“The Ur Game” Released In Game Poems #1: First Moves
I’m honored to be part of the editorial collective for the first issue of Game Poems, an interactive magazine founded by Jordan Magnuson, who literally wrote the book on game poetry. The first issue collects 13 short, poetic video games that can all be played in your browser. My contribution1 is “The Ur Game,” a … Continue reading “The Ur Game” Released In Game Poems #1: First Moves →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2026%2F02%2F09%2Fthe-ur-game-released-in-game-poems-1-first-moves%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dthe-ur-game-released-in-game-poems-1-first-moves&action_name=%26%238220%3BThe+Ur+Game%26%238221%3B+Released+In+Game+Poems+%231%3A+First+Moves&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
I’m honored to be part of the editorial collective for the first issue of Game Poems, an interactive magazine founded by Jordan Magnuson, who literally wrote the book on game poetry. The first issue collects 13 short, poetic video games that can all be played in your browser. My contribution1 is “The Ur Game,” a puzzle about games, war, and the rules we choose to follow. The theme for this issue was “First Moves,” and I explore both the experience of interacting with an unfamiliar game for the first time and the question of what we need to do in order to start to escape this broken system we live in. <img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="450" height="450" src="https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/The-Ur-Game-512x512-cover-450x450.png" alt="" class="wp-image-3425" srcset="https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/The-Ur-Game-512x512-cover-450x450.png 450w, https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/The-Ur-Game-512x512-cover-300x300.png 300w, https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/The-Ur-Game-512x512-cover.png 512w" sizes="(max-width: 450px) 100vw, 450px" /> You can play “The Ur Game” on Itch.io. (We’re still working on some loading issues with the version of the game that’s included in the magazine. For now, the version on Itch will load much more reliably with less chance of making your browser unresponsive. I’ll try and remember to update this post once that issue is resolved!) I initially designed “The Ur Game” last year at a time when the primary bit of world news on my mind was the ongoing genocide of Palestinians by the state of Israel. Now, my own country, the United States, has dramatically increased the pace of its genocidal campaigns against Latine people and is terrorizing its own residents with secret police. I hope the is less relevant to world events in another year. Please check out the rest of the games in Game Poems #1! I think we selected a diverse and excellent selection of artsy games, and I hope that they help to expand your view of how games can work. And take a look at the Community Showcase, which collects submissions that didn’t end up in the issue! It was very hard picking just ten submissions to include, and the collection contains many excellent works. Show 1 footnote Ten of the games were selected by the editors from an open request for submissions. Three, including mine, are invited submissions from established developers. ↩ <img decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2026%2F02%2F09%2Fthe-ur-game-released-in-game-poems-1-first-moves%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dthe-ur-game-released-in-game-poems-1-first-moves&action_name=%26%238220%3BThe+Ur+Game%26%238221%3B+Released+In+Game+Poems+%231%3A+First+Moves&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
I’m presenting at the Charlotte Writing Project Fall 2024 Conference on Sep. 19!
My talk is titled, “Dada, Animal Crossing, and ChatGPT: Can We Ever Write Our Own Stories With the Master’s Tools?” If all goes well, I’ll be teaching an audience of mostly educators how ChatGPT works at a high level (it’s a fancy Markov generator) and why they shouldn’t use it (it serves hegemony). If you … Continue reading I’m presenting at the Charlotte Writing Project Fall 2024 Conference on Sep. 19! →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2024%2F09%2F12%2Fim-presenting-at-the-charlotte-writing-project-fall-2024-conference-on-sep-19%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dim-presenting-at-the-charlotte-writing-project-fall-2024-conference-on-sep-19&action_name=I%26%238217%3Bm+presenting+at+the+Charlotte+Writing+Project+Fall+2024+Conference+on+Sep.+19%21&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
<img decoding="async" width="1080" height="1080" src="https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/For-Presenters.png" alt="I'm presenting on (the evils of) generative AI at the Charlotte Writing Project Fall 2024 Conference on Sep. 19!" class="wp-image-3408" srcset="https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/For-Presenters.png 1080w, https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/For-Presenters-300x300.png 300w, https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/For-Presenters-450x450.png 450w, https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/For-Presenters-768x768.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1080px) 100vw, 1080px" /> My talk is titled, “Dada, Animal Crossing, and ChatGPT: Can We Ever Write Our Own Stories With the Master’s Tools?” If all goes well, I’ll be teaching an audience of mostly educators how ChatGPT works at a high level (it’s a fancy Markov generator) and why they shouldn’t use it (it serves hegemony). If you can’t make it to the conference, I’ll be sharing my slides afterward and am open to doing similar talks elsewhere! You can get more info on the conference here. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2024%2F09%2F12%2Fim-presenting-at-the-charlotte-writing-project-fall-2024-conference-on-sep-19%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dim-presenting-at-the-charlotte-writing-project-fall-2024-conference-on-sep-19&action_name=I%26%238217%3Bm+presenting+at+the+Charlotte+Writing+Project+Fall+2024+Conference+on+Sep.+19%21&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Content Warning: Colonialism, Misogyny, Racism, Childhood sexual assault I used to diligently keep up with “interactive fiction”, a game category that used to mean the same thing as “text adventure” but has broadened over time. At one point, it mostly included parser games (where you type things like TAKE DEVICE and EXAMINE VISTA) but is … Continue reading IF Retrospective: The 2006 XYZZY Awards →
Content Warning: Colonialism, Misogyny, Racism, Childhood sexual assault I used to diligently keep up with “interactive fiction”, a game category that used to mean the same thing as “text adventure” but has broadened over time. At one point, it mostly included parser games (where you type things like TAKE DEVICE and EXAMINE VISTA) but is now also commonly used for hypertext games (Twine games and choose-your-own-adventures) and similar works. These days I see this sort of game often described as “text games”, which seems a fine enough label. I’ve fallen out of the habit of keeping up with the genre, and I’d like to get caught up. The most well-known IF awards competition is, appropriately, the Annual Interactive Fiction Competition, or IFComp, an event initiated in 1995 with the express intention to encourage new works of IF. The IFComp, however, is focused on works which can be played in two hours, there’s a tradition of well-known authors using pseudonyms, and it only collects games submitted newly to the Comp. That means it’s not quite comprehensive in the way I’m looking for. The actual premiere in-group awards competition for IF is the XYZZY Awards, a relatively obscure ritual mostly open to dedicated practitioners of the medium. It tends to have nominators, nominees, and voters that are super-dedicated to text-heavy works that are in conversation with the canon of parser and hypertext works that were historically discussed on the Usenet group rec.games.int-fiction. Yes, this is a community so old that it’s defined by a technology that was obsolete by 2005 or so.1 When I look at the XYZZY Awards, the last year that I remember playing most of the winners was 2005, although that was helped by how that year’s awards were swept by Jason Devlin’s “Vespers”, which won four of the ten categories. I also remember playing “Mystery House Possessed” by one of my personal favorite authors, Emily Short, which won Best Use of Medium in that year. That means that, in my quest to catch up with the past decade and a half of IF, I’ve chosen to start with 2006. Best Game and Individual NPC: “The Elysium Enigma” by Eric Eve “The Elysium Enigma” is a game by a relatively new (in 2006) author, Eric Eve, a theologian at the University of Oxford. There’s a notable amount of theological themes in IF in general, maybe prompted by its intensely textual nature and the tendency for it to focus more on abstract imagery than violence and spectacle. This was a fun game! It plays around with some conventions of the form: you have a multifunction device which lets you analyze technology, get emergency help, be violent, generate light, or ask someone for exposition. This means that you’re immediately empowered in ways that most IF protagonists are not. On the other hand, it contains some truly archaic and contrived puzzles, such as one where you need to find a fishing rod, hook, and bait in order to get a fish to give to a cat to make it get off of a crate. Indeed, there are a lot of crates, drawers, and cabinets in this game. As this was the first work of IF I’ve played in a while, I’d forgotten how much the world model of these games encourages thinking of the world in terms of containment: doors and containers and pockets and such. There’s an entirely unnecessary system for automatically putting objects into your pockets so you have the room to carry what is still a preposterous number of items. The game’s politics in general feel rather stodgy. The shuttle pilot is described as of “oriental extraction”; even in 2006 this phrasing would have seemed a bit dated, and doubly-so in a sci-fi setting where the characters are not all born on Earth. Perhaps she’s from the eastern part of the galaxy. The main (award-winning!) NPC Leela feels rather exploitative; I was immediately suspicious of her wide-eyed innocence, and while the plot reveals hidden intention behind her persistent waifishness and such behavior as bathing naked in front of you, it still feels rather sleazy to me. There are times where I am super reminded of the awkwardness of parser disambiguation, where there are, say, three doors in the room and typing “open door” doesn’t just open the closed one. I suspect that some of this is intentional, such as this situation that highlights the pervasive iconography of empire: > x eagle Which eagle do you mean, the eagle on your belt buckle, the eagle on your tunic, the eagle on the flag, or the eagle on the wall? > wall It’s a large heraldic eagle, of the same pattern as the one on your tunic, that represents the might of the Empire and the authority of the Aquila dynasty who rule it. On the other hand, the game seems a bit naïve regarding its geopolitics (astropolitics?). While the local occupied colonists are clearly displeased with their situation, the author’s notes at the end say, regarding the Empire, that “although far from perfect, it is basically a benign institution.” I felt the whole way through that my protagonist was not a good person and that the Empire was in the wrong, and I’m concerned that the game doesn’t agree. Best Setting and NPCs: “Floatpoint” by Emily Short I played this one back when it came out! For this discussion I skimmed the ClubFloyd transcript facilitated by Jacqueline Lott. Short has consistently been one of my favorite IF authors. I’m discussing this one next because it, like “Elysium”, involves an agent of empire coming to a backwoods planet to make tentative contact with the locals, with express instruction to avoid causing waves and implicit encouragement to disregard that instruction. Unlike “Elysium”, this gives the locals a culture beyond “xenophobic primitives”. You don’t speak the language, you don’t understand the social conventions, and you don’t feel as in-control as the protagonist in “Elysium”, who can get an info-dump from an NPC at any time. The protagonist has religion, backstory, and relationships. It’s definitely a game about differing viewpoints. Different characters tell you to do mutually exclusive things; there’s a device that recontextualizes recordings in moods like “STORY” or “SCIENTIFIC”, giving dramatically different readings of the same events; the locals are categorized into some sort of genelines; and much of your actual information about the setting and backstory is filtered through unreliable summaries in personal logs. As is typical of Short’s work, there are some virtuosic implementations of complicated objects, including the contextual recording/playback device, there are multiple endings with none being presented as unequivocally “correct”, and many things are left intentionally vague or unexplained. I like this one a lot. Best Writing, Puzzles, Individual Puzzle (Navigating the mansion), and Individual PC: “Delightful Wallpaper” by Andrew Plotkin Plotkin is another of my most-favorite IF authors, but I didn’t play much of this at the time. The individual puzzle it won an award for is a complex maze, of sorts, that is made at all feasible by a notepad that automatically records information you’ve uncovered about how doorways interact. I had to restart the game and make a map to feel able to navigate the house, and even then had to poke through the published source code to figure out one bit. A key part is that sometimes a doorway will make something happen once, and sometimes it will toggle something every time it’s traversed. It’s a good puzzle in the Plotkin style, but one that would have been improved by some more of the automatic time-saving stuff included in his later Hadean Lands. I actually prefer the second puzzle of the game, which takes up the second half; the conceit is that your (award-winning PC) is an Edward Gorey author figure, metaphorically exploring the setting to establish an archly sensational sequence of deaths in a terrible family attending the reading of a will. This involves consulting your notes in the form of incomplete couplets, with clues to be teased out from the poetic sketchwork. It works! It’s also not saying particularly much; some of Plotkin’s work is pretty deep, but this one is just an excellent Gorey pastiche. This highlights something odd about the XYZZY Awards: since the entrants are (almost?) universally text games, there are several text-related award categories that sound blurry. Best Writing, here, is specifically about the prose itself: descriptions of scenes and actions. And the writing is very clever and charming, but doesn’t really seem to be doing much beyond being a pleasant backdrop for a pair of tricky puzzles. The PC themself is fine. There’s some fun characterization on how they’re flatly aghast at the canoodling going on at the party, and they certainly have a whimsical voice. They’re not particularly a character, though, as much as a sort of narrow archetype. Regardless, I enjoyed embodying them! Best Story: “Tales of The Traveling Swordsman” by Mike Snyder At first I was skeptical of where this story (from veteran IF insider Snyder) was going. The prose is kind of belabored: you come from a town named “Homesdale”, you’re inexplicably unable to speak the language of the people you’re purportedly saving, and there’s an eerie quality to the descriptions that is honestly a bit disorienting, to the point that most of my trouble with puzzles involved not noticing an important object in a sea of cardinal directions. Luckily, the walkthrough is detailed and offers gentle hints before outright stating the solution. Playing further, I found further evidence of an upcoming twist: the initial meadow, described as like “green fleece”, is later echoed by the rug in the ship captain’s quarters. You’re repeatedly dealing with strange animals and moving bits of rubbish around. The reveal, when it comes, is pleasant enough but does end up taking what was a serviceable but pretty low-tension plot and stealing it of any remaining import. I wonder if this perfectly lovely but not narratively-complex game won Best Story in part because it strikes a good balance between accessibility and effective storytelling. “Floatpoint” is far more my style, but it also is for a certain sort of reader. “Swordsman” is pleasant enough for everyone without being alienating… unlike the final winner from this year. Best Use of Medium: “The Baron” by Victor Gijsbers This is a challenging one that I played at the time and am not inclined to replay. Best Use of Medium is the prize generally assigned to games that push the genre forward, and was eventually split into Best Implementation and Best Use of Innovation in the 2010 awards. In the case of “The Baron”, the award is more about its very earnest and rather well-told story with a troubling meta-move. There’s no good way to discuss “The Baron” without revealing that it’s about childhood sexual assault, and specifically about the psychology of the abuser. The story explores how perception of abusers as “monstrous” deflects them from taking actual responsibility for their actions, and it provides for a wide array of player choices over the course of the game, including encouraging replay. This results in a pretty difficult emotional experience for the player. Gijsbers is a Dutch academic philosopher, and I think this game shows a great deal of care and nuance. It’s his first published IF work, as far as I know, and is a hell of a splash to make. Gijsbers seems very interested in making confrontational games (he later released a project called “The Game Formerly Known as ‘Hidden Nazi Mode'” that explores cryptofascism and the dangers of closed software). “The Baron” could have gone very wrong, but I think it’s a success. In looking back over a decade later, this one feels a bit blunt, maybe in part because this sort of writing and design has filtered out into more conventional games and general games discourse. The idea of a game that reveals a dark secret underlying its story is well-established in our now-post-Bioshock and –Nier era. Additionally, its focus on the interiority of an abuser to the exclusion of his victim’s feels like more of a problem to me now than it apparently was for most players at the time of release, based on reviews. Still, this game is solid, and serves as a good peek into where the IF world was sitting in 2006. Final Thoughts The 2006 finalists weren’t too surprising to me, which makes sense, as this is a year in which I actually played several of them. I’m looking forward to venturing into less-familiar territory. I don’t have a strong timetable for this adventure of mine; thank you for joining me! Let me know in the comments if you have any thoughts. Show 1 footnote The current home of IF discussion seems to be the Interactive Fiction Community Forum. ↩ <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2022%2F08%2F02%2Fif-retrospective-the-2006-xyzzy-awards%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dif-retrospective-the-2006-xyzzy-awards&action_name=IF+Retrospective%3A+The+2006+XYZZY+Awards&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Theatre is a live-action roleplaying game for any number of players, limited only by your available space and resources. Together, like in most roleplaying games, you'll enact a story. One difference in this game is that you aren't all in control of the events in the story: they proceed in the sequence established by the adventure you're playing. What you can control is how those events are explored: what mood do they establish? What events are especially significant, and how do the characters actually feel as they go through the sequence?
This game is intended for players experienced with roleplaying. For beginners, we recommend Countdown: A Game for Two Players, by the same developers. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="672" height="450" src="https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/800px-Abandoned_Outdoor_Theater_5217048634-672x450.jpg" alt="An abandoned theatre in the woods, rotting and overgrown with plants" class="wp-image-3337" srcset="https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/800px-Abandoned_Outdoor_Theater_5217048634-672x450.jpg 672w, https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/800px-Abandoned_Outdoor_Theater_5217048634-300x201.jpg 300w, https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/800px-Abandoned_Outdoor_Theater_5217048634-768x515.jpg 768w, https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/800px-Abandoned_Outdoor_Theater_5217048634.jpg 800w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 672px) 100vw, 672px" /> Image by Daniel Ramirez (CCBY 2.0) Theatre is a live-action roleplaying game for any number of players, limited only by your available space and resources. Together, as in most roleplaying games, you’ll enact a story. One difference in this game is that you aren’t in control of all the events in the story: they proceed in the sequence established by the adventure you’re playing. What you can control is how those events are explored: what mood do they establish? What events are especially significant, and how do the characters actually feel as they go through the sequence? You’ll typically play this game with a pregenerated adventure, which establishes the nature of the characters and the moves they’ll make during a play session. Advanced players can play the game improvisationally, with certain players essentially making up the characters and moves as they go; guidelines for this mode of play are available in additional supplements. A sample pregenerated adventure is included at the end of this document, but a wide array of free and paid adventures are available from third-party creators and publishers. For small groups, a home setting is perfectly appropriate. If you intend to play with a particularly large group (more than ten, perhaps), you will need an appropriate venue with sufficient seating where everyone can see the roleplay area. Consider a place where musical performances are held, perhaps a park bandstand; these usually have an raised, visible area for roleplay and enough seating to support a large number of House players. Regardless of your setting, you should establish a space for roleplay that is visible to all participants, with enough space to move around. Try to establish a space that people can access from all sides, and make sure to have options for private areas to which people can withdraw if they’re not actively involved in play. Player Roles In Theatre, the players are divided into three groups: the Troupe, the Crew, and the House. You can play with as few as two players; try to have at least one Troupe player and at least one House member, but the system is otherwise very flexible. While there is no maximum number of players supported by the system, we recommend limiting the number of Troupe and Crew players to around ten each unless your group is particularly experienced. House roles are especially appropriate for beginners, as they need not be familiar with the rules or the adventure being played. The Troupe control player characters; for beginners, you should probably assign one PC per Troupe player, but as you become more comfortable in play you may wish to assign multiple characters to a single player, as is most feasible. We recommend against playing multiple characters that interact in the same Scene of an adventure. Each character in an adventure should have a Troupe player controlling them. The Crew are responsible for facilitating the play of the Troupe and for setting mood and other aesthetic aspects of the game session. They are, essentially, controlling all elements of the setting of the adventure. The basics of the Crew’s responsibility will typically be described in the adventure module, but it is a rather flexible and rules-light role, similar to that of a Game Master in a more typical roleplaying game. The final group of players, the House, can be of any size. While you can participate in a game session without any House players, the presence of the House is important and rewarding if you seek a full game experience. The House observes the rest of play, and takes moves collectively or individually to guide the mood of play and, in extreme cases, call it to a premature end. Some advanced adventure modules may blur the lines between these play groups. For example, the actions of the Crew may reflect certain characters within the story of an adventure, or the characters played by the Troupe may interact with House players as if the House players are themselves player characters. Flow of Play Use the sequence of your selected pregenerated adventure to determine how play proceeds. While you can certainly play through an adventure that is unfamiliar to you, we recommend that the Crew and Troupe review the adventure module beforehand to guide their roleplaying. If you find it inconvenient as a Troupe player to consult the adventure during play, you can even memorize the moves available to your character. Once you are ready, the House players will observe the gameplay as the Troupe players roleplay the moves of their characters in the sequence dictated by the adventure module. The Crew players facilitate this roleplay with their particular planned (or improvised!) support. During play, Troupe players will typically roleplay behavior described in italics and read suggested dialogue labeled with their character’s name. As you become more comfortable with the rules of the game, you should feel free to stray from the exact actions or dialogue dictated by an adventure, but make sure to do so in such a way that it does not interfere with the play of other Troupe and Crew players. You may wish to discuss any major changes with Troupe and Crew members before the game session. During play, Crew players will typically stay out of the main roleplay area, adjusting elements of the play space from afar and only making direct changes in the roleplay space between Scenes. Crew play may include changing the decorations of your play venue to match the setting of each scene; finding and preparing props or cosplay to add verisimilitude to the Troupe’s roleplay; or controlling appropriate music, sounds, and lighting for the session. You may find it useful to appoint one member of the Crew to a supervisory role, making overarching decisions about Crew activities and making sure the Crew and Troupe play together smoothly. During play, House players will closely observe play and provide feedback over the course of a game session. The Crew and Troupe should keep in mind the opinion the House players are communicating and let it shape their play as long as it does not distract from roleplaying as the adventure dictates. For beginning House players, we recommend that they offer simple critique between Scenes by cheering or jeering, but as you become more comfortable with your play group, you may enjoy encouraging the House to offer detailed commentary, either during a Scene or afterward in a post-session review. Sample Adventure Module Included as an appendix to this ruleset is the adventure module The Tragedy of Macbeth. For convenience, the full adventure text is available in HTML format on an external site. Get the adventure module here. Variants of Play There are several variants of play, appropriate for players who, for logistical reasons, cannot play the default version of Theatre. These include: Timeshifted Play: The Crew and Troupe players proceed as normal, without any House players present. However, record the play session using audio and/or video recording. You may wish to have a Crew player edit this recording to remove any table talk or rules mistakes for a smoother experience. Later, the House players can observe the recording and provide their feedback in whichever way seems appropriate. This approach can make a play session accessible to a large number of House players, as they need not all watch the recording at the same time. Solo Play: You can play through an adventure solo, taking on all the player roles yourself. Think of yourself as a House player first and read through the adventure. Imagine the play of the Troupe and Crew as you proceed: you may read the moves aloud if you wish, but this is not necessary. While any adventure may be played this way, there are adventures available that are intended for solo play, with additional detail to the Crew moves and a complexity of story that would be too complicated for group play. Competitive Play: To make this a competitive game, form multiple teams of Troupe and Crew players, with each team engaging in a play session. Each session will use the same House players, regardless of team. Each Troupe/Crew team will play through a different adventure, and the House players will determine which team did a better job. You may award a prize such as a commemorative statuette when the competition is complete. Welcome to Theatre Thank you for trying out these quickplay rules for Theatre! While there are many more details in the full version, including a guide to writing your own adventures, we hope that in playing with these rules you have a good idea of how the game is played. We welcome any feedback you may have on how your play went! If you want a more conventional tabletop game, check out my game about making friends and protecting your home, Fusion Time.
I’ve put out a new game! It’s a GM-less tabletop roleplaying game where the players are a team of people with special powers defending their home. When their interpersonal clashes grow strong enough, an opponent attacks, and the players will have to Fuse in order to fight back and protect their home. Fusion Time by … Continue reading Fusion Time Released! →
I’ve put out a new game! It’s a GM-less tabletop roleplaying game where the players are a team of people with special powers defending their home. When their interpersonal clashes grow strong enough, an opponent attacks, and the players will have to Fuse in order to fight back and protect their home. Fusion Time by Gregory Avery-Weir I’m calling this a “playtest” version, a sort of early-access thing. It’s fully playable but I haven’t done pretty formatting or figured out illustrations or anything. I’d like to see if I’ve missed any issues and if anyone’s even interested in the game at all before I do work to lay out the book in detail. There’s more on mechanics and acknowledgments on the game’s store page, so check it out! There are even free community copies there for queer folks and/or people of color who don’t feel able to afford the game. Additionally, if you’re in media (including being a streamer) and want a review copy, or would like me to facilitate a game session for you, let me know! Check out Fusion Time! You may have noticed that I’ve released several tabletop things lately and relatively few video games. One of the main reasons for this is that it’s simply less work: both media need design and testing, but I find it quicker and easier to write up and format a rules document than to code up and create material for a video game. That said, I’m still working on stuff over at Future Proof Games, and you can keep an eye on this space for more. Oh! And for more on my thoughts around the concept of fusion in media, check out my post on one of the game’s major influences, Steven Universe: “Everyone Should Watch ‘Alone Together’“.
