Oh, Horrors! Say it's not so!

I am a great fan of ESCAPIST MAGAZINE, a free online magazine contributed to by (mostly) electronic gaming developers and journalists, but occassionally an old-school type, some of which are acquaintences of mine. In the latest issue, Vincent Kang writes a perceptive article with the somewhat heretical title: I'D RATHER GAME THAN READ A BOOK I found the article to be of interest to video game addicts and parents of same. Like some of you, computers and internet and games take up far too much of my free time, and I begin to despair of finding time to pursue some of my lifelong passions, notably reading books. Mr. Kang addresses the tradeoff between massive multiplayer online games (such as Second Life, and Warcraft, and what have you) in a trenchant and readable fashion. His semi-heretical point is that online gaming fosters narrative thinking in a fashion not unlike reading epic ficiton:

Literature is equipment for living. The cultural critic Kenneth Burke wrote those words in his 1974 book, The Philosophy of Literary Form. In a utilitarian sense, the stories we tell each other in books, movies and videogames help shape our consciousnesses in a way a straight recitation of facts cannot. Little Red Riding Hood teaches us to not trust strangers in a way that simply saying "don't trust strangers" cannot.

Narratives are the key. The format, be it film or books or videogames, acts as a wrapper by which the substance, the story, is delivered. They help shape the story by setting the boundaries of the playing field in which the story plays itself out

In a sense, isn't a MMORPG an ongoing narrative that we interact with every second that we are logged in? I find it rather easy to take a humorous incident of from an online incident and spin an anecdote out of it. I note, from the journaling efforts of other online gamers, that most of them that bother to do so can spin a tale out of relatively few narrative threads. In that sense, isn't gaming (and online gaming in particular) beneficial towards a story telling creativity? I can't hazard a guess as to whether it would replace fiction for me personally (it certainly hasn't, I'm reading four books at once, currently), but it has an epic look and feel that appeals to the same sense of creativity within my soul.

If you have an interest in the narrative process and creativity, I suggest you look into this article (linked above) as well as the non-fiction essay collection SECOND PERSON, by MIT Press. Second Person is a book all about telling narrative storys through the medium of gamesmanship. It features some interesting contributors. A very costly read (alas, MIT Press books ain't cheap), but well worth it if you are a devotee of the genre.

Speaking of which, Allen Varney weighs in

I've plugged the ESCAPIST on this blog many times, and Allen Varney (as my favorite correspondent) at least a few times. In the most recent issue, Allen weighs in on a topic of interest to me, rendering 3D imagery so we appear to be viewing a 3D world on a 2D screen:

Every "three-dimensional" game you play is a pussy. On your flatscreen TV or monitor, your so-called 3-D game presents nothing but an illusion of depth, a sleight, a fake. When will we get computer gaming in three real, no-kidding spatial dimensions?

Allen Varney, "Will Computer Games Ever Truly Breach the Third Dimension?", Escapist Issue 79

As I hinted at earlier, I don't consider what we are looking when we gaze into a VRML style world to be "three dee" with a capital 3. At best, it's a visual art form that cunningly represents the image of depth for 2D or flatscreen viewers. It would take a revolution in computing to have the true three dimensional technology suggested by "cyberpunk" genre fiction. Allen discusses what steps have been made in this direction, which are still somewhat rudimentary, and arrives at a similar conclusion to what I did; stick with 2D until the new tech is easily affordable, and that may be never.

This is an interesting column, which I'm used to from Allen, and a nice survey of TRUE 3D tech.

Another Great Article from the Escapist

I have often mentioned articles in The Escapist, a free monthly gaming E-zine with professional standard layout and graphics and a surprising amount of authors involved in the gaming industry. Much of their material is focused on computer gaming, which I enjoy, but not nearly as much as the paper and metal kind. Every once in a while, though, you encounter a real gem, as I discovered in Issue 69 recently. In IS RAPE WRONG ON AZEROTH? author Bruce Sterling Woodcock opines on one of my personal favorite subjects, the idea that morality has a place in games.



