Games take a set of rules describing how things work, and they apply those rules to a world state to determine how that world changes over time. Sometimes the rules are very simple; “Snakes and Ladders” has about four rules. Sometimes, they are extraordinarily complex; World of Warcraft has rules that govern the actions and interactions of thousands of actors at once, with each actor having maybe a hundred different ways to affect the progress of the simulation. All games, however, share these fundamental attributes: they simulate the changes in a system over time using a set of rules.

Inherent in their status as a simulation is the fact that games are abstractions. No simulation can be an exact model of real life. Therefore, games use only a subset of the rules present in the systems they simulate. Sometimes, games simulate the real world: Roller Coaster Tycoon simulates the everyday workings of a theme park. Sometimes, they simulate a fantastic world: Morrowind is a simulation of the fictional fantasy island of Vvardenfell. Sometimes, they simulate an abstract world: Conway’s “Game of Life” simulates a world composed of either a grid of unicellular organisms, or a world of multicellular organisms with a very strange way of living. In all these cases, however, the designers of the game have chosen which rules to include in the simulation and which to abstract away. Roller Coaster Tycoon does not require the player character to get sleep. Morrowind allows the PC to eat, but does not require it. The “Game of Life” uses a very limited set of rules.

What distinguishes a game from, say, the sort of airflow simulation used by aerospace engineers? Player interaction. In games, players can modify the progress of the simulation. They can change the starting parameters, or choose what an actor will do, or even modify the rules of the simulation as it progresses. It is this interactivity that is essential to the nature of games. Games simulate worlds, but their most important property is that they allow the player to affect the simulation. It is from this ability that goals emerge, that agency arises, that fun appears. Games are simulations with life.

Of course, there have been several other awesome IF pieces released this year. I need to play more of them myself before I can make a proper decision.

I’d love to hear what you think! Comment if you have any opinions on the things I discuss in this episode.

It’s a shame, because despite the premise and backstory, The Bryant Collection is a real game, and one that I poured a lot of effort and heart into. But I haven’t gotten a single review, game entry on an IF site, or even a comment from someone who’s played the game. The only e-mail I’ve gotten about it is from my parents.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t be surprised. Mixing truth and fiction is risky enough when it’s not on a day dedicated to lies, and the games from the Spring Thing were released at almost the exact same time. The Spring Thing is probably the second or third biggest IF event of the year, so naturally Bryant would be overshadowed by those games, especially if it’s dismissed as a joke.

This post isn’t a cry for attention or anything. I just wanted to share my reactions when a game doesn’t get very well-received, since I always post when a game gets positive reactions.

Right on the heels of my last release, here’s my April game, The Bryant Collection. This one is a bit of a cop-out; it’s not actually my game. Instead, it’s a translation of someone else’s work into interactive fiction.

An excerpt from my release post on RGIF:

A few months ago, I found an old strongbox at a garage sale. The box was full of papers written by a woman named Laura Bryant. The majority of the stuff in the box was a collection of what she called “story worlds.”

These story worlds are akin to interactive fiction or roleplaying games; they’re designed for one player and one mediator who serves as the parser or the game master. The earliest date on a story world in the box is 1964, which means these works predate Crowther and Woods’s Adventure, Dungeons & Dragons, or Wesely’s Braunstein. The Bryant Collection contains the five stories that I found the most interesting and feasible to convert to IF:

• “The End of the World” is a story about lunch.
• “Morning in the Garden” is a story about dealing with annoying people.
• “Tower of Hanoi” is a rather interesting little puzzle, but not what you think. It came with a sort of feelie in the strongbox, which is included as an IF object.
• “Going Home Again” is a story about growing up.
• “Undelivered Love Letter” is a story about airports.

Download The Bryant Collection.

For more information, including links to interpreters that will run the game, see the game page.

Other games in the awards that caught my eye:

Read the rest of Majesty Wins JIG Art Game Audience Award...

Read the rest of Hope for the Future...

For the simplest of games, this tree consists of a straight line of nodes labeled something like “Reach Checkpoint 1,” “Reach Checkpoint 2,” and “Beat Boss.” Games with a hint of nonlinearity, however, can often have rather complicated goal trees. The simple tree has a branching factor of one. Each action, or node, has only one successor action. The game Planescape: Torment, on the other hand, has a branching factor of more than ten in some places, such as just after the player reaches the Clerk’s Ward. There are many the player can go or quests she can pursue, each separate and rather complex in its own right.

I’ve been playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion lately, and that is a game with a branching factor. Each town has four or more quests connected to it, in addition to the main quest, which itself sometimes branches into subquests. Add to this the guilds, of which there are at least four, and the game gets a bit intimidating for me. I hesitate to even mention the plugins and expansions. I walked through the door to the Shivering Isles, a whole new country with its own central plot, towns and sidequests. I think I lasted about fifteen minutes before I retreated back to Cyrodiil, overwhelmed. Oblivion‘s branching factor is a bit too large for my tastes. So what, then, is the optimal branching factor? Let’s look at some examples.

Read the rest of The Terror of Choice...

First, as with most top ten lists, there is an issue of definition. What is a game? The much-lauded Chris Crawford has claimed that a game must be made for money, must have a goal, and must allow you to attack your opponent, among other things. By this definition, The Sims, Tetris, and the original release of Cave Story are not games. Many other definitions of games include “fun,” “play,” or “artificial,” although mathematical game theorists would vehemently argue otherwise. Let’s see if we can come up with a definition in the spirit of The 99th’s list.

For the purposes of this post, a “game” is a goal-oriented activity with artificially-established rules that are shared among multiple participants, called “players.” Players need not play simultaneously or adversarially. By “historically important,” I choose to mean “most significantly contributed to and/or were most necessary for the existence of the sort of games I discuss on this site.” As an initial disclaimer: I am not a historian. Now, for my version of The 99th’s list.