Tabletop Garden: The Great Molasses Flood
Over at Tabletop Garden, we’ve just started airing a new campaign! It’s called “The Great Molasses Flood”, it uses the Rosette Diceless system I helped design at Future Proof Games, and it’s a great place to start listening if you haven’t yet checked out my actual-play podcast of short campaigns about interesting characters with a … Continue reading Tabletop Garden: The Great Molasses Flood →
Over at Tabletop Garden, we’ve just started airing a new campaign! It’s called “The Great Molasses Flood”, it uses the Rosette Diceless system I helped design at Future Proof Games, and it’s a great place to start listening if you haven’t yet checked out my actual-play podcast of short campaigns about interesting characters with a critical agenda. 03.00: The Great Molasses Flood Teaser “The Great Molasses Flood” is a weird-fiction story where we take a real historical disaster that was entangled with issues of class and ethnicity and examine it through the lens of strange sci-fi. I really like how it turned out! “Ego Driver”, the previous campaign, was a lot of fun and explored some cool stuff, but I really like “Flood”‘s more personal feel and the way that things go off the rails in the second half. Check it out! If you like it, I would very much appreciate support on my Patreon account. You’ll get new episodes a week in advance and also get access to behind-the-scenes material; I did an hour-long postmortem on “Ego Driver” that went deep on my intentions and reflections on the campaign, and I plan to do the same for this one. I hope you enjoy “The Great Molasses Flood”! <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2021%2F03%2F20%2Ftabletop-garden-the-great-molasses-flood%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dtabletop-garden-the-great-molasses-flood&action_name=Tabletop+Garden%3A+The+Great+Molasses+Flood&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Warframe Has the Best Worldbuilding In Video Games
(This article contains a discussion of the storyline of Warframe. It contains many things that some people may consider spoilers. Trust me. Read it.) Warframe is a free-to-play online third-person sci-fi shooter by Ontario developer Digital Extremes where you control a cool, acrobatic robo-warrior in a grindy co-op game where the PR tagline is “ninjas … Continue reading Warframe Has the Best Worldbuilding In Video Games →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2021%2F01%2F29%2Fwarframe-has-the-best-worldbuilding-in-video-games%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dwarframe-has-the-best-worldbuilding-in-video-games&action_name=Warframe+Has+the+Best+Worldbuilding+In+Video+Games&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
(This article contains a discussion of the storyline of Warframe. It contains many things that some people may consider spoilers. Trust me. Read it.) Warframe is a free-to-play online third-person sci-fi shooter by Ontario developer Digital Extremes where you control a cool, acrobatic robo-warrior in a grindy co-op game where the PR tagline is “ninjas play free”. You fight space nazis, mechanized capitalists, and a bioplague in a handful of standard mission types to get loot and level up your gear. Warframe, written and designed by Creative Director Steve Sinclair, Lead Writer Cam Rogers, and a team of other designers and writers, is the story of a dark future set in a fallen posthuman solar empire, where the generational victims of the cruel, long-lost Orokin are in constant conflict and where solidarity and empathy are the strongest forces against an apparently-inevitable cosmic struggle borne out of the resonating echoes of exploitation and familial loss. The Moon came back. No one told stories about its destruction, in the same way that no one told stories about the fall of Rome, or Dubai, or Io Prime. It was a fact, not a myth. But the throne of the Golden Lords reappeared above the world. They say the Tenno did it. They say the Tenno are reviving the Empire, and we will be their slaves. They say the Tenno are finally going to kill the Last Executor and finish the bloody slaughter they began generations ago. They say the Tenno are sorry, so sorry, and they have recreated Lua as a monument. The next night, a Grineer patrol killed my cousin. He had snuck out to find food. When you start Warframe in its current version (29.x.x), you awaken after a dreamlike introductory vision of an ancient war. You embody a biomechanical warrior called a warframe, sought by the militant Grineer. Guided by transmissions from the mysterious Lotus, you escape using a derelict landing craft to an orbiter managed by Ordis, an AI-like Cephalon who recognizes you as his beloved Operator. As you proceed across the Solar system, you are gradually introduced to the major factions of this world. The Grineer are a clone army, suffering from terrible degeneration of their bodies, but obsessed with conformity and strength to the degree that any sign of empathy or deviation is considered a capital offense. The Corpus are a hypercapitalist merchant empire, using their technology and robotics to rule and experiment upon the weak. The Infestation is a strange technoplague, colonizing flesh and metal with equal ease to consume everything into its hive mind. You are a Tenno, a survivor of an ancient warrior culture who seeks to maintain balance and protect the weaker civilians. Finally, there are the echoes of the Orokin: the fallen empire that created all the other factions and still exerts influence via ancient treasures and half-functioning security systems that exert mental control over anyone who comes within their grasp. My name is Cephalon Sigma. I reside in the Weave, and embody the Seventh Precept by tracking all of my brethren. Long ago I committed a terrible sin against my betters. I cannot remember what I did. This is my punishment. I can see each of my brethren, tiny shards of glass in scattered datascapes. There are too many of some of them. Too few of others. They are not machines. They do not deserve to be mass-produced. Do… do machines deserve to be mass-produced? I can consider this question. This is my punishment. There are things which are not my brethren in the Weave. They are not made of glass. They are not made of souls. Some are tiny, obedient, curious. Some are immense, resentful, infinitely sad. I do not look at them, but I see them. This is my punishment. What did I do? What did they do? I hear a whisper in the Weave, a song backed by Naga drums. “All is silent in the calm,” it whispers. “Hushed and empty is the womb of the sky,” it sings. You begin to get a feeling for this setting. While there are certainly lore dumps to read in the game’s Codex, you pick most of it up through osmosis or interactive story. You help cyborg debt-slaves take back a sliver of power from the cruel megacorp that holds their literal body parts as collateral. You make guesses at the nature of the Orokin from the fact that their spaceships had five-meter-tall ceilings and then notice that their structures are all made of meat and bone covered up with gold leaf. You realize that every creature in the Infestation is recognizable as an infected version of some other enemy unit… except for a few, more troubling examples. There’s a consistency to the world’s look and feel that lends itself to this sort of slow discovery. In other shooters with a large cast of enemies, enemy units feel ontologically distinct from player characters: they work by different rules and use different, less-cool equipment. In Warframe, you can craft and use virtually every weapon you see on an enemy, leading to the unsettling experience of hearing your own gun make the sound that you recognize as making Heavy Gunners a priority target. And then, startlingly late, tens of hours into the game, the plot starts in earnest. My great-grandmother first signed on to work the Venusian processors, back when the Corpus were just tapping the busted old mountaintop terravents, before Nef Anyo’s damned scheme. She sold her legs to buy a pair of hands to replace the ones that got frostbitten. Sold her lungs to pay for the busted servos in her knuckles. Sold her jaw for a new maintenance contract on her oxygenator. I’m still working off the food siphon. They say the Corpus are purpose-bred. Well, now so are we. When I was born, my fathers knew I’d be the one to inherit their debts. They died with more debt than they were born with. What would it be like, to not know in every waking moment the history that weighs your life down and keeps you underground? Would it be better to think I was free? Until “Natah”, quests in Warframe are loose narrative wrapped around rather standard missions. You pick them up in menus or by talking to an NPC in an online social space, and then you’re running a normal mission type with custom voice lines for the mission guidance. Often, these serve as sort of delayed tutorials; you have Maroo guiding you through spy missions, or Simaris asking you to do Synthesis scans during other missions. “Natah”, however, starts with a mystery. In some missions on Uranus, you can encounter strange drones that look like little you’ve seen before. They’re bifurcated, joined only at the head, and float strangely. They’re not hostile, but bear a resemblance to the strange giant creature you may have seen roaming the Plains of Eidolon on Earth. When you scan them for more information, you start a quest that exposes the history of your leader, the Lotus. Because Warframe so diligently sets up its world and its factions, these things can immediately be recognized as not only new, but alien. The game has established a visual language, letting you recognize who you’re up against as easily as reading text, only to present you with something that doesn’t even register as letters. They do not match any existing societies you’ve met, which is unsettling: you’ve potentially played hours and hours of the game without encountering this new group, the Sentients. I always liked the stories of the Old War. The brave Tenno fighting against the evil Sentients, creatures from another solar system. And then the Tenno betraying the oppressive Orokin, murdering them all at the celebration that was meant to mean an end to the violence. The Orokin were cruel, conceited, capricious. They ruined every planet in the Origin system and then terraformed them anew only to ruin them again. They stole children, made monsters, tore space itself apart. But they were still human. The Tenno are something else. I’ve heard backwater primitives call them gods. I’ve heard others whisper about Void demons. They summon storms, bend time, shatter minds. But I’ve seen them, met them. They don’t act like gods. They act like confused children. With the proper guidance, we can use them to wipe this system clean of the corrupt and the cruel, forging a peace out of fire and blade. And anyone who stands against us doesn’t have a place in that peace. The old Tenno from the stories would understand. No cost too great. No blood too precious. This is one of Warframe‘s great tricks. It gives you a consistent world, one you can trust, so that when it disrupts that world, you easily believe that it is doing so intentionally. And in doing so, it says two simple but important things: people and problems exist as part of immense systems that stretch far back into history; and yet these systems can be exposed for what they are and changed. Once you encounter the Sentients, inhuman survivors of the Orokin’s colonization efforts, you are presented with the next revelation, one which gives you a more personal stake in the growing solar conflict. There’s been a lot of discussion surrounding “The Second Dream”. As Dominic Tarason explains, “It is here, nearly 40 hours into the game, you are presented for the first time with the character creation screen.” Previously, you were only your Warframes, but now you finally have an identity in-game and thus a personal investment. You’ve been learning about and shaping this world for a long time before Warframe finally allows you to live in it. And you know very well that, without a lot of work and cooperation, it is not a world that anyone would want to live in. If you had to choose between dying and killing, what would you do? If you were looking someone in the face and it was you or them? What if it was you or someone, anyone, and you had to choose who you would sacrifice? I was just a child. We didn’t have many children, as a rule. When you live forever, these things can wait. As a result, my entire culture knew me, followed my growth, my development. My entire culture knew about my diagnosis. They took me to the Yuvan Theatre. They told me it was better for me to pick someone my age, by which they meant at my stage of development. The children looked like me, but they were half as old. Their right arms were decorated so you could imagine them with the control circuitry installed. Continuity is not a replacement. It is a reshaping, a subsuming, an overlay. Like all of our magic, it is a trick, a half-fraud. I can still hear her in here with me, after all these centuries. We were—are—evil, by our very nature. The only way for us to stop is to die. And we live a very, very long time. Everything wrong in the world of Warframe is, at its root, the fault of the Orokin. There are certainly characters who choose to do evil, but the game recognizes that evil is never that simple. The Orokin empire set up the circumstances for all of the misery in the game’s world, manufactured its tools of oppression, and created the rivalries that echo through its history. The Sentients, the Tenno, the Grineer, the Corpus, the Infestation: they are all generational victims of the cruelty and selfish indifference of a group with more power and resources than could ever be conscionable. Beyond their general colonial oppression, the Orokin perpetuated their empire by literally transferring their consciousnesses into the bodies of their subjects against their wills. The Orokin deserved to die. To continue being Orokin was an ongoing act of abuse and oppression. And the wars and tragedies that continue in the world of Warframe are echoes of that cruelty, victims of abuse striking out at or desperately trying to emulate their long-destroyed oppressors. What am I? My mother was a miner, using her many hands to scrape away the soil. I emerged from my father’s womb even as he watched over the system, coordinating and organizing my people. I was born to be clever. To predict, to plan, to conceive. The others resent the Golden Lords for stealing their fertility from them, but I never cared for offspring. I resent the Golden Lords for creating us at all. I finally understood during the eternal trip through the poison realm, wisdom whispered from within my skulls. None of us asked to be brought into this world. From my place in our great and just fleet, I have an opportunity to correct that error. I can provide the ultimate mercy for the people of Origin. Trust me. It’s better this way. The rich world of Warframe is made possible through a dedication to worldbuilding by its creators. They constructed the game with a consistent visual language, with a setting aware of history and systems, and with an ontological consistency that encourages players to gain a gradual and deep understanding of the fictional universe. Thus, when new aspects of the game are revealed or released, players are equipped to understand how these new elements fit into the game world and how they are tied to the generational history of the Origin System. This then feeds into the play itself, providing emotional motivation for the combat that makes up most of the player’s activities. This writing and design work is more clever and thorough than most any other game you’ll find, and the fact that it is done in service of a free-to-play game about space ninjas is delightful. It’s an example that should be studied by any developer who wants to create a rich game world. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2021%2F01%2F29%2Fwarframe-has-the-best-worldbuilding-in-video-games%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dwarframe-has-the-best-worldbuilding-in-video-games&action_name=Warframe+Has+the+Best+Worldbuilding+In+Video+Games&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
We’ve finally completed the most recent campaign of my actual play podcast, Tabletop Garden. In “Ego Driver“, a group of misfit killers participate in a postcolonial road war in a postapocalyptic world. It draws from Mad Max: Fury Road, Trigun, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, and Wacky Races. I’m super proud … Continue reading Tabletop Garden: Ego Driver →
We’ve finally completed the most recent campaign of my actual play podcast, Tabletop Garden. In “Ego Driver“, a group of misfit killers participate in a postcolonial road war in a postapocalyptic world. It draws from Mad Max: Fury Road, Trigun, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, and Wacky Races. I’m super proud of how the campaign turned out, despite an embarrassingly long hiatus in the middle while I struggled with my own mental health issues. I’d really love it if you checked it out, and if you like it, shared it with your circles. You can start with the first episode: 02.01: Ego Driver – Beat It If you’d like more insight into how I planned the campaign, or how I feel about it looking back, you can sign up to support my Patreon, where I’ve just published over an hour of postmortem retrospective discussing things like how the players shaped the narrative and how I now feel about the extensive Michael Jackson references: Become a Patron! I’m real pleased with the story my players and I put together, and I’m looking forward to sharing the next campaign with you soon. It’s currently in recording and editing, and if you want a sneak preview, check out the end of the postmortem above!
All My Flash Games Now Downloadable With Source
I’ve released all my Flash games as locally-playable SWFs and Windows projectors on itch.io! That means that they should remain playable even after browsers and Adobe stop supporting Flash. These represent three years of my career, and they were pretty prolific ones! Get all my Flash games on itch.io here! If you’re interested in seeing … Continue reading All My Flash Games Now Downloadable With Source →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2020%2F10%2F28%2Fall-my-flash-games-now-downloadable-with-source%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dall-my-flash-games-now-downloadable-with-source&action_name=All+My+Flash+Games+Now+Downloadable+With+Source&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
I’ve released all my Flash games as locally-playable SWFs and Windows projectors on itch.io! That means that they should remain playable even after browsers and Adobe stop supporting Flash. These represent three years of my career, and they were pretty prolific ones! Get all my Flash games on itch.io here! If you’re interested in seeing the source code or resources for the games, you can get it for most of them1 by paying $5. If you want the source for more than one, it’ll be a better deal to get my whole Flash Source Code Collection for a flat $10. Sometime soon I’ll get around to updating the game pages on this site to feature Itch widgets, like so: I’m very happy to have these games available again without requiring players to enable a deprecated plugin. If you’ve wanted to support certain Flash games of mine directly, this is also a good way to do that! You’re welcome to donate a bit when you download one, although I don’t expect that of anyone. If you’re wondering what’s been going on with me, I’ve gone into some detail on my Patreon, which I hope to revive in coming months: Become a Patron! Let me know if you have any thoughts on this release, or if you run into any problems. Thanks! Show 1 footnote I haven’t released the source for the games repackaged by Future Proof Games. ↩ <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2020%2F10%2F28%2Fall-my-flash-games-now-downloadable-with-source%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dall-my-flash-games-now-downloadable-with-source&action_name=All+My+Flash+Games+Now+Downloadable+With+Source&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Toward a Sustainable Resource Escalation Game
An emerging form of games, born out of Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress, has occupied my thoughts lately. It doesn’t seem to have a name yet; it grew out of some Minecraft mods and had its seminal work in Factorio. It’s a cousin, or even sibling, to the idle/incremental game, but usually looks more like a … Continue reading Toward a Sustainable Resource Escalation Game →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2019%2F03%2F19%2Ftoward-a-sustainable-resource-escalation-game%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dtoward-a-sustainable-resource-escalation-game&action_name=Toward+a+Sustainable+Resource+Escalation+Game&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
An emerging form of games, born out of Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress, has occupied my thoughts lately. It doesn’t seem to have a name yet; it grew out of some Minecraft mods and had its seminal work in Factorio. It’s a cousin, or even sibling, to the idle/incremental game, but usually looks more like a management or survival sandbox game. You could call it a resource management and automation game, or a factory simulator, but I’ll use the term “resource escalation game,” because its primary features are: resources to collect, usually from a world you must explore crafting of resources into more complex or rich forms structures for automation of the crafting, allowing you to take a higher-level conceptual view where you are concerned with the logistics of automation rather than foraging and an escalation created by those resources, where your initial low-level needs become inconsequential and the pace of progression is governed primarily by what complexity of resources you have instead of a more abstract research system1 A brief list of well-received games (not all of which I’ve played!) that fall into this very loose and fuzzy category, or are adjacent to it: Minecraft with appropriate mods Factorio Subnautica (limited automation) Autonauts FortressCraft Evolved! RimWorld (research-driven)2 Nom Nom Galaxy (crueler, as I’ve written about) I’m sure there are many more, and I’d love to hear about them in the comments. These games borrow gameplay loops from sandbox games like Terraria, where you collect resources that are rare or located in dangerous areas in order to craft equipment that lets you gain access to even more exotic resources. Resource escalation games also often include logistic challenges that bring to mind puzzle games like Infinifactory, although the goals are much less clearly-defined. They even evoke the space-claiming and hygge of farming or town-building games like Stardew Valley or Populus. However, there’s a problem with the conventions of this new game form. It’s viciously exploitative of nature, celebrating some of the worst excesses of capitalism and colonialism. Let’s look at one of my most anticipated games at the moment, Satisfactory: Look at the beautiful dance of conveyor belts; the delight of seeing your labor multiplied ten-, a hundred-fold; the creativity of making your own design for a factory, tweaking and optimizing it. And now look at a team of masked corporate employees clearcutting a conveniently-uninhabited valley, replacing greenery with smoke-belching smokestacks. Knowing the sense of humor of Coffee Stain, the developers, the player’s relationship to the in-game corporation is likely to be fraught. Still: this is a game about colonizing land and commodifying its resources. The Problem This sinister undercurrent is inherited from the budding game form’s roots. Joel Goodwin has a beautiful piece on his experience as an eventual Minecraft conservationist that also exposes the fundamentally amoral, individualistic bias at the core of a game that presents a fantasy about being the One Settler (or Few Chosen Settlers) in a world of bountiful harvests, conveniently uninhabited ruins, and residents that are either inarguably monstrous or placidly accommodating. Many of the criticisms of Stardew Valley can also be applied to these games, in that they celebrate the fantasy of the gentleman farmer without exposing the social context that surrounds agriculture and production in the real world. Finally, resource escalation games are usually violent, assuming that the player will develop weapons to fight back against an environment that is unavoidably hostile. In short: resource escalation games see their worlds as threatening, their production as unencumbered by morals, and their characters as entitled to utilizing3 and consuming the resources they gather. Is there a way to create a resource escalation game that is nonviolent, morally-driven, and ecologically sustainable? The Cruces First, let’s examine violence. I’ve written before about the potential of nonviolence in video games. We have too many games about fighting, and it’s unnecessary. While I enjoy many violent video games, I think of it as a crutch, an easy trope that plays into the worst ways our culture casts challenges as battles and treats violence as an acceptable, even inevitable, solution. This is the easiest of my criteria to satisfy. Next: is it possible to avoid the moral quandaries that come with a lone explorer utilizing the resources of a hostile world? I believe so; these arise mainly from unexamined capitalist and colonial assumptions: for example, that it is better for a thing to be used than for it to exist for its own sake4; that the ability of an actor to do a thing inherently justifies that action; and that the appropriate way to thrive in an unfamiliar environment is to shape the environment to your existing way of life. While it’s a challenge to resist these assumptions (in part because they’re part of my real-world cultural hegemony), none of them seem essential to the appeal of resource escalation games. Notably, industry and technology does not require capitalism. While their history is intertwined, there is no reason why manufacturing must be privately controlled, any more so than roads and other infrastructure. Likewise, much (perhaps most!) of our technological innovation occurs outside of a corporate context, and there is substantial evidence that common resources tend to lead toward triumph, not tragedy. Finally: can we have a game which is about collecting and processing resources using built structures which is ecologically sustainable? I find this criterion the most challenging, in part because the vision given by the existing canon of these games is universally one of replacing the existing ecology with industrial sprawl. Factorio not only assumes you will be stripmining its worlds, but even models pollution — not as an encouragement toward responsibility but as an inevitable escalation of challenge, making the world increasingly adversarial as it responds to your activities. You can minimize this impact, but eventually you will come into conflict with the planet’s immune-system-like fauna5. Resolving this issue will require a more fundamental re-examination of how we think of resources in these games. The prominent resources in play tend to be material and difficult to replace: wood, minerals, fossil fuels, and so on. The rules are designed so that sources can be expended, encouraging wider exploration. Sometimes resources can be farmed, but this often takes the form of replacing native forest with “efficient” orchards. As the resource escalation proceeds, play requires less player attention and effort for the same low-level tasks, but often resources are consumed at a rate that scales with the complexity of the player’s focus. It may be that the very concept of resource escalation is inherently anti-environmentalist. The joy we take in playing these games may stem directly from our elimination of the wild and the interconnected and in our distillation and concentration of the natural into the “useful” or “productive.” I hope not. In the spirit of that hope, let’s look at some potential angles from which we can pursue sustainable versions of this game form. The Promise I would love to provide a completed formula for the sort of game I want to see, but I don’t have one. This style of game hasn’t even quite solidified into what it wants to be, and I am presenting some tricky problems. Instead, here’s some brainstorming. Below are seeds for ways to resolve the problems above, and I’d love to hear more suggestions for resolutions in the comments. Eliminating violence The resolution to a violent threat could be placating or creating understanding with the threat instead of battling it. Survival games already present tension and danger in the form of starvation, exposure to the elements, and hazardous environments. These can provide the same thrill as violent threats with strategies that involve crafting and mastery of the space. We may not need danger at all. It serves a game design purpose of limiting the pace of exploration and lending weight to decisions, but we may be able to do that by making use of things like character speed or player time investment instead. Finding value beyond productivity Instead of treating the environment simply as a source of harvestable resources, we could attach a value to in situ resources. Look at how The Sims attaches value to the environment of a room, and consider how that could apply to tradeoffs between consuming a resource and benefiting from it remaining untouched. We could move away from interchangeable or fungible resources. Similar to how players of games like Diablo soon ignore items of common rarity in favor of ones with random benefits, we can attach value to diversity or uniqueness over quantity. Perhaps resources in the fiction of the world are not consumed, but provide benefits when discovered or understood. See resources in Civilization and other 4X games, where their presence is useful but they are not always spent like currency. Assign value to aesthetic expression. Perhaps the player’s labor does not derive its value from harvesting resources, but from curating them or using them in a creative way. Eliminating colonial entitlement Justify the player’s activities by making them a request of local stakeholders, or an active reclamation of a space previously spoiled, or make the resources sapient and explore the complexities of acquiring their consent. Alternately, set the game in an active society, with the player character(s) either part of that society or coming from an underclass, where their actions are not performed with unilateral authority. Contrast the player’s actions against a colonizing or exploitative force, where the player is defending against incursion instead of acting as a settler. This would require thought to avoid an implication of paternalistic oppression, where the player is “protecting” a weaker and subordinate group. Incorporate peers for the player, requiring compromise and communal use of resources. These can be abstract rather than detailed AI agents. Rejecting erasure of the existing space Instead of transforming local resources into more easily-digestible forms, try transforming the player character(s) to more easily exist in this new environment. Explore roles like “host,” “caregiver,” or “custodian” rather than “settler” or “entrepreneur;” make the player responsible for maintaining a space or providing joy to its inhabitants rather than transforming it. Make the “structures” involved in automation less intrusive. Think treehouses rather than buildings with concrete foundations. Exploring sustainability Place a greater mechanical focus on maintaining resource health; for example, instead of penalizing overharvesting by slowing production until the player finds or creates a replacement source, consider prohibiting overharvesting altogether and requiring sustainability to be a proactive practice. In many resource escalation games, renewable non-biomass energy is presented as a high-tech luxury, painting bio and fossil fuels as unavoidable for development. Disrupt this by using low-tech renewable sources like waterwheels and windmills, but don’t ignore the environmental impact of activities like damming water sources. Explore environmentalist approaches to resource use, such as sustainable agriculture, agroforestry, and recycling. Keep in mind the way in which these can become moral luxuries for the privileged when the poor may not be able to afford sustainable sources. Instead of resource escalation allowing for consumption of resources at a higher rate, try focusing on more efficient use of existing resource supplies. At the very least, allow for the prevention of waste due to obsolete equipment, spoilage, or lack of energy storage. Maybe even reject any appearance of zero-sum simulation by making the resources less concrete. Have the player collect information, or inspiration, or something mystical that avoids the problem of environmental exploration entirely. See how Cultist Simulator makes heavy use of lore, relationships, and moods as resources as opposed to physical objects and assets. The Hope This discussion explores the things that I would like to see in this emerging game form. I like many of the existing resource escalation games, but I want to see their successors build on their best aspects while also improving on their shortcomings. If you’re a developer like me, let’s all work to create games that reflect our values while still providing the experiences we seek. And if you’re a player of resource escalation games, especially those in early access or ongoing development, consider compassionately advocating for these moral priorities when you give feedback on the games you love. Show 5 footnotes Factorio gates a lot of things behind research, but research is driven by manufactured resources, not the more typical research-over-time approach seen in strategy games. ↩ Note some issues with how RimWorld handles identity and the dev’s not-great response. ↩ I specifically use “utilize” to mean “make useful,” in the sense that these games take resources that exist in one interconnected system and reduce their value to their usefulness for the player’s purposes. ↩ Which is not to say that there is inherent value in “authenticity” or an ideal state of nature. Some purposes are absolutely good justifications to utilize resources, but not because unused resources are valueless. ↩ On the default difficulty. You can turn off automatic escalation, but the game is designed with the assumption that it is active. ↩ <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2019%2F03%2F19%2Ftoward-a-sustainable-resource-escalation-game%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dtoward-a-sustainable-resource-escalation-game&action_name=Toward+a+Sustainable+Resource+Escalation+Game&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Your Only True Choice – Complicity in Unavoidable Tragedy