As an example of a moral gray area, that's questionable. I could tell stories of RPG evil that would make this author's hair turn white. However, I see where the author is going with this. He had no way of knowing if the hobbit had wronged the centaurs in some grevious manner, nor was he acquainted with centaur customs. Perhaps burning at the stake is par for the course in their view of morality?

Morality as an issue in gaming has been with us for many years. Very RARELY does a game design around the idea of morality, and that's the thrust of this article. The groundbreaking Ultima IV actually had a morality subsystem embedded into it-- you built the character's world view (and sense of good and evil) from a series of quite intricate questions the program asks you at the very beginning of the adventure. The result was a character that had a distinctive moral outlook, and woe be unto he who deviated from that world view! I remember that game, by Origins Systems, back in the late 80s or early 90s. I remember thinking all that "questiaonaire stuff" was pretty boring at the time, but looking back I can see where origins was going with this. For the first time in a gaming context, you were capabile of living in a logically consistent, ethical world with REAL CONSEQUENCES for transgressors. I love that. Many games have had little code bits hidden in the main engine to at least give the player some form of consequence for either a mistake (as noted in the next segment) or an outright evil action:



Woodcock cites Michael Ruse's somewhat well-known article "Is Rape Wrong on Andromeda?" (which I read qutie a few years ago and highly recommend-- it can be found in the collection THE DARWINIAN PARADIGM). He says:

"If intelligent alien species existed on other planets in the universe, they might have different notions of morality than our own. Taking his cue from the growing field of what is now known as evolutionary psychology, Ruse argued that much of what we consider moral is shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and natural selection. Indeed, many biologists today believe that a variety of beliefs and behaviors like justice, fairness, mutual cooperation, reciprocal altruism, proportionality, inclusive fitness, kin favoritism and even the instinct to protect children all evolved from basic biological behaviors that made those who followed such principles more likely to survive and pass those values on to their offspring."

That's an interesting mindview to approach gaming with. In essence, Woodcock is stating WE are the aliens, when we enter into a gaming world, no matter if your playing a graph paper and pencil RPG, wargame, or computer game. You are entering into a world that is pristine and free from our sense of reality. WE change the world by imposing our moral world view upon it. I'm not sure I would personally extend the paradigm quite that far, but it's an interesting point nonetheless. I have always thought that we play evil characters doing evil things (and yes, I certainly have done this before, but not lately) because it appeals to the worst part of our natures-- the adolescent desire to be God, to mete out our reality and impose it on others. The id is a nasty place to visit, as we all should know. When we find ourselves in a consequence free environment (only a game, right?), what monsters do we let forth?

IS RAPE WRONG ON AZEROTH? is a great article and a good companion piece to The Escapist's earlier
WHAT THE OTHER GUY THINKS, a fantastic essay on the life of the filler character. I recoomend the October issue highly, as it focuses entirely upon the idea of good and evil in gaming.

Return of the Feelies, Escapist 62

I like Allan Varney, though I'm sure the feeling isn't mutual. Escapist 62 is out, with an article by Allan that I really found fascinating.

Obviously, if you've read this blog for more than a few posts you've caught on that I'm a big softie about nostalgia. Especially about gaming. One of the great companies of the early computer gaming industry was INFOCOM, a company I have tremendous respect for, because their only product was text adventures-- the visuals, the adventure itself, came alive in your head. No great graphics, no whiz bang animation you needed a graphic card with gigs of memory on it. ONE element of Infocom that I loved was the extras you got with every game. If the text adventure was a crime mystery, you got real, tangible photographs, a crime blotter, pencils and other paraphenalia. If it was a fantasy adventure, you got a map and other adventure oriented stuff. Infocom, and to some extent Origins and the early Electronic Arts, all specialized in these extras that Varney calls "the Feelies" in his latest article. I loved that stuff, all of it lost long ago of course. Varney's article goes into the process and creation of FEELIES in the early days of computer game packaging, and it's a danged good read. Give it a look!

Just a few items of note, crunched into a post.

Jim Van Verth, the co-creator of the free REALPOLITIK Diplomacy adjudicator is already a minor hero in my book because he pours so much time into making a damned useful tool (realpolitik) for free. I had some problems with RP during my last DIPLOMACY game run on here (SINGULARITY ONE) and had to switch to JDIP to save the game, but I still like the general look and functionality of RP better than JDIP.

