous across the system. Also, you can use them in your games as a replacement for your characters, or in your UI, or whatnot."

Egbert further explained: "You build them from a predefined set of geometry and textures and customize them as you want... to suit your tastes."

How about edgy avatars? Egbert explained: "This is a product for everyone, so nothing in here will violate an E10 rating - no weapons, no compromising situations."

He added: "Avatars are meant to be an extension of the player - this is not a pet, this is your online presence."

Technical Specifics

According to the XNA programmer: "Provided with avatars will be two ways to actually use them. First of all is a supplied renderer and animation system. Secondly, you can get the assets and render them inside your technology as you choose."

The technology should allow game creators, using metadata, to use random avatars in games, and create specific avatars to be used in the same way every time in your game, "like a game show host".

Egbert continued: "Animation in avatars is done through two methods -- the first is skeletal animation, which takes care of all of the body animation. It uses the same skeleton through both male and female avatars. Body weight is also controlled through the skeleton system... it can vary by about 7%."

The second type is facial animation, which is "all done through textures", and looks very Mii-like, with different eye and mouth textures to be switched out.

How about integration with Xbox Live? According to Egbert: "Avatars follow your profile across live - so if you load up your profile on one box, it'll look the same on another box. All changes are propagated to Xbox.com", and "...the user has an option to use a 2D headshot of his avatar as his GamerPic."

Questions And Answers

Finally, Egbert and colleague Kroymann took questions from the audience, with Egbert answering a query about whether there would be branded clothes or hats in the game with: "That's not anything that's being handled in the first iteration."

He did indicate that there may later be achievements to unlock avatar-related items, and Microsoft may later add branded items for avatars into the Xbox Live Marketplace.

How about avatars rolling out across Games For Windows or MSN? Egbert said there's "...nothing to announce right now - this is the first stage, doing it on Xbox".

When's the rollout and SDK for avatars for Xbox 360? Egbert indicated rollout will be in "fall, no hard date" and the SDK will be available at the same time.

Can you use avatars in Xbox Live Community-developed games? Dan Kroymann noted: "not yet", but that the Community Team had been talking to them.

Finally, how many avatars can be seen on screen at once if you push things? Kroymann's opinion: "If you're rendering the full avatar maybe 100 would be a rule of thumb, for most games."

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[How do you go from a gothic past to a teen oriented future? KingsIsle development head Todd Coleman tells big sister site Gamasutra how key team members behind traditional MMO Shadowbane ended up creating their forthcoming teen-wizard MMO Wizard101, and the differences between designing for kids and hardcore gamers.]

First announced in May, KingsIsle's forthcoming Wizard101 MMO is a fantasy-based 3D virtual world targeted at teens and 'tweens, where players take on the roles of wizard apprentices at the Ravenwood School of Magical Arts.

In it, players can customize their wizard character's outfits and accessories, play arcade-game inspired puzzles and mini-games, adopt magical pets, and learn from seven different schools of magic, with a heavy PVP focus on collectible cards used for card duels alongside and against other players.

Interestingly, the core of KingsIsle staff has roots not in traditional children's entertainment, but in the much darker 2003 Ubisoft MMO Shadowbane, something which development head Todd Coleman told Gamasutra could be explained by the team's more family-oriented mindset, so many years from their first post-college roles.

In this interview, Coleman takes us through inception of the game as a true card-game MMO, rather than an MMO with a card game attached, its Yu-Gi-Oh! and Final Fantasy inspiration, and how designing for teens differs from designing for an older, more hardcore set of gamers.

So KingsIsle has people with a lot of experience on MMOs in the past, particularly Shadowbane.

TC: Yeah, I was on Shadowbane.

Is [Id and Ion Storm co-founder] Tom Hall still there?

TC: Tom runs the other project, so we have two MMOs in development. I run one, and Tom runs the other. Mine just happens to be first, so I'm sure at some point you'll get to talk to Tom about his.

Right now, Tom is also helping me by playing Wizard. His wife and him are a little bit addicted to it. I think he might be a little mad at me right now, because I think I nerfed his character last week.

KingsIsle is a really different and unique culture, because we have the sensibilities of a startup but the resources of a much larger company. A lot of that is because our founder, Elie Akilian, had such a strong and dynamic background in the telecom software space. It's a very different startup story than you'll hear from a traditional game publisher.

Where are you guys located?

TC: Our corporate office is up in Dallas -- in Plano, actually -- and the game development team groups are located in Austin. There's also a core technology group that works on cross-platform operations tools and networking layers -- all the things that would be common across multiple MMOs.

When you say cross-platform, you mean the MMO platform?