Complicity is the most important distinguishing feature of games. Other media still requires your interaction. You choose the order in which to experience a series (broadcast or DVD order of Firefly? publication or chronological order of Narnia?), the way in which you experience a painting or sculpture (from a distance? different angles? different lighting?), or … Continue reading Your Only True Choice – Complicity in Unavoidable Tragedy →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2019%2F02%2F19%2Fyour-only-true-choice-complicity-in-unavoidable-tragedy%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dyour-only-true-choice-complicity-in-unavoidable-tragedy&action_name=Your+Only+True+Choice+%26%238211%3B+Complicity+in+Unavoidable+Tragedy&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Complicity is the most important distinguishing feature of games. Other media still requires your interaction. You choose the order in which to experience a series (broadcast or DVD order of Firefly? publication or chronological order of Narnia?), the way in which you experience a painting or sculpture (from a distance? different angles? different lighting?), or how you experience a play (what cast? what seat? do you read it first? do you watch it staged at all?). Other Perspectives In “Choice, Consequence, and Complicity,” a talk I attended at GDC 2016, designer Alexis Kennedy of Failbetter Games (and now of Weather Factory) defines complicity in games as “the emotional experience you have as you are making a choice.” This is, from my perspective, a side effect of complicity but is not actually complicity itself. In “‘Who Did I Jettison into Space?’ Complicity as a Tool for Narrative Expression in INSIDE and The Swapper,” Monica Evans of the University of Texas at Dallas defines complicity as “the moment in which the player is required to do something they find morally or ethically repugnant in order to continue playing the game.” My usage banishes the repugnance into connotation, but the fact that complicity is required for continued play remains important. Brenda Brathwaite Romero’s 2009 board game “Train” explores real-life complicity within systems by using games as a rhetorical tool, but may also be one of the sparks for discussion of the concept of ludic complicity in games. Building on her work and others’, Miguel Sicart writes in Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay that “player complicity means surrendering to the fact that actions in a game have a moral dimension.” I agree, but consider this a consequence rather than a definition of complicity. Destructoid community member Jinx01 discussed complicity in a very similar way to how I’m using it in a 2013 blog post. However, only in games do your actions involve a complicity with the diegetic1 events of the game. When you choose not to watch an episode of Supernatural, you do not absolve yourself of the injuries the Winchesters experience. There is no way to examine Guernica which makes you responsible for the depicted atrocity. Listening to the 1812 Overture on MP3 rather than live may save on real-world gunpowder but does not inform your relationship to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, fictional or historic. However, when you choose to punch a reporter in the Mass Effect series, your action (with the assistance of the games’ developers) causes an assault on a (fictional) civilian member of the press. You probably feel emotions as a result of this that are related to that complicity: “personal pride” or “embarrassment”, not simply “just satisfaction” or “disappointment.” The experience of consuming this work is different because it requires your active participation: pressing a button to trigger an action, not just turning a page to advance the narration. This responsibility the player bears for the events of the game is what I’m calling complicity. But what about when a game makes you complicit in something that you do not want, where you do not have a choice in the matter? I’ve written before about the tragedy in the ending of Prince of Persia (2008), but the most apropos in-game examination of this is the “Museum Ending” of The Stanley Parable. Created For You Long in Advance The Stanley Parable2 features the titular player character being guided by an unseen Narrator through a physically- and narratively-branching absurdist story, steered by more-or-less blatant binary player choices. In one ending3, Stanley is given a respite from certain death when a meta-Narrator takes over, commenting on the illusion of control the game presents and showing “behind-the-scenes” material, before returning Stanley to the previous deathtrap and entreating: But listen to me. You can still save these two. You can stop the program before they both fail. Press “escape” and press “quit.” There’s no other way to beat this game. As long as you move forward, you’ll be walking someone else’s path. Stop now, and it’ll be your only true choice. Whatever you do, choose it! Don’t let time choose for you! Don’t let time choose for you! And if you don’t quit before the end of her narration, Stanley is killed. This ending frames all other choices in the game as “false,” saying, “When every path you can walk has been created for you long in advance, death becomes meaningless, making life the same. ” In this view, you are complicit in the choices Stanley makes, but you have no agency in them. You are only selecting from a menu of actions not of your own creation… but this, paradoxically, makes you responsible for interacting at all with this broken system. Is the choice to end the game at any time a “true” choice? Is it a choice that you are complicit in, within the “magic circle” that circumscribes the play space, or is it a choice akin to closing a book before the end and imagining that it preserves the fictional world in stasis?4 The Stories Themselves Might Be the Problem What Remains of Edith Finch, by Giant Sparrow, has the player embody Edith, the youngest of a family that suffers from a “curse” that purportedly causes the dramatic death of every member. You explore the now-abandoned and implausibly-architected Finch home, uncovering accounts of these deaths. Each time you find one, you then reenact the final moments of each character. These reenactments are tragic and brutal. Many of them involve children and require you to take action that you know will lead to their deaths. While this is thematically consistent — the game explores concepts of fatalism, death-seeking, and self-defeating self-narratives — it is a traumatic experience for many players. The game arguably avoids becoming exploitative by couching the reenactments in fantasy, but the fact remains that the player must become repeatedly and deliberately complicit in the death of a child and experience what is, on its surface, their ensuing dying fantasy. This is a story in which the player is the villain. In any interpretation, you are repeatedly taking on the role of the cause of the characters’ demise, whether that is a literal curse, a familial disposition toward risk, or just a dangerous framing of the family’s narrative. There is no opportunity to continue experiencing the game’s story without being complicit in death. The fact that the deaths have “already occurred” in the past of the game’s central narrative thread is immaterial, as is the fact that the player, after the first death or two, is sufficiently warned what they’re getting into. These facts don’t change the traumatic experience of embodying and enabling each death. When I played Edith Finch, I found the experience tragic and harrowing but ultimately cathartic; my complicity in death felt worth it given the concepts and aesthetic journey it allowed me to explore. However, this experience is (of course) not universal. Writer and sustainable technologist Aurynn Shaw writes about Edith Finch in her piece “On Forced Complicity in Games.” What Remains of Edith Finch was rated as one of the best games of 2017, but I’m not going to remember the story or the themes or the writing. None of that touched me, because of the alienation of discomfort. All I remember is that discomfort. All I will remember is that discomfort. This topic was proposed and selected by my Muse patrons on Patreon. Melissa Avery-Weir wrote: What Remains of Edith Finch was pretty traumatizing (last time I play a game on stream without at least watching a trailer first!). Can you write about players being stuck doing inevitable (and unchangeable) horrific shit in games? Obviously, I could have stopped playing, but within the game itself, I was stuck performing actions that (agonizingly slowly) led to awful things. If you want to see their full stream of the game, check it out in our Future Proof Plays archives. If you have a topic you want me to write about, consider supporting me there. Chances are, if you create works, you want those works to be read, understood, and retained by others. Traumatic emotional experiences, such as being complicit in the death of a (fictional) child, tend to override memory and perspective. To require a player be complicit in deliberately uncomfortable acts in order to experience your game is to alienate and exclude a player that might otherwise be a prime audience for your work. There will always be (and should always be!) games which challenge the player emotionally and force them to be complicit in tragedy. However, doing so not only gives players a deeply unpleasant experience, but also undermines the retention of that experience by those most affected. The people who most strongly feel their own complicity in the tragedy of the game are those most likely to only remember that unpleasantness instead of the underlying message or story of the work. This is yet another reason why considering choice, agency, and accessibility is vital to the game design process. If Edith Finch had allowed me to skip the reminiscence of the tragic death of children, it would have been less effective for me; that discomfort was acceptable and essential to my appreciation of the work. However, it was actively disruptive to Shaw’s appreciation of the game. Design is always a task of considering a diverse audience and making tradeoffs. Designers must consider how they force their players to be complicit in the events of the game. Because the designer is complicit in however the game affects those who play it. Show 4 footnotes Diegetic: within the game’s fiction or world, as opposed to part of the way that world is translated into a work ↩ I’ve written about The Stanley Parable previously, discussing its paradoxical lack of agency and its unsettling uncertainty. ↩ Arguably the second most “obvious” ending, as it requires doing everything you’re told until you see a large “escape” sign ↩ Spoiler: as I discuss in “Candyland: Game as Critical Lens,” this sort of choice doesn’t count and is often a cop-out. ↩ <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2019%2F02%2F19%2Fyour-only-true-choice-complicity-in-unavoidable-tragedy%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dyour-only-true-choice-complicity-in-unavoidable-tragedy&action_name=Your+Only+True+Choice+%26%238211%3B+Complicity+in+Unavoidable+Tragedy&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Actual Play Podcasts Do Not Portray Actual Play, Actually
Actual play podcasts are not what the name suggests. They're a form of podcast that purportedly serializes a recording of a group playing a tabletop roleplaying game. The listener hears the dice rolls, the out-of-character discussions, and the social interaction that surrounds the in-character story being told at the table. The apparent appeal is the fun of hearing the "actual play" occurring when creating an interesting story. But actual play podcasts are a lie.<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2019%2F01%2F26%2Factual-play-podcasts-do-not-portray-actual-play-actually%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dactual-play-podcasts-do-not-portray-actual-play-actually&action_name=Actual+Play+Podcasts+Do+Not+Portray+Actual+Play%2C+Actually&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Actual play podcasts are not what the name suggests. They’re a form of podcast that purportedly serializes a recording of a group playing a tabletop roleplaying game. The listener hears the dice rolls, the out-of-character discussions, and the social interaction that surrounds the in-character story being told at the table. The apparent appeal is the fun of hearing the “actual play” occurring when creating an interesting story. But actual play podcasts are a lie. Actual Play This topic was proposed and selected by my Muse patrons on Patreon. If you have a topic you want me to write about, consider supporting me there. Roleplaying game systems (tabletop or otherwise) are more complex to examine than other games. I’ve written about their oddnesses over the course of years, but here is a summary1: Unlike most games, what you purchase when you buy a traditional RPG is a ruleset, not a potential narrative. When you buy Arkham Horror or DUSK, you can immediately begin playing without doing much creative work of your own. With RPG systems, on the other hand, one or more players must create characters, settings, and/or conflicts, depending on the game2. Once this “campaign material” has been created (or purchased as a separate supplement), then you have a potential narrative: a set of rules for simulation plus an initial world state (and potential future events). Playing through the campaign concretizes this potential narrative into an actual one. The campaign material is transformed by the rules and the player choices into the actual events that occur in the narrative and can later be breathlessly related to a gracious and patient third party. Actual play podcasts add an additional layer to this matryoshka of potentiality: The actual recorded play session is edited (or deliberately not edited!) to present a specific version of the narrative. This can include everything from removing rules discussions that were vital to the play experience of the players but not deemed necessary for the listener, all the way to going back and rerecording a section with different behavior to better fit the vision of the show3. Notional Play We’ve just started a new campaign of my own actual play podcast, Tabletop Garden. Ego Driver is a postapocalyptic, postcolonial road war using the BESM3 system. Some examples of places where I’ve edited the first episode to deliberately misrepresent how the play occurred: I’ve edited some player narration of their actions to rearrange their speech and make it more dramatic, eliminating prompts for more detail or questions about some aspects of the game situation. In the first combat, we used BESM’s rules for “shock value,” where sufficient damage can stun a character. We applied them inconsistently and it slowed down play, so I’ve stopped using those rules and edited out all but a hint of their presence in the show. I cut out several questions from the players about setting and background information that informed their character motivations because I want to leave those details ambiguous for the listener. If you want to see the end result, check out the first episode of Ego Driver over at Tabletop Garden. Games already involve a chain of fake people, and actual play podcasts add an extra few, including the editor and the listener. They also flavor the whole endeavor with the feeling of performance. A roleplaying game played with the intent to present it to a listener is different than one played “just for fun.” There can’t help but be a pressure to produce something consumable. To do what is interesting to hear rather than what is wise or fun or interesting to play. To ignore rules to avoid them bogging down the story, or to enforce rules just so you don’t get irate responses about your laxness. There are few other artistic forms in which the process of making the final work is immortalized as part of the work. Actual play presents both in-character and out-of-character as essential. Reality television revels in presenting the process of its own creation, but generally doesn’t have an inner narrative; the story of the show is the story of the creation of the show only. Professional wrestling presents a fictional narrative partially improvised live, but it keeps the out-of-character bits blurry through the doctrine of kayfabe4. But actual play podcasts give similar weight to the inner narrative of the game’s characters as they do to the “backstage” process of the players collaborating to construct that narrative. The closest thing I can think of is The Great British Bake Off and similar cooking competition shows, where the viewer both admires the aesthetics of the dishes being cooked and also enjoys the drama of the kitchen process. Artificial Play Actual play podcasts seek to provide listeners with an experience that evokes actual play, not one which documents it. Spectating tabletop roleplaying in life (not on stage) is uncommon, perhaps because it can be unsatisfying to sit passively through such a participatory experience, complete with its pauses for inside jokes and snacks and bathroom breaks. Instead, these podcasts represent their play in a way that provides a hyperreal5 experience, one in which the listener feels like they are listening to a roleplaying game, despite this feeling resulting from the experience being an inaccurate representation of typical home play. This dishonesty may not be intentional on the part of the show creators, but that doesn’t matter. The act of recording a play session, editing it, and presenting it to an audience unavoidably transforms it, affecting both the moment-to-moment actions of the players and the shape of the final product. The lies that are being told varies from show to show. When you listen to The Adventure Zone, you are shown a version of play that is ridiculous and informal yet transcends this mood to be deeply emotional. When you listen to Friends at the Table, you see complex worlds emerging from casual interplay between friends. When you listen to Tabletop Garden, you (hopefully) see rich characters emerging as the result of intentional play practices. The lies told by these shows may be true of some games, some of the time. However, by presenting their curated, edited view of play experience, the shows craft a subtle argument about how roleplaying games are, or should be. The listener is complicit in their own deception, enjoying this manufactured version of play and unavoidably allowing it to shape their future views and play practices. Actual play podcasts do not portray actual play, but an ideal that the creator has chosen to present. Keeping this distinction in mind will help a creator make sure to convey an ideal they embrace, and will help a listener to recognize how this ideal is being presented to them. Show 5 footnotes Throughout this piece, I’ll use the word “players” in a way that includes the possible Game Master, Dungeon Master, Storyteller, etc. ↩ “No-prep” games like Fiasco or Lady Blackbird are weird edge-cases where the setting seems very entangled with the rules, but these still tend to require detailing and/or interpretation that happens before play proper begins. ↩ From the transcript: “They all destroyed the world and then flew away and then that was the ending and we finished recording and then almost like we hung up on the Skype call, and then like a minute later we started texting like ‘That sucked.'” ↩ In which wrestlers pretend, even outside of an event, that they are engaging in honest athletic competition rather than the partially pre-scripted acrobatic performance everyone knows they’re doing ↩ The hyperreal is an imitation of something which does not exist. ↩ <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2019%2F01%2F26%2Factual-play-podcasts-do-not-portray-actual-play-actually%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dactual-play-podcasts-do-not-portray-actual-play-actually&action_name=Actual+Play+Podcasts+Do+Not+Portray+Actual+Play%2C+Actually&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Ludus Novus 030 – Transcendentalism, Gentrification, and the Procedural Rhetoric of Stardew Valley
What does Stardew Valley say about the world with the rules of its simulation, and how does it compare to another Transcendentalist game, Walden, a game? Transcript: Transcript for this episode If you like this episode, check out the other podcasts I’m involved in: Audacious Compassion, The Future Proof Podcast, and Tabletop Garden. The Ludus Novus … Continue reading Ludus Novus 030 – Transcendentalism, Gentrification, and the Procedural Rhetoric of Stardew Valley →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2019%2F01%2F12%2Fludus-novus-030-transcendentalism-gentrification-and-the-procedural-rhetoric-of-stardew-valley%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dludus-novus-030-transcendentalism-gentrification-and-the-procedural-rhetoric-of-stardew-valley&action_name=Ludus+Novus+030+%26%238211%3B+Transcendentalism%2C+Gentrification%2C+and+the+Procedural+Rhetoric+of+Stardew+Valley&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
What does Stardew Valley say about the world with the rules of its simulation, and how does it compare to another Transcendentalist game, Walden, a game? Transcript: Transcript for this episode If you like this episode, check out the other podcasts I’m involved in: Audacious Compassion, The Future Proof Podcast, and Tabletop Garden. The Ludus Novus podcast is supported by my patrons. To help, please visit my Patreon. The theme music is “A Foolish Game (Vox Harmony Adds)” by Snowflake, Admiral Bob, and Sackjo22, available on ccMixter under a ccby3.0 license. REFERENCES Barone, Eric. Stardew Valley. Chucklefish, 22 February 2016. https://stardewvalley.net/ Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. MIT Press, 2010. Brice, Mattie. “My First Year in Stardew Valley.” Alternate Ending, 29 April 2016. http://www.mattiebrice.com/my-first-year-in-stardew-valley/ Fullerton, Tracy et al. Walden: a game. USC Game Innovation Lab, 4 July 2017. https://www.waldengame.com/ La Flèche, Gersande. “The gentleman farmer, labour and land: ecocritical possibilities in Stardew Valley.” Gersande’s Blog, 3 May 2016. https://gersande.com/blog/the-gentleman-farmer-labour-and-land-ecocriticial-possibilities-in-stardew-valley/ Keegan, Brett. “Stardew Valley, Sorge, and Martin Heidegger.” Backyard Philosophy, 27 March 2018. https://backyardphilosophy.com/2018/03/27/stardew-valley-sorge-and-martin-heidegger/ Olson, Dan. “The Stanley Parable, Dark Souls, and Intended Play.” Folding Ideas, 26 July 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHmivGmkjJw Piel, Michael. “The Video Game Based on Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ Will Bring You Closer to Nature.” Motherboard, 25 October 2017. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x4vmz/video-game-based-on-thoreau-walden-will-bring-you-closer-to-nature Schultz, Kathryn. “Pond scum: Henry David Thoreau’s moral myopia.” The New Yorker, 19 October 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/pond-scum Thoreau, Henry D. Walden; or, Life in the woods. Ticknor and Fields, 9 August 1854. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2019%2F01%2F12%2Fludus-novus-030-transcendentalism-gentrification-and-the-procedural-rhetoric-of-stardew-valley%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dludus-novus-030-transcendentalism-gentrification-and-the-procedural-rhetoric-of-stardew-valley&action_name=Ludus+Novus+030+%26%238211%3B+Transcendentalism%2C+Gentrification%2C+and+the+Procedural+Rhetoric+of+Stardew+Valley&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
I’ve started a new podcast! It’s called Tabletop Garden, and it’s an “actual play” show where a rotating cast plays tabletop roleplaying games and talks about them. Tabletop Garden is an actual-play podcast where we collaborate on short, self-contained stories about interesting characters, and we do it with an agenda. Throughout each campaign we discuss … Continue reading Tabletop Garden: New RPG Podcast →
I’ve started a new podcast! It’s called Tabletop Garden, and it’s an “actual play” show where a rotating cast plays tabletop roleplaying games and talks about them. Tabletop Garden is an actual-play podcast where we collaborate on short, self-contained stories about interesting characters, and we do it with an agenda. Throughout each campaign we discuss values, techniques, and how to play with intention. Our first pilot campaign uses Mechanical Oryx by Grant Howitt to tell a tale of looming violence in the solarpunk postapocalypse. During each campaign, episodes will release weekly. Check out the show at tabletop.garden.
Ludus Novus 029 – The Goalless Path of Bernband
What do people actually mean when they say “walking simulator?” Bernband by Tom van den Boogaart doesn’t even seem to have a goal. But then why do you keep playing it? Bernband: https://gamejolt.com/games/bernband/34864 Bernband Remake Twitter: https://twitter.com/bernband Youtube (MP3 below): Transcript: Transcript for this episode If you like this episode, check out the other podcasts … Continue reading Ludus Novus 029 – The Goalless Path of Bernband →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2018%2F09%2F11%2Fludus-novus-029-the-goalless-path-of-bernband%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dludus-novus-029-the-goalless-path-of-bernband&action_name=Ludus+Novus+029+%26%238211%3B+The+Goalless+Path+of+Bernband&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="http://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Thumbnail-300x169.png" alt="" width="300" height="169" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-2444" srcset="https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Thumbnail-300x169.png 300w, https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Thumbnail-768x432.png 768w, https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Thumbnail-800x450.png 800w, https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Thumbnail.png 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />What do people actually mean when they say “walking simulator?” Bernband by Tom van den Boogaart doesn’t even seem to have a goal. But then why do you keep playing it? Bernband: https://gamejolt.com/games/bernband/34864 Bernband Remake Twitter: https://twitter.com/bernband Youtube (MP3 below): Transcript: Transcript for this episode If you like this episode, check out the other podcasts I’m involved in: Audacious Compassion and The Future Proof Podcast The Ludus Novus podcast is supported by my patrons. To help, please visit my Patreon. The theme music is “A Foolish Game (Vox Harmony Adds)” by Snowflake, Admiral Bob, and Sackjo22, available on ccMixter under a ccby3.0 license. REFERENCES Ashe, Pat. “Walking Simulator Simulator.” Feral Vector, 2014. https://soundcloud.com/thepatashe/walking-simulator-simulator (Transcript on The Pat Ashe, 6 July 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20141007075156/http://thepatashe.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/walking-simulator-simulator/ ) Barlow, Sam. Her Story. 2015. http://www.herstorygame.com/ The Fullbright Company. Gone Home. 2013. https://gonehome.game/ Goodwin, Joel. “Screw Your Walking Simulators.” Electron Dance, 16 July 2014. http://www.electrondance.com/screw-your-walking-simulators/ Juul, Jesper. “Without a goal”. In Tanya Krzywinska and Barry Atkins (eds):Videogame/Player/Text. Manchester University Press, 2007. http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/withoutagoal/ Key, Ed and David Kanaga. Proteus. 2013. http://twistedtreegames.com/proteus/ Koster, Raph. A Theory of Fun for Game Design. 2nd ed., O’Reilly Media, 2013. Nygren, Nicklas. Knytt. 2006. https://web.archive.org/web/20170509070555/http://nifflas.ni2.se/?page=Knytt Schell, Jesse. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. 2nd ed., CRC Press, 2015. van den Boogaart, Tom. Bernband. https://gamejolt.com/games/bernband/34864<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2018%2F09%2F11%2Fludus-novus-029-the-goalless-path-of-bernband%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dludus-novus-029-the-goalless-path-of-bernband&action_name=Ludus+Novus+029+%26%238211%3B+The+Goalless+Path+of+Bernband&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Ludus Novus 028: Candyland: Game as Critical Lens
What is a “game?” It only matters in context. When we examine things as games to learn from them, what does that mean? Any useful definition of game used as a critical lens must encompass Soccer, Candy Land, Sim City, Doom, and Gone Home. But Candy Land doesn’t have any player choice. Is it just … Continue reading Ludus Novus 028: Candyland: Game as Critical Lens →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2018%2F09%2F04%2Fludus-novus-028-candyland-game-as-critical-lens%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dludus-novus-028-candyland-game-as-critical-lens&action_name=Ludus+Novus+028%3A+Candyland%3A+Game+as+Critical+Lens&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
What is a “game?” It only matters in context. When we examine things as games to learn from them, what does that mean? Any useful definition of game used as a critical lens must encompass Soccer, Candy Land, Sim City, Doom, and Gone Home. But Candy Land doesn’t have any player choice. Is it just dancing? I’ve tried something new with this episode. I’ve put together a video version, currently hosted on YouTube, with some nonessential visual aids. For now I intend to keep the show audio-first, but having it available via YouTube may make it more accessible and attract new listeners/viewers. If you’re seeing this on my website, the normal audio player is still below. I’ve also put together a text transcript for the episode: Transcript for this episode If you like this episode, check out the other podcasts I’m involved in: Audacious Compassion and The Future Proof Podcast The Ludus Novus podcast is supported by my patrons. To help, please visit my Patreon. The theme music is “A Foolish Game (Vox Harmony Adds)” by Snowflake, Admiral Bob, and Sackjo22, available on ccMixter under a ccby3.0 license.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2018%2F09%2F04%2Fludus-novus-028-candyland-game-as-critical-lens%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dludus-novus-028-candyland-game-as-critical-lens&action_name=Ludus+Novus+028%3A+Candyland%3A+Game+as+Critical+Lens&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
I love the work that Kate Compton and others have done with generative/procedural art. One thing I’ve missed, though, is the ability to just link to a quickly-made thing. Specifically, I’ve done things like specify the naming structure of alien species for a roleplaying game using Kate’s tool Tracery, but there’s no easy way I’ve … Continue reading Tracery Live Released →
I love the work that Kate Compton and others have done with generative/procedural art. One thing I’ve missed, though, is the ability to just link to a quickly-made thing. Specifically, I’ve done things like specify the naming structure of alien species for a roleplaying game using Kate’s tool Tracery, but there’s no easy way I’ve found to just link to an arbitrary Tracery grammar without spinning up a server or making a Twitter bot or something similar. So I made one. Tracery Live is an open-source Tracery front-end that stores your JSON source code in a query string, so that you can load grammars without any back-end storage needed. It supports HTML and various other supportive techs. You can paste in an arbitrary Tracery grammar or edit it directly on the page. Here’s Tracery’s Night Vale example for a sample of a lengthier end result. This really is, like many software projects, a bunch of techs slapped together: George Buckingham’s Node version of Compton’s Tracery library, Nicholas Jitkoff’s itty.bitty.site approach using Nathan Rugg’s JS implementation of the LZMA compression algorithm, and the is.gd URL shortener, glued together with the unnecessarily-bulky-for-this-purpose Ember.js framework and hosted on GitHub Pages. My thanks to everyone involved. Check out Tracery Live on GitHub Pages. If you have any feature requests or bug reports, let me know in the GitHub issues or in the comments.
At Future Proof Games, we just released a tabletop/live-action roleplaying game called Rosette Diceless. For those who have followed me for a while, this is a distant descendant of my 2009 beta release, LORE. We’ve been playtesting it for a year or two, and we’re looking forward to hearing what other folks use it for. … Continue reading Rosette Diceless Released →
At Future Proof Games, we just released a tabletop/live-action roleplaying game called Rosette Diceless. For those who have followed me for a while, this is a distant descendant of my 2009 beta release, LORE. We’ve been playtesting it for a year or two, and we’re looking forward to hearing what other folks use it for. As with the rest of Rosette, Rosette Diceless has an agenda: it is dedicated to a consensus-based, story-first, and improvisational approach. We believe that this creates the best social environment for creating and expressing stories that incorporate everyone’s creativity. You can pick up a digital copy of Rosette Diceless on itch.io, Kindle, or DriveThruRPG. We’ll have a paperback print-on-demand version on DTRPG soon; if you get the digital version before then, send us a proof of purchase to info@futureproofgames.com and you can pick up the print-on-demand at the bundle price. Check out Rosette Diceless on its website!