So Jim really didn't have to lift his pinkie to add to his exalted status of selfless people that I admire from a distance (not that that will get you even a cup of coffee!).

Vintage Gamer podcast

Now it turns out that Jim is running one of my favorite gaming podcasts going right now. VINTAGE GAMER is not known for its frequency of publication or the dynamic audio presence of Jim (who speaks in a rather quiet and "monotonal" speaking voice). VG is, however, one of the few game podcasts out there that feeds my nostalgia impulse. Very few of the games that Jim covers in his shows were published after the mid-90s. Therefore, they land squarely in the middle of my gaming 'youth' and have receded into a dim misty memory of pleasant past experience. See my Microgame Index if you want an explanation of that impulse. Recent shows on DEMONLORD, CAN'T STOP and especially DIPLOMACY were excellent. I recommend this show for all of you folks who "remember when".

Bringing back Barbarian Prince?

The latest 'cast is on one of my favorite Dwarfstar games of all time, BARBARIAN PRINCE. As Jim is wont to do, he goes through the basic mechanics of BP, in depth. It's a very good episode. A while back, maybe almost two years ago, I published a session of my last solo BP adventure and it eventually found its way up to the Boardgamegeek, HERE and HERE. I'm tempted to post another solitaire adventure on here at some point, that's a fun exercise.

Skullcrusher Mountain

Also on a tip from Jim, I found Jonathan Coulton’s site and downloaded "Skullcrusher Mountain" last night. This is a hysterically funny 'love' song as sang from an evil villain from a James Bond picture's point of view. My favorite lyrics:

I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don’t like it
What’s with all the screaming?
You like monkeys, you like ponies
Maybe you don’t like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?

I laughed so hard, I gladly sent the guy a buck.

Costikyan in the latest ESCAPIST

I got my normal email blurb from THE ESCAPIST that they have a new issue out. I've mentioned them on here before, which apparently hacked off the author enough to write in. Well, I'm not taking cudgels to this issue, and actually am strongly recommending Greg Costikyan's "IT ALL STARTED WITH PAPER" article, a broad survey of board gaming. Very well written. I have disagreed with some of Costikyan's conclusions before, but can't argue with this piece. Check it out.

A Random Gnome's Lair

Found a great blog from (who else? Jim!) called the GNOME'S LAIR. Dunno who's running this but I like his style-- very nostalgic in places, especially about "retro" computer games. And if you read here regular, you know I'm ALL about nostalgia.

Little Ol' Me? In a Podcast?

Last thing: I've agreed to assist Tom Vasel in future podcasts for THE DICE TOWER, contributing samllish bits mostly dedicated to wargaming as a sort of "replacement" (though not really) for the outgoing Joe Steadman. I'm calling my section THEORY AND PRACTICE, because I don't really want to focus solely on reviewing titles or what passes for "gaming news" in wargaming. For one thing, I won't be on often enough to have anything "newsworthy" to say, and for another, it gets done to death elsewhere. So I thought it might be fun to illustrate wargaming CONCEPTS, like why we do what we do... that way I can sneak in miniatures material along with my boardgame stuff. It should be fun.

So stay tuned.

What the Other Guy Thinks

An interesting post by Will Hindmarch in the recent issue of THE ESCAPIST. Hindmarch is discussing what he calls the "little details" or background texture to a computer game. The part of the article that resonated with me is captured here:

One moment, you're neutralizing a pawn to complete a mission objective and capture points. The next, you're a vile murderer ambushing a penniless grunt to get your hands on the castle's loot. What happened?

The guard opened his mouth, that's what happened. You're playing the first of level of the "immersive sim," Thief: The Dark Project, in 1998, when the polygonal soldier whose gullet you were about to lance with an arrow mumbles to himself on his patrol.

GUARD: Everyone above me gets all the favors and I haven't had a thing to eat in days.