Read the rest of The Most Important Games...

This adventure is designed for four 3rd-level characters, and should provide them with half of a level’s experience, or take them to fourth level if you double experience as I do. Note that because I double experience, this adventure contains a full level’s worth of treasure. GMs using this adventure will want to adjust accordingly. The full adventure is after the break.

Read the rest of Morbus 3 – The Dizzying Tower...

Where is the interactive fiction that simulates colonizing space? Where are the text games that have the same playful feeling as Katamari Damacy? Why are text adventures always either puzzle-filled exploration games or highbrow, slow-paced stories?

I’m being a bit cruel, I think. But I still can’t think of a single piece of interactive fiction that I’d pick up and play for fun after finishing it once. There’s no gameplay to most IF except puzzle solving and figuring out what happens next. A good friend of mine once pointed out that in interactive fiction, you never really do stuff.

I’d like to see that change.

In Episode 5, I discussed the difference between short form and long form video games and interactive fiction. I compared certain games to short stories and novels, but I didn’t discuss the third well-known form of artistic writing: poetry. A poem is a work of language where the properties of the language itself — rhythm, sound, and imagery — are as important (or more important) than the words’ literal meaning and the narrative content of the work.

When I think of “poetic” games, where the form is as important as the content, I think of Tetris. Tetris is a game with a very simple narrative: pieces are falling, and must be organized or else the game ends. The story isn’t very important. What stands out about Tetris is its feeling and gameplay: the imagery and form of the game. The excitement of the race against time, the satisfaction of clearing a row, and the imagery of building a wall and tearing one down, where any hole is a flaw.

“Phyta,” by Abraham Parangi, is a poetic game.

Read the rest of Phyta: Games As Poetry...

The Player-Author Contract
1. The work can be played by the player.
   • Violated by games which are unexpectedly incompatible with the player’s system.
2. The entire work can be played by the player.
   • Violated by “game-breaking” bugs as in Battletoads and Pac-Man
3. Through playing the work, the player can affect the progression of the work.
   • Subverted by “Rameses“
4. The events in the work are governed by a set of rules.
   • Violated by some Choose Your Own Adventure games
5. The rules of the work do not change without warning.
   • Subverted by Karoshi 2.0
6. Any player failure can be avoided by player actions.
   • Violated by really hard games.
   • Subverted by I Wanna Be The Guy and similar games and custom levels.
7. The author provides some goal that the player can pursue.
• Violated or subverted by Noctis.
8. The player can evaluate progress toward a provided goal.
   • Let me know if you know a game that violates or subverts this!

Also see Without a Goal: On open and expressive games by Jesper Juul.

The music for this episode is “Broken (DURDEN version)” by DURDEN and featuring Trifonic & Amelia June, and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license.

References:

• Morrowind from Bethesda Softworks
• Jigsaw by Graham Nelson
• “Slouching Toward Bedlam” by Daniel Ravipinto and Star Foster
• Grim Fandango from LucasArts
• The Myst series from Cyan Worlds
• The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time series from Ubisoft

The next episode will be a new segment called False Narrativism.

The music for this episode is “Big Bad World One” by Jonathan Coulton, and is available under a cc by-nc-sa 2.5 license.

This episode, unlike most, is available under a cc by-nc-sa 2.5 license.

References:

• Doom by id Software
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within by Ubisoft
• The Craft of Adventure by Graham Nelson
• Adventure by Will Crowther and Don Woods
• Pac-Man by Namco
• The Legend of Zelda by Nintendo
• World of Warcraft by Blizzard Entertainment
• Prey by Human Head Studios and published by 3D Realms
• The 7th Guest by Virgin Games
• “Rameses” by Stephen Bond
• “Photopia” by Adam Cadre

The next episode will be about the length of games and how that relates to game classification. Is there a distinction between an interactive “short story” and an interactive “novel”? If you have comments or ideas, contact me at gregory@ludusnovus.net.

The music for this episode is Enrique Granados’s “Spanish Dance n. 2” performed by Mario Mattioli, and is available under a cc by-nc 2.5 license.

This is the first episode in which I’ve talked much about table-top roleplaying games.

References:

• Doom by id Software
• Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet H. Murray.
• “Rameses” by Stephen Bond
• Dungeons & Dragons currently published by Wizards of the Coast

(Note: I’m going to start putting the titles of IF pieces from the IF Comp in quotes, as that competition is intended for short works, so participants presumably intended their pieces to be analogous to short stories.)

Read the rest of IntroComp 2006 Notes...

The music for this episode is “Noite de Carnaval” by Code, and is available under a cc by-nc 2.5 license.

References:

• The Silent Hill series from Konami
• Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem by Silicon Knights and published by Nintendo
• LASH by Paul O’Brian
• Spider and Web by Andrew Plotkin
• Glass by Emily Short
• The Space Under the Window by Andrew Plotkin

I will be out of town for a week, so the next full episode should appear on August 19, 2006. There may be something put up between now and then, though.

Correction: In the original version of this episode, I attribute Nothing But Mazes to Stephen Granade, but it is actually by Greg Boettcher. Stephen Granade wrote Child’s Play, which is also part of IntroComp 2006 (and does some interesting things with the voice of the narrator). I should have a corrected version up shortly.

The music for this episode is “Babylon Bring Me Down,” by spinningmerkaba, and is available under a cc by-nc 2.5 license.
References:

• Half-Life from Valve Software
• Shadow of the Colossus from Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc.
• “First Timer Foibles” #7: Encumbering Exposition by Michael Coyne
• Nothing But Mazes by Greg Boettcher (part of Introcomp 2006)