“The Majesty of Colors” Remastered and Released
In 2008, I made a game called “(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors.” It got played millions of times, won awards, and is still recognized by many people I run across randomly. In 2016, in part as a response to the impending death of Adobe Flash, we at Future Proof Games announced … Continue reading “The Majesty of Colors” Remastered and Released →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2018%2F02%2F28%2Fthe-majesty-of-colors-remastered-and-released%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dthe-majesty-of-colors-remastered-and-released&action_name=%26%238220%3BThe+Majesty+of+Colors%26%238221%3B+Remastered+and+Released&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
In 2008, I made a game called “(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors.” It got played millions of times, won awards, and is still recognized by many people I run across randomly. In 2016, in part as a response to the impending death of Adobe Flash, we at Future Proof Games announced “The Majesty of Colors Remastered”, a rebuild of the original game in Unity with enhancements. We estimated that it would take a few months. Today, two years later, the game is finally released on five platforms: iPhone/iPad, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux. Every game release is scary for a different reason. One of the reasons I’m nervous about this one is that “The Majesty of Colors” is real short, and we’re asking money for it. Even on mobile. In the end, our estimate wasn’t far off; it took the two of us a few person-months of actual work, but that was spread over two years of working at day jobs. Even with the low price we’re asking, it will still take tens of thousands of sales to “break even,” making the game pay for itself. It’ll take even more to make a profit, supporting more steady work on future games and maybe even justifying further enhancements like extra interactions or (no promises!) more story. We’re tentatively buoyed by the response to the game we’ve gotten so far today. Folks are excited, and we’ve gotten some press interest and are hopeful for more. But “The Majesty of Colors” is a work very close to my heart, and I’m still afraid that its time has entirely passed. We’ll see. I’ve written this in various places over the last few days: thank you for dreaming with us.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2018%2F02%2F28%2Fthe-majesty-of-colors-remastered-and-released%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dthe-majesty-of-colors-remastered-and-released&action_name=%26%238220%3BThe+Majesty+of+Colors%26%238221%3B+Remastered+and+Released&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Ludus Novus 027: Imposition of Order Results in Escalation of Disorder
In this episode of the Ludus Novus podcast: Prey 2017. The lie of a power fantasy is that power over others is something you deserve. Prey is a consequence fantasy: to take agency, you must incur risk. To escape a cage of lies, you have to open the door onto a world of new danger. … Continue reading Ludus Novus 027: Imposition of Order Results in Escalation of Disorder →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2017%2F06%2F07%2Fludus-novus-027-imposition-of-order-results-in-escalation-of-disorder%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dludus-novus-027-imposition-of-order-results-in-escalation-of-disorder&action_name=Ludus+Novus+027%3A+Imposition+of+Order+Results+in+Escalation+of+Disorder&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
In this episode of the Ludus Novus podcast: Prey 2017. The lie of a power fantasy is that power over others is something you deserve. Prey is a consequence fantasy: to take agency, you must incur risk. To escape a cage of lies, you have to open the door onto a world of new danger. The Ludus Novus podcast is supported by my patrons. To help, please visit my Patreon. The theme music is “A Foolish Game (Vox Harmony Adds)” by Snowflake, Admiral Bob, and Sackjo22, available on ccMixter under a ccby3.0 license.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2017%2F06%2F07%2Fludus-novus-027-imposition-of-order-results-in-escalation-of-disorder%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dludus-novus-027-imposition-of-order-results-in-escalation-of-disorder&action_name=Ludus+Novus+027%3A+Imposition+of+Order+Results+in+Escalation+of+Disorder&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Richard Spencer — a known racist and genocide advocate — got punched on video and publicly humiliated and it was funny and satisfying to watch. It was an effective way to weaken his public platform, both in an immediate sense (it silenced him mid-sentence) and in a long-term sense (he will always be the person … Continue reading Punching Nazis Is a Sacred Act →
Richard Spencer — a known racist and genocide advocate — got punched on video and publicly humiliated and it was funny and satisfying to watch. It was an effective way to weaken his public platform, both in an immediate sense (it silenced him mid-sentence) and in a long-term sense (he will always be the person with silly music behind videos of him being hurt). This has started a wave of public speech alternately condemning the specific act or advocating for eagerly and proactively punching more Nazis. While there’s certainly been a range of viewpoints in this discussion, two common ways these ethics are being framed are1: “violence as political action is never acceptable” and “punching Nazis is always great so let’s do more of it.” I disagree with both of these ideas. Violence is sometimes justified and even necessary. But it is a serious, severe, and indeed sacred act. When you commit violence in the defense of virtue, you are causing a feeling person pain, potentially permanently injuring or killing them, and you are taking the poison of that violence into yourself. It’s a transformative act, a sacrifice, and to take it lightly is not only reckless: it is sacrilege that minimizes that sacrifice. Violence is Justifiable If anyone deserves to be hit, Spencer and his ilk do: he is a vocal advocate for perspectives and policies that will hurt and kill people and is very good at framing his views in a way that is innocuous to the most ignorant and gives others plausible deniability to look the other way. Worse, this seems to be working. White supremacy seems to be openly growing. From a utilitarian perspective, causing Spencer some pain in exchange for ending his advocacy is a good trade-off. I’ve long been a pacifist. I despise violence as a tactic. Still, I recognize that violence is often an effective way to directly prevent worse violence in an actively violent situation. An fact that is more uncomfortable to me is that, in a situation where there is no clear ethical approach, inaction serves to reinforce the status quo and the existing vectors of power. If you don’t confront the Nazis, they grow in power. We’ve dismissed white supremacists as fringe wackos for decades and now they’re in the White House.2 How, then, do I act in alignment with my values of pacifism and of justice? How do I form my praxis, my system of behavior by which I manifest my morals? I’m thinking hard about something that my partner Melissa tweeted out earlier: “at what point is it okay for killing to start?” It’s very well to encourage people to find Nazis and punch them. And if punching is effective, surely murder is more effective. I’m not pulling a slippery slope fallacy3 here: I am saying that there is some level of egregiousness that justifies hurting people and that picking that point is very, very important and more difficult than the Nazi-punching discourse is implying. Kelsey Piper is someone whose words and thoughts I hold in great respect. She writes very insightfully on difficult moral problems and shows patience and empathy toward some often-hateful messages. She wrote on a similar topic just after the elections in November, specifically on the antifa “make Nazis scared” rhetoric of the time. She wrote “[the argument] ‘violence against fascists is always justified’ is horrifying and terrible, especially since in practice it will inevitably shake out to ‘violence against people who have been labeled fascists is always justified.'” This is so important. Violence is justified to prevent worse violence, but you must be pretty damn sure of two things: that there is actually risk of violence and that your violence will stop it. Finding the Nazis to Punch I watched Gamergate happen. I escaped any direct harm: I was obscure and white and male-passing and straight-passing enough that I didn’t become a target in the heights of its fury. But I watched it closely starting at its beginning in August 2014 and did what I thought I could4 to advocate for its victims. One thing I saw during that is how eagerly people, with righteous fury, will believe any nonsense that fits their worldview and offers them a cathartic target. We see a nebulous haze of unreliability around any current event these days. For example, most facts about the Women’s March on Washington in late January are clear: it happened, it was enormous, it was impressively intersectional and well-organized. Still, there have been occasional images of older protests conflated with recent ones or confusion over who is collecting data on attendees and for what purpose. These issues are typically cleared up within hours and can be identified with a bit of media literacy. But in the moment it can be hard to spot a mistake or a lie. If we establish a praxis by which Nazi-punching is encouraged outside of a sacred context, we leave ourselves open to striking out at any shout of “Nazi!” At the recent Berkeley protests, a Muslim was reportedly attacked with the simple excuse of “You look like a Nazi.” Could the assault be the act of a fascist sympathizer trying to paint activists as violent?5 Or the act of someone who just wanted to hurt someone and was using the protest as an excuse? Certainly. But regardless of whether this Berkeley punching was an earnest anti-fascist act, it was an attack against an undeserving target, enabled by an atmosphere that encourages punching “Nazis” early and often. Also note that, as usual, it is the more marginalized people in society that tend to suffer the effects of violence. “Punch all Nazis” is a dangerous and hurtful rallying cry. “Punch certain Nazis” is far better. Some people labelled as Nazis simply aren’t Nazis. Others are radicalized youths who, when cared for properly, will look back on their current perspectives with horror.6 Others are powerless or disorganized enough that hitting them would be a waste of time. Given a limited amount of fists, time, and public acceptance, choose your targets well. The risk here isn’t something silly like “perpetuating the cycle of violence.” Any violence committed by Nazis and other oppressors is their own responsibility. The risk is of punching someone innocent (someone who isn’t a Nazi) or someone reachable (someone who can feasibly be changed and not just fought). We must take care in how we choose our targets. We can never be sure that we are punching the right people, and that ethical struggle is good. Questioning our choices is what makes us moral beings. And Punching Them Properly A popular joke after the Spencer punching had a setup like, “Before you punch a Nazi, think of the harm you’re doing,” then included excerpts from guides like this one on proper punching form. I’ve taken martial arts; there’s more to punching than you can learn from that article, not to mention a single isolated image from it. Yes, yes, it’s a joke.7 But not only can punching hurt your wrist, it can also have a number of other consequences. Is your goal to kill, to maim, or to hurt? Better punch someone in the way that corresponds with your intention. After the punch, what will you do? Will you need to escape the other Nazis before they beat you to death? Do you plan to flee any nearby police, or are you willing to go to jail in exchange for punching a Nazi? Are you attacking in a way that will actually make a difference, or are you taking on extreme risk for little advantage? The person who attacked Spencer was likely a member of an antifa group. Anti-fascist organizations meet, train, and learn together. They pick their battles and, hopefully, act deliberately and with purpose. Even the people who practiced civil disobedience in the 60’s US civil rights movement underwent a gauntlet of training that seems almost paramilitary in rigor. Violence in defense of justice is not as simple as spotting a Nazi and throwing a punch. Note, especially, that Spencer was punched twice that day. The first one didn’t take. Wasn’t caught on video. Those who punch Nazis must be prepared to hit a person, evade consequences, stalk them until the right moment, punch them again, harder, flee, and evade the inevitable wave of Nazi sympathizers and legitimate law enforcement trying to track them down, identify them, and punish them for their violence. When I hear the argument that torture should be legal because it could save thousands of lives, my usual response is “then you should be willing to go to jail for torture if it saves thousands.” It’s not so simple in this case; the US justice system is profoundly white-supremacist and exists mostly to maintain the status quo. Nazi-punchers have little hope for a fair trial or a reasonable punishment. Still, in general: if it is worth committing violence, it is worth accepting the cost of that violence. Even if you escape death, injury, or imprisonment, committing deliberate violence will take a toll on you. You risk becoming inured to violence, ignoring the fraught and dangerous nature of it; or you risk guilt, finding difficulty accepting your actions and moving on. For your emotional health, you must measure how much violence you can commit before you must recover from it. Sanctity When hateful people like Spencer are hurt, the impulse to crow and celebrate is entirely understandable. Those feelings of elation and satisfaction are valid and important. However, it is a mistake to channel those feelings into a public delight in pain or an ongoing environment that encourages physical violence as the first or the best response to all oppression. Sometimes violence is the best response; sometimes it’s not. To call for caution is not to condone Naziism. But caution has limits. Violence in defense of life and peace and joy is sacred. It is risky. It is extreme. It hurts people. It takes a toll on the one who commits violence. It should never be taken lightly. It should never be done recklessly. It should be done when it furthers a society with less violence, more joy, and justice for everyone. Punching Nazis is a sacred act. Violence is justifiable. But find the right Nazis to punch, if they are available, and make sure you punch them properly. Show 7 footnotes along with disingenuous arguments that do things like evoke Martin Luther King without understanding his work or proposing elaborate counterfactuals ↩ Specifically Steve Bannon, but there are others. ↩ It’s an error in reasoning to believe that a small step in a direction necessarily leads to going all the way down that path. More on Wikipedia. ↩ Probably not as much as I actually could have. ↩ Cries of “false flag” operations should be taken as a warning sign of possible conspiratorial fantasies, although of course such operations do occur. ↩ I’m not saying “boo hoo poor young Nazis” here. I’m saying that an environment of justice and care, plus a lot of education from people with privilege and understanding, can pull people back from being advocates for atrocity. See Sarah Nyberg’s harrowing “I Was a Teenage Edgelord” (CW: hate speech, sexual abuse, et al) for more insight. ↩ It’s never just a joke. ↩
“Headless Swarm” has landed. It’s the first season of paid story for Exploit: Zero Day, our cyberthriller puzzle game about social justice hacktivism. The game’s still in alpha1 but buying “Headless Swarm” will get you immediate access to the game, the free season of story “Black Echoes,” and the first couple of jobs in the … Continue reading Headless Swarm Released →
“Headless Swarm” has landed. It’s the first season of paid story for Exploit: Zero Day, our cyberthriller puzzle game about social justice hacktivism. The game’s still in alpha1 but buying “Headless Swarm” will get you immediate access to the game, the free season of story “Black Echoes,” and the first couple of jobs in the new season. Our living story approach to plot in Exploit: Zero Day means that we release story gradually over time during the first run of a season. It means that you get to play story sooner and lets us adapt our approach as we see how story is received. “Headless Swarm” will be nine jobs in total, released over the coming months and all included in the single purchase. This storyline is pretty cool, I think! It focuses around a real, scary hacking technique and explores the growing ubiquity of drones, the effect cyberintrusion and hacktivism can have on society, and how corporations use the fear of cyberattack to collect power. I’m also proud of the new characters and organizations we’ve written: Kilroy-sama is weird and silly, OnyxHorde feels like a good balance between sinister and contemptible, and Shay Oakes legit creeps me out. I hope players enjoy it, too. Check out “Headless Swarm” here! Show 1 footnote With free access given periodically through our newsletter. ↩
Exploit: Zero Day – Headless Swarm Landing December 1
For years I’ve been working at Future Proof Games with my partner Melissa on Exploit: Zero Day, a cyberthriller with living story where you roleplay as a hacktivist by making and solving puzzles that represent computer systems. It’s been in closed alpha testing for a while, but on December 1, 2016 we’ll be releasing our … Continue reading Exploit: Zero Day – Headless Swarm Landing December 1 →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2016%2F11%2F22%2Fexploit-zero-day-headless-swarm-landing-december-1%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dexploit-zero-day-headless-swarm-landing-december-1&action_name=Exploit%3A+Zero+Day+%26%238211%3B+Headless+Swarm+Landing+December+1&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
For years I’ve been working at Future Proof Games with my partner Melissa on Exploit: Zero Day, a cyberthriller with living story where you roleplay as a hacktivist by making and solving puzzles that represent computer systems. It’s been in closed alpha testing for a while, but on December 1, 2016 we’ll be releasing our first season of paid story: “Headless Swarm.” You can read more about the release and the game on our announcement blog post, but here I’ll just say that I really hope people check the game out and spread the word about the release. Even if you don’t want to buy the season right now, please sign up for the newsletter and you can get free alpha access when the season comes out. Make some puzzles, play the free story, and let us know what you think. And if you like it, consider picking up “Headless Swarm!” With everything going on in the world right now, both Melissa and I want to feel like we’re making a difference. We’re trying to do that in a bunch of different ways but one of them is with Exploit: Zero Day. We want this game to be a way to explore difficult moral topics and modern technological ethics and encourage players to think hard about them, especially if they’ve never done so before. The more people hear about the game, the more successful we can be at that. Please let your friends know about the game! If you’re press or a streamer, please reach out to us for free media keys on distribute().<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2016%2F11%2F22%2Fexploit-zero-day-headless-swarm-landing-december-1%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dexploit-zero-day-headless-swarm-landing-december-1&action_name=Exploit%3A+Zero+Day+%26%238211%3B+Headless+Swarm+Landing+December+1&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
In this episode of the Ludus Novus podcast, I discuss the election and GamerGate and how we can make a difference with games. I start with an excerpt from Austin Walker’s recent, amazing piece “A Note on Trump, Waypoint, and Why We Play.” I move on to discuss mirror neurons, Gone Home, my presumptuous racial … Continue reading Ludus Novus 026: Reflection →
In this episode of the Ludus Novus podcast, I discuss the election and GamerGate and how we can make a difference with games. I start with an excerpt from Austin Walker’s recent, amazing piece “A Note on Trump, Waypoint, and Why We Play.” I move on to discuss mirror neurons, Gone Home, my presumptuous racial awareness thanks to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, my plans to survive violent abuse, and the power of games to promote compassion. The Ludus Novus podcast is supported by my patrons. To help, please visit my Patreon. The theme music is “A Foolish Game (Vox Harmony Adds)” by Snowflake, Admiral Bob, and Sackjo22, available on ccMixter under a ccby3.0 license.
It’s the sign of a good conference if you’re affected emotionally, but I generally prefer not to end up in tears. I recently attended Sex Down South, a sex and sexuality conference in Atlanta. It’s a great event featuring sex educators and layfolk discussing sex, advocacy, and relationships in an array of lectures, panels, and … Continue reading Breaking Down at Sex Down South →
It’s the sign of a good conference if you’re affected emotionally, but I generally prefer not to end up in tears. I recently attended Sex Down South, a sex and sexuality conference in Atlanta. It’s a great event featuring sex educators and layfolk discussing sex, advocacy, and relationships in an array of lectures, panels, and workshops. One of the things I love about it is that it explicitly prioritizes the experiences of people of color and queer folk: perspectives that are often overlooked in discussions about sex. This year’s theme was “The Politics of Pleasure,” and most talks explored that in some way: the idea that how we choose our partners is political, the difficulty of approaching consent around trauma survivors or when exploring complicated kinks, or the process of effective advocacy for healthier sexuality. It was heavy stuff, and by early in the third and final day I was socially exhausted. Stretched Thin I’m pretty introverted, so conferences inherently take a toll beyond the normal long days and lack of sleep involved. Additionally, I try to adhere to the concept of “take space/make space,”1 where people who are naturally quiet should try to make themselves heard and people who tend to talk a lot should pull back a bit and give room for others to speak. I was always the kid with the hand up in class and if I follow my instincts I can easily dominate a discussion without meaning to. Because of that I was working very hard to pay attention to how much social space I was taking up… to the degree that it was exacerbating my natural social anxiety. On top of that exhaustion, I began experiencing a sort of impostor syndrome. I’m a genderqueer, transgender, non-binary person, and at the conference I was quite visibly so, wearing facial hair and mostly feminine clothes. Still, though, I had a disturbing and unsettling feeling of being “not queer enough.” Several years ago I identified as genderqueer but didn’t claim the label “transgender.” I didn’t really experience body dysphoria and wasn’t very involved in my local trans community, so I thought that calling myself that would be somehow appropriating the identity from “more worthy” people. When I mentioned this to a trans guy I had befriended at a conference, he just said “Huh. That’s a pretty narrow definition of ‘trans’ you’re using.” I realized that I wouldn’t hold someone else in the same situation to the same standards, and so I became willing to consider myself transgender. Being in a talk with people describing their experiences feeling unsafe as trans folk or feeling unable to be out in public as themselves or having difficulty with their partners reading them authentically began to take a toll. I felt very privileged: my partners are supportive, I’m read as masculine so people don’t really mess with me, I live in a neighborhood where I can walk to dinner at night in a skirt and makeup and not feel unsafe, and the fact that I’m white and well-educated gives me additional comfort that a lot of queer folks don’t have. As a result, I didn’t think I deserved the pain I was feeling. This wasn’t something wrong with the conference, its organizers, or the speakers. It was something I was doing to myself: simultaneously feeling like I was about to take up too much space and feeling like I wasn’t good enough to contribute. I became visibly distraught to the point that people asked me what was wrong. I finally retreated to the “healing space” provided by the conference and cried in a corner. Good Enough My mistake that led to my breakdown was confusing compassion and charity with martyrdom. Recognizing the ways in which I have it easy is great: it gives me perspective and highlights areas where I might be unfamiliar with the struggles folks face. However, the privilege I carry doesn’t make my own pain any less valid, nor does it mean I don’t deserve the same kindness I try to extend to others. “Take space/make space” isn’t a taxonomy. There aren’t “people who should take space” and “people who should make space.” Instead, everyone should take as much space as they need (whether in a discussion or in life at large) and those who have enough should make space for those who don’t. By focusing so strongly on suppressing myself and wondering if I was “queer enough” to deserve a seat at the table, I was depriving myself of some of the benefit I could have gained and I was failing to give others the faith that they would take up enough space on their own. After collecting myself, I gave myself permission to be a bit less considerate. I paid attention to how much space I was taking, but I prioritized presenting myself authentically. And I assured myself: I am good enough. And I deserve to exist as me. Have you had a similar experience of feeling inadequate or trying to be so generous that you hurt yourself in the process? Please share in the comments, if you feel willing and able. Show 1 footnote This concept is also commonly called “step up, step back.” “Take space/make space” is a better wording in a few ways. I haven’t been able to find a good source of either phrasing. ↩
Why is no one talking about Picross 3D: Round 2? To put it another way, what can I say about Picross 3D: Round 2? It is an ideal game. It’s not perfect; I could list flaws like the error-prone controls if I were ever inclined to write a review. But as someone who likes to … Continue reading Invisible Design in Picross 3D: Round 2 →
Why is no one talking about Picross 3D: Round 2? To put it another way, what can I say about Picross 3D: Round 2? It is an ideal game. It’s not perfect; I could list flaws like the error-prone controls if I were ever inclined to write a review. But as someone who likes to write about games as works of art and craft, it’s almost too ideal to grasp. Like the smooth carved-wood toys you produce when solving puzzles in the game, there are no hard corners or rough spots to get a rhetorical grip on. The game just follows. It follows from its ruleset and its heritage and the decisions made in its design are all either necessary or arbitrary. The decisions are hard to even notice and games like these receive less attention in the critical space due to this invisible design. Necessary Decisions P3DR2 is the latest in over 10 Picross games for Nintendo systems: an implementation of the well-established nonogram puzzle type mostly for portable devices. It uses a modification of the standard nonogram rules: it’s on a 3D instead of 2D grid, it uses two colors, and instead of listing the exact groupings and order of color in each row it just lists the total number of blocks of each color and whether they are in one, two, or many groups. These are all incremental changes, made to enable the experience required for the game. Consider the groupings. While 10×10 or larger grids are common in 2D Picross games, the foreshortening required for 3D makes a 10-block cube the near maximum size that still allows accurate selection of blocks with a stylus. However, a 10×10 puzzle feels easy in standard Picross; 20×20 puzzles or larger are the norm for advanced levels of 2D games. To make the smaller puzzle size challenging, information needed to be removed. The simpler row labeling is necessary for the smaller puzzle size, which is necessary due to the realities of 3D projection. There’s a division in nonogram games: what do you do when the player makes a mistake? Some games, such as Pokémon Picross, leave the mistake on the board and let you realize your error later when numbers don’t match up. P3DR2 takes the other approach; as soon as you mark a block (orange, blue, or empty) incorrectly, you are told it’s wrong and receive a “strike” which reduces your score at the end of the level. This also follows from the game’s initial design: the process of tracking down a past mistake is onerous enough in 2D that I usually just restart the level. It would be even worse in 3D, where you can rarely see the whole puzzle at once. Additionally, P3DR2 entirely removes blocks that are marked as empty, and restoring ones removed by mistake would add a new, complicated user interface layer that would only actually be relevant when the player messes up. Using the strike approach instead simplifies the interface and avoids confusing backtracking. One design decision in the game is confusing at first glance. In a game series called Picross 3D, in which 3D reasoning is important, on a game device with a 3D screen, why is the puzzle not displayed on the 3D screen? Simple: for whatever reason1, the touch-sensitive screen is not 3D. The designers had to choose between the visual flash of working on the puzzle in 3D and the ease-of-use of selecting blocks with a stylus rather than some awkward directional-pad setup. They chose comfort over style, settling for sliding the puzzle up onto the 3D screen when completed as a sort of reward. What seems an odd choice emerges naturally from the constraints inherent in the game and its platform. Arbitrary Decisions Other decisions in P3DR2 seem much less automatic. Adding an aesthetic layer on top of the bare rules is common for puzzle games: in this game, the menus have a backdrop of some sort of coffee shop populated by the wooden toys that appear when you solve puzzles. You select puzzles from scrapbooks on the shelves of the shop which gradually become filled with instant photos of the toys. The intellectual, relaxed tone of the environment matches the cerebral feeling of solving puzzles, but one could just as easily set the game in a woodcarving workshop or art gallery. In fact, the game’s predecessor Picross 3D lacked such a menu metaphor, just setting the game in abstract menus. The aesthetics chosen for P3DR2 are appropriate but not particularly notable. They are inoffensive, attractive, and ultimately irrelevant. One could imagine a more inspired or idiosyncratic choice, letting the game explore some other theme or genre.2 But, ultimately, there’s no reason to do so. This scenery is fine. The game also assigns different roles to the different colors of blocks. Blue blocks become solid cubes in the final toy, while orange blocks become differently-shaped pieces: spheres, curves, angles, or posts. Together these compose each more complex shape for the final toy. While this is a clever distinction and continues the series’s tradition of making each puzzle result in a (sometimes) surprising piece of art, it’s also an arbitrary choice. One could just have easily made the two colors represent different materials in the final piece, or represent light and dark or warm and cold colors, or any number of other things. This decision is perfectly good, but it’s neither inspired nor surprising. Invisible Design Why do we not see many thinkpieces exploring the design of Picross 3D: Round 2, a game from the wildly popular developer HAL Laboratory and superstar publisher Nintendo? Why is broad critical discussion mostly restricted to adventure puzzle games like The Witness while fabulous works like Snakebird and Stephen’s Sausage Roll seem virtually ignored? Why is it so hard for me to write about Picross 3D: Round 2? There was a game studies debate, long ago, between academics who supported “ludology” and those who supported “narratology.” Ludologists said that aesthetics may provide a welcoming introduction to a game, but what is really important are the rules and the experience of playing. Narratologists said that games are really just a way to explore a story, and the rules exist only to serve that end. Of course the consensus settled out in a middle ground where both perspectives are interesting. Still, our discussions about games are flavored by these perspectives: we like talking about the novel experiences a game gives us and the interesting stories the game enables. Industrial design is a discipline that was, until recently, entirely ignored by society at large. Until the arrival of things like the film Helvetica, the rise of Apple fandom, and the podcast 99% Invisible, we didn’t think about the fact that someone spent hours and hours designing the chairs we sit in (and many folks still don’t think about it). Chairs are functional. Their design aspects are either necessary (they must be built in such a way that they support weight) or they are arbitrary (they should look nice but seldom make a loud artistic statement outside the most avant-garde design studios). I probably play P3DR2 more than any other game right now, and have for weeks. My 3DS often sits in my bathroom, and I try to stay well-hydrated. Many nights recently have ended with me on my couch, spending a far-too-late half-hour finishing just one more puzzle. And yet the only ludological hook I can think of is a small discussion of why the game divides group counts into “one,” “two,” and “many.” The only narratological story I can tell is of the unsettling sight of the inside of Gulliver’s skull during a multi-piece construction puzzle. This is a functional game. It does what it sets out to do and it does it exceedingly well. It is lovely and well-polished and near-seamless and that should be enough to have people talking about it. But what would they say? This article was made possible in part through the Patreon donation program. To support my work, sign up for my Patreon and help me continue producing writing like this. Show 2 footnotes Likely related to cost. ↩ See, for example, our game Exploit: Zero Day, which makes each puzzle into a computer system you’re hacking into in service of a cyberthriller storyline. ↩ <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2016%2F10%2F22%2Finvisible-design-in-picross-3d-round-2%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dinvisible-design-in-picross-3d-round-2&action_name=Invisible+Design+in+Picross+3D%3A+Round+2&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Big news! As part of Future Proof Games, I’m remastering my classic Flash art game “The Majesty of Colors” for modern technologies. Instead of Flash, the game will be available natively for Windows, OSX, Linux, iOS, and Android. We’re polishing some rough edges but otherwise staying true to the original. This feels very odd! “(I … Continue reading “The Majesty of Colors” Remastered →