Words change everything. Like dousing or lighting a torch changes the nature of the environment in Thief, hearing, reading or missing a line of text changes the intellectual landscape for the player. Consider how this note, pinned to the kitchen wall in that castle, changes the way you render the environment in your imagination:

"Cedric -
Please speak to Cook about last night's dinner. While, technically, the menu conformed to my instructions, I suspect that the lamb was somewhat older than this spring's, and I am in no way fooled by his practice of warming the salad to disguise wilting. If Cook is incapable of finding adequate ingredients, he can be replaced.
- Lord Bafford"

By itself, it's just a simple tool to evoke an opinion about the absent lord whose stuff you're stealing. (Probably, you get more satisfaction out of robbing a whining schmuck.) But, if you happened to overhear that first guard's mumbling, the words amplify each other. Now, Lord Bafford is complaining about the technical conformity of his meals while his soldiers are going hungry.

Are you going to try harder to boost every scrap of his loot, 'cause "that'll show him?" Or will that just get his hungry guards punished for incompetence? What's going to happen in the castle after you're gone?

It doesn't matter. Nothing happens after you leave the castle - when you're finished, it ceases to exist. What matters is you bought into it implicitly for a moment or a minute or 10 minutes, while you played. You enjoyed the illusion. So, it does matter.

GUARD: What is that smell? Smells like... old meat.

The devil's in the details. One line of dialogue makes a room smell like rot. One note conjures a person out of nothing. In Bafford's castle, his journals show he suspects someone called Ginny is stealing from him, and he's trying to dig up dirt on "Viktoria." In your imaginarily rendered game world, these people exist out in the city somewhere now, but you don't know who's just background or who
might step into play. Anyone could be Orson Welles' Harry Lime.

When do we actually take the time to step out of the classic heroic role to examine the life of the 'set dressing' characters in games like this? Well, never. Nobody wants to play a goon, or a spear carrier, or the local baker. Nor should they. We don't play games to reinvent a humdrum life, we play games to simulate another form of reality.

And yet...

The notion that a supporting detail has more depth than just another way to further your interaction with a game has tremendous appeal to me. Does anyone remember the final credits and special extra bits from Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery? In it, we see a series of vignettes. First, the wife of the security guard that Austin dispatches with toothpaste and rabid trout ("he lost HIS head..") gets a phone call where someone notifies her of her husband's death. She (and their son) weep uncontrollably. In another vignette, Rob Lowe and a bunch of bowling buddies are planning a surprise party for an absent guard character (the guy run over by the steam roller at the end, played by the guy who does the Stuart character on Mad TV). Rob Lowe and the buddies go on and on about the guy, telling stories about how great he is... then the phone rings and they are notified that he has been smooshed by Austin Powers. That's the sort of background detail we almost never think about... what does that goon do in his off hours? Read books? Watch TV? Write the great American novel? What happens in the dungeon when we leave it? It's no good thinking on the subject, because the background detail ultimately is there on our whim and for our pleasure. Still, it's nice to think about faceless dungeon guards playing cards, or laughing and joking, or standing in chow line togather, down there in the dungeon... waiting patiently, for us.

Check it out, Mr. Allen Varney, writer and game designer, actually checked in about a previous post on his last article in the Escapist (and my response): HERE

Allan Varney checks in at the ESCAPIST

Varney, the designer of GLOBBO and Illuminati: Mind Freeze (aka Illuminati expansion set 3) wrote a nice general survey article about the problem of the lack of human players in your home town and how the internet is providing technology to counter the problems of physical separation.

Most of the article is a survey of available PBEM utilities and programs (such as Cyberboard, ADC2, and Vassal), most of which I already knew about. I thought it was a pretty good article but incredibly pessimistic about paper based wargaming, which I absolutely disagree with Mr. Varney on. I'm a little ticked about the "Elite" attitude demonstrated by console and PC programmers towards our hobby. check this out:

It would take a miracle to pull the wargame community back from imminent oblivion. But you know, military history is full of unlikely last-ditch victories. Wargamers should try for one of their own.

With all due respect to Allan V., whose work I enjoy (especially Paranoia).. maybe he should have done some homework (over on CONSIMWORLD) before letting fly like this broadside. The very hobby he is issuing a postmortem for in this article has been greatly reinvigorated by the advent of the Internet technologies described in detail therein. It's certainly true that we aren't enjoying a cornucopia of new releases these days, but respectable companies such as GMT and Avalanche are pulling of 2 or 3 products a quarter, and that's nothing to sneeze at.

