The Player in Oblivion

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Many game designers are so enamored with their game that they neglect the player.

I’ve been sick for the past week or two, so I’ve been getting very little done and pursuing rather escapist past-times. One of the unhealthier things I’ve done is play a lot of Bethesda Game Studios’ Oblivion. A whole lot of it. Steam says I’ve put in 39.3 hours, and I’ve only been playing for four or five days.

It’s an escapist game that appeals to my urges for exploration, completion, and optimization, even if I feel the need to patch the hell out of it. I’ve got 39 mods installed for it, all graphical upgrades, bug fixes, or interface tweaks. People no longer look like corpses and most of the bugs are fixed, making the game quite playable.

As much as I clearly enjoy the game, it suffers from a fatal flaw: the developers sacrificed user experience in their pursuit of their game system. Oblivion has an elaborate, interesting setting and backstory, an impressively large and detailed world, and a complex set of mechanics. But it’s all a lot less fun than it should be.
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The Obsolescence of Lives

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I twitted that “restarting a long multi-screen level on death” and “limited lives” are examples of retro mechanics that should stay dead. I thought that I would expand a bit on what I meant.

In part, this is a corollary to my past writings on challenge and punishment. In my definition, challenge is when a task is difficult to accomplish because it requires a high amount of skill, ability, or experience. Punishment is when failing a task imposes a burden on the player, usually in the form of lost time.
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Eidos and Monaco

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“The most unsettling thing about it,” said Monaco, “is that if you have Eidos simulate our own world, it means it’s simulating another Eidos. It doesn’t take much thought to realize that there is an endless chain of nearly-identical Eidos-frames, stretching into infinity. The chances that we are in the original, ‘real’ frame are infinitesimal. We have simulated ourselves into fictionality.”

Saving Professor Booster: Choice and Agency in Cave Story

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Cave Story is a classic of the indie games movement. It single-handedly showed many people that a single developer could make a game with dated graphics that was as good as AAA commercial games. This was already clear to some, but Cave Story‘s prominence means that it has heavily inspired much of the work done by the modern indie games culture. There are a lot of things that Cave Story does well; its handling of mood and narrative structure are great, as well as its balancing of humor and pathos. One thing it does badly at, however, is providing the player with effective choice and agency.
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Bizarre Variable Naming Issue With iPhone Packager for Flash

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I posted the other night about my difficulties with Adobe’s iPhone packager for Flash, the program that lets you convert a Flash app into an iPhone app. I’ve managed to track down at least one of the issues that’s been eluding me, but it’s a doozy.

If I name an embedded bitmap resource “sprBatteries,” the app hangs at startup on the iPhone.

I can name it “sprDryCells” or “sprBatteriesX,” and it works fine. I can replace the resource PNG with a PNG I know works elsewhere, but if I name it “sprBatteries,” the app hangs. The app runs fine on my desktop. I believe (although I haven’t done systematic testing to confirm) that it works on the iPhone if I compile it as a simple AS3 app using the Flex compiler instead of compiling it as an AIR app. The resource variable name doesn’t collide with any others in the project.

If you’re not a programmer, let me explain that this behavior is bizarre. Variable names are totally arbitrary. As long as you don’t use any prohibited characters, you can name a variable anything you want. A college friend of mine liked to call his loop iterators “taco.” Many languages/compilers won’t even bother remembering the variable names once the source code is turned into a program. Flash happens to record theirs in the compiled SWF for various reasons, but there’s no sensible reason why “sprBatteries” should be treated differently than “sprBatteriesX.”

I give up on AIR for iPhone unless someone can get me a solution. I’ll see if I can get this running in simple AS3 without any hardware APIs, but it’s unlikely that my final product will contain any accelerometer input (for example). This is frustrating, and I’ve spend a total of over 12 hours fighting with this thing. Adobe hasn’t represented this as a finished product, and rightfully so. In its current form (and assuming I haven’t overlooked something simple), the Packager for iPhone is not ready for use in serious AIR development.

Interviewed by Casual Girl Gamer

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I got interviewed by Casual Girl Gamer. They asked me about various things, including art and success, and I gave them some information on my current projects that I’d never talked about publicly before.

Check out the interview on their site.

I enjoyed the interview, and I like doing interviews in general. They make me think about what I’m doing and how I’m doing it, and often my answers are a bit of a surprise even to myself. If you want to interview me for something, like your church newsletter or your Fortean literary periodical, you’re welcome to e-mail me at Gregory.Weir@gmail.com.

“The Day” Released

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I just released “The Day” on ArmorGames.com. It’s a game about birthdays, trading cards, and war.

It’s Tia’s birthday, and she’s looking forward to beating all of her friends with the new card her dad gave her! Beat the other kids by choosing the right cards, and earn more cards until you’re the best of them all!

And don’t go into the woods, or the guards will kill you.

The game is an experiment in orthogonal goals.

Play “The Day” at Armor Games.

The Nature of a Masterpiece

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These days, we use the word “masterpiece” to mean “a work that could only be created by a master.” Any especially good painting, game, or poem could be called a masterpiece. Originally, though, the term had a very specific meaning: a masterpiece was the work created by a craftsperson to demonstrate that she was now a master of the craft.

The craft guild educational system started with apprentices. Apprentices worked for and learned from a master. When they were finally able to earn money on their own, they usually became journeymen: craftsfolk who worked and produced good products, but weren’t officially recognized as experts. In order for the guild to recognize a craftperson as a master, she would need to make a masterpiece: a work that demonstrates her skill.

It’s interesting looking at this concept in the context of game development. Terry Cavanagh‘s masterpiece is VVVVVV. His work beforehand was excellent, but 6V demonstrated that he had a mastery of every aspect of the craft: challenge, story, managing the player’s feelings, and creating a unified feel. The concept is a little awkward to apply to teams, but it can be done; Ico was an excellent game, but it’s only with Shadow of the Colossus that Team Ico created a masterpiece.

The way I see it, a masterpiece must be perfect. I don’t mean that it must be without flaw, but it needs to be complete in every way. If there is a big piece missing, or if the work is not expansive enough to fully demonstrate mastery of the form, then it can’t be considered a masterpiece. Masterpieces are dissertations, theses, graduation projects: they are evidence of the creator’s skill and control over the totality of the craft.

It’s fun to play a game to decide on masterpieces for various creators. Frictional Games have Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Jonas Kyratzes has Phenomenon 32, a great example of a perfect masterpiece that still has flaws. Valve has Half-Life 2… or maybe one of the episodes? Or maybe some other game entirely, depending on your opinion. Personally, I don’t think Anna “Auntie Pixelante” Anthropy has made her masterpiece yet, although REDDER comes close.

As for me, I know I haven’t produced a masterpiece yet. I’m still a journeyman. I have been thinking lately about what I could do for a masterpiece, though. I’ve got one tempting idea involving survival in a warzone without weapons.

Do you disagree with any of my choices for masterpieces? Do you want to suggest candidates for other creators? Please comment with your ideas.

Ludus Novus 020: Acceptable Losses

Digital Games, Podcasts
Ludus Novus
Ludus Novus
Ludus Novus 020: Acceptable Losses
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In this episode of the Ludus Novus podcast, I discuss the basic minion summoning and equipment mechanics of Overlord, and how they both encourage tactical gameplay and maintain the characterization of the player character.

The music for this episode is from “medieval evil” by Baal Anamelech and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 license.