TC: Yes, across the MMO platform. We haven't looked at or announced any plans to move to any consoles or anything like that. I was meaning across one game and another game in a web in all the ways we're building technology. We're looking for commonality. We've got a little bit more than a hundred people now, I think.

One of the most interesting things is that no one had ever heard of us before. We're just kind of in a little room in Austin and Dallas just chugging away on a couple of MMOs.

February 1st was my three-year anniversary with the company, so it's been three-and-a-half years now, and we've finally announced the company and the products and immediately followed that up within weeks with, "Hey, not actually are we doing these projects, but one of them's in beta. By the way, you should join beta." The announcements are coming fast and furious.

With MMOs, a lot of the time you have the opposite situation, where somebody announces an MMO project when all they have is concept art. This happens a lot.

TC: That's what we had on Shadowbane, right?

Right. Since an MMO takes so long to make, even if everything's going right, it can seem like they were just hanging you out to dry, because you'll go all this time without seeing anything.

TC: From my standpoint, I was in that situation with Shadowbane. We put the marketing cart so far in front of the development horse that we felt like we were playing a game of catch-up forever. We were always trying to keep our fans happy while getting the game done, and those two things are really hard to juggle.

It's been a really refreshing experience here, that we were able to just concentrate on getting the game done and making the best game that we could, before we subjected ourselves to the pressure of the market as a whole.

I'm not sure exactly what your funding situation is, but is that at all a result of having more financial security?

TC: Absolutely. With Shadowbane, we were always hungry and trying to figure out where our next meal was going to come from. In this situation, we still have the startup sensibility, but resources have not really been a huge issue for us.

If we need to get another development server, we have to justify it, of course, but they've been very, very cool about being realistic about the resources that it takes to build one or, in this case, multiple MMOs.

Do you find that it's easier to get funding for projects like this? Your target audience and this segment seems like a hot area right now.

TC: It is now, but rewind to four years ago when I was out talking about it and nobody was particularly... well, [CEO and founder] Elie [Akilian] had the foresight at the time.

Remember, this was while it was still in beta, and at the time, people were still arguing, "Well, EverQuest is as big as any MMOs is going to be, and from now on, all it's going to be is carving up that same 500,000 people and cannibalizing." That was the general feeling.

Yeah, I remember the GDC after World of Warcraft came out. It was successful, but before it had really exploded, there was a GDC panel announced that was called something like, "Will an MMO ever reach a million subscribers?"

TC: Back then, the market was a lot different. Everybody thought, "Well, we have determined in our infinite wisdom that there is a total of 500,000 MMO subscribers in North America, and there won't be any more." It was a little short-sighted, I guess.

Back then, the kids market was fairly well ignored. Everybody was looking at fantasy, and a few people were looking at sci-fi, but even that was visibly small. And, of course, there were these monster projects out there like with Marvel and DC in the superhero space where everybody thought, "I don't know if they're going to hit or not."

In the kids space, it was mostly silence. The idea when it initially came up was a conversation. It was one of those sitting at [pizza chain] Mr. Gatti's, writing up ideas on a paper napkin kind of conversations.

It usually starts with me and a couple of buddies. We always seem to be in this position together. We have one that just really resonates with us. Joseph Hall -- my director of technology -- and I were chatting on the phone about kids games, because his wife and his daughters were playing a very light kids MMO.

We were talking about how that market could potentially blossom and be huge, but there was almost nothing in it at the time. We started talking about what would be cool if we were younger, and what we came to was the realization that collectible card games are all about, by definition, collection. I mean, that's what you do with them. They're a competition and collection.

MMOs, to a large degree, are about collection and either passive or active competition. We thought, "Nobody's married those two concepts together. There's just no answer for an MMO that's wrapped around a CCG as its base component."

The other thought that we had was that all the other MMOs were following the same game model of, "Let's stand around a monster and all hack at it. There's a giant crab on a beach. Let's all smack it with our sticks," or whatever. We were thinking it would be cool to find some other mechanism to do that.

That's when we lit upon [Disney MMO] Toontown Online, which did turn-based combat. We thought, "That's a really cool idea. I wonder if you can do turn-based combat but make it more of a Final Fantasy style?"

We decided to rope that whole Final Fantasy style of turn-based combat in with a collectible card game and put it into a world that we thought was very appealing, which was the world of a wizards' academy.

Clearly, I've heard at least, that genre has blossomed into something on its own. The idea of a wizard school is evidently kind of popular.

So yeah, we took those ideas and stuffed them in a bag and kind of hit "puree" and what came out the other end was, "Wow, this is really cool. This is really compelling."