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="http://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Majesty-Greenlight-Promo-300x300.png" alt="Majesty Greenlight Promo" width="300" height="300" class="alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-2238" srcset="https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Majesty-Greenlight-Promo-300x300.png 300w, https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Majesty-Greenlight-Promo-450x450.png 450w, https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Majesty-Greenlight-Promo.png 512w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Big news! As part of Future Proof Games, I’m remastering my classic Flash art game “The Majesty of Colors” for modern technologies. Instead of Flash, the game will be available natively for Windows, OSX, Linux, iOS, and Android. We’re polishing some rough edges but otherwise staying true to the original. This feels very odd! “(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors” is one of the first games I made that got any attention and remains one of my most-recognized games. It can be a bit frustrating sometimes that a game I made almost eight years ago is more familiar to folks than my recent work, but the truth is that “Majesty” is one of my favorite projects I’ve worked on, along with Looming, Ossuary, and Exploit: Zero Day. Out of all my games that are becoming inaccessible due to the fading of Adobe Flash, “Majesty” is the one I most want to preserve. I’m hoping that there’s an audience for weird little art games in the modern gaming world, especially on Steam. If you think there is, please vote for us on Steam Greenlight. Otherwise, you can see the trailer and get more information on the official website of “The Majesty of Colors”. Let me know if you have any questions!<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2016%2F08%2F25%2Fthe-majesty-of-colors-remastered%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dthe-majesty-of-colors-remastered&action_name=%26%238220%3BThe+Majesty+of+Colors%26%238221%3B+Remastered&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Strange Symmetra: Accretive Design in Overwatch
Symmetra is the most strangely-designed character in Blizzard’s Overwatch. In a game where most heroes’ roles can be summed up in a few words (“fast flanker,” “mobile area-denial tank,” “AOE healer,” “slowing defender”) and their story concepts naturally arise from their roles (“time-traveling jet pilot,” “leaping electric gorilla,” “portable DJ,” “cute ice Satan”1), Symmetra makes … Continue reading Strange Symmetra: Accretive Design in Overwatch →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2016%2F08%2F04%2Fstrange-symmetra-accretive-design-in-overwatch%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dstrange-symmetra-accretive-design-in-overwatch&action_name=Strange+Symmetra%3A+Accretive+Design+in+Overwatch&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Symmetra is the most strangely-designed character in Blizzard’s Overwatch. In a game where most heroes’ roles can be summed up in a few words (“fast flanker,” “mobile area-denial tank,” “AOE healer,” “slowing defender”) and their story concepts naturally arise from their roles (“time-traveling jet pilot,” “leaping electric gorilla,” “portable DJ,” “cute ice Satan”1), Symmetra makes little sense. She builds many tiny sentries, gives minor shields to allies, builds teleporters, and can attack with either a short-range cumulative auto-aim beam or a slow-moving death orb. This is explained by her being a combination architect and sci-fi construction worker, shaping solid forms out of light. She is the only character with “photonic” technology, and it is not explained how being able to project physical holograms also lets you bend space and time to craft a teleportation portal. I have no special insight into the Overwatch design process, but I can speculate with some confidence about how it proceeded. Symmetra (and indeed all the heroes) were not designed from the ground up. They were assembled using an accretive process, where abilities were assembled piecemeal and then unified with a story-based concept. How to Build a Roster Overwatch‘s design pedigree is two parts Team Fortress and one part DOTA. The concept of a first-person shooter where classes perform specific roles comes from TF, but its classes lack character and are a bit too mechanically similar2. Team Fortress 2 makes the characters distinct in appearance and personality, but they all play similarly enough with the exception of the specialist classes (Engineer, Medic, and Spy). As TF2 developed, new weapons were released that allow a wide range of customization of classes and, in some cases, complete overhauls of class roles3. This customization increased play diversity while further blurring the roles of the characters. Other games that Overwatch borrows concepts and abilities from include the Borderlands and Left 4 Dead series, Diablo II and the games it inspired, recent Call of Duty games, and Titanfall. DOTA is a modification for Warcraft III that popularized the MOBA form of games. It features very many (over 100) heroes which are very distinct in appearance and design (from wizards and stone giants to floating balls of light and two-headed dragons). Beyond basic attacks, heroes have four distinct, hero-specific abilities with cooldowns, including an ultimate ability with major utility. This short list of powers for each hero mitigates the learning curve for such a large roster, but the game itself is enormously complex with a wide array of items to buy, experience and gold resources to manage, and esoteric systems involving certain elements of the map. Overwatch is a clear attempt to transform TF through the DOTA lens. The varied roles available in TF2 and other FPSes were enumerated, broken up, and assigned to individual heroes. Each hero has at most five abilities, usually a primary attack, an optional secondary attack, a movement ability, a situational utility, and an ultimate ability. Some heroes replace one or more of these with a passive bonus of some sort. Some heroes are much more useful in certain modes or game phases. Some heroes are “hard counters” to others, guaranteeing a one-on-one win: for example, the sniper Widowmaker can destroy Torbjörn’s turrets from outside their range and kill him easily. Look at the adaptation of the mechanics for the Sniper from TF2. He has the option of a sniper rifle or a bow; his rifle was given to Widowmaker while his bow was given to Hanzo. His primary utility ability Jarate, which makes enemies take more damage, was adapted and assigned to Zenyatta in the form of that hero’s Discord Orb (and in a different way as Ana’s heal/harm grenade). Virtually all heroes’ abilities are inspired by either abilities in other FPSes or by prominent cheats or hacks (e.g. Soldier 76’s autoaim or Hanzo/Widowmaker’s wallhacking). The developers created a concept, picked abilities that matched that concept, and then polished until ready for play. What, then, of Symmetra, the turret-building microwaving teleporter? The answer lies in the game’s role system. Fitting a Role Overwatch divides its heroes into roles. These roles are: Offense: These heroes are designed to do damage, kill enemies quickly, and push the line of battle forward. They all have reliable mobility and escape abilities, relatively low amounts of health, and an ultimate that is difficult to run away from. Defense: These heroes are designed to keep enemies out of an area, allowing other players to focus on another goal. They all deal their primary damage in some limited way: close range, through a scope, or indirectly. They may have circumstantial mobility abilities but they are not particularly useful in a retreat. Their ultimates (with the exception of Widowmaker) force enemies to choose to either leave an area entirely or (sometimes) focus on a single target. Tank: These heroes are designed to absorb damage, reducing the amount of damage their allies take. They have high hit points and the ability to either entirely negate damage or heal a large amount of it4. Their ultimates are either distracting or disruptive, forcing enemies out of a set formation. Support: These heroes are designed to increase the effectiveness of their allies through force multipliers. This often takes the form of healing, increasing the time that players can fight before dying or retreating. However, each hero also has other force multipliers such as speed or damage boosts. Their ultimates all negate the effects of ultimates and major offensive pushes. Every hero fits rather well into its role. Occasionally a hero will branch out a bit, but never enough to take the place of a hero from another role. For example, Soldier 76 can drop a healing field for his allies, but it is limited in its power compared to the healing abilities of most supports. Symmetra is a support. However, I am quite sure that the designers did not say “We want a support character who summons objects from light.” They must have done the opposite: sort abilities into what role they were most appropriate for, determine what abilities seemed to mesh together, and then looked at those clusters of abilities and created a character around them. This design process is accretive: it assembles the character from basic components taken from the game’s inspirations. Several of Symmetra’s abilities are inspired by the Engineer from TF2: her turrets and teleporter. The Engineer’s most notable ability, an upgradeable turret, was assigned to Torbjorn as it fits solidly into the Defense role—it discourages enemies from entering its range of fire without immediately destroying it. The teleporter, however, is definitively a support ability. Because part of the cost of death in TF2 and Overwatch is the time spent running from the spawn point to the battle line, the teleporter is equivalent to a slightly-delayed resurrection. Because of the designers’ dedication to keeping roles separate, it had to be assigned to a support class, not a defender. It seems likely that the designers then considered how turrets have two functions: they protect an area, yes, but they can also serve as force multipliers. The Engineer’s turret, unlike Torbjorn’s, knocks an enemy back when it hits it. It thereby slows the speed of advance of any enemies, giving your allies more time to attack them. Strangely enough, even the constant damage of a weak turret can be thought of as a force multiplier. If it’s not enough to kill an enemy faster than they can heal, it is equivalent to enhancing the damage of other attackers. This, then, was the seed for Symmetra: let the defensive half of the Engineer’s abilities go to Torbjorn, and create a support with the other half. Building teleporters and weak, slowing turrets allows her to fill an excellent support role, but just building things and hiding doesn’t make an interesting character. How, then, to flesh her out? Finishing the Plan Something you often see on web forums is a plea for Symmetra to be recategorized into the Defense role instead of Support. Often cited is her lack of direct healing. Indeed, a recent patch changed a warning on the hero select screen from “No Support Heroes” to “No Healer” and excluded Symmetra from it. All Support heroes have some form of healing, and Symmetra, despite objections, is no different. Hers, however, is less obvious. Symmetra can give any allied hero 25 extra shields; a relatively negligible amount. At first glance this is a weaker but more reliable version of Torbjorn’s ability to spend “scrap” to provide 75 armor. However, this ignores an important aspect of shields. Shields recharge. If a hero with a Symmetra shield survives an encounter with the enemy and avoids taking damage for three seconds, the shield regenerates at a rate of around 20 HP per second. This means that, just after a fight, with a full complement of shields on all five allies, Symmetra effectively heals 100 HP/s: faster than any other hero except Ana without needing to aim or even maintain line-of-sight. Additionally, because allies’ health totals are increased, the extra shields prevent more fragile characters from dying quickly5. Symmetra, then, has become a proper support: she can resurrect with her teleporter; enhance the effectiveness of her allies with her cheap, weak, slowing turrets; and give every character a bit of extra, regenerating health. But what does she do once she’s set up all her structures and given everyone shields? She needs some sort of attack. Here is where I think the design process for Symmetra changed from accreting a collection of cool abilities to making a hero that worked. These abilities add up to a sort of “mastermind” character: someone who makes everyone else more effective by keeping them in the fight, returning them to the fight, and deciding what zones her allies will be more effective in. All she needs beyond that is the ability to deal with any difficult situation that could possibly arise. Symmetra’s primary weapon has two wildly different modes: a short-range, auto-aim beam that increases in power over time and a long-range, slow-firing ball of energy that slowly travels through all heroes, shields, and hero barriers except D.Va’s Defense Matrix and Genji’s Deflection. The beam is useful to repel flankers and tanks while furiously dodging, since it is hard to avoid and does incredible damage once charged up. The energy ball will kill any hero except a tank in two shots, but is very easy to dodge. Its role is therefore a disruptive one: it is highly effective against tightly-grouped enemies, turrets, and enemies hiding behind a barrier like Reinhardt’s. The enemies must either move or take serious damage. With these two weapons, Symmetra has tools that let her support her allies against flankers, entrenched positions, and well-organized pushes. Her other abilities let her provide support to her allies even when dead (indeed, she seems one of the most likely heroes to get “Play of the Game” while waiting to respawn). She is too fragile to be a dedicated defender or tank, and her damage is too situational to be a good offense hero, but she provides excellent support to her allies. Viewed as the result of a gradual process of assembling abilities from a pool of inspirations, Symmetra’s eclectic design makes much more sense. She can be seen as the Support half of TF2‘s engineer with a sprinkling of fire-and-forget healing and a pair of weapons that help a team deal with difficult situations. As someone who plays Symmetra as one of my main heroes, I suspect that she is underappreciated in the current competitive scene; she’s a complicated hero with deep strategies surrounding structure placement and weapon usage. I look forward to someone cracking the Symmetra code and elevating her into a more competitive spot in high-level play. Speaking of cracking codes, Blizzard is now teasing a new hero, Sombra, in earnest with an ARG involving hidden waveforms, an encrypted message, and a barcode painted on the literal sky of a map. If you’re wondering what abilities Sombra could possibly have, I suggest looking at what abilities in TF2 are unaccounted-for. Most notably, look at the character of the Spy, whose ability to disguise and cloak has not yet been added to Overwatch. I can’t wait to see how Blizzard interprets his abilities. This article was made possible in part through the Patreon donation program. To support my work, sign up for my Patreon and help me continue producing writing like this. Show 5 footnotes I find Mei infuriating to play against. ↩ All have combat options for all ranges, two grenade types, and minor secondary abilities ↩ The “Demoknight” loadouts replace the Demoman’s grenade launchers and mediocre melee weapon with a powerful sword that increases speed on kills, a shield that enables a charge, and boots that further improve mobility. ↩ In a way, D.Va has both: her Defense Matrix blocks incoming projectiles, while her ability to re-Summon her Mech is effectively a complicated total self-heal. ↩ This was more pronounced when Widowmaker could kill the most fragile heroes with a single shot to the body… except if they had Symmetra shields. ↩ <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2016%2F08%2F04%2Fstrange-symmetra-accretive-design-in-overwatch%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dstrange-symmetra-accretive-design-in-overwatch&action_name=Strange+Symmetra%3A+Accretive+Design+in+Overwatch&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
My partner Melissa and I have started a new project: a monthly podcast called Audacious Compassion about how to demonstrate empathy in difficult everyday situations. The first episode, “Go Buy a Caddy,” is up and you can subscribe via RSS or iTunes. You can even rate us five stars on iTunes if you like! “Audacious … Continue reading Audacious Compassion Podcast →
My partner Melissa and I have started a new project: a monthly podcast called Audacious Compassion about how to demonstrate empathy in difficult everyday situations. The first episode, “Go Buy a Caddy,” is up and you can subscribe via RSS or iTunes. You can even rate us five stars on iTunes if you like! “Audacious compassion” is a concept we’ve made a primary value of our company Future Proof Games. We’re huge believers in the ethical power of understanding others’ viewpoints and motivations, especially in situations where the other person is very different or is doing something that seems (or is!) malicious. We’re focusing on everyday struggles with the podcast—the first episode is on longstanding minor annoyances, domestic and otherwise—but just because they’re mundane doesn’t mean the feelings and problems surrounding them aren’t difficult or powerful. If you’ve got an issue you want us to discuss on the show, write us@avery-weir.net. For those of you eager for more episodes of Ludus Novus, I have some I would like to do, but they take more planning and investment of energy and emotion than Audacious Compassion. I don’t feel able to commit to a schedule on them, but I hope to release more soon.
I’ve read one too many “git gud” posts arguing that challenge is essential to games and that including an easy mode on, say, Dark Souls would ruin it; if you don’t want a hard game, don’t play Dark Souls. They’re wrong. Firstly, challenge isn’t an inherent aspect of games: it’s just one way of evoking … Continue reading Challenge is a Calibration →
I’ve read one too many “git gud” posts arguing that challenge is essential to games and that including an easy mode on, say, Dark Souls would ruin it; if you don’t want a hard game, don’t play Dark Souls. They’re wrong. Firstly, challenge isn’t an inherent aspect of games: it’s just one way of evoking certain player responses. Challenge is partly a personal preference thing: some people want a smooth experience and I do think that Dark Souls is a poor choice for that, and that experiencing Dark Souls as a cake walk won’t let you understand Dark Souls. But that’s not the point. My perspective was summarized pretty eloquently by Rob Fearon but I feel like it can be distilled even further. The argument: what is hard for you might not be hard for me. Look at it this way. I have a certain level of expertise with games, based on my experience, reflexes, and ability (e.g. having thumbs). Call this number X. A game has a certain set of obstacles it puts in your way, which must be overcome by acting within certain tolerances: fast enough, accurately enough, with a certain amount of strategy. Call this minimum level of performance Y. The level of challenge, then, can be seen as the difference between X and Y. Y – X = C. Let’s assume that an ideal challenge for a game like Dark Souls occurs when my skill is barely enough to meet the obstacles, making Y and X the same and making C equal zero. If the game’s obstacles are easy to bypass—at level 5, say—and my skill is a high number at an 8, then C is -3 and the game is easier than intended. However, with the same level 5 obstacles, if my skill is lower (a 2, say) then C becomes +3: a real frustrating slog that I may not be able to overcome. Consider especially that I may not be able to increase my skill. I may lack sufficient talent. I may have a disability. I may have a low frame rate and no money to upgrade my computer. If a game doesn’t adapt to me, I cannot get the proper experience of the game. Consider instead a game where you can pick a minimum level of performance: 2, 5, or 8. For the sake of convenience, we’ll call these “Easy,” “Medium,” and “Hard.” On Hard mode, my original skill of 8 gives me a challenge of zero: perfect. On Easy mode, if I’ve got a low skill level, my challenge is also zero. Dark Souls on Easy mode is hard if I’m not good at the things the game expects me to do. I still get the same learning experience, the same progression of understanding the world and building my timing skills. I’m just starting at a level that matches my ability. Everyone’s not the same. Games need to adapt to their players. Challenge is a calibration, and that’s why we need difficulty settings.
The Transformative Power of Good Writing – Wolfenstein: The New Order
Wolfenstein: The New Order, developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda, should have been awful. If you’d asked me before release, I’d have predicted that the ninth game in a franchise, an alternate-history game set in the 1960s where the Nazis won World War II, featuring B.J. Blazkowicz as a recovered locked-in veteran, would only … Continue reading The Transformative Power of Good Writing – Wolfenstein: The New Order →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2016%2F07%2F05%2Fthe-transformative-power-of-good-writing-wolfenstein-the-new-order%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dthe-transformative-power-of-good-writing-wolfenstein-the-new-order&action_name=The+Transformative+Power+of+Good+Writing+%26%238211%3B+Wolfenstein%3A+The+New+Order&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Wolfenstein: The New Order, developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda, should have been awful. If you’d asked me before release, I’d have predicted that the ninth game in a franchise, an alternate-history game set in the 1960s where the Nazis won World War II, featuring B.J. Blazkowicz as a recovered locked-in veteran, would only be good for a few hot takes and maybe some mediocre shooting with nose firmly held. Instead, this game is one of the best I’ve played. It’s not just great, it’s well-crafted. That is to say that, beyond the things that appeal to my personal preferences (alternate history, cool sci-fi, a diverse cast, a dark tone, a considered pace) it shows great skill in how it executes what it sets out to do. The credit for this success belongs to various factors—the expressive visual art, the excellent voice acting, and the well-polished rule systems—but more than anything, it’s thanks to the excellent writing. The Main Timeline When we talk about good writing in video games, we usually mean something different than when we talk about it in prose. “Good writing” in games typically means that the sequence of events in the game are interesting when summarized. Well-written prose, however, might have totally mundane events; it is the way in which they are communicated that distinguishes the quality of the writing. Video games are obsessed with high concept. A clear and literal threat exists, usually threatening all of society. A hero is uniquely equipped to defeat that threat. In the end the threat is defeated. Stories are usually distinguished by an interesting setting and by the “twists” that happen along the way. Let’s look at Bioshock Infinite, a game which received numerous “Best Story” awards in 20131. Infinite is lauded for its interesting setting: a city above the clouds tainted by American nationalism and racism. It’s got a charming naif in the form of Elizabeth. And it has a complex twisty storyline involving parallel worlds and surprise identities. But on a low level, the writing is functional but unremarkable. Consider this scene, from the ending to the game: That’s decent for video game writing. Still, it’s full of “profound” writing that sounds cool but doesn’t actually communicate much or scan well as interesting prose. The rhythm of conversation is formal and unconvincing. “Constants…” “And variables.” It reads like characters following cues, not having an actual exchange of ideas. “We swim on different oceans but land on the same shore” is serviceable: the characters from different worlds all end up at the same climactic event. But as a metaphor that evokes little. What does it look like to land on the same shore from two different oceans? What does it say about the situation that would not be better communicated with literal language? This scene was written in service of communicating the Big Idea of the game, preparing players to understand how parallel worlds work in this setting so that the Dramatic Ending makes sense. But as a scene featuring characters in a credible world, it falls flat. What are Elizabeth and Booker feeling in this scene, beyond “wonder” and “bafflement?” How does this inform their moral or emotional journey or their relationship as more-or-less-surrogate family? This is the problem with video game writing. It’s seen as a tool to deliver the plot beats instead of as an integral aspect of the art. As long as we evaluate game story by what happens in the plot rather than how it’s communicated, we’re missing the point. Point of Divergence The events that happen in The New Order read like a mildly original action game. You’re fighting a Nazi supervillain during World War 2, get injured, and are put into a coma for sixteen years. When you wake up, the Nazis rule the world. You revitalize the resistance, steal Nazi technology, visit the moon, and ultimately confront the supervillain in the same base where you originally failed. When seen as a sequence of events, this story is unremarkable. Consider some details and you may find it concerning: a powerful, secret Jewish society; a level set in a Nazi work camp; mentally and physically disabled characters in a setting that constantly reminds you of Nazi ideologies. However, through careful writing these concerns can be alleviated. Compare the following segment from The New Order to the one above: When I played the game, I didn’t even realize that Caroline is a character from earlier in the series. I’d assumed that The New Order was a proper reboot, but it is in the same continuity as earlier games Return to Castle Wolfenstein and the awfully-named Wolfenstein. I haven’t played Wolfenstein; Caroline appears in that game in the 1940s as a resistance cell leader, albeit not as well written or acted. The game does incredibly well at incorporating past story elements. It makes Caroline’s relationship to BJ clear regardless of the player’s familiarity with previous games. It also does well at establishing General Deathshead as a past recurring rival of BJ’s. If you haven’t played the previous games, this one simply feels like one that begins in media res with characters’ relationships existing before the start of the game. In this scene, even if you haven’t seen the earlier exposition, you understand who these characters are, what their relationships are, and how they feel about the situation as the larger plot is moved forward. Caroline is a leader, stern and no-nonsense, who deals with pain through abrasiveness and open confrontation, but who is willing to change tactics when she has made a mistake. B.J. is brash and friendly, but with a tone of resigned sadness; he functions best when operating under orders but has trouble dealing with unfamiliar situations (although injury and disability are not unfamiliar to him). Caroline and B.J. know each other from long ago, but this is their first time meeting since their respective injuries. Anya is quiet, unassuming, and very smart; she wants to help people and is good at expressing herself without offense. Tekla reacts to strong emotion by lashing out and is entirely uninterested in courtesy, but her agitation suggests that she does care, at least about Fergus’s survival. I realized while playing The New Order that when I play high-budget games, I’m often on constant edge, bracing myself for the game to do or say something disappointing. It’s a consequence of my being enthusiastic of both positive representation and game design technique. In the back of my head I’m always worrying that the game will, in a cutscene, arbitrarily kill a woman or make me hate my player character. But by consistently treating its characters with respect and showing a capacity for purposeful and nuanced plotting, The New Order let me relax and accept the sometimes-silly story and well-crafted combat without getting distracted by worries about what would happen. Alternate Choices So what’s different about The New Order that it was written so well? Was the writer just great? That’s part of it. Jens Matthies was the creative director of the game. He previously worked on The Darkness and Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, both games noted for their surprisingly well-handled characterization. In an interview with Giant Bomb, he makes it clear that they considered things like how to represent an action hero with depth, or how to address Nazi ideology without trivializing it or turning it into a cartoon. Matthies and the rest of the game’s team were clearly well-equipped to handle the creative process well. But that doesn’t mean that other games’ writers and directors are poor at their jobs. Part of the reason that The New Order is able to showcase the skill of its creators is that the development process placed story and character in a high-priority position. Time and effort and attention (and money!) were spent on writing, rewriting, acting, and presentation. Too many games clearly focus overmuch on “fun” and established conventions without considering that those things are successful only when supported by a well-crafted aesthetic framework. To make a game with story as well-handled as The New Order‘s, you must make it a priority from the beginning. You can’t design a bunch of fun levels and then mortar them together with a post facto plot. You must make your story grow and mature beside the rest of the game and be willing to prioritize nuance and consistency of presentation. I never would have suspected that Wolfenstein: The New Order would be one of the best-written games I’ve ever played. But it was. And it is something that we can all aspire to. This article was made possible in part through the Patreon donation program. To support my work, sign up for my Patreon and help me continue producing writing like this. Show 1 footnote I’m not saying that Infinite‘s story was badly written, but its praise was disproportionate to the quality of craftsmanship in its writing. ↩ <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2016%2F07%2F05%2Fthe-transformative-power-of-good-writing-wolfenstein-the-new-order%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dthe-transformative-power-of-good-writing-wolfenstein-the-new-order&action_name=The+Transformative+Power+of+Good+Writing+%26%238211%3B+Wolfenstein%3A+The+New+Order&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Our 2013 game Ossuary is currently on sale for $7.49 on Steam! I wrote all of Ossuary and released it with my partner as the first project of Future Proof Games. It’s a little game that’s pixelly and funny and strange. You’re a newcomer to a macabre philosophical underworld, and to escape you have to … Continue reading Ossuary in Steam Summer Sale 2016 →
Our 2013 game Ossuary is currently on sale for $7.49 on Steam! <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="http://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Blog-Summer-Sale-2016-Offer.png" alt="Blog Summer Sale 2016 Offer" width="500" height="262" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2200" srcset="https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Blog-Summer-Sale-2016-Offer.png 500w, https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Blog-Summer-Sale-2016-Offer-300x157.png 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" /> I wrote all of Ossuary and released it with my partner as the first project of Future Proof Games. It’s a little game that’s pixelly and funny and strange. You’re a newcomer to a macabre philosophical underworld, and to escape you have to solve conversation-based puzzles and use sins as inventory items. I used it to explore a lot of Discordian concepts and perspectives, so in a sense it’s a religious work for me. It’s weird looking back on Ossuary. I’m really proud of how it turned out, although it’s never had real financial success. We’ve sold maybe a couple thousand copies. For now it’s paying Future Proof’s monthly expenses for servers and such, but it’s certainly not making enough to provide us with paychecks. Each sale on Steam helps a bit, though, so if you haven’t picked up the game, check it out! It’s cheap! (And hey, if you know someone you think will like Ossuary, you can always get it for them as a gift!) And a final request: if you have played Ossuary, please do leave a Steam review. Our 17 reviews are 94% positive, but Steam won’t list them as “Very Positive” or “Overwhelmingly Positive” until we have enough of them. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that these categories make folks more likely to check out an otherwise-unknown game. Thank you for reading!
