Fixing Silent Conversation

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I like the concept behind my game “Silent Conversation.” The words of a piece form the physical structure of a level that is shaped by the setting, events, and feelings of the work’s content. Unfortunately, “Silent Conversation” is, well, not a very good game. It’s slow, because I wanted to encourage people to read the pieces. But it’s way too slow to be fun. The idea of certain words being “powerful” is promising, but the dodge-dark-red-things gameplay is more annoying than engaging.

A lot of people really resonated with the idea. I heard plenty of compliments for the visual interpretation of the text, and for making the text interesting to read, and for the potential of the game for education… but no one really said the game was fun. So here’s a question for you: how can I make a spiritual successor to “Silent Conversation” that’s actually fun? I’m seeking your help here.
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Games As Simulation

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Games are simulations.

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

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

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

Waves: A Ludum Dare 17 Postmortem

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This past weekend I took part in Ludum Dare 17. Ludum Dare is a periodic informal competition where participants make a game in 48 hours based on a certain theme. This time, the theme was “Islands.” By the end of the weekend, I created a game called “Waves,” which can be played on my site. Kayla Kinnunen posted a postmortem of her own experience, and I thought it would be fun to do one of my own.

Note that the work-in-progress builds linked below will probably require you to click on the game to give it focus before it will react to your keystrokes.
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Saira

Blogs, Digital Games,

Saira is an explorer. Three years ago, she was a photographer, working to take pictures of exotic and dangerous wildlife. She is brave and athletic, able to leap from rock to rock without hesitation. Her eyes are trained to notice things hidden in the world around her, and her hand is steady as she takes each picture. She can scramble up air shafts, dodge hungry wildlife, and hazard cruel environments to achieve her goals.

Saira is a character piece. Continue reading Saira →

Difficulty and Walkthroughs

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I had an interesting discussion at GDC with a guy I know named Tasselfoot. Chances are that you know Tass, even if you don’t think you do; if you’ve ever used a YouTube walkthrough of a Flash game, that walkthrough was probably made by Tass. As far as I know, he’s the only person in the world who makes his living off of walkthrough videos.

While we were on the bus to the ill-fated Zynga-hosted afterparty, Tass and I had a conversation where he tried to convince me to put links to video walkthroughs inside my games. Obviously, he has a vested interest in this, but he also believes in it from a player’s perspective. Walkthroughs, he feels, should be as accessible as possible to the player. My initial reaction, as a video game auteur, was to disagree. The presence of a walkthrough ruins the carefully-crafted difficulty curve I’ve prepared for the game. But as Tass continued, he began to sway my mind.
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The Brutality of Saints Row 2

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I’d like to take a moment to discuss a game that does some really interesting things with character and storytelling: Volition’s GTA3-em-up, Saints Row 2. Wait, where are you going? I’m serious. Here’s the thing: SR2, more than any other game I’ve played, makes me despise my player character. By the end of the game, my PC is the most reprehensible person in Stilwater.

SR2 is a game that borrows liberally from Grand Theft Auto 3 and its successors. The player character is a sociopathic criminal, doing a series of missions to gain power in a city while murdering thousands of people in the process. Playing a game like this, the player should expect to do horrible things; it’s a game (in this case) about a street gang leader taking over an entire city. These games set up an environment in which the player can suspend their ethical disbelief. The world is farcical, with corrupt police, over-the-top raunchy radio ads, and stereotyped characters. All of the characters with dialog are criminals, and none of the bystanders get enough characterization to make the player empathize with them.

But there’s something weird in SR2‘s approach. The middle of the game consists of three parallel storylines, corresponding to the PC‘s strengthening of her gang, the Saints, through destruction of three rival gangs: the Sons of Samedi, the Ronin, and the Brotherhood. The Sons of Samedi plotline is a drug-running crime story in the Tarantino vein. The Ronin is a full-on action movie, complete with katana duels. But the Brotherhood is the brutal story of the cold-hearted destruction of a man and his family.
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Ludus Novus 019: False Narrativism: Awesome Zone

Digital Games, False Narrativism, Podcasts
Ludus Novus
Ludus Novus
Ludus Novus 019: False Narrativism: Awesome Zone
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This podcast episode is about an unreleased game from 1990 that a guy showed me at GDC. It’s called Awesome Zone, and it was created by developer Theodore Alby for a company called KnowSoft over the course of a six-week nervous breakdown.

The music for this episode is from “Three Goes On Forever” by Time Slips By, and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike License as part of the compilation Ctrl-N.