We decided initially to target the 8-to-whatever age group, but then once we actually started getting into it, we thought, "You know, I think I would actually play this game." It's been really interesting for us, watching our market kind of blossom and go well outside the bounds of what we originally expected it to.

Our design lead, James Nance, who was another friend who I've known since high school and was from Shadowbane and basically everything I've ever done - his mom is now playing our game, and she's put a couple dozen hours now into an MMO.

This is someone whose background in gaming is Solitaire and Minesweeper. She's not a game player at all, and we find her getting in and talking about damage over time and recovery rates and stuff like that. We've seen a pretty broad swath of people who have gotten into the game and found it to be really cool.

It sounds like you're growing more from your own experiences with traditional MMOs, but trying to put it in a different framework. That segment is rather heavily 2D instead of 3D, but what you're doing, at least in terms of the more technical sense, is more of what a gamer thinks of as an MMO.

TC: It totally is. We looked at the offerings that were out there, and - let me say - that's not an excuse for us to not run on an incredibly low-min spec. In terms of production value, we decided to swim upstream of the web-based offerings that had come before us, but we had set goals for ourselves that would still allow us to tap into that market.

Our initial download, in theory, for a broadband user, should be about two minutes to be up and running in the game. Then, while you're in character creation, we're downloading the tutorial. While you're in the tutorial, we're downloading the first adventure area.

Everything is more streaming, like a browser, and we set our minimum threshold to be, I believe, a 1 GHz machine with a GeForce 2. So yes, we did absolutely try to set a higher bar for production value, but we always put that secondary to keeping the game eating light as a bird on a processor or bandwidth standpoint so that it could still be very approachable.

The example I use is that, often, the kids' machine in the house, was not purchased to be a kid's machine. It's because mom got the new laptop, so dad got the desktop, and dad's old desktop is now what's in the kids' room. As a result, we needed to be able to target machines that were six or seven years old and still be running on them fine.

We still want to scale up so we can be competitive, so people who are looking at World of Warcraft or something and looking at us will think, "Well, World of Warcraft really isn't for kids, but this is still visually stunning. This is a really cool concept and a great game and I can see myself and my family investing time in this." That was basically what we went through. It's a real tough balance to strike, but I think we've done a pretty good job. Hopefully people will agree with me. (laughter)

The CCG aspect seems like something that tends to remain fairly popular among that age set.

TC: Definitely. A big chunk of this is because it's not like we made an MMO and then later said, "Hey, we should just slap a CCG in there too and try and do some CCG stuff." We actually developed that as the core of the game.

The heart of the game is that combat is based on turn-based CCG with cinematic style movies, basically, baked into it, like the old Final Fantasy games. When you start with that as your core and you build an MMO around it, it's a much different feel from, "Hey, I built this MMO. Let's slap a CCG in there."

We'll definitely see, but it certainly raises a lot of opportunities for us to look at other avenues and other ways we can try and spread the Wizard101 idea to outside the traditional MMO mobs.

There's also clearly an attempt to attract the Harry Potter group as well?

TC: It wasn't accidental of course, but there's a bunch of different influences. Harry Potter is clearly one of them. We're a wizard school, and there's definitely that similarity. You're an apprentice wizard at a wizard school, and you are the hero that they need with the potential to save the world.

Beyond that, though, the similarities aren't as deep as you might expect. We actually draw from things like Narnia, and we have a dose of [fantasy/sci-fi author] Roger Zelazny in there.

You'll also notice some pretty heavy Yu-Gi-Oh! similarities. We're fans of the Yu-Gi-Oh! TV series. It's actually really well-written and pretty cool. There's a bunch of different areas like that that we pull from.

There's no way to look at it and go, "Well, it's just like blah," because if you say, "It's just like X," somebody else is going to say, "It's got this, this, and this. That's clearly like Y." "Oh, that's true, but it also has this, this, and this. That's clearly like Z."

But the name, obviously, and the idea of collecting these spells in Wizard101 - originally, actually, we intended to do 101 spells to collect, and what happened is that we got into development and started producing this and when we all started playing it, and we were constantly hitting against that 101 wall.

We thought, "When are we going to put in this new spell that we want?" Finally, we thought, "Okay, forget it. We're going to go right past the 101 and keep going." So it clearly has the school tie with the idea of Wizard101, but it no longer is a cap for us in terms of spells and powers.

So your title now is just a single-entendre?

TC: Yes. (laughter) I guess I could pick out my 101 favorite spells, but not really.

Having worked on a more hardcore-skewed focus before, from a development standpoint, does this feel different?

TC: In some ways, it's actually more challenging. It's actually, from what I've found, harder to do a more elegant, simple interface, than it is to do a more hardcore interface, because you're constantly having to back up and think about things from a different perspective.