A Stillness of Mind, Skill Honed Sharp – Hyper Light Drifter
Hyper Light Drifter, from Heart Machine1, is an inscrutable game: one which presents you with various mysteries and challenges, inviting you to overcome them, but doesn’t bother guiding you along that path. It’s part of a new trend in so-called “retro-inspired” games that recontextualizes the challenge and low fidelity of console game from the 1980s … Continue reading A Stillness of Mind, Skill Honed Sharp – Hyper Light Drifter →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2016%2F06%2F10%2Fa-stillness-of-mind-skill-honed-sharp-hyper-light-drifter%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Da-stillness-of-mind-skill-honed-sharp-hyper-light-drifter&action_name=A+Stillness+of+Mind%2C+Skill+Honed+Sharp+%26%238211%3B+Hyper+Light+Drifter&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Screenshot of Hyper Light Drifter from Steam user 芊一. Hyper Light Drifter, from Heart Machine1, is an inscrutable game: one which presents you with various mysteries and challenges, inviting you to overcome them, but doesn’t bother guiding you along that path. It’s part of a new trend in so-called “retro-inspired” games that recontextualizes the challenge and low fidelity of console game from the 1980s as intentional, stylistic choices. Because of these choices, it has limited accessibility but provides a specific mood and emotional journey that would be difficult to evoke in a more populist game. Hats and Capes I don’t think I can discuss Drifter without talking about Fez. Like that game, Drifter is a pixelly, atmospheric exploration game with a soundtrack by Disasterpeace. Like that game, Drifter has a set of civilizations on floating islands that you understand in part through a set of hidden carvings and a secret alphabet. Like that game, Drifter uses glitches that break the normal visual style of the game to symbolize fragile reality. Like that game, Drifter contains secondary objectives that are harder to find and understand than the main challenges of the game. These two games are part of a larger canon that is exploring the same concepts. Look also at Secrets of Rætikon or Sword and Sworcery or Titan Souls. Game creators are looking back at a collection of ingredients from the past and using them intentionally instead of out of necessity, like how high French cuisine arose out of lower-middle-class dishes. The inscrutability of many Nintendo games wasn’t a fully intentional choice; it was the result of the system’s restricted memory and poor text support. Indeed, the manuals tend to contain detailed backstories that disrupt the feeling of mystery. Drifter is often described as similar to the Zelda series, but that comparison falls apart upon close examination. Yes, it is a top-down game where you explore distinct regions, fight bosses with a sword, and collect weapons and upgrades. However, the distinctive conventions of Zelda are missing. Upgrades don’t serve to gate areas to enforce a linear path through the game. There are keys, but they are an optional side collectible, not a basic way of structuring dungeons. Drifter has an overworld and an underworld, but they are interconnected instead of isolating the underworld into discrete dungeons. The Zelda comparison (or more bizarrely, Diablo) is facile and, upon consideration, not particularly useful. Instead, think of it like this: Drifter examines how past games have done things. It takes the hidden-in-plain-sight exploration from Zelda. The combos and dodging from Platinum. The conquest weapons from Mega Man. The push-and-pull of gun ammo and swordplay from… where? Maybe from whole cloth. It combines these together and becomes its own work. This is a game with new things to say, but it refuses to speak them out loud. Hidden Lessons Screenshot from Steam user *Killy*. Is this a hard game? Yes. It is very hard. However, it is a game that becomes much easier once you figure out a few of the things it wants you to learn. The fact that it refuses to tell you outright is what makes it hard. Does this make it a Dark Souls? Maybe, but I think instead it and Dark Souls are channeling the same (only slightly obstinate) rebellion against the hyper-refined tutorial style of the Valve and EA schools of design, where hovering text or manipulative level design ensure you never get lost or have the opportunity to reach your own revelation. Does this mean it will leave people behind? Yes, including literal professionals. The game seems content to alienate many of its potential players. However, there are three major lessons that, once you learn them, make the game open itself to you (and vice versa). 1. It’s not linear. At the beginning of the game, three regions are open to you: the north, the west, and the east. Each has distinct enemies and each has a boss at the end. Each has a single teleporter, closer or further from the boss, which lets you return there at any time. At the beginning of the game, it is theoretically possible to reach and defeat any of the three initial bosses. Theoretically. Most games teach us that when you enter an area or level you are expected to beat it before going elsewhere. This isn’t a good way to approach Drifter. The later fights in each area, especially the bosses, are hard. Unless you have astonishing reflexes, you will not be able to beat them if you’re proceeding linearly through each area. Instead, you should explore each area at least enough to reach each teleporter, then branch outward, exploring side passages and collecting the yellow “gearbits” that serve as currency for upgrades. Every2 hidden path is marked with a symbol on the floor or a visible, apparently-unreachable platform nearby. Collecting this currency lets you buy essential upgrades, and the fights you have along the way will train you in the game’s combat rules. 2. It’s about timing and patterns. Unlike a Zelda or similar slashy action game, continuously attacking and staying on the offensive will not be easy. Your damage can be dealt in combos of three sword swings, you have dramatic evasive abilities, and enemies attack rarely but for significant damage. Fighting is not about killing as fast as possible to make your rate of damage dealt exceed damage taken. It’s about finding out when you are strong and when you are vulnerable and acting accordingly. I don’t consider myself particularly talented at video games, although I suppose I have a great deal of experience. I found the game infuriatingly challenging for my first several hours until I started thinking of the fights in terms of attrition and combinations of attacks. Slash, slash, slash, retreat: this is the rhythm of Hyper Light Drifter. “Getting greedy” is how you take damage. Taking damage is nearly never necessary. 3. Versatility provides power. The upgrades available for sale in town initially seem minor. Adding extra options to already frantic-feeling combat is not a compelling sales pitch. However, these tools are essential to becoming more survivable. Increasing your healing item slots from three to five nearly doubles your ability to store health items and survive damage. The grenades you can buy provide much-needed crowd control and recharge over time instead of via sword slashes, which makes them essential when resources are low. The ability to chain dashes lets you retreat much more effectively. The ability to reflect bullets with a sword slash turns clouds of projectiles into an opportunity instead of sudden death. You don’t get more max health in this game until you’ve basically beaten it. Your sword slash never does any more damage. Instead, you gain abilities that let you deal with circumstances that were previously deadly. Should Hyper Light Drifter actively teach these things, instead of leaving them out for you to stumble upon in the wasteland? This isn’t “To the Right, Hold on Tight.” The game doesn’t test to make sure you understand these lessons or even really give you a focused opportunity to learn them. You can easily reach (and die repeatedly on) one of the initial bosses without ever learning one of these… and it’s not your fault for missing anything. Learning these lessons feels great. But is it worth it, coming after so much frustration? Is it worth losing so many potential players? Tunnel Vision Screenshot by Steam user Nojafox. Dark Souls, again. Some people don’t get to “get good at” Dark Souls — because they lack the necessary background in similar games or in basic controller operations, because they lack talent in recognizing patterns and tactics under pressure, because they have a real physical or mental disability that already limits their access to many other things in life, or just because it’s not worth the time or effort to get the potential rewards. Should Dark Souls have an easy mode? Yes. Absolutely, yes. Should Hyper Light Drifter? Probably. A few extra health boxes and some more forgiving combo timing would make Drifter as challenging for the people I mention above as it was for me. People come to games with different skill levels and everyone deserves to experience a game as intended. Challenge is not one-size-fits-all. But an easy mode wouldn’t resolve the problem with the lessons that Drifter refuses to teach. When I first played Dark Souls3, years after it came out, I gushed about it to my D&D group. One player said, “That game’s too hard for me. I got stuck right after the tutorial. I either get killed by skeletons in the graveyard or I get eaten by ghosts in the underground. I got so frustrated and gave up.” “How did you do against the first few undead up the stairs?” I asked. “What stairs?” he replied. Looking at your environment, identifying what is and isn’t navigable, and figuring out how to get from here to there is a core technique in those games and it’s one that the games don’t really teach you. After I showed him where the stairs were that led to the Undead Burg, he went on to love and complete the entire series. The game that Drifter most feels like is Shadow of the Colossus. It’s a game that, while it has standard tutorial prompts and structure, evokes the same feelings of openness and immediacy as Drifter. After long periods of wandering, often unsure if you’re headed in the right direction, you’re suddenly confronted with battles that appear, at least aesthetically, to be impossible. However, by applying what you’ve learned, you can overcome these challenges. If Drifter took the Colossus route, telling you its secrets outright and guiding you to its challenges in a set, achievable order, it would lose its strange, unsettling confusion. There’s value there, in its ambiguity and its coy shrugs. In Shadow of the Colossus, you feel bad for killing the Colossi but know that there was no other way to proceed in the game. The game holds you as you weep and reassures you that this was necessary. Not so, in Drifter. Drifter has a downer of an ending.4 When you finish, there’s at least some ambiguity: is there another way? It told you so little, demanded you figure things out on your own. What if you collected more than the four required triangles in each area? What if you collected all the keys? All the monoliths? The outfits have undocumented, still not-quite-understood benefits; is there one that changes the ending? Did you miss something? And if you knew, if this was a game that made itself clear, would you be left with the same feeling when you were done? This article was made possible in part through the Patreon donation program. To support my work, sign up for my Patreon and help me continue producing writing like this. Show 4 footnotes A company with whom I feel a sort of kinship, as their logo has some strong similarities with that of my company, Future Proof Games. ↩ As far as I recall, at least. ↩ I still haven’t beaten it. I’ve rung one bell and died repeatedly to the Titanite Demon. ↩ You’re coughing the whole time and the world is in ruin. It’s hardly unexpected. ↩ <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2016%2F06%2F10%2Fa-stillness-of-mind-skill-honed-sharp-hyper-light-drifter%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Da-stillness-of-mind-skill-honed-sharp-hyper-light-drifter&action_name=A+Stillness+of+Mind%2C+Skill+Honed+Sharp+%26%238211%3B+Hyper+Light+Drifter&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Family and Communication – Atlanta Poly Weekend 2016
I’m polyamorous, and for the past four years I’ve attended Atlanta Poly Weekend, a great education and activism conference all about ethical nonmonogamy. I’ve seen an interesting transition in my relationship to the conference over the years, one that I think is completely natural. In earlier years, I found the most value in the things … Continue reading Family and Communication – Atlanta Poly Weekend 2016 →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2016%2F06%2F07%2Ffamily-and-communication-atlanta-poly-weekend-2016%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dfamily-and-communication-atlanta-poly-weekend-2016&action_name=Family+and+Communication+%26%238211%3B+Atlanta+Poly+Weekend+2016&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
I’m polyamorous, and for the past four years I’ve attended Atlanta Poly Weekend, a great education and activism conference all about ethical nonmonogamy. I’ve seen an interesting transition in my relationship to the conference over the years, one that I think is completely natural. In earlier years, I found the most value in the things I learned; in later years, I’ve found more and more value in the things I’ve taught. Previous years have not just improved my understanding of polyamorous relationships; they’ve also helped me understand how to manage my own feelings, understand my identity, and improve all the communities I’m in. Some important takeaways have been: Treat your past, present, and future selves as loved ones. Note down relationship red flags when you’re thinking straight so you can refer to them later when your judgment might be skewed. Do things for yourself just like you would for a loved one. Recognize how privilege interacts with responsibility. As a member of a few marginalized groups who has the privilege to be able to be out and public, I feel that I have a responsibility to be an advocate for those groups. Likewise, when forming a community (for example, a poly group), it’s not enough to protect the safety of those in the group; we need to work to make sure newcomers stay safe until they can learn about potential dangers. One’s life and relationships don’t need to fit into templates of expectations and assumptions. Frameworks like relationship anarchy can allow for a beautiful diversity of experiences, and understanding concepts like codependence and abuse can help make your interactions more open and nurturing. This year, however, I found that I had fewer big takeaways. This is partly due to circumstances: I chose to attend some talks on topics I’d seen before, more of my partners and <def title="your partners' partners">metamours</def> were there than previous years, and I was in the midst of a nasty cough/sore throat/head cold. However, I think there’s also a certain saturation level you can reach in any specific community, where over time it has less to teach you and instead asks you to give back. This was the first year I presented at APW. My spouse and I presented “An Introduction to Non-Violent Communication,” which was an overview of the NVC philosophy and communication process. It’s something that’s a huge part of how I view the world, and I was really happy to be able to share it with others. I also had other opportunities to share with other attendees, whether it was providing queer 101 explanations to curious but ignorant attendees at queer-focused talks or hearing about the very cool PolyQ project to include queer-focused groups in the wider poly community. That former step is, I think, very important: while queer folks often practice polyamory, they seem much less inclined to participate in specific polyamory-focused communities in part because those communities tend to appear heavily white, hetero, cisgendered, and upper-class. The closing keynote of the conference still has me thinking. It was by Ricci Levy of the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, on advocacy for U.S. government recognition of polyamorous unions through the reframing of “marriage” as a private union combined with a set of contracts, using as a justification Article 16 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I’m a huge advocate for radical social change, especially when it seems feasible, but I worry about approaches that seek to reframe the issues of marginalized people (like poly folks) as something palatable to the mainstream. The US fight for marriage equality tended to focus on respectability and traditional concepts of relationships at the cost of minimizing the visibility of trans folks, queer folks of color, and other groups that made conservative Americans nervous. We need to make sure that we don’t do the same as we advocate for the freedom to choose our family structure. We can achieve legal measures that protect the stable, safe-looking triads and group marriages, but we still need to enact societal change to protect the children of solo polyamorists from being taken away or to ensure that you won’t lose your job for asking your new girlfriend to your company’s holiday party instead of your husband. I think that Woodhull’s approach is promising, but we can’t let it be the only approach we take.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2016%2F06%2F07%2Ffamily-and-communication-atlanta-poly-weekend-2016%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dfamily-and-communication-atlanta-poly-weekend-2016&action_name=Family+and+Communication+%26%238211%3B+Atlanta+Poly+Weekend+2016&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
In this episode of the Ludus Novus podcast, I discuss incremental games, also known as idle games or clickers. How did a formula that started as satirical jokes from people like Ian Bogost yield things like A Dark Room? Games discussed: Cow Clicker, Progress Quest, Candy Box, Cookie Clicker, A Dark Room. The Ludus Novus … Continue reading Ludus Novus 025: Idle, Incremental →
In this episode of the Ludus Novus podcast, I discuss incremental games, also known as idle games or clickers. How did a formula that started as satirical jokes from people like Ian Bogost yield things like A Dark Room? Games discussed: Cow Clicker, Progress Quest, Candy Box, Cookie Clicker, A Dark Room. The Ludus Novus podcast is supported by my patrons. To help, please visit my Patreon. The theme music is “A Foolish Game (Vox Harmony Adds)” by Snowflake, Admiral Bob, and Sackjo22, available on ccMixter.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2016%2F02%2F09%2Fludus-novus-025-idle-incremental%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dludus-novus-025-idle-incremental&action_name=Ludus+Novus+025%3A+Idle%2C+Incremental&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
I love it when games wear their math on their sleeves. I also like when games are based on real-life systems, even when those systems are twisted or simplified for the purposes of smoother design. Pandemic is a good example of the former: the way the Infection deck is constructed and manipulated makes it clear … Continue reading Hopping Numbers in Pocket Frogs →
I love it when games wear their math on their sleeves. I also like when games are based on real-life systems, even when those systems are twisted or simplified for the purposes of smoother design. Pandemic is a good example of the former: the way the Infection deck is constructed and manipulated makes it clear how the game’s randomness works and why the same cities keep breaking out in more and more disease. Spacechem is a good example of the latter: it takes the concept of chemical bonds and process engineering and turns it into a brain-twisting puzzler. Pocket Frogs, by Nimblebit, does both of these things. It takes the concept of genetic inheritance and uses it to make a sort of gambling game where the math is always visible and calculable. It’s a game where you breed frogs, trying to produce certain special collections. But let’s pretend it’s not. Pocket Tuples Pocket Tuples, by Nimblebit, is a game where you are trying to collect a large amount of experience points. You do this by generating 3-tuples of numbers from the tuples you already have. A tuple looks like this: (X, Y, Z). Each member of a tuple is an integer. At the moment, X may range from 0 to 22, Y may range from 0 to 15, and Z may range from 0 to 103 (although Z is also bounded by a function of your XP total). Game updates have increased these ranges. You begin the game with two tuples in your collection. You can construct a new tuple from two input tuples: each element of the output tuple is copied from one of the two corresponding elements in the input tuples, selected at random. Thus, the tuples (1, 1, 3) and (2, 2, 3) can generate four equally-likely results: (1, 1, 3), (1, 2, 3), (2, 1, 3), and (2, 2, 3). The new tuple is placed in your collection, but you don’t know its elements for a certain period of time; this time monotonically increases as a function of Z. You can always combine two tuples in your collection once you know their elements. At times, you are offered the opportunity to buy new tuples or to combine a tuple in your collection with a randomly-selected tuple. The size of your collection is limited, but it can be increased by spending currency, either virtual or real-world. Once your XP total is sufficient to make all values of Z available, the primary remaining goal is to reach a state where all 38,262 possible tuple configurations have, at some point, been in your collection. Pocket Tuples is a very boring game. The Debating Game In the early 2000s, there was a lively debate among academics who studied video games. The “ludologists” claimed that the valuable parts of games, from a critical perspective, were the formal systems and rules they applied. Stories and visuals — “aesthetics” — were ultimately superfluous. The “narratologists” disagreed. They claimed that the valuable part of games was the narrative. The interesting thing about games, they argued, is their novel way of telling stories, which involved rules simply as an inconvenient side effect. Of course, as is painfully obvious in retrospect (and, truth be told, was probably obvious at the time), the real answer is somewhere in the middle. The interesting thing about games and game design is the interplay between a game’s aesthetics and its rules. Pocket Tuples is a boring game, and a choose-your-own adventure about breeding frogs wouldn’t be very fun without a good system under the hood (although Tom McHenry’s horrific Horse Master might prove that statement wrong). Random Frog Generator The math above is a way of describing the rules of Pocket Frogs. The game only achieves its design unity by casting those systems in the guise of frog breeding. Frogs have one pattern and two colors. Breeding two frogs results in a child that selects its traits randomly from its parents. When you select a pair of frogs for breeding, you see all of the possible child frogs laid out in a dialogue box. Breeding two identical frogs is guaranteed to get you an identical child frog, but in order to generate new frog designs you must breed two distinct frogs, and thereby cast the dice. If one trait differs, you will produce a child that looks like one of the parents but not both. A flip of the coin. If two traits differ, you have four possible children: one like each of the parents and two entirely new. A 25% chance of getting the frog design you seek. If all three traits are different, your result will be one of eight possible frogs. Genetics. Math. The game’s challenges require you to understand this system and play the odds. It shows you a specific set of frogs to produce and lets you work out how to create them. It’s raw numbers clothed in colorful amphibian skin. It’s elegant. Frogs isn’t the sort of game I play for fun. I first played it five years ago as part of the judging process for the 2011 IGF awards; I took a look at it again by request of one of my patrons. I’m glad I did. I find myself wondering what a more complex version of this game would be like, maybe with Mendelian dominance tossed in. For now, though, my Froggydex is 0.0002% complete. Only 38,262 tuples to go. This article was commissioned by a patron. To support my work, sign up for my Patreon and help me continue producing writing like this.
Over at the Future Proof Games dev blog, my partner Melissa has done a summary of how we spent 2015. Our game Ossuary hit Steam, our new game Exploit: Zero Day is in open alpha, and we’ve learned a bit more about how to run a tiny indie game company. Check out the post on … Continue reading Future Proof in 2016 →
Over at the Future Proof Games dev blog, my partner Melissa has done a summary of how we spent 2015. Our game Ossuary hit Steam, our new game Exploit: Zero Day is in open alpha, and we’ve learned a bit more about how to run a tiny indie game company. Check out the post on the FPG blog.
Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist is a weird little free game that’s a whole lot like the demo to The Stanley Parable, which was designed by the same person. No, not Davey Wreden, the creator of the original mod; his followup game is The Beginner’s Guide, a first-person … Continue reading A Whirlwind Heist →
Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist is a weird little free game that’s a whole lot like the demo to The Stanley Parable, which was designed by the same person. No, not Davey Wreden, the creator of the original mod; his followup game is The Beginner’s Guide, a first-person experiment in form that explores the creative process as relates to video games, inspired in part by the impostor syndrome triggered by unexpected popularity. Heist is designed by William Pugh, who worked with Wreden on the standalone remastering of Stanley, and this followup is a first-person experiment in form that explores the creative process as relates to video games, inspired in part by the impostor syndrome triggered by unexpected popularity. On Spoilers I’m increasingly dismissive of the idea of spoiler warnings. The occasional work actually has a twist or reveal that is weakened by knowing it’s coming: Saw, The Prestige or Twelve Monkeys. Most twisty works, you only weaken a scene or so; see Se7en or The Dark Knight. And plenty of works — The Usual Suspects, Fight Club, Citizen Kane — are actually better once you know the secret, because it informs the rest of the movie. Most things people lament as spoilers, however, are just… facts about the work? Knowing that the hero wins or a character dies doesn’t cause any problem. I can summarize the whole plot of a story and it doesn’t matter, because the important thing is how the story is told. Even humor is about delivery, not the actual punchline. So I don’t like spoiler warnings. That’s a long way of getting to the point that a lot of reviews or discussion I’m seeing about A Whirlwind Heist avoid discussing its main conceit. I don’t avoid doing so here because at worst I’m making you slightly less surprised about the first fifteen seconds of the game. I need to write more about The Beginner’s Guide. Pugh, who is probably responsible for Stanley‘s visual polish and environmental cleverness, uses the same premise here as that game’s demo, even beginning with the same joke of showing what initially seems to be a title screen but turns out to be a poster on the wall. A Whirlwind Heist follows the earlier game almost beat for beat: a narrator admits that they’re unable to let you play the game immediately, but offers you a behind-the-scenes tour, there’s jokes about video game concepts being real-world machines operated by people, and finally you never get to play the game that you were promised. They’re even roughly the same length. The difference here is that you’re asked to be complicit in the inept “live” staging of an underfunded game, operating behind the scenes and not getting to do any of the cool stuff that the real player gets to do. The narrator is harried and unsure, unlike Stanley‘s pompous, commanding narrator. This is a funnier game than Stanley because it places you in the role of antagonist. Most any action you choose to take contrary to instructions is met not with a tut-tut but with a shriek of frustration. The game sets up a joke for you and lets you knock it out of the park, instead of making you the butt of the laugh. The jokes in this game are like the “speak button” joke in Portal 2 or Face McShooty in Borderlands 2. You are the comic demon sent to make the narrator’s life hell, and they seem to deserve it. I love to see games that give you a short experience, not asking for any big choices or presenting any challenge. Just giving you a little vignette of humor or pathos and then signing off. Gravity Bone, “Room of 1000 Snakes,” A Whirlwind Heist, and the like are not using the full potential of the medium; they don’t provide interactive storytelling and the joy of mastery over deep rules systems. But I love them so much.