I remember the days of SPI and AH (naturally), and people seem to forget that with all the gems being made in those days, there were PLENTY of turkeys...

Death to the Game Industry?

Long live games!

That's the eye catching title of a recent issue of THE ESCAPIST, a fairly interesting gaming industry and review journal, available online, for free, in PDF format. Do consider subscribing to it; it's a great little rag, filled with catty observations about the (mostly electronic) gaming industry.

Althought the mission statement seems a little chi-chi:

The Escapist covers gaming and gamer culture with a progressive editorial style, with articles and columns by the top writers in and outside of the industry. A weekly publication, its magazine-style updates offer content for a mature audience of gamers, entertainment enthusiasts, industry insiders, and other "NetSet" readers.

Anyhoo, Greg Costikyan recently posted a very interesting (and long) diatrbie in the Escapist #8 entitled "Death to the gaming industry/Long live Games!" which I found interesting and engrossing.

Greg starts out by quoting "Designer X"

"The machinery of gaming has run amok... An industry that was once the most innovative and exciting artistic field on the planet has become a morass of drudgery and imitation... It is time for revolution!"

- "Designer X" in the Scratchware Manifesto

Not too surprisingly (if you follow Greg's posted commentary here and there) Designer X is Greg himself.

Death to the Gaming industry is a long, well-thought out and presented article about the economic trends of the electronic gaming industry. Greg points out that development costs are starting to become overwhelming, mostly because of public perceptions about technology costs. "If the technology is available, then it has to be in the next game"... especially in the graphic rendering department.

Today, art assets (not programming) are the main cost driver. As machines become capable of rendering more detailed 3D models in real time, the market demands more detailed 3D models - and models are hand-created by artists using tools such as 3D Studio Max and Maya. All things being equal, a doubling in polygon count means a doubling in the amount of time an artist needs to spend generating the model - and a doubling in cost. Faster machines can push more polygons; more polygons means more cost.

Furthermore, the nature of the market and the narrowness of the marketing channel are causing a rise in prices and a dearth of availability. Costikyan invites us to compare the shelf load in a common book or music store with an electronic game store; in the former two you'll see thousands of titles; in the game store, maybe hundreds. I've noticed this in the local "Gamestop" gaming store in my community; a relative balkanization of titles and formats, a diminishing of PC game choices, and compared to an average browse in an old Waldensoftware of a few years ago, fairly empty shelves.

Add to that (as Costikyan points out) a diminishing gaming population to buy the titles that do come out, and he thinks it's obvious that our marketing and distribution channels are in for some trouble.

Where does it all lead? In Costikyan's words:

The result is that the average game (not the industry as a whole) loses more and more money. The publishers make up the losses on the few games that hit.

Ergo, a certain critical mass much be reached (in form of capitalization and tempo of operations), to survive. Small time game companies (in his words) are simply "fucked."

The solution? Again, from Cotikyan...

Spector is right. We must blow up this business model, or we are all doomed.

What do we want? What would be ideal?

A market that serves creative vision instead of suppressing it. An audience that prizes gameplay over glitz. A business that allows niche product to be commercially successful - not necessarily or even ideally on the same scale as the conventional market, but on a much more modest one: profitability with sales of a few tens of thousands of units, not millions.

Well, he's discussing scaling back expectations here, and to some extent I agree. I mostly come from a boardgaming and miniatures gaming background (as does Costikyan, although he hasn't done a boardgame in years). What Costikyan is describing here could be the prototype that board wargaming had to adopt when the distributorships dried up in the early to mid 90s. Perhaps customer interaction prior to the sale, along the lines of GMT's famous "P500" program, or some form of consumer buy in to help the company cover development costs. And a great reliance of cheap, direct marketing channels like the Internet... who knows, maybe boardgaming has a good small-scale marketing model to emulate, Greg!



Attribution: All comments quoted in the above by Greg Costikyan, the Escapist online magazine, issue 8