It's hard for me to remember a time when I didn't understand the concept of health or experience points, but when my wife got into our game and said, "What is this XP symbol?"

I said, "It's experience, of course!" and she looked at me like, "Why would I possibly know that?" I realized that, "Well...you wouldn't!" So we had to add a tutorial tip for that.

That's actually been really challenging, but to your question, part of the reason that myself, Joseph, and James were all attracted to this was because Shadowbane was such a grueling experience.

There was a lot of good that came out of it and a lot of great experiences, but it was also such a dark, gothic world, and a very heavy theme. Going from that and being like, "You know, I think I'm just going to go design some ninja pigs," was a freeing experience, and it was a very relaxing way to be creative.

There are commonalities and crossovers. We're still competitive players by nature. When we wrote the high-concept doc for Wizard, we were on the fence about how much cooperation versus competitive nature was going to have. We later added the arena just because we wanted to fight each other and stuff like that. Then, of course, it's a CCG-based game, and CCGs are PVP by their very nature.

When you get in, you'll be able to see elements of our background and our sensibilities as designers clearly carried forward, but thematically, it's very, very different. We wanted to make a very different kind of universe.

It could probably go without saying, but I'd add that we're in a different place now than we were with Shadowbane, where we were out of college and full of spit and vinegar and young and single. Now, all of us have kids.

We're all older and married, and started talking about how, because these take so long and you devote so much of your life to them, you don't have that many MMOs in you, unless you're going to jump from one project to the next. We looked at it and said, "What do we want to work on for the next four years?" And I think we've been very pleased with the choice that we made back then.

Did your company have any sort of a self-imposed charter in any way, in terms of the type or tone of games?

TC: Absolutely. KingsIsle as a whole definitely wants to make mass-appeal games for everyone, not games for the gamers. That's also been different because Shadowbane was a very hardcore experience. It was not just a game for gamers. It was for gamers that are exactly like us, and if you don't like it, you should leave.

With this one, I think we've grown, in terms of what we find fun and what we find acceptable of those games. I've got a Wii in my living room right now, and my wife and I play Zack & Wiki all the time. We've definitely all grown significantly, and I think that's reflected a lot in the kind of properties that we want to put out.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[In this opinion piece, game commentator Duncan Fyfe takes a look at how and when games end - citing titles from BioShock to Portal and beyond to ask how to set expectations and deliver on them for game endings.]

In video games, the ones that tell the player a long, linear story, the ending is usually an uncertain proposition. Prose and film teach an audience to expect three-act structures and considered pacing in storytelling.

Instead, games have what Warren Spector calls the second-act problem; where act one is the intro movie, act three is the outro movie, and in between is the game.

Games are structured less like a novel and more like an anthology; an arbitrary number of assembled vignettes, thematically united in post-production. A collection of missions and quests that exist because one designer had a cool idea for a boat chase sequence and another designer had an awesome idea for a stealth mission. It's a problem of pacing, and it relates directly to the presupposed need for games to have fifteen-hour narratives.

I think this issue is compounded by another: players don't know how long a game is. You can hold a novel in your hands and feel the weight of the pages. An album has its track listing printed on the back.

A television season consists of a predetermined number of episodes with those episodes at a fixed length. A movie is somewhere between 90 and 180 minutes. No such guidelines with video games. They lack an intuitive metric: it'll fall between one and one hundred hours.

If players don't know when to expect the real ending then they'll have to guess. Maybe after this mission in GTA we'll get to the endgame. Wait, no, one more thing. One more thing after that. With these interminable games that try for an engrossing narrative, players just get tired. Will it ever actually end?

Fallout is based on the premise that the player must find this water chip. It takes a long time, it's an exhausting journey, you find it and return home victorious. And then... one more thing... and you're actually only halfway through.

Objectively, there's nothing wrong with the content. But expectations frame experience, and the game had just prepared the player to say goodbye, not to enjoy another ten hours. Having to take a game at its word, players feel betrayed and jerked around. We react to a piece of content differently if we know it's the ending.

When we watch the season finale of a TV show, we know that this time the characters are really in danger. With a video game the player has no idea. Is this thing going to go on for another hour? Or five? Or ten? Where the hell am I in this story?

I'm not sure many developers are aware that this can be a problem; like how Ken Levine has said he didn't anticipate the ugly comedown from the stratospheric highs of BioShock's Andrew Ryan scene.

Expectations are everything. The movie Gone, Baby, Gone has a fake ending at about the 70-minute mark, but the audience doesn't start leaving the theater. They know how long a movie is and they're mentally prepared for the remainder of the film. I don't think Fallout players would be as bummed out if they found the water chip at the 70-minute mark.