One of my patrons posed this question: If “be cautious!” is the dominant strategy of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, why is the game still interesting? This is a complicated question, in part because it makes several assumptions I disagree with. The short answer is “because being cautious in XCOM is hard.” But let’s tease apart the … Continue reading Degeneracy and Competing Goals in XCOM →
One of my patrons posed this question: If “be cautious!” is the dominant strategy of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, why is the game still interesting? This is a complicated question, in part because it makes several assumptions I disagree with. The short answer is “because being cautious in XCOM is hard.” But let’s tease apart the details. What is a “dominant strategy?” I increasingly favor the alternate term “degenerate strategy.” In game theory (which has nothing specifically to do with games and more to do with obscure strategic matrices that bear faint relevance to real-world economics) a dominant strategy is a way of approaching a competition which is universally better than other available approaches. Imagine a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, Bomb, like the traditional game except that Bomb always wins. The dominant strategy here is to always play Bomb, because then you’ll tie at worst. In the book Rules of Play, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman use the term “degenerate strategy” to refer to a dominant strategy which results in the player focusing on one narrow approach to play, making miss out on the full complexity of the game. If one unit type in a strategy game is universally the best choice to use, with no need for another type of unit, that presents a degenerate strategy. The most effective way to play the game is to use that unit at the exclusion of others. And that’s a boring way to play. Is “be cautious” a strategy? Only sort of. To be deliberately superficial: suggesting someone “be cautious” is barely more useful than suggesting they “not die.” The fact that XCOM requires you to be cautious is a simple result of it being a game in which resources (i.e. soldiers) can be permanently lost, errors cannot easily be recovered from, and fortunes can change quickly. The alternative to “be cautious” is to take foolish risks, which is something the game takes pains to teach you to avoid. It’s not quite that simple, of course; there is no “be cautious” button in the game. Caution is an approach that requires adapting to circumstances and evaluating risk. There are simple actions that you can take that are cautious, including using cover and placing soldiers into Overwatch mode so that they will shoot at moving enemies. There are also complex behaviors, such as advancing slowly while providing cover or focusing fire on the most hazardous enemy. The set of cautious strategies is dominant over the set of reckless strategies, which could include tossing grenades near your own soldiers or splitting up your squad. However, there is an array of choice within the set of cautious strategies. Do you risk a support character’s safety in order to tend to an injured character in a dangerous position, or do you stay put and risk the injured character being killed? Do you leave your soldiers in a well-defended position with a low chance of hitting the enemy, or do you move them into a more vulnerable position to better kill an enemy and reduce the amount of incoming fire? The fact that there are multiple competing options within the set of cautious strategies demonstrates that it’s not very useful to consider caution a strategy. Instead, caution is a heuristic function: a property that can be used to evaluate the suitability of strategies. In XCOM, all other factors being equal, a more cautious strategy is a better one. Is caution dominant? Of course, all other factors are rarely equal. XCOM has a variety of mission types. In the most common and most basic types, the goal of a mission is simply to kill all enemy units. In these missions, it’s fine to prioritize caution over other choices. There’s no real advantage to completing these missions in fewer turns. However, there are also missions where bombs must be defused before they explode, or people must be rescued from killer aliens. In these missions, there is a tension between caution and the mission objectives. Taking too long will result in detonation or civilian deaths. Cautious play must be tempered by efficiency, and is therefore not a degenerate approach. In order to be effectively cautious, you have to understand and account for the totality of the game. Why is it interesting? Caution is one of the primary things that XCOM explores. Just like Thief: The Dark Project explores stealth and Knytt explores, well, exploration, caution (and its counterpart, risk) is one of the primary themes of the game. One could imagine an alternate XCOM where “brave” risk-taking let you could increase a soldier’s Will and quickly completing a mission provided resources that would compensate for the increased chances of injured or dead units. In such a game, it would be more useful to examine to what degree cautious strategies were dominant. However, the XCOM in our world is designed to encourage caution and punish recklessness. The interesting decisions concern how to be cautious, and when to relax this otherwise stringent requirement in the service of other priorities. This overwhelming pressure to be cautious, and the despair when caution fails, provides XCOM with its uniquely apocalyptic mood. And that sensation, of struggling against overwhelming odds and always being an inch away from defeat, is very interesting indeed. This article was commissioned by a patron. To support my work, sign up for my Patreon and help me continue producing writing like this.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2016%2F01%2F20%2Fdegeneracy-and-competing-goals-in-xcom%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Ddegeneracy-and-competing-goals-in-xcom&action_name=Degeneracy+and+Competing+Goals+in+XCOM&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
There’s a rich tradition in video games of villainous protagonists. One of the most interesting things about this trend is how it encourages you to understand and assign personhood to characters that you might otherwise demonize. At Future Proof Games we’re motivated by a concept we call “audacious compassion:” exercising players’ everyday empathy skills by … Continue reading It’s So Easy When You’re: Evil Genius →
There’s a rich tradition in video games of villainous protagonists. One of the most interesting things about this trend is how it encourages you to understand and assign personhood to characters that you might otherwise demonize. At Future Proof Games we’re motivated by a concept we call “audacious compassion:” exercising players’ everyday empathy skills by encouraging them to have compassion for characters that seem alien, evil, or irrational. Villainous games align with this concept. Tie Fighter shows you how the underlings in a dictatorial government justify their actions as preserving order. Overlord depicts a character who does the right things for the wrong reasons. And Evil Genius depicts a supervillain who’s inordinately concerned with keeping people happy and entertained. Lair Keeper If this post encourages you to play Evil Genius, note that the game has some relatively major issues that were never quite patched. The big one is certain henchman types hurting, rather than helping, your efforts. I’d recommend installing the unofficial patch: the Steam version is here. Evil Genius is a 2004 game1 heavily inspired by fellow villain game series Dungeon Keeper. You play a spy-movie scheming villain with an island base, carrying out evil plots in an eventual attempt to rule the world. You design the layout of your base, staff it with minions, and deal with secret agents trying to uncover your plans. You have a number of secondary concerns in addition to carrying out your evil plots. You have to look after your minions’ needs, which you do with an assortment of whimsical base items. You have to prevent secret agents from learning too much or interfering with your plots, so you can build gauntlets of traps along with infrastructure for imprisoning, interrogating, and converting agents. And you also have to deal with tourists to your exotic item, whom you distract with exotic hotels and diversions. Endless Distraction Much of your task as an evil genius is occupied with keeping people from realizing you’re an evil genius. Your minions have a Loyalty stat, which drops when they see disheartening things like body bags. As a result, it’s wise to arrange for dead agents to be spirited away to freezers in secret, to maintain your minions’ illusions that maybe they’re not serving a really evil genius. Maybe just a misunderstood one. Likewise, while secret agents can be killed and imprisoned, they can also be distracted and confused away. By setting up traps which sap their Attention and Smarts, you can cause them to forget what they’ve seen and become willing to be escorted out of your base. These traps can affect your own minions if they are overworked (i.e. if their own Attention is too low). It becomes a balancing act between security and efficiency. The Sympathy of Toil As a result, your evil genius is less a figure of diabolical chaos and more a hassled administrator with a macabre sort of whimsy. Far more of your time and effort is occupied with feng shui and personnel logistics than with actual villainy. Indeed, your actual Acts of Infamy are carried out off-screen; whether you’re clubbing seals or wiping Nashville off the map, you only really interact with the systems at your base. While your evil genius’s motivations to arbitrary villainy are comical and incomprehensible, the difficulties of their day-to-day work life are totally sympathetic. The minions’ AI is smart enough to get simple tasks done, but stupid enough that you’ll feel the frustration of a megalomaniac who sees all of their underlings as incompetent. The much-deconstructed trope of tormenting agents rather than just killing them becomes completely sensible in the context of the game’s systems. Evil Genius turns a comical archetype into someone you can relate to and sympathize with. By inhabiting the role of the evil genius, you understand and empathize with them, which may help you empathize with difficult people in your real life. Rather than seeing their end goals and declaring them irrational, you can take the lessons you learned in the game and consider their everyday problems and how that could lead them to behave the way they do. This article was commissioned by a patron. To support my work, sign up for my Patreon and help me continue producing writing like this. Show 1 footnote We won’t mention the Facebook follow-up that leaves out most of the interesting bits. ↩ <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2015%2F12%2F04%2Fits-so-easy-when-youre-evil-genius%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dits-so-easy-when-youre-evil-genius&action_name=It%26%238217%3Bs+So+Easy+When+You%26%238217%3Bre%3A+Evil+Genius&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
PixelJunk‘s Nom Nom Galaxy is a hard game. It’s a well-crafted resource-gathering and automation game in the vein of Terraria or Minecraft, but with a focus on factory production and automation. It’s hard because it’s far too complicated. One of the classic problems of game design is the dominant strategy. A dominant strategy occurs when … Continue reading Overcomplexity in Nom Nom Galaxy →
PixelJunk‘s Nom Nom Galaxy is a hard game. It’s a well-crafted resource-gathering and automation game in the vein of Terraria or Minecraft, but with a focus on factory production and automation. It’s hard because it’s far too complicated. One of the classic problems of game design is the dominant strategy. A dominant strategy occurs when one way to play the game is so much better that it becomes the only option a player should pursue. The simple solution to a dominant strategy is to add a complicating factor that acts as a tradeoff, weakening the strategy and leading to interesting player decisions. Nom Nom Galaxy, however, goes through this cycle a few too many times. Dominant strategies are complicated by challenges that can be overcome with strategies that are further complicated by new challenges. The end result is a frantic, frustrating time that keeps me from experiencing the joy of mastery. Stock Gameplay The central play loop of Galaxy is simple. Find or grow plants that serve as soup ingredients. Bring those ingredients to soup machines to make soup, then launch that soup off on rockets to be sold. Make enough soup and you beat a level. Robots make this easier. You can buy a number of robots, each of which performs a specific task: carrying things horizontally, throwing ingredients or soup vertically, harvesting ingredients, replanting ingredients, and so on. With enough understanding of the systems, you can set up a garden and produce soup automatically, your factory operating as an efficient machine. The problem with that is that this could result in a very shallow game. Once you understood how to make a smoothly-running factory, there’d be no more game left for you. To provide ongoing challenge and depth, the developers added complications. Reaching a Boil First, you have competitors. Instead of having a goal like “make 100 cans of soup,” your goal is “reach 100% market share.” Your competitors don’t share the planet with you; they simply produce soup. It’s not clear what determines their production rate, but it’s fast enough that you need to be able to consistently produce soup instead of doing it by fits and starts. If you’re doing well, your competitors will send robots to attack your factory base. This means that you have to build base defenses and support them by fighting the robots yourself. If you don’t defend well enough, parts of your base can be destroyed. This means you can’t just set up a base and leave it alone while you go off to hunt hidden treasures; you have to return home often to protect it. Additionally, you have to deal with market forces. Periodically, an ingredient will be declared fashionable, at which point soup made with that ingredient will sell for more. Occasionally, an ingredient will become disliked, which means every can of that soup you ship won’t just earn less; it’ll hurt your market share. That means that you must have a diverse array of ingredients, preventing you from relying on one or two easily-available plants. These complications serve to turn a sedate, methodical base-building game into a more active, desperate struggle. Properly balanced, they could result in a tricky but fun game. However, the developers didn’t stop there. Spoiling the Soup If this was all managed from an omniscient, cursor-based interface, it might be fine. However, Nom Nom Galaxy is also a platformer. You have to traverse blocky terrain in a series of hops, since you can’t climb the stairstep slopes at a rate even approximating tolerable. You take falling damage at surprisingly short fall distances. You walk quite slowly, with running being only marginally faster. The movement feels cautious, but the distances involved in exploring and finding new ingredients beg for more fluid traversal. Add to that the detailed gravity simulation. Chunks of land must be supported, which means you can’t tunnel through a hill without thinking about it collapsing on your head. You can accidentally flood or crush your garden or your robots. If a chunk of your factory is destroyed, it could get cut in half and send important rooms falling to the level below with no way to restore them beyond demolishing and rebuilding from scratch. You also need to worry about air supply. Sprinting consumes air more quickly. There’s no easily-reproducible way of oxygenating an area without connecting it to your factory’s power. So even if you master the fiddly platforming, you’re limited in how far you can explore without worrying about suffocating. Finally, the tools that could make your problems easier aren’t available from the start. Eventually you unlock vehicles or weapons to make fighting robots less awkward than fisticuffs, but you have to beat several hard levels first. You can get gum that helps with problems like air supply, but it’s limited-use based on collecting large numbers of resources that require exploration to find. In the Can All of the complications that Nom Nom Galaxy adds succeed at preventing the dominant strategy of just building a good factory and calling it done. However, they do so at the price of removing any ability for you to feel mastery over the game’s systems. No matter how good you are, either something will always go wrong or you’ll be reduced to tiresome, fiddly micromanagement. Soup is spoiled by too many ingredients. I wish this game provided room for its basic systems to shine. This article was commissioned by a patron. To support my work, sign up for my Patreon and help me continue producing writing like this.
A big secret of tabletop RPG design is that roleplaying games play themselves. Get the right group of people together and they’ll have fun telling a good story, regardless of which edition of which game they’re playing. The hard parts of RPGs are things the designer can’t control: social dynamics. What good are rules at … Continue reading Helping RPGs Play Themselves →
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="http://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Rosette-Logo-With-Handwriting-Draft.png" alt="Rosette Logo" width="300" height="305" class="alignright size-full wp-image-2096" srcset="https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Rosette-Logo-With-Handwriting-Draft.png 300w, https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Rosette-Logo-With-Handwriting-Draft-295x300.png 295w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />A big secret of tabletop RPG design is that roleplaying games play themselves. Get the right group of people together and they’ll have fun telling a good story, regardless of which edition of which game they’re playing. The hard parts of RPGs are things the designer can’t control: social dynamics. What good are rules at all, then? Rules serve two purposes: to enable and constrain the play. The rules of an RPG serve to make the creative process easier by enabling story, and they constrain the scope of the story to keep the group within a manageable narrative space. In my role as lead designer on Future Proof Games‘s upcoming tabletop RPG Rosette1, I’ve made tons of decisions regarding how the rules work. By the request of one of my patrons, I’ll go over that process from a high level. Where the Rules Live There are several rough categories you could fit rules into. There are character creation rules, which help to inspire and shape a character and provide mechanical2 hooks for the character’s story traits. There are conflict resolution rules, which answer the basic question, “How do you tell if a character succeeds at an interesting task3?” There are special encounter rules, such as combat, which typically form a little sub-game that can be more strategic than the general ruleset. Finally, there are narrative rules, which govern how players and the GM can introduce story elements in a rule-based way. Not all games have each type of rules, and different games focus on different things. The newer style of “indie RPGs4” tends to have little or no combat system and far more narrative control (sometimes not even assigning the role of GM), while old-school Dungeons and Dragons and similar games have virtually no narrative rules beyond “what the GM says happens happens.” When making these rules, the designer has a broad toolbox. She can assign statistics to certain traits and make players do math on them; this allows for differentiation of characters and situations and makes it easier to guess probable outcomes. She can leave certain outcomes up to chance, usually based on a die roll but sometimes based on card pulls or even games of Rock, Paper, Scissors; this adds tension to situations and allows the story to develop in unexpected ways. She can involve resources, where certain events or choices cause a character or player to gain or lose qualities or points; this shapes the progression of the story or pushes players to make interesting choices that trade risk and reward. Muses and Boxes You could run an RPG without any rules at all. I’ve done it; in college I ran a years-long campaign called Slowdream where players made whatever characters they wanted. Characters succeeded at things they were good at and I guided the course of the story by feel. What the rules provide is structure: support to keep things moving and guidelines to keep things on track. Rules serve as an inspiration by enabling story. Dungeons and Dragons provides a collection of fantasy races (species) and classes (jobs) that help players come up with cool character concepts. A player that struggles when told to “create any fantasy character” might come up with tremendously creative concepts when inspired by the idea of a “gnome barbarian” or a “dwarf monk.” Likewise, the fact that the Shadowrun rules depend heavily on money pushes the story toward performing jobs for wealthy corporate backers. Rules also constrain story, keeping it within expected bounds. When you play Vampire: the Requiem you want to explore darkness and complex morality; the rules support this by making it difficult to play an isolated homebody or a flashy superhero. A game of My Life with Master is supposed to end in pitchforks and fire, and the rules ensure this through their bleak-but-hopeful exchange of statistics like Love and Weariness. This is the balance of RPG design. Shove the story in a direction, but use constraints to keep it from going too far. Quirky Case Study Let’s look at an example from Rosette to see how all this works in practice. Rosette is intended to provide “quick, creative collaboration.” As part of this, players need a mechanical way to influence the story by featuring their character’s idiosyncrasies in a way that doesn’t slow the game down. Rosette characters have up to five quirks: a concept borrowed from GURPS to represent notable features of a character that aren’t covered by more general statistics. A character might have Calm Facade, Caring, Driven, Simple Clothes, and Traumatized. I wanted to make these quirks come up in play, in the same way that Commander Sisko’s love of baseball helps him communicate with aliens or Hamlet’s mourning melancholy lets him disguise his plotting as madness. Rosette‘s conflict resolution happens through a roll of two dice, with the player hoping to roll as high as possible. To encourage the player to bring quirks into play, I chose to let the player use a quirk to roll a third die to improve their results. This lets players affect the outcome of a chance-based situation when it has narrative weight relevant to the character. In order to constrain the frequency by which character traits come into play, to keep the game from becoming a litany of quirks, each quirk may only be used once per game session. Players therefore have to choose whether a situation is important enough to expend their limited resources on. As a way of inspiring better story, quirks can be used in three different ways. They can be Highlighted, where a character demonstrates their quirk to influence a situation. They can be Defied, where a situation pushes a character to overcome a foible or betray their values in order to accomplish a task. Finally, they can be Introduced, where a situation that appeared unrelated to a quirk is revealed to be relevant. The last option, Introduction, lets players guide the story by adding details that make it fit their characters better. This inspiration can shape the GM’s story in unexpected ways and gives the players a way to implicitly tell the GM what kind of story they want to tell. RPGs Play Themselves A well-suited group of players can make a good RPG experience out of any ruleset through their natural creativity and social synergy. The role of the game’s rules, then, is to encourage that experience by fueling and shaping the story. I designed the quirks system in Rosette to serve this purpose. Quirks encourage players to highlight their characters’ less mechanical aspects in the service of their greater challenges. However, their use is constrained to discourage more assertive or goal-oriented players from claiming too much attention to their own characters’ foibles at the cost of the rest of the characters. Every game designer, whether they realize it or not, is going through this process. Enabling story, constraining story. Pushing and pulling. As an exercise, take a look at a rule in a game that you never considered, and ask yourself: what was the intent behind this rule? You might learn something about the shape the designer wanted for the game. This article was commissioned by a patron. To support my work, sign up for my Patreon and help me continue producing writing like this. Show 4 footnotes Formerly LORE. ↩ “Mechanical” is a bit of a vague word, but I don’t know a better one. Read “mechanical” as “relating to rules rather than narrative.” ↩ One of the most important lessons to learn as a game master, the referee of a tabletop RPG, is that you don’t make players roll dice for unimportant tasks. If the thief is trying to pick the lock to the palace’s back gate before the guard comes back, that’s interesting. If the thief has all the time in the world to open the jewelry box she brought back to the hideout, just let her succeed. The classic rule of thumb is, “Are there consequences to failing this task?” ↩ Call them “Forge-inspired games” or “story games” or whatever you like, but if you have an opinion then you know what sort of game I’m talking about. ↩
Beauty of Frozen Waves – Mind: Path to Thalamus
Mind: Path to Thalamus is a staggeringly beautiful game. Let’s set aside its silly name and its wince-inducing narration. We’ll pretend the game was made as it should have been, as a series of evocative vignettes that trust the player to put together the pieces without forced explanation. The waves scene is a great example … Continue reading Beauty of Frozen Waves – Mind: Path to Thalamus →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2015%2F10%2F31%2Fbeauty-of-frozen-waves-mind-path-to-thalamus%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dbeauty-of-frozen-waves-mind-path-to-thalamus&action_name=Beauty+of+Frozen+Waves+%26%238211%3B+Mind%3A+Path+to+Thalamus&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
“Just keep swinging â «” by Steam user Zephyr from Mind: Path to Thalamus Mind: Path to Thalamus is a staggeringly beautiful game. Let’s set aside its silly name and its wince-inducing narration. We’ll pretend the game was made as it should have been, as a series of evocative vignettes that trust the player to put together the pieces without forced explanation. The waves scene is a great example of how the beautiful imagery of the game, created by Carlos Coronado, serves its narrative purpose. Take a moment to click on the picture above and view it at full size. As a screenshot, it’s pretty, but you must understand that the wave in that screenshot is still, frozen, even in the game. Take a look at it in motion (or lack thereof) in the below video, accompanied by some awed profanity in a rich, lovely accent: The evocative imagery in this game is simply sublime. It’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of true multimedia sculpture. Let’s look at this level in depth. Time and Memory The frozen waves are related to a little girl who died in a storm. At this point in the game, the protagonist is considering whether the strange world he’s exploring will let him change the past and save her. This level depicts a desert or beach, with the curling storm waves frozen above it in a moment of terror-induced paralysis, or perhaps examining a single instant divorced from the flow of time and its unbearable consequences. Waves are motion concretized. They represent inevitable, unceasing movement, often inescapable, certainly unstoppable. In Sonnet 60, Shakespeare writes: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend. In addition to symbols of inevitability, waves are also agents of erasure, washing away footprints on the beach and reducing sandcastles to indistinct mounds. These frozen waves, then, represent a resistance both to the passage of time and to the numbing distance of memory. Cold Water and Warm Sand Untitled Screenshot by Steam user Æthere from Mind: Path to Thalamus I keep calling them “frozen waves,” and the fact that I’m drawn to those words is significant. Waves are associated with summer and the beach. Note that despite the storm imagery that pervades the game, this scene begins in a sunny, clear-skied state. This is a warm scene. However, water is only motionless as ice. If not for the scattered surf, these walls of frozen water would resemble the edges of a glacier or the cleft faces of an iceberg. Of course, this isn’t actually a beach. Look at the picture above, specifically at the pattern of sand around the shrubs. It’s not the organic pattern of ripples caused by waves on sand. It’s geometric, the pattern of a karesansui, or Japanese dry garden1. These gardens of raked sand (or, more properly, gravel) are associated with meditation and contemplation. The waves looming over this landscape of calm provide a strong duality and also present a dilemma. Are the waves salty tears, threatening to disrupt the protagonist’s mental calm, a memory of trauma sweeping over and overwhelming his inner peace? Or is it the reverse: is the discipline and stillness in his mind holding the waves at bay, forcing them to remain frozen? There is definite tension there. Upon arriving in the level, a swingset is suddenly torn apart as if hit by great force. Clearly, this scene is not in perfect equilibrium, but it’s not clear which side is winning: stillness or destructive force. Place and Distance Untitled screenshot by Steam user Skyline from Mind: Path to Thalamus Position is important in Mind. Many of the puzzles require you to place a neuronal sphere in a spot marked by flowers or gears in order to change the world state from day to night or one season to another. This is often complicated by slopes that make it hard to keep the spheres in one place. The game trains you to pay attention to what happens in certain places or how things change as you move. This level begins in a hollow completely surrounded by water, evocative of the caves from earlier in the game. You then travel down a twisting passage to a more open area of the level. The roof of these segments is open to the sky, showing the large tree that is your eventual goal. After this claustrophobic space, you emerge into an open, freeing place of gently-rolling hills. The waves form a wall of water, sweeping in the same direction you are travelling. They come from the past and are moving with implied ill intent toward the future and the tree, which has been established to represent your personal power, sanity, and ability to seize agency over your problems. This escape into the open space is, then, not an attainment of permanent freedom but a momentary pulling-ahead of an inevitable advancing threat. Some of the waves form caves or hollows, where the water curls overhead to form a roof. These places feel more threatened and confined, and they also contain some of the trickier puzzles in the level, matching the emotional difficulty of the space with the mechanical difficulty of the game. The initial soundscape of this level is gentle wind, steady surf, and the sound of children playing. However, when standing near the waves, you hear a more sinister sound: screaming crowds and the gurgling of a person struggling for air. These unpleasant sounds encourage you to avoid the waves, but there’s an even deeper thing going on here. Because the game has trained you to associate being near key points with actual changes in the world, it encourages you (the player) to believe that staying away from the water actually changes whatever events are causing those sounds. This mirrors how the protagonist refuses to confront the events in his past by fleeing from them, pursuing an impossible quest to change history rather than accept it. The game uses these unpleasant sounds and the rules it’s established to urge the player to emulate the behavior of the protagonist. Rules, theme, and story work together to bring the player and the protagonist closer together. Crash of Waves The visual, audio, and level design of this scene serves its narrative goals, evoking the emotional and mental journey of its protagonist. The motionless waves evoke stopped time, with a contrast between their ice-like surface and the warm but contemplative sand. The general layout of the area mirrors the protagonist’s journey and goals and the game uses the unsettling sounds of terror and drowning to encourage you to avoid the waves just as the protagonist avoids the past. This striking scene is made even more beautiful by the meanings and allusions beneath its surface. By gazing into the waves we see the depths they hide. This article was commissioned by a patron. To support my work, sign up for my Patreon and help me continue producing writing like this. Show 1 footnote “Zen garden” is probably a misnomer; see this discussion. ↩ <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2015%2F10%2F31%2Fbeauty-of-frozen-waves-mind-path-to-thalamus%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dbeauty-of-frozen-waves-mind-path-to-thalamus&action_name=Beauty+of+Frozen+Waves+%26%238211%3B+Mind%3A+Path+to+Thalamus&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Unsettling Uncertainty in the Stanley Parable
Years ago I wrote a piece on the original mod version of The Stanley Parable.1 It’s since been remade and released as a for-sale title with very high production values, which I got just after release. I’ve played a few remakes of old games or overhauls of mods, and it’s always an uncomfortable experience. Everything … Continue reading Unsettling Uncertainty in the Stanley Parable →<img src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2015%2F10%2F30%2Funsettling-uncertainty-in-the-stanley-parable%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dunsettling-uncertainty-in-the-stanley-parable&action_name=Unsettling+Uncertainty+in+the+Stanley+Parable&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="http://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/the-stanley-parable-most-entertaining-thought-provoking-game-ever-0QFT2-300x300-14462364622.jpg" alt="A screenshot from The Stanley Parable with papers scattered on the floor of an office" title="A screenshot from The Stanley Parable with papers scattered on the floor of an office" width="300" height="300" class="alignright size-300square wp-image-2062" />Years ago I wrote a piece on the original mod version of The Stanley Parable.1 It’s since been remade and released as a for-sale title with very high production values, which I got just after release. I’ve played a few remakes of old games or overhauls of mods, and it’s always an uncomfortable experience. Everything in the game is familiar but different, and I constantly find myself wondering, “Did this happen in the original and I’m just forgetting? Is it totally new? Is it similar to an old bit but different enough that I don’t recognize it? Did I just miss it the first time?” Stanley weaponizes this feeling, even for new players who didn’t experience the original. With The Stanley Parable, you never know what to expect. Comforting Prison Bars Games have edges. There’s a limit to what they simulate. Even tabletop games, the most unrestrictive sort of game, have boundaries beyond which you hand-wave or make things up on the fly without using the rules. And this is a good thing: it provides a comforting sense of understanding. When you understand the constraints of a game, you can plan and anticipate what’s coming next. In Half-Life, you expect to solve problems by hitting switches and shooting people. If a segment of the game required you to play hide-and-seek with someone, it would be bewildering. Chances are you’d have trouble even understanding how to take the necessary actions. Games establish your expectations as a sort of contract with the player so that you understand what they expect you to do. This can be taken too far. I find the Assassin’s Creed series tremendously boring because of how obvious its constraints are. Every section follows the same pattern. Scout, sneak, kill, escape. There aren’t enough surprises, so the whole thing feels tedious to me. But when you know what to expect, or at least know what sort of thing to expect, you feel in control and powerful. The Stanley Parable does not want you to feel in control or powerful. Random Encounters Stanley is about choice and interactivity and determinism and a bunch of other things that ultimately distill to “this is a game about the nature of games.” The core of it is a branching structure where it presents you with a choice, tells you which choice you should make, and then reacts differently depending on what you actually choose. These choices range in visibility from “red door or blue door” to “I think I found a bug; no, wait, this is another choice.” But there are also random events. Sometimes the office is painted a different color. Sometimes you see someone else in the office, through a window. Sometimes the phone rings and, if you answer it, things are different the next time you restart the game in bold rebellion against causality. Randomness is common in games. Random chances to hit with a weapon, random selections of enemies for a randomly timed battle. However, the randomness usually has bounds. You know when it will happen, roughly what the range of possible results will be, and what the eventual consequences are. Stanley takes this away. The game makes things happen, and you don’t know whether it’s because of something you did or a roll of the dice. You don’t know if it’s something that you can respond to or whether it’s just window-dressing. The internet is full of people speculating on whether they caused a certain event to happen in Stanley or whether it was poor chance. These events serve to unsettle and disorient the player. They make it so that you’re never sure if you’ve fully explored the game and fully understood what is going on or if it has another surprise waiting for you the next time you start it up. By making the edges of the game vague, The Stanley Parable prevents you from getting comfortable and keeps you in a state of wonder. This article was commissioned by a patron. To support my work, sign up for my Patreon and help me continue producing writing like this. Show 1 footnote Looking back, that piece comes across as very critical, but I remember loving the game. A tonal error on my part, I think. ↩ <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2015%2F10%2F30%2Funsettling-uncertainty-in-the-stanley-parable%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dunsettling-uncertainty-in-the-stanley-parable&action_name=Unsettling+Uncertainty+in+the+Stanley+Parable&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Skyrim made me want to murder. I’m usually a kind video game player. I choose non-lethal options when available, act morally, and generally roleplay as a responsible (if sometimes abrupt) character when given the option. The character I played in Skyrim was an ambitious but magnanimous barbarian-mage, seeking the power to rule and protect. I … Continue reading Theft, Murder, and Morals in Skyrim →