But no one knows how long Fallout is, like how no one knows if Return of the King's running time is three hours and two minutes or three hours and four minutes. The movie continues long past the point where anyone was interested.

One more thing. One more mission, one more quest, one more rung in a ladder carved from monotony and you have only the vaguest of assurances that the ladder ever stops. I wonder why people don't finish games.

Oblivion's core story is paced terribly, which is to say it's paced like a video game. One more thing. One more lost object to find. That's at least consistent with Oblivion's general M.O. as a treasure-hunting smorgasbord, and Mass Effect doesn't handle that dichotomy nearly so well; instead redefining 'sidequest' as a repetitive grind existing at the periphery of the story.

BioWare dumps a whole lot of extra content on the player for the purposes of making Mass Effect long enough to count as a conventional video game. It dilutes the tightly focused, very linear narrative that they're trying to showcase. It's also why games like GTA that measure game completion with a percentage stat don't really work, since it can take players five times as long to get from 76% to 77% as it can from 1% to 2%.

Subquests aside, Mass Effect is able to manage player expectations of length. After act one, you get on the spaceship and you're given a certain number of planets to visit.

Those are goalposts; checkpoints by which the player can measure their progress in the second act, and theoretically the third act should be as long as the first. See? Easy. Knights of the Old Republic did that, Monkey Island 2 did that. No unpleasant surprises and the player is never unintentionally misled through poor design.

Some games telegraph their length with exceptional results. Right up front, Portal tells you: 19 rooms. Indeed there are, and so the player never thinks that room 15 might actually be a plot-critical gameplay escalation instead of a puzzle chamber.

Portal continues after 19, of course, but here it works. It capitalizes on the players' perception that the game is over; the "epilogue" comes as an intentional surprise more of the same. When you anticipate player psychology as Valve clearly does, then you can work with it.

You know how everyone in the world is able to pinpoint the exact moment that A.I. should have ended? Spielberg kept telling the viewer "one more thing", and the more times he said it, the worse the movie got.

Unless you're Portal, unless you know what you're doing, when players think a game is ending, they should be right. If a game prompts players to say goodbye, then, one way or another, they will.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Yeehaw, time for GameSetLinks, and we're still rounding up some miscellaneous E3 links (towards the bottom), but hey, nothing wrong with that if it's neat.

Some of the other highlights in there - 'massively singleplayer' as a genre, my random GameTap tips, the new skool Zombie Cow Studios, and downloadable Spore prototypes. Yay.

Out to lunch:

Orbus Gameworks: 'Character Blogging and Metrics'
On Dungeon Runner's automated in-game character blogging.

gameslol » Blog Archive » Massively singleplayer: a real genre?
Discussing the neat concept of "...singleplayer games that are played by lots of people simultaneously."

Game Tycoon » Blog Archive » Designing for Older Gamers
Expanding on the recent Gamasutra article on this very subject.

Spore.com: Downloadable Spore prototypes
Featuring 'Particleman', in which you can: '...play with physics controls to create different kinds of gravitational simulations.' Via ErrorMacro.

realtimecollisiondetection.net - the blog » Salary of a game programmer (artist, designer, or producer)
Absolutely excellent post on ways to tell what people are paid - disclaimer, includes Game Developer salary survey info, which I help compile. Not clear if H1-B info is accurate tho - see comments.

Play in Community Spotlight - Celebrity Picks - Simon Carless and other games on GameTap.com
Me and other games! My picks for my favorite GameTap titles, from Sensible Soccer through The Last Express.

Zombie Cow Studios
The folks behind indie neatness Gibbage are back with a super-quirky free adventure game and some other indie titles.

Nihilistic Software - 'New Game Teaser'
Hey, I never noticed this before - upcoming downloadable PC zombie game from Nihilistic?

Wired Gallery: 'At E3, Insiders Thrive as Booth Babes Go Extinct'
Shuttle bus bliss!

pushing buttons...: My E3, Come Back!
A paean to the classic days from an ex-God Of War designer.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Finishing up the Games, Learning and Society coverage masterminded for GSW by The Brainy Gamer's Michael Abbott, this last one is an intriguing one from Mary Flanagan of the Values At Play project - thanks again to him for covering this intriguing social/educational gaming conf.]

Speaking at a Games, Learning, and Society Conference workshop entitled “Values at Play: Tools for Activist Game Design,” Dr. Mary Flanagan, an associate professor at Hunter College's Software Art and Culture department, argued that every game design decision and feature can potentially have and convey social, moral, and political content.

Flanagan directs Hunter College's Tiltfactor