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="http://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/SR-npc-Maven_Black-Briar-300x300-14461414251.jpg" alt="Maven Black-Briar" width="300" height="300" class="alignright size-300square wp-image-2055" srcset="https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/SR-npc-Maven_Black-Briar-300x300-14461414251.jpg 300w, https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/SR-npc-Maven_Black-Briar.jpg 1080w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Skyrim made me want to murder. I’m usually a kind video game player. I choose non-lethal options when available, act morally, and generally roleplay as a responsible (if sometimes abrupt) character when given the option. The character I played in Skyrim was an ambitious but magnanimous barbarian-mage, seeking the power to rule and protect. I didn’t seek to kill anyone unprovoked… until I met Maven Black-Briar. Maven1 is the rich de-facto ruler of the city of Riften. She is rude, cruel, and entitled. In a world of racist Vikings and execution-happy Imperials, she stands out to me as the most loathsome humanoid character. Sure, there are strange avian hags that eat people and vampiric assassins, but she is just a brewery owner who’s happy to kill and torture and extort for personal wealth and power. She mirrors her city, a place that represents corruption and villainy, and in doing so says a lot about Skyrim‘s attitude toward morality. She’s also immortal. Beneath the Hood I could talk specifically about the Thieves Guild questline, but it’s already been done quite well in a series of posts by Shamus Young: This is a major part of Skyrim and a lot of environments, characters, and cutscenes are dedicated to it. This is a shame, because the Thieves Guild questline is a mess. Itâ€ s unnecessarily terrible, failing at multiple levels and attempting things that arenâ€ t even needed. Check out his analysis at Twenty Sided. In Skyrim, certain NPCs are marked in the game’s code as “Essential.” While most of the characters in the game can be killed, Essential characters can’t. If they take enough damage, they drop to one knee, then eventually recover their health. Usually this is because they’re important to some quest. The game designers didn’t want players to accidentally block off any content, so any important NPC is invulnerable. In Maven’s case, her invulnerability goes beyond being unkillable. You also can’t meaningfully decrease her power or hurt her. At best, you can steal a horse from her family; at worst, you destroy her competition by poisoning mead as part of the Thieves Guild questline and make her Jarl (de jure ruler) of Riften as part of the Imperials questline. There is no way to bring her to justice for her corruption or meaningfully improve the city’s situation. A Lack of Scruples The city of Riften is a hive of villainy sitting in a fetid lake. It’s home to a brewery industry ruled by a petty villain, an orphanage with a sadistic headmistress, and the province’s Thieves Guild. The only local institution of any merit is a temple to Mara, the goddess of love and compassion. When you arrive in town, the guards extort you for money before you can even pass through the gates. It serves as the perfect place for the game’s evilest profession2. The role of “thief” in fantasy games is a complicated one. The archetype of the thief or rogue is, ultimately, inspired by the character of The Gray Mouser, introduced in Fritz Leiber’s 1939 story “Two Sought Adventure/The Jewels in the Forest.”3 Tolkien picks this up in The Hobbit Bilbo Baggins’s role of “burglar.” Gary Gygax cites Jack Vance’s Cugel and Roger Zelazny’s Shadowjack as his primary inspiration for adding the “thief” class (later renamed “rogue”) to Dungeons and Dragons. Of these, Cugel seems to be the closest to an actual criminal; the rest are really treasure-hunters, skilled in avoiding danger and surviving through stealth, skill, and cleverness rather than brute strength. They tend to steal from ancient tombs or dread monsters, not everyday folk. Games traditionally cast the thief as the mundane specialist of an adventuring group. The fighter is there to keep the front line and swing a weapon, the mage is there to cast spells from a distance, and the thief takes care of traps, locks, and vulnerable turned backs. In Skyrim, however, any character can do any of these tasks, and it’s not practical to be a member of a party. The Skyrim thief, therefore, is someone who chooses to steal things from people. The fighters guild (the Companions) are mostly-moral mercenaries. The mages guild (the College of Winterhold) are generally isolationist academics. The Thieves Guild is the only main employer in the game that hides its headquarters and makes its business to commit crimes and harm people’s livelihoods. The Nature of the Criminal When games portray fictional worlds, they make implicit statements about the nature of the real world. By placing the Thieves Guild — one of the game’s three major employers — in a corrupt town ruled by a coldhearted mead magnate, Skyrim makes a statement about criminals and morality. Criminals come from bad places, and there’s nothing you can do to improve the situation. Of course, in our world there is a strong statistical correlation between poverty and crime. Poor people are more likely to be the perpetrators of and the victims of crime then people in a higher socioeconomic class. This seems reflected in Riften: there is a large homeless population and the city does not seem to be as wealthy as many of the other cities of Skyrim. The big statement that the game makes, however, is that this problem is intractable. No matter how hard you try, you can’t depose the corrupt businessfolk or the leaders of organized crime. Once a place is lost to crime and poverty, nothing you can do will improve it. Some storylines in the game have choice; some allow you to affect the outcome. In this case, the designers decided that you could do nothing. Maybe the reason I want so badly to kill Maven Black-Briar isn’t her rudeness or her petty, banal villainy. Maybe it’s because she represents a threat to my fundamental optimism. I want to believe that we can improve the problems of poverty and crime and make our society safer and healthier. But Maven can’t be killed. This article was commissioned by a patron. To support my work, sign up for my Patreon and help me continue producing writing like this. Show 3 footnotes Despite sounding like a title, “Maven” is her first name. ↩ I’m not counting the Assassin’s Guild. It’s a more hidden quest chain that isn’t reflected in the game’s trinity of playstyles. ↩ Baen has it available under unclear license online. ↩ <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2015%2F10%2F29%2Ftheft-murder-and-morals-in-skyrim%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dtheft-murder-and-morals-in-skyrim&action_name=Theft%2C+Murder%2C+and+Morals+in+Skyrim&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Sparky’s Den, in the Memorial Union at Arizona State University, is a bowling alley and arcade where I spent many of my summer late afternoons as a young teenager. I can’t find any photos of their arcade online, so I don’t know if they still have the old Dungeons and Dragons or Alien vs. Predator … Continue reading Character Select: Marvel vs. Capcom 3 →
Sparky’s Den, in the Memorial Union at Arizona State University, is a bowling alley and arcade where I spent many of my summer late afternoons as a young teenager. I can’t find any photos of their arcade online, so I don’t know if they still have the old Dungeons and Dragons or Alien vs. Predator beat-em-ups, the Gauntlet Legends machine, the copy of Silent Scope. The Marvel vs. Capcom machine. I don’t have the same love of fighting games and arcades that a lot of video game folks seem to. I was never good at split-second reflexes, and my arcade time was limited to short spans after a summer program for gifted kids that was held at the university. Fighting games were weird curiosities: colorful characters equipped with secret moves in fanciful stages. The fighting games I remember are odd ones: Battle Beast, from a PC Gamer demo disk, or the inexplicable Golden Axe: The Duel. And I definitely remember Marvel vs. Capcom. Crossover Marvel vs. Capcom is a crossover between characters taken from each company’s stable of games and comics. These were characters I recognized from elsewhere: characters from the cheaply-animated X-Men cartoon (Gambit! so cool!) and the main character of Mega Man 3 (which I played at an elementary school after-school program). It also had glimpses into unknown works: what on earth is a Captain Commando, and who is this mysterious Morrigan (from something called Darkstalkers, I was told)? The animation was beautiful and the game was fun even though I was terrible at it. A few years ago, I gained access to a copy of Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Ostensibly, it uses the same premise, but the years had not been kind to my perception of the series’s development. It draws an inexplicable three fighters from Resident Evil, the game with the most boring characters ever conceived. It includes characters from Okami and Viewtiful Joe, which is ridiculous albeit creative. It includes Zero instead of Mega Man. It has Nolan North cosplaying as Deadpool. Tag Team My time at the summer program at ASU was fun and challenging. I took my first game development class there. But my life at the time wasn’t amazing. I had things better than a lot of people, but I had emotional and social problems that took me years to understand and deal with, hurting people along the way. That arcade, and Marvel vs. Capcom, was an escape, a place where I didn’t feel surrounded by hostility or self-loathing. I had friends at school, good friends, but they always felt like the rare exceptions that were willing to spend time with me. Things were different at the summer program, where the shared identity of “gifted kid” let me accept friendship at face value. Years later, I played MvC3 while part of a polyamorous triad that I’ve written a bit about elsewhere. It wasn’t a good look. It proved toxic for all three of us. MvC3 was another sort of escape, a thing for us to do together that was theoretically low-pressure and safe from meaningful conflict. I haven’t played much of it. MvC3 feels like MvC writ large. The pixelly art of the original is replaced with higher-fidelity 3D models that ultimately lack character. Instead of two members for your tag team, you have three. There’s a forgettable story. It’s fine. The game is fine. Backstory Works like the Marvel vs. Capcom series are virtually unique to comic books and games. It’s exceedingly rare to see a crossover novel or television show. But comic books mix and match their characters with wild abandon, even between companies on occasion. And video games are full of weird crossovers: the various Capcom Vs. series, the Smash Brothers series, the unrepentant cameos that appear time and again, regardless of how poorly one character might fit in another game. How many games contain a playable Ezio Auditore, or at the very least his pointy hood? Marvel vs. Capcom is a product of its environment. Without the background that spawned it, it would not exist. This article was commissioned by a patron. To support my work, sign up for my Patreon and help me continue producing writing like this.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2015%2F10%2F13%2Fcharacter-select-marvel-vs-capcom-3%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dcharacter-select-marvel-vs-capcom-3&action_name=Character+Select%3A+Marvel+vs.+Capcom+3&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
There is evil in this world. Some is systemic, titanic, nigh-insurmountable. And some is petty, banal, all the more troubling for its triviality. Farm Story 2 is the lesser evil. It’s the whispering, cloying, harrying serpent at the heel of gamers. Farm Story 2 is evil in a way that inspires not rebellion, but pity. … Continue reading The Evil of Farm Story 2 →
There is evil in this world. Some is systemic, titanic, nigh-insurmountable. And some is petty, banal, all the more troubling for its triviality. Farm Story 2 is the lesser evil. It’s the whispering, cloying, harrying serpent at the heel of gamers. Farm Story 2 is evil in a way that inspires not rebellion, but pity. This is a well-crafted game. There are barely any bugs and the art is attractive if generic. The bug-eyed chickens are charming, and it has a scamp of a kid who is adorable until the third or fourth time they implore you to install another of Storm8’s insipid games. I don’t have a quarrel with any of the (mercifully uncredited) people who worked on the game. My issue is with the environment who produced such a work. Let’s explore the darkness at its depths. Farm Story 2‘s evil is based in its exploitation of humans’ psychological and neurological weaknesses in the pursuit of profit without providing anything of worth in return. Most games take advantage of our mental foibles in order to provide brain-stem-level rewards, but in exchange they provide fun, or escapism, or enriching story and worlds. FS2 provides only the opportunity to reward its creators with your money in order to get temporary respite from discomfort. “Give me money,” FS2 says, “and you can make this stop.” The Weaknesses of Humanity and the Exploitation Thereof It’s pretty well-known among game design circles that our brains have certain fundamental bugs. Taking advantage of our logical fallacies and psychological quirks can let us do pretty cool things, but we game designers have a responsibility to do things that are mutually beneficial to our customers and our wallets. The patron who requested this article asked about Farm Story 2, “Please help me: why can’t I stop?” Here’s why. Farm Story 2 is a fairly standard business management game, sans the business management. You plant crops and buy animals, and then you return periodically to collect the product (in the pigs’ case, you collect bacon from their living bodies). You replant some of the seed, feed the animals, and fulfill random “orders” for assorted product. Sometimes you use buildings to convert raw materials into more complex materials. There are no maintenance costs, no market trends: nothing to plan for or strategize about. You just tap all the things that you can tap, then wait until you can tap more things. Processing Fluency There’s a base-level pleasure to this action. The processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure is a theory of psychology that says that things we can easily understand or process are aesthetically pleasing. We enjoy understanding what’s going on and seeing the pattern in it. By making a simple system that we can demonstrate understanding of, even when tired or busy, FS2 ties into that base desire. To take full advantage of this, a designer needs to disguise the source of the understanding. To put it another way, if you realize that you understand something just because it’s simple, you’ll be less satisfied. This ties into Raph Koster’s Theory of Fun, which proposes that the fun in games arises out of mastery of complex systems. FS2 provides Nilla Wafer levels of simple satisfaction, but its systems aren’t complex enough for actual mastery. Mere Exposure Not to worry, though. By the time you realize how shallow the game is, it’s hooked you with another flaw in your brain patterns: the mere-exposure effect. You like things which are familiar, even if only through repetition. In Farm Story 2, wheat takes 120 seconds to grow. Corn takes 240. Each time one of these crops completes, you get a push notification: “You have Wheat (sic) ready to harvest!” If you respond to even half of these notifications, you’re opening the game up every few minutes. This game will become familiar to you before you realize it has little to offer. You’ll also become familiar with Storm8’s other products. As mentioned earlier, the characters in the game will implore you to install other games by the same company. These notices appear in your quest log alongside actual game goals, and these requests are in addition to the more normal interstitial advertisements that appear every time you open the game. As a result of these advertisements, you’re more likely to download those games if you come across them elsewhere. Even if you don’t recognize them, hey’ll seem pleasant, thanks to the brainwashing you got from Farm Story 2. Partial Reinforcement As you get into the game, you’ll soon run out of space in storage or on your land. In order to upgrade or expand, you need certain resources that you can only get from fulfilling orders or clearing underbrush (which consumes tools)1. These resources, however, arrive randomly. They only sometimes appear, and when they do they are selected from a long list, which means that you only rarely get the specific resource you want. This takes advantage of the Partial Reinforcement Extinction Effect, or PREE. If you put a pigeon in a box and let it pull a lever to get food, it will pull that lever quite a bit. However, if that lever only sometimes gives food, the pigeon will pull the level more urgently, and it will take longer to give up on pulling the lever when the food stops coming. Farm Story 2 trains you to keep playing it in the same way that Pavlov trained his dog to drool on command. Escalation of Commitment If you play Farm Story 2 or a similar game, you probably recognize these things. You’ve already realized that the game’s appeal lies solely in its simplicity and familiarity, and you’ve probably already felt uncomfortable with how excited you get when the tedious order fulfillment finally gives you the land permit or seven that you need. You want to stop. Why don’t you stop? Because you’ve already spent so much time on it. You’re suffering from escalation of commitment. Related to the behavior surrounding sunk costs, this phenomenon means that we don’t like abandoning behaviors that have already cost us effort and resources. We don’t want to leave a bad movie because we’ve already paid for the ticket. We don’t want to lose an auction even when bidding exceeds an item’s value. We don’t want to leave Vietnam because so many people have already died. Because you have invested time in this game, quitting it feels like an admission of failure. However, every additional moment spent playing it is another moment lost, increasing your sunk costs. The sooner you quit, the less you will have lost. The Designer’s Responsibility As game designers, we must give as much as we take. Especially when trying to run a business, we choose to take money, time, and effort from our players. We have a responsibility to give something in return. Whether it be mastery over a genuinely interesting challenge, good feelings, an enriching moral question, social interaction, or just a pleasant story, we need to make sure that our relationship with players is mutual and nurturing, not exploitative. In exchange for your time reading this post, here is a gift. If you want an easy, cute game about tapping a bunch of things, making numbers go up, and getting push notifications that things are ready to be collected, download Happy Street. It provides the same brain-stem attractions discussed above, but in exchange you get cute characters, silly story, and a good feeling instead of a bad taste in your mouth. Now I have to go and uninstall Farm Story 2. This article was commissioned by a patron. To support my work, sign up for my Patreon and help me continue producing writing like this. Show 1 footnote You can also spend gems. In other words, real money. Because of course you can. ↩
Odin Sphere: Muggle Escabeche Ã la Erion
When Odin Sphere was released, it was a game from a parallel dimension where 3D technology never caught on. Now, though, it sits among Rayman Origins, Dust: an Elysian Tale, Ori And The Blind Forest, and many others in presenting gorgeous living, breathing, hand-crafted art and a strong visual aesthetic. Looking back, then, there’s one … Continue reading Odin Sphere: Muggle Escabeche Ã la Erion →
When Odin Sphere was released, it was a game from a parallel dimension where 3D technology never caught on. Now, though, it sits among Rayman Origins, Dust: an Elysian Tale, Ori And The Blind Forest, and many others in presenting gorgeous living, breathing, hand-crafted art and a strong visual aesthetic. Looking back, then, there’s one thing I remember about Odin Sphere. Food. More generally: cooking, gardening, and deliberate growth. Odin Sphere is a roleplaying game, but it doesn’t work like most RPGs. You don’t earn experience points by killing things or practicing your skills. Instead, you have two character growth gauges: Psypher Level and HP Level, which govern attack and defense ability respectively. Psypher Level increases when you absorb sparkling Phozons, which drop from enemies and certain plants; HP Level increases when you eat food, which you get from growing plants with Phozons and potentially combining them in recipes. This interaction of resources means that you’re constantly balancing Psypher and HP leveling: they both use Phozons, and you must be conscious of both in order to maintain your ability to overcome the game’s challenges. My memories of Odin Sphere are filled not with fighting dragons or maudlin romance, but with nurturing Baromett plants to grow sheep or hunting for Mandragora to dig up and collect. Preparing comestibles is essential to survival. Besides gaining experience to increase your maximum health, you’ll need healing from food and protection from various potions. In some areas, you need a protective potion to avoid taking constant heat or cold damage (unless you’re willing to give up a precious accessory slot for a protective item). Potions require their own preparation process: they need a Material of a certain value. You can increment the value of a Material by combining it with another item, or you can dramatically increase their value by combining two Materials. Their value is multiplied, with the units digit of the product becoming the value of the resulting Material and a number of Phozons released equal to the tens digit of the product. The Materials are then combined with ingredients grown and gathered in the world to create potions. This is the loop of Odin Sphere. Make sure you have enough bags to carry your forestry supplies. Plant seeds before you start a fight, to make use of the Phozons released by the enemies. Harvest the fruit before it becomes overripe. Scan the ground to find buried Mandragora. Eat what you need, keeping track of the seeds released. Hatch an egg, raise it, feed it seeds to make more eggs. Slaughter the chicken and eat it, then use the bone to increase the potential of your Materials. Plant another seed before crafting your materials to absorb any Phozons that are released. Absorb any stray phozons. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="http://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/PookaKitchenVelvet-300x300-1441225023.jpg" alt="PookaKitchenVelvet" width="300" height="300" class="alignright size-300square wp-image-2011" srcset="https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/PookaKitchenVelvet-300x300-1441225023.jpg 300w, https://ludusnovus.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/PookaKitchenVelvet-0x0-14412250341.jpg 390w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /> The depiction of food and plants in this game is loving and cozy. The Pooka restaurants accessible between trips into combat zones provide increased benefits when you supply them with the ingredients for their cooking. Their artwork might be even more of a benefit, though. The warm glow of a hearth, the dangling pots and pans, the blush of a table setting, and the carefully-arranged china on a shelf. Odin Sphere is a story-heavy roleplaying game with a fun fighting-game-style combat system, but that all pales in my mind in favor of the experience of planting, nurturing, mixing, and balancing my assorted needs for food and power. This game rivals Morrowind in my mind for presenting a world that I feel I know well enough to want to eat there. I’d like to go out digging for Carroteers and pet a Baromett, then return to town to dine on Muggle Escabeche Ã la Erion, have a fresh Napple for dessert, and toss away the core.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2015%2F09%2F03%2Fodin-sphere-muggle-escabeche-a-la-erion%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dodin-sphere-muggle-escabeche-a-la-erion&action_name=Odin+Sphere%3A+Muggle+Escabeche+%C3%83%C2%A0+la+Erion&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Games are as much about what they don’t let you do as what they do. Figure and ground. The tools they withhold from you are often more important than the tools they provide. Constraint guides cleverness and creativity. Supercell’s Clash of Clans is a fairly typical free-to-play mobile game on its surface. You build a … Continue reading You Can’t Control Clash of Clans →
Games are as much about what they don’t let you do as what they do. Figure and ground. The tools they withhold from you are often more important than the tools they provide. Constraint guides cleverness and creativity. Supercell’s Clash of Clans is a fairly typical free-to-play mobile game on its surface. You build a town. It takes a while. You can pay money to make it take less of a while. You build troops, and they follow the same pattern. What’s a bit unusual is that you can rearrange your town, and the layout you choose matters. When a town is raided, the placement of its defenses means the difference between winning and losing. Especially because you can’t control your troops. When you raid a town in Clash, you see the town’s layout and can choose where to release your troops. Once you release them, however, they choose where to move and attack… and your troops aren’t very clever. They always attack the closest target that fits their targeting criteria. Normal ground troops will attack anything, while specialty troops only attack certain structures like defenses. You can’t focus on a target the same way you can in most strategy games. Even if you send all your barbarians after one cannon emplacement, once that one is destroyed they scatter to two or three others, getting cut down before they can accomplish anything. If a dangerous defensive weapon is surrounded by walls and lesser defenses, your troops will never get to it in time. My first reaction to the game was frustration. Why can’t I give commands after sending in my troops? Why is it so hard to take out one simple mortar? Why are my troops so stupid? Constraints. By removing the assumed affordance of directing your troops, Clash forces you to see a battlefield differently. Because your troops follow only their own AI, you have to plan ahead and predict what they will do. Sometimes you’ll send a sacrificial troop ahead to trigger hidden traps. Sometimes you’ll distract defenses while you drill deep into their town. Sometimes it may be better to break through a wall under heavy fire than to take the long way around. This influences town design as well. In many base-building games, non-defensive building placement seems arbitrary, at least to a beginner. Clash makes it immediately clear that this isn’t true. Every building is a wall, a honeypot, a distraction. You have to think about the path that an attacker might take into your town. Do you have a weak point? You could seal it, or you could line it with traps to drop the attacker’s numbers below that which can challenge your defenses. The fact that every attack against you can be replayed helps with this base refinement process. You can see when your defenses fail, understand where you missed a vulnerability, and occasionally celebrate as you see an attacker become frustrated and give up. Your own town persists, but your targets don’t; you can only attack random players or get revenge on ones who have attacked you, once. The only targets you can attack repeatedly are goblin encampments, which serve as a single-player tutorial accompaniment to the multiplayer matches: more puzzles than actual fair fights. Clash of Clans could have let you control your troops. Even tapping a building to focus attacks would have been simple to implement. By choosing not to do so, the developers are abstracting the low-level tactics to highlight the higher-level strategy. You have to think of your troops as expendable, simple-minded tools; even if they survive an attack, you lose any you’ve deployed. All that matters is the town and its weaknesses. Figure and ground. Constraint and affordance. This post was commissioned by one of my patrons, who knows who she is and isn’t sorry she made me play Clash of Clans. To request posts of your own, become a supporter.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://stats.irrsinn.net/piwik.php?idsite=7&rec=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2F2015%2F08%2F29%2Fyou-cant-control-clash-of-clans%2F%3Fpk_campaign%3Dfeed%26pk_kwd%3Dyou-cant-control-clash-of-clans&action_name=You+Can%26%238217%3Bt+Control+Clash+of+Clans&urlref=https%3A%2F%2Fludusnovus.net%2Ffeed%2F" style="border:0;width:0;height:0" width="0" height="0" alt="" />
Neko Atsume is a game with feline sensibilities. It doesn’t beg for your attention. It’s often inscrutable. Sometimes you’re not sure why you keep it around. More games should be like this. Neko Atsume is a gently brilliant deconstruction of mobile games and how we approach Pokemon-style collecting. Through its passive and cryptic approach, it … Continue reading The Feline Grace of Neko Atsume →
Neko Atsume is a game with feline sensibilities. It doesn’t beg for your attention. It’s often inscrutable. Sometimes you’re not sure why you keep it around. More games should be like this. Neko Atsume is a gently brilliant deconstruction of mobile games and how we approach Pokemon-style collecting. Through its passive and cryptic approach, it encourages the player to approach it with intention as opposed to most games’ eager-to-please style. It might be the Dark Souls of pet simulators. Undercoat Neko Atsume has been downloaded millions of times, a number that even surprises its creator. It certainly doesn’t seem designed for mainstream success. Most free-to-play games are like a dog: overeager for your attention, always reminding you that it’s ready to play, and asking you to take on the unpleasant task of paying money whenever it feels a certain urge. Maybe it’s because I’m a cat person, but I prefer Neko Atsume‘s approach. You stock a patio and eventually an entire apartment with cat food and toys. However, nothing happens when you’re paying attention to it. There’s no juicy reward, no timers counting down. You have to close the app and return in order to see if cats have shown up. It doesn’t even issue push notifications to let you know when something happens. You must remember the game and choose to check on it to see any progress and, if you’re lucky, take pictures of any cats that haven’t already left. More often than not, the progress you find is that a fat cat has eaten all the food. The game is especially inscrutable to me because it’s in Japanese. Since I only speak English, playing the game is a process of interpreting icons and remembering which side of a dialogue box means “OK” and which half means “Cancel.” But even when translated the game remains mysterious. Special cats have certain toys that trigger their appearance and, when they visit often enough, they give strange treasures. Cats have names and personalities that don’t seem to have any direct relevance to the mechanics. Often, you’ll return to the game to find a cat has come and gone, leaving behind only some dried fish and a silhouette in your visitor log. It’s almost shocking how little the game pushes itself on you. It doesn’t make you feel bad for leaving it alone. At the worst, leaving the game alone results in a less efficient collection of currency and cat photos. Scratching at the Door It’s tempting, as a game designer, to beg players to enjoy your game. “Engagement” is seen through a post-hoc Cargo cult lens: because good games encourage people to play them, you can make your game better by encouraging your players to return to it. These games end up with the personality of a needy significant other: texting you for no reason but expecting a response, letting you know when they finish chores, and leaving passive-aggressive requests like “You haven’t played me in six days…” Far better to be like a cat. Far better to keep in mind the hoary adage, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” Neko Atsume knows that true love means being able to sit quietly with your partner in the next room, confident that they care for you and will seek your attention when they want it, not just to verify that you still breathe. But how do we channel that feline spirit? First, as always, is to have any sort of spirit to begin with. Neko Atsume has, at its core, cute cartoon cats and a simple currency-earning and upgrade system. It knows what it is about and carries that out with aplomb. Second, let your players come to you. This requires a great deal of confidence that your game is good enough to draw them in. Useful notifications aren’t a bad thing, but if a player wasn’t convinced by your useful notification, a nagging one a week later won’t endear them to your game. Finally, don’t take the feline drive too far. Cats certainly have negative traits. Don’t insist that your players jump through hoops to play the game; this is like crying for food in the middle of the night. Make your work accessible for when your players feel the urge: implement convenience features to make their experience as smooth as possible. Don’t be confident to the degree that you become rude. Vomiting up a hairball of entitlement, acting like your game is doing its players a favor, will only drive them away. Recognize that the player-game relationship is mutual: players are benefiting you just as much as you benefit them. And don’t scratch your players when they stop coming back. Players may drift away, and that often means that they’ve lost interest, but don’t assume that. If they come back after months away, they shouldn’t return to shredded furniture and an overflowing litter box. Forgive your players for drifting in a way that cats often don’t. Neko Atsume has the dignity of a cat without the shedding or the claws. Learn from its example. This post was commissioned by one of my patrons, who seems to be fond of getting me to write about animal games. To request posts of your own, become